Chimera (24 page)

Something rushed toward me. I stepped back with my fingers ready to catch the SIG. A bright yellow handibot scurried by on its spider legs, carrying a pile of sheets and towels down the hall.

I wondered if I should follow it. Then a lamp lit up on a small table in the opposite direction. "Go toward the light," I said. "Sounds like a euphemism to me." If I was being monitored, no one bothered to respond.

I walked down the hall and stopped at an intersection. To my right, a spotlight came on to illuminate a painting, a Friedman that I'd seen in a documentary on her life. When I came up to it, I was ready to stand and admire it for a minute or two, but a small green light glowed over a door inlaid with strips of wood in many colors.

I stepped through the door onto the shore of a Pacific lagoon. Moonlight streamed down from the sky. The water lapped softly against the sand. If there hadn't been underwater lamps throwing flickering highlights over the entire scene, I would've thought someone had found a way to teleport living things, to Tahiti, at least.

I said, "Hello?" No one answered.

A rocky point thrust out over the pool. I walked out to its edge to study the only lights I saw, globes that were content to float midway between the sandy bottom and the surface. Since that route wasn't promising, I glanced up at the artificial moon for a clue as to what to do next.

A dark shape raced underwater toward me. Before I could jump back, it broke the surface with a splash and stood half out of the water in classic dolphin fashion. Which made sense, since it was a classic dolphin, except for a tiny piece of silver jewelry at its throat.

"Chase Maxwell, welcome. The resources of my house are at your disposal."

I recognized the voice, but I wanted confirmation. Okay, I was startled. How often do you meet a talking fish? Yes, dolphins are mammals, but if it looks like a fish and acts like a fish, in the unreasoning atavistic part of your soul, you're sure of two things: it's a fish, and it shouldn't talk. "Mycroft?"

"I have another name, but you'd find it difficult to pronounce."

"Thanks for seeing me."

"If I might help save a life, how could I not? Please, ask what you will."

"Your bio says you consult. On what?"

"Many things. Most recently, the Antarctic natural gas discussions."

"Who for?"

"Whoever's paying me. In that case, several nations. I'm a remarkably disinterested party." He also seemed to be a remarkably amused party, but that may've only been the permanent grin of the dolphin jaw.

"I was in UNSEC. I never heard of you."

"What country would admit that a trusted advisor never wears clothes and has a hole in his head?"

I smiled. Mycroft said, "May I call you Chase?"

"If you're a patronizing cop or a phone solicitor. I go by Max."

"I have a breathing apparatus for visitors, Max. Would you care to join me? The water's delightful."

"Thanks, but it's kind of hard to talk underwater."

"Then you're here because time is urgent, and not because you've nothing to do on Christmas Eve."

"Zoe Domingo's serving thirty years in an indenture camp for a crime she didn't commit. I'd like to get her out as soon as possible."

Mycroft dove suddenly, turned in a tight circle, and resurfaced. "Come. I'll show you my home, and you'll tell me your story."

So I walked along the shore and talked about Zoe and our time together. Mycroft swam lazily beside me, occasionally diving or racing away for a moment. The environment beneath him changed as we toured. Sometimes the bottom was near, sometimes far, sometimes sand, sometimes coral, sometimes tumbled rocks, sometimes a lava bed. There were half-buried Atlantean ruins, a sunken galleon, an alien spaceship. Oxygen burbled into the pool from the helmet of a life-sized deep-sea diver. At the end of the enormous pool was a door, half underwater, where I finished my account.

Dolphins are remarkably easy to talk to. Though I said nothing about Zoe's suspicions regarding Oberon Chain, I found myself telling Mycroft about sex with Kristal Blake. Remembering it made me want to shed my skin, but I had been sent down the wrong path too often on cases by clients who neglected to mention sexual relationships that they didn't think pertinent. A woman once had me hunt for days to find someone leaving threatening messages for her; I would've solved that one in an afternoon if she'd told me she was having an affair with a married man.

