The Robot and the One You Love | Page 4

she asked again. "How long before you can finish this?"
"Hard to say. Could go a week if their security shells are really good,
and they might be, especially now. But more likely we'll get in within
the next thirty hours. No special reason for them 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