Chapter 9: The Future Eve (Part II)

It was good to see Hadaly in better spirits. If an AI could be described to have spirits. Ever since she had damaged the chassis, Elaine wondered if Hadaly had suddenly gained a phantom limb syndrome—except something far worse: phantom body syndrome. It was a really noble thing, putting herself in harm’s way like that. Of course, Elaine had originally contemplated imprinting her with the Three Laws of Robotics but…in a moment of moral ambiguity she hadn’t.

Sure, protocols for self preservation and general empathy wound through her vast code stacks, but nothing so rigid as Asimov’s Laws.

Except that…when Elaine had done a post-mortem dissection of the decision matrix—in part to calm her own nerves, and in part to make sure that Hadaly’s personality hadn’t taken damage along with her body—she discovered that the protocols had not been accessed. The little AI that could. For her, jumping in the way of the falling debris had been an impulse act. If a person had done it, Elaine would have called it both extremely stupid and extremely brave—excepting, of course, that Hadaly could survive the loss of her body. The damage was an inconvenience, not an end.

“Do you want the long or the short?” Hadaly asked. “Or the long and the short? Haha.”

“I’ll take what you got,” Elaine said.

She had set the AI to the task of actually reading through the quotidian IMs, txts, and various exchanges that made up Emily’s cellular life. Aside from the pictures, a great deal of her life had been spent in chattering away with other people through the connection of the phone. It may not have stored anything about calls more than phone numbers and durations—although tricks could be had to retrieve those conversations if she needed—but all the other ancillary kruft still had some worth to the investigation.

“After all,” Elaine said on the subject. “If I was going to start helping someone win elections, I would want to be in contact with them. Especially if she has a stalker, he will want to insinuate himself into her life.”

The sun had set and together, but alone, they walked through the yellow and grey night that was ASU campus. Passing students would look up at them briefly, and bikes would whizz past with chain rattles. In this sort of light it was difficult to tell Hadaly from a petite girl wearing an overlong lab coat—necessary because the long sleeves hid a lot of the poorly skinned joints on her arms from easy inspection.

“I compared your girl’s conversations to normal students her age,” the AI said. Her voice was synthesized with a polynomial harmonic but then actually rendered using a syrinx-like organ in her throat, a design that Elaine had developed from an old copy of MAKE about using stretched rubber and balloons to reproduce the songs of birds. It rather limited her ability to mimic other sounds but made her voice more lifelike. “And she seems extremely normal. She has several suitors, none of whom seem to display any sort of infatuation beyond the usual. I did compare some psychological profiles of her interactions to your previous stalker case.”

A year ago, Elaine had taken a case to actually stalk a stalker. The poor girl couldn’t shake the guy and couldn’t get enough evidence to get the police to act. Of course, when Elaine had gotten enough evidence to do so it had put the client in serious danger. However, that ended rather rapidly when the stalker went to confront his unrequited love in her own apartment with a baseball bat and instead met the business end of Frog’s fencing saber. Five years in Maricopa County lockup. The client left town after the trial.

“Nothing?”

“Your client talks to her daddy a lot,” she said. “And I mean she calls him a lot more than one would expect a woman her age to do so. From what I gather she also has an on again off again conversation with him that stretches back almost a year on this phone. Or through successive phones. She’s been transferring her entire social database from phone to phone.

“Nothing from her mother though. At least not in the texts.”

That probably didn’t mean much. Emily had moved far from home and if Elaine’s instincts were right, she’d been trying to impress her father from day one.

“What about political enemies?”

“You mean Tom Barrett?”

Elaine stopped walking and glanced over at Hadaly. The college kid from the photograph with the specter standing over him.

“Is there something interesting?”

“Well. I guess you could call having hours long conversations with your political rival on a nearly nightly basis interesting,” the AI said. If Elaine didn’t know better, she would have guessed that Hadaly was being snarky. She had developed a sense of irony somewhere along the way. “It generally starts with a few zinged IMs of meaningless nonsense, like, ‘Hi. How are ya?’ or ‘Working?’ and then follows is a phone call from various different numbers. It appears that he works at the City Capital building in his off hours.”

Elaine started walking again. “Looks like I’m developing quite a list of questions to ask Emily the next time we meet. What a tangled web she’s woven indeed, don’t you think? I even learned today that she saved some mysterious student’s life when she was a Residential Life advocate. And now I’m learning that she has had conversations at length with her primary rival…”

“And their nightlong chatting has not changed since they were named rivals in this upcoming election. I sense impropriety. Perhaps the amphibian-wannabe might have some insights into that sort of behavior.” Hadaly raised a few fingers and flexed them in the moonlight. “I am just getting used to my anatomy again, who am I to peer into the motivations of human hearts.”

Eyes rolled. “What do you think it means?”

“Don’t ask me,” she said. “I’m just the computer; you’re the detective.”

“Ha!”