The best thing about confessing sexual misadventures to dolphins is that they think erotic encounters between consenting compatible entities are natural and desirable. Mycroft only began to understand my disgust when I pointed out that I wasn't upset because I'd had sex with an AI; I was upset because I'd had sex believing Blake was something other than she was.

When I finished, Mycroft said, "Four years ago, Singer Labs sought a way to scan a living brain, encode the information stored there, load the information—call it the mind—into a computer where it could function as pure intelligence unencumbered by the body, then, when the uploaded mind had completed its task, download the mind back to the subject's brain. You can see the appeal of their goal. Imagine scientists and artists able to think without the world's distractions, at speeds that the brain cannot approach, with all the world's research accessible in an instant. Tell no one I told you this; I'm breaking a nondisclosure contract."

"Sounds like a sweet job."

"I can't say. I turned it down."

"Why?"

Mycroft laughed, a dolphin's chattering, not human at all. "I like bodies. Distractions may be annoying, yet they're often inspiring. Newton couldn't have observed apples in the electronic realm. And I'm not sure Singer can succeed. The interaction between brain and mind remains a mystery. If you mapped all but an infinitesimal portion of the mind, then wrote the scanned mind back onto a brain, you could wipe away forever the bit that you'd missed. The lost information might seem inconsequential—the color of a favorite childhood toy, the sound of an obscure bird's call—but who's to say what ultimately makes us what we are? What we do not know and treasure may be the heart of what we are. Imagine the price of losing an artist's ability to analyze or a scientist's ability to empathize."

"I see your point."

"The legal and ethical questions multiply exponentially. When the digital mind is returned to the physical host, what happens to the mind that existed between the time of the scan and the download? Aren't you destroying that mind when you write the digital one over it?"

"If the person gave consent—"

"Which person? You begin with the person who is scanned. Then there are two sapient entities, a digital one in the computer and a biological one that continues to think and experience life. Even if you put the biological subject to sleep, or even if the process is so quick that less than a second of the world's time passes between the scan and the download, the two minds will have different experiences and become subtly different. Yet the body's mind will be overwritten by the download. Must the subject give consent twice, once before the scan and once before the download? Suppose the scanned subject decides against the download, seeing it as a form of death for the self that then exists. Do you respect the subject's later wishes or original wishes? If you respect the original wishes, perhaps as expressed in a contract signed at the time of the scan, do you physically force the subject to go through with the download? If you respect the later wishes, what do you do with the digital mind? It's an AI, and therefore has no legal rights, but the ethical questions remain.

"Is erasing a digital mind a form of murder? If you conclude that it's only property, to whom does it belong, the person who was scanned, the person who did the scan, or someone else? A digital mind can be copied endlessly. Who owns the copyright? Suppose you make two copies of a digital mind and set them to different tasks. When it's time to download the digital mind to the subject's brain, which copy gets precedence? What happens if a digital mind is accidentally imposed on the wrong brain?" Mycroft gave another burst of dolphin laughter. "It's a fascinating problem, but an enormous one, and ultimately, it doesn't address my concerns."

"Well, I can see how as a chimera—"

"Humans only gave me speech and tools, Mr. Maxwell." Mycroft rolled onto his back. "Are you sure you wouldn't care for a swim?"

"You're a healthy bottlenose dolphin. Got it. No, thanks."

"As you wish."

"Gold and Tauber worked for Singer on this project?"

"They did."

"So Blake and Doyle could've been created by scanning two real people?"

"If Singer's project got that far. These AIs sound unusually concerned with worldly matters."

I thought of my time with Blake. "Yeah."

"If this was an experiment using scanned minds, there may not be two personalities. Two copies of the same mind could act as both Blake and Doyle."

"If they were separated, they might've developed separate goals."

"Or they could've been updating each other as easily as reconciling files on different computers."

"If you could do that with a computer and a person, Singer's problem would disappear."

"Reconciling memories is more challenging than writing over them. And there's the question of whether you can overload a human mind with information. With a computer, you have the advantage of knowing exactly how much data it can store."

"Did you ever meet Oberon Chain?"

"Not in person."

"What did you think of him?"

