The Robot and the One You Love | Page 2

deep that it might
be in your genes; in the tattered phrase, you'll find the one you love.
He painted her face into Search Chip Memory. It began its routines,
matching her face against local hotels' register tapes, district police
updates to the National Data Bank, composite travel records compiled
from trains, buses, airplanes. And there, on the passenger list of a
United flight that had come in three days earlier from Miami, she
turned up. But Jerome was asleep when that happened. Only the diener
was awake to hear the bell ring, and it moved with a ripple of black
tentacles across rose and watched her face begin to expand across the
paintscreen, color and shape flowing as if someone were dropping
pigment into invisible set forms. The diener extruded a black cable and
plugged into the Search Chip interface, which gave all it had on Connie
Stone.
From atop the Riggs Bank at the corner of M and Wisconsin, a flat,

black camera sat on the golden dome and watched for any of eight
"Sons of Bright Water"--descendants of Hiroshima survivors rumored
heading for the base of the Washington Monument with two-kiloton
suitcase bombs. This was a CIA search program, and Jerome had
piggybacked it to look for Connie Stone. It was not, however, the CIA's
camera but a Safeway's "sidewalk sentry"--a blue aluminum box
surrounded by fine wire mesh--that spotted her getting into a Yellow
Cab on Wisconsin Avenue near the National Cathedral. She still carried
the cold bag, and in close-up her eyes were red shot, tired, and wary.
Jerome's search programs had a fix. They sounded the alarm to tell
Jeremy she had been found.
Jerome sat at his console and watched the cab's coordinates trace a path
along Connecticut Avenue toward downtown. Now he had her. What
should he do?
When the cab dropped her on K Street in front of the New Millennium
Hotel, eighteen stories of silvered glass, he was watching through the
hotel's entrance monitor, and he thought, First, Connie Stone, I've got
to find out who you are.
Until three years ago, she had been just another medical lab assistant.
Then, according to the National Data Bank, her employment history
went off record and stayed that way. She did not marry or otherwise
change her name and did not appear on unemployment compensation,
welfare, or disability rolls. More peculiar yet, she had disappeared from
credit records as well. The state of California might forget her, Jerome
thought, but Masterchip, VisaBanque, Amex? No way.
He had to dig in forbidden ground to find her. A quick raid, very
quick--their reprisals were vicious--on the IRS records indicated a
complex arrangement with a company named American Bioforms,
which somehow was not her real employer. The IRS knew this but
didn't mind; it was getting its cut of her salary.
The Dow Jones computer coughed up a string of parent companies and
blinds terminating in a Caribbean bank. Home Free: The bank's

computer told him she was working for I G Biochemie in the
Dominican Republic. Finally the CEO Intel Digest told him that the I G
Biochemie compound was located on the Dominican Republic's
northern coast near a little town called Sosua, a place with a strange
history. In 1940 Rafael Trujillo, an almost forgotten twentieth-century
dictator, had invited German Jews to come to the Dominican Republic
and promised them sanctuary and their own town, Sosua. A few Jews
had come, but over the years their numbers dwindled, so that by the
end of the twentieth century there were none left.
A few decades later, in came I.G. Biochemie and a horde of Germans,
very few of them Jews. And a few years later, in came Connie Stone.
Looking at life as a secret sharer had put some very strong torque on
Jerome's already strange worldview. He walked a path signposted with
paranoid conceits and occult symbols some real, some at least arguably
real, others purely delusional. Connie Stone's blind employment history;
associations with genocide, old dictators, German cartels it all reeked
of geoconspiracy, multicorporate plot. Jerome lit up like yellow
phosphorus in sunlight.
"Locate l.G. Biochemie Sosua data processing station," he said,
beginning the instructions to his computer. "Call and institute mole
programs. Compile user data establish operating-system codes. Load
virus and execute. Terminate on unforeseen interrupt, and restart only
on verbal authorization." It might take days to penetrate the
corporation's security shells, but he was betting the I G. Biochemie
computer would fall.
Connie Stone sat beneath a green, white, and red umbrella. Blown in
summer breeze, her hair was tangled around a red plastic barrette above
her left ear. She wore a tropical print dress red and blue and green
flowers on a white background that rode to her thighs as she