Pygmalion Unbound (4 page)

“Maybe. But they won’t be all identical,” Crane said. “You wouldn’t want that. Each individual droid is going to be unique, with different responses, different ways of adapting to a situation and solving a problem. Makes it harder for an enemy to anticipate and prevent.”

“And when do I get to run her through the O-course at Quantico?” Danner asked.

“Three months, tops. You can put her up against a platoon of your best Marines, Navy SEALS, Airborne — she’ll beat every one of them without breaking a sweat.”

“She’d better. I’ve got a lot of two- and three-stars and Congress types breathing down my neck wanting to know where their money’s gone.”

And,
Crane thought,
a star of your own at stake.

Her rise had been rapid. But she’d clearly spent more time in grade than she was comfortable with. Another year, maybe two, and if her name wasn’t on the promotion list for Brigadier General, she would undoubtedly call it time to retire. She’d find a job in the private sector, maybe even as a consultant or lobbyist for American Cybernetics. But he knew a revolving-door civilian job would bore her.

“Three months, Colonel. And then you’ll have your own stars.”

Danner watched Kelly talking with Maria on the monitor, with Franklin hanging back.

“Take good care of her,” she said, and she cut the link.

3

Franklin watched Alannah Kelly with his creation.
His
, just as much as Crane’s.

Crane did the work on force-growing the tissue samples with nanobots to get a fully formed body inside of three months in a tank. But the brain — the brain had been Franklin’s work, using the DNA coding research done years ago by Bell Labs, MIT, and IBM back in the ’teens and running with it. Take stem cell tissue, combine with adult brain tissue, and grow a brain. It was in essence an organic CPU, complete with a few hundred gigs of RAM, ROM — not quite a Deep Blue or a Cray teraflop, but damned close and far more portable to boot. It was a superbeing with an IQ in the 300-400 range. Numbers like that would make Einstein look like a dimwitted second grader. But now —

Now he watched as Kelly talked to the droid as if
she
were the dimwitted second grader. That was the big bug — he’d had a hell of a time booting up the system. Couldn’t go too fast, this wasn’t like unpacking a Dell laptop and plugging it in to run gaming apps. It wasn’t hard-wired of silicon chips and preset codes. The organic circuitry was designed to grow, to develop, to develop engrams unique to the unit. Force-feed it Fermat’s Last Theorem, with the command to solve straight out of the tank, and it would freeze up for good. Meaning a reboot. That would be tricky and take him back to step one.

Intelligence, the raw data of sentience, could be downloaded. But the superego, the undefinable “it” that held it all together and made it not-a-glorified-Mac — that took time.

But for all the slow start, it was a wonder —
she
, he corrected himself.
She
. Female. Very female.

This was Franklin’s chance to play God, and if it worked, it meant a shot at scientific immortality. The Nobel. Right alongside Einstein, Fujita, Watson and Crick. Not bad for a kid from the Alabama coast.

For all that, he was willing to forgive Crane his little obsession in creating her.

It’s like dealing with a child
, Alannah Kelly thought. A friendly but reserved child, who had to be drawn out. She could identify basic shapes and colors, household items, animals and machines, recite facts in a flat voice.

Bigger concepts — that was a bit different.

Maria’s room might have been in any hospital. It was sterile, white and chrome, windowless, a single metal-frame bed, nightstand and a chair. A small bathroom sat sterilized and so far unused and locked. No TV, no radio — just a silvery bubble in two corners for the monitor cameras.

“How do you feel, Maria?”

Her face clouded over. “Feel?”

Of course
, Kelly thought.
She has no experience to judge against. No childhood bumps or scrapes. No torn ligaments or twisted ankles or menstrual cramps or migraines. No on-top-of-the-world feelings after acing a calculus test or depths of worthlessness after being dumped by the cute boy in class for the vapid cheerleader with bigger tits.
“Are you experiencing physical pain?” she asked.

“No.” Maria shook her head, the raven hair waving on each side of her face. “All my systems are functioning nominally.