The Robot and the One You Love | Page 4

to look for a computer burn on top of--"
"A theft," Connie said. "I'm a biolab technician specializing in cold-spot asepsis, and I'm a goddamn thief." Her voice was speeding up like a disk player with a faulty power supply, and Jerome knew it was all going to come out of her now. She said, "I took their six."
Jerome lay on the padded floor in the workroom. The diener was plugged in again for recharging and from time to time twitched like a dreaming dog. Opposite them both, a two-meter wallscreen ran mixed windows. From the news window came the voice and face of Latoh Bernie, one of the more popular computer-constructs. Below red wolf eyes, pale lips moved, and Latoh Bernie's voice said, "The Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London reported today the theft of the brain of Charles Babbage, nineteenth-century pioneer in computer science. He was the man who first envisioned an all purpose computer, which he called the Analytical Engine "
Babbage, Jerome thought, the man with the gears and cams and pulleys, inventor of, call it the zeroth computer generation, the one that never happened. Start counting generations, and you get to five by the beginning of the twenty-first century--systems like the diener robot. It walked, it talked, it performed a fair number of tasks with enormous skill... But fifth-generation machines came up short in important ways--within limits they were hell, but they still weren't worth a damn at a Turing test.
Here an impish voice whispered inside him, Oh, yeah, then what about the diener? Because Jerome had stopped thinking of the diener as a machine long ago, never mind its limitations.
The way most people saw it, however, you were unlikely to mistake a fifth-generation machine for an intelligent being under any but the most restricted conditions. So for anyone with a professional stake in the matter, the magic number had become six. Information-dense transfer states, many-mind theory--researchers were working at the edge of things, where reality's fuzziest states connected to nature's complex systems, and there was a feeling that soon something would have to tumble.
If Connie was right, something had: I.G. Biochemie had hit the jackpot, an organic artificial intelligence. Then it died, this little bit of flesh, poisoned by a series of metabolic irregularities that IGB desperately wanted to examine. And they would have if Connie hadn't stolen the remains.
"Signing off, babies," Latoh Bernie said. "Let's hear it for Charley, eh? So bring back the brain, whoever you are." Latoh Bernie giggled.
'Christ!" Jerome said. "All off." Wallscreen windows faded to rose.
"David," Connie said. "What are you doing?" She stood backlit in the doorway, wearing baggy pants and a blouse of crushed white cotton.
"Come on in," he said. She sat next to him on the padded floor and leaned back against the wall.
"I've been thinking," she said. "Now that you understand what's going on maybe you want out."
And to himself Jerome said What I want no longer matters; you're what I need.
"We'll see" he said. "If things get too strange I'll tell you. But for the moment no problem. I said I'd do it; I'll do it."
"That's very nice of you."
She gave a kind of sigh as he put his hands on her shoulders.
The events of the next few hours were as inevitable as the path of a freely falling object. As they took place, the diener remained motionless and apparently oblivious to what went on. But perhaps it was aware.... There, as Jerome was bent between her thighs, and she cried out, was the diener moving, did it make a sound?
Jerome walked along Q Street near Dupont Circle. An old woman selling flowers out of white crockery vases arranged in a line along the sidewalk called to him, her tongue a blotch of dark red behind toothless gums. She said, "Come on, roses for your lady, mister." As if she knew.
In the middle of the next block, a tall, thin man in a green plastic jacket was bouncing plasma balls against cement steps. Flashes of electric gold exploded under sick amber streetlights. Jerome stopped and yelled, "Hey, 2-Ace!" The man gestured for him to come on. 2-Ace was shirtless under the jacket. Bones of chest and rib cage stood in clear outline, and chrome stars set into the meager flesh of his left pectoral gleamed in the streetlight. His eyes were bright, and even standing still, he seemed in motion--his left hand jerked back and forth in quick, unconscious arcs. 2-Ace did a fair amount of speed.
"Man," he said. "Jerome." A small maroon velveteen bag dangled from his waist, and he shook it gently. "Good shit," he said.
"I hope so," Jerome said. 2-Ace was selling credit chip blanks and recent codes--the necessary ingredients to cook up instant credit in whatever name he