Half Life (Russell's Attic Book 2) (30 page)

C
HAPTER 28

I
LEANED
back against the wall at Miri’s place and dug into my arm with a sterilized pair of tweezers from her medicine cabinet, biting down on a towel and trying not to pass out, and tuning out Arthur as he railed at me.

“Goddammit, will you please stop and let me call you a doctor!”

“Nnnn,” I said through the towel. The bullet outlined itself in my mind, nestled against the bone.
HolyJesusChristfuck.

“Russell, I’m telling you, you ain’t supposed to try to get it out. You gonna hurt yourself worse. You listening?”

I eased the tweezers through my flesh and up against the slug. I anchored them, considered the lack of friction, and tightened my grip. With one quick tug the bullet was out—

—a new wave of pain slammed into me as I yanked; my throat closed and bucked and I almost threw up into the towel.

“Hey. Hey. Russell.” Arthur was crouched next to me, touching my face. “Hey.”

I spat out the towel. My face was cold with sweat. “Find me something to splint this thing with.”

“Russell, please. You might need surgery. And if it gets infected—”

“I’ll see your doctor when all this is over,” I said. “Now find me something to splint it with, for fuck’s sake.” The words came out weaker than I wanted them to.

When I’d practically fallen through Miri’s door covered in blood, Pilar had whisked Liliana—who’d been cheerfully conscious again—into the bedroom, covering her eyes. She’d popped back out to make sure I wasn’t dying and there wasn’t anything she could do, and then gone back to babysitting.

Rayal was sitting in the corner, her face in her hands. She hadn’t taken the murder of her entire team well.

Checker came back out of the kitchen with a bowl of warm water, more towels, and another first-aid kit. “Here—I’m going to go check the closets; she’s got to have something better than Neosporin—”

I grunted. I didn’t know why I hadn’t gone back to one of my bolt holes. I had better medical supplies in all of them than Miri probably had in her whole apartment, but I’d jacked a car and driven here automatically, my mind in a fugue state. Probably from the blood loss.

“Least let me help you,” begged Arthur.

“Yeah,” I said. “Good. I have to set it.”

“
Set it?”

“Yeah.” It was why I’d dug out the bullet—my physical hyperawareness had revealed how it sat exactly where I needed the stupid bone to go. I’d do a crappier job setting the break than a doctor would, probably, but math was useful for all sorts of things. “You want to help? Brace me.”

“I ain’t think this is a good idea, Russell—”

“Help me or fuck off.” I’m eloquent when I’m in pain.

Arthur reluctantly did as I bid him, holding down my shoulders and anchoring my upper body against the wall. I grabbed above my right elbow with my left hand, did the calculations, closed my eyes, and braced myself. Two choices: slow and steady or fast and over with, and the math was the same either way.

I yanked.

I’d forgotten to bite down on something again. Checker and Pilar both rushed back into the room afraid I was dying.

I slumped against the wall, waiting for the world to stop distorting itself, and waved them off with my good hand, though even those muscles didn’t seem to be working well. My whole body throbbed, as if my nervous system had given up containing the searing mangle to my right arm. Everything felt raw and red and horrible, and I’d already taken as many of Miri’s over-the-counter painkillers as I dared.

Arthur moved against me, dressing the wound and splinting my arm. Checker had piled as many medical supplies as he could find next to us, which didn’t include much better options than gauze, ace bandages, a couple rudimentary first-aid kits, and some strong-smelling herbal balms Miri apparently swore by.

“Are you going to tell us what happened now?” came Checker’s voice, his worry pecking at my consciousness. I’d given them the basic rundown of events when I’d come in, but not the details. I hadn’t told them about the sniper.

“I got shot,” I said.

“Cas!” cried Checker.

I got lucky,
I didn’t say.

I pushed my brain into working. “We have to find out who’s moving the chess pieces.” Chess. That was a pretty high-brow metaphor for me. I was proud of myself. “Ally Eight stole the tech, but then someone else stole the robots, and they’re using ’em as weapons. Who?” Robots as killing machines. I wondered if Liliana could be reprogrammed that way. I didn’t want to think about it.

“This is bad,” said Checker. “This is really, really, really,
really
bad.”

“I know it’s bad,” I said. “I’ve been shot.”