"Like all who hoard wealth, his sense of group and family is small, and his sense of entitlement is great. Do I think he would kill? Most humans will, under certain circumstances. I don't know what those circumstances might be for Oberon. I have no reason to think he may be your killer. Do you?"

I wished I could trust Mycroft enough to tell him what Zoe had smelled. I said, "No. You've been very helpful."

"I only knew Dr. Gold by reputation. But I knew Amos Tauber. He acknowledged the difference in each species, yet treated every soul alike."

"Which assumes every species has a soul."

"You humans tether the soul to religion. The soul is what yearns and seeks to rise. All intelligences have that."

"He was your friend."

"No one understood me as well as Amos. He was part of my family, my group. Dolphins are not by nature solitary, Max. Isolated humans become poets or go mad. Isolated dolphins pine and die."

I looked around at the world that had been created for him, then back at its only occupant. "What do enhanced dolphins do?"

"We adopt a more inclusive view of the group. When that fails— You see that door, with the light?"

I nodded.

"When that light is on, no one may enter."

"I thought isolation was the problem."

"And sometimes, the cure."

What do you say to that? I couldn't apologize for what members of my species took from him when they gave him our kind of speech. I said, "Until we know why Gold and Tauber died, you have to consider that a killer may be after you, too."

"I have."

"You let me walk in here alone."

"You were scanned at the front door. The Infinite Pocket was troubling, but had you done anything threatening, Chives would've stopped you. As for here—" Mycroft whistled, and the light suddenly came up. I looked behind me. A handi-bot crouched by the wall. Mycroft whistled again, and the bot left the room.

"I could've gotten off half a dozen shots before it stopped me."

"I didn't say that was my only defense." Mycroft whistled a third time, and the lights dimmed again.

"Are there any AIs running anywhere in the house? Or with access to the house computer system?"

"I don't own any AIs."

"For the same reason as Tauber?"

Mycroft ducked his head twice. "When you give something awareness, you become responsible for it. You humans have the apple myth. Chimeras will undoubtedly evolve something similar, as will AIs."

"Zweig works for you."

"Laws govern the treatment of human employees, and to a lesser degree, chimeras. But you can still buy an intelligent machine for the sole purpose of hammering it into junk or shooting it dead."

"If you'd concluded that I was the killer—"

"If I thought you'd killed my brother Amos, you wouldn't leave this house alive."

"The justice of the lonely dolphin?"

"Don't worry, Max." He swam toward the metal hatchway, and it opened before him. "Humans aren't responsible for what I am."

The hatchway closed behind Mycroft. The red light came on. A moment later, the far door opened, and Paul Zweig stepped in. I said, "And I thought dolphins always looked happy."

"Excuse me?"

"Nothing."

"Mr. Maxwell?"

"Max."

"Paul. There's always a guest room ready for company. The kitchen's embarrassingly well stocked. Whatever you'd like, ask. When Mycroft said the resources of this house are available, he wasn't just being polite."

"You were listening in."

"As you said, you could've been a killer. Sorry about that."

"I back my friends sometimes, too. How long will he be in there?"

"A minute, a week." Paul shrugged. "Usually, overnight."

"And I thought
I
was going to have a crummy Christmas Eve."

"Don't feel too sorry for him. Right now, he's grieving for Tauber. But I think he enjoys being what he is, all things considered."

"Why do you think that?"

"Because I could pull his vocalizer and he could go to sea at anytime."

I shook my head. "We don't escape our past that easily."

Chapter Fifteen

Christmas Eve dinner consisted of spinach salad, lentil soup, curried wild rice with almonds and portabello mushrooms, nutloaf with teriyaki sauce, mashed potatoes and yams, asparagus with soy Hollandaise sauce, lingonberry scones, and white Zinfandel, followed by soymilk latte and carrot cake. If every bite hadn't made me wonder what Zoe was eating, it would've been a perfect holiday meal.

The view was grand. The moon had risen, so the Pacific surged beyond the dining room windows. Mycroft could have been there—the table sat beside a small pool connected by a tunnel to his main one—but he was not. I doubt watching him down live fish would've been a major part of an ideal dining experience.