“No, I mean—well, yes, of
course
it’s bad that you got shot, but I mean the whole someone-using-androids-as-weapons thing. This is
really
bad. The mob rioting we’ve seen so far is nothing; now people are going to flip out—the government will be shutting down all AI research everywhere, just you wait, and every roboticist alive is suddenly going to be suspect; it’ll be a witch hunt—”

“I think we have bigger problems right now,” I said. The words were only a little slurred. I needed more pain meds.

“Bigger problems?” exclaimed Checker. “
Bigger problems?
All of AI is going to be a scapegoat for this! It’ll set research back fifty years! People are going to think robotics is—is
dangerous!”

“Seems pretty dangerous to me,” said Arthur darkly.

“Yes, an extremely limited anthropomorphic robot is any sort of threat when we have
Predator drones—”

“One thing being dangerous don’t mean they both ain’t,” said Arthur. He was threading a cutout piece of bed sheet around my arm to make a sling—gently, but every touch stabbed—and his tone was hooded.

Checker didn’t seem to notice. “But you’re talking about a threat of computerized violence! My point is that we
already
have ridiculously deadly robots! The ones like Liliana are barely more than—barely more than
toasters
in comparison. In terms of violence, I mean; obviously the natural language processing’s better than a toaster—”

“Toasters ain’t look like us,” said Arthur.

“If looking like us is the scary part, you should be more scared of other humans,” Checker argued. “All an android can do is what it’s programmed to. It can’t react to new situations, or plan a crime, or have any sort of
motivation
for violence—”

“Or have remorse or second thoughts,” said Arthur. He tightened the knot on my sling and wheeled tiredly around to face Checker. “Come on now. The thing that stops people killing each other ain’t the thought that killing might be too hard. The ’bots, they got no…no compunction. No empathy. You can’t reason with them. I get why people’ll want ’em stopped.”

I thought, briefly, of Rio.

“Well, they’re programmed to mimic empathy and reason, so you can still sort of manipulate the AI, if you know how,” said Checker. “Unless someone overrides those algorithms…but saying the technology’s at fault here is like saying internal combustion is at fault for a hit and run. You want to ban cars next?”

“Robots don’t kill people, people kill people?” I muttered sarcastically.

“Cas, I’m serious! We have to get out in front of this!”

“What do you expect me to do?” I managed to wrest my eyes around to look up at him. It was an effort. “Seriously. What do you want us to do here?”

He threw his arms wide. “I don’t know! But we have to do something!”

“He’s right.”

I rolled my eyes the other way. Rayal had come over to stand behind Arthur. Her eyes were wet, the skin below them puffy and shadowed. “Losing what Arkacite was doing—that will be enough of a blow. We can’t let everyone else be taken down, too.”

I was starting to feel very hemmed in. Wasn’t being shot supposed to make people be nice to me for a while? “I thought you hated Arkacite,” I said.

“What?” she said, taken aback. “No, not at all. I—when I left, that was about me, not them. We were doing great things there, tremendous things, and my team…” More tears leaked out over her cheeks; she sniffed and dabbed at her face with the hem of her sleeve. “Look at what we did. We built something amazing, something nobody’s ever—and we couldn’t have done that without Arkacite. They gave us free rein; they took a chance on us—they had no idea how it would turn out, and they gave us the time and the funding to figure it out, and…we did something great.”

“Yeah, Lau strikes me as an accommodating sort of boss,” I said.

“Him? He was just a manager. He liked to think he had a part to play, but he wasn’t an engineer.” She got quiet. “Universities can’t do everything. The world needs more companies like Arkacite. More of the research we were doing. There are so few industry labs left that do real research.”

I thought about Grant’s deathbed confession about stealing Funaki’s secrets to base the company’s work on. Rayal was probably happier not knowing that.

“I kind of agree,” said Pilar. I hadn’t realized she was still hovering. I wrenched myself around to look at her, and she twitched under the scrutiny but didn’t back down. “I mean, I—I hated working there—they were awful to me—but that was mostly because of, um, certain people. The technology, it was fascinating, like they were building the future. They were working on things like self-driving cars and 3D cameras and honest-to-God invisibility stuff—and they were trying for inventions that would help police, like a frequency thingamajiggy that would help break up mobs in situations just like what happened today, and brain interfacing machines for people who’ve been injured. And Liliana…I dunno, I’ve been spending a lot of time with her, and she’s something. Really something.” A smile tugged at her face, and she shrugged self-consciously. “I guess I’m just trying to say, in a lot of ways they might’ve sucked, but Denise is right. What they were doing—it was like working in
Back to the Future
or something. Except with a miserable boss.”

“I still don’t know what you all want me to do about it,” I said. “We don’t even know who’s weaponizing the ’bots.”

“So we find another one and kidnap it, like we were planning to do with Sloan,” said Checker. “Cas, with your help I’m sure we can get the recognition algorithm to work. We find any other ’bots out there, and Denise can figure out who’s using them as weapons, and then we can stop them.”

“No,” I said. Nobody else was getting hurt on my watch. Maybe later there would be breathing room for investigating and fighting back, but there was a time to play detective and a time to get innocent people who couldn’t even handle a gun out of the fucking crosshairs. “No. We run.”

In the silence, one of the laptops trilled.

Checker grabbed at it and looked up at Denise. “It’s Vikash Agarwal calling back.”

Agarwal—the one scientist on her team who hadn’t been at Arkacite.

“Answer it!” said Rayal, rushing over.

“You can tell him Arthur will pick
him
up, too,” I muttered. “Seeing as we’re now an inn for wayward scientists.” We’d get him out with Denise. The mob and whoever was behind Sloan’s assassinations would have no one left to come after.

Checker hit a key.

“Vikash?” cried Denise. “Vikash, tell me you’re all right. Did you hear what—did you hear?” Her voice cracked.

“Yeah,” he said. “I did. Denise, did you manage to find those people you told me about? The ones who stole our Liliana?”

“Yes, they’re—it’s a long story, but yes.”

“Oh,” he said. “Good. I need her.”

Rayal blinked. “What are you talking about? Vikash, someone is targeting us, all of us. You have to—”

“I don’t
have to
do anything,” he snapped. “Not anymore.”

Arthur stood up slowly and went to stand next to Denise.

“I just meant…Vikash, where are you? We can help—”

“You always tried to be so helpful.” He sighed. “You were a good project leader. You can come with me if you want.”

“I don’t understand,” said Rayal. “You have a plan?”

“Of course I have a plan. I always have a plan. I have ten thousand contingency plans for every event, every branching. Exponential preparedness. It’s why you liked me, isn’t it? Every time one of the others fucked up, I had a plan. Me.”

“Vikash—don’t, not now—they’re
dead.”
Her voice shook, and her eyes overflowed again.

“Yes,” he said coldly. “Truth value, correct. They are.”

She winced. “Can’t you leave the past…”

“Do you know what I think is one of the only unforgivable sins?” said Agarwal conversationally. “Plagiarism. Plagiarism and censorship. Those are inexcusable. People can have a reason for murder, you know.”

“Vikash, we
dealt
with this—”

“It was Arkacite’s culture, wasn’t it? They encouraged it. Publish or perish—but in our case, it was
develop
or perish, and steal from your colleagues if you have to. You and I, we were ninety-nine percent of the innovation, but no, other people wanted some credit, too, they said it was
fair—
they didn’t like me, did they? So no problem to put their names on my work. Except you, of course, but you were always smarter than they were. Were you smart enough to figure out how much Arkacite stole, I wonder? How much we worked off the backs of other people’s property? You were always so innocent, with your dreams of a better future.”

Rayal straightened up, very slowly. “Or maybe I think all research should be shared anyway.”

“Without
credit?”
Agarwal roared. A bang sounded from the speaker. “Don’t try to play a hippie liberal copyleft card here; you
know
the difference! You’re smarter than that! You’re smart enough to understand the truth!”

“Yes,” said Rayal, and my breath caught at the coldness in her voice. I hadn’t known she was capable of that tone. “Yes, I am smart enough.”

Agarwal was silent.

“I think I understand a lot of things,” said Rayal, with that same harsh frigidity. “I think Funaki Industries offered you a job on the condition that you brought Liliana and all the behavioral research we’d put into her. I think
you
were the leak, that you’ve been feeding them our research for years as retaliation for what you see as the moral wrong of us stealing theirs.” Her voice held the slightest tremor on those last words—I was right; she hadn’t realized, not until now. “I think you knew about their plans to cause mass AI hysteria in the United States, and maybe you even helped them out—or maybe they didn’t need you; their roboticists are just as good as ours. I think their goal was to get AI research shut down in the States so they could corner the market, and their methods weren’t extreme enough for you. I think you told the rabid McCabe-followers exactly who was artificial and used the mobs to cover up your crime, and I think you killed people you’d worked with for over a decade in a fit of petty jealousy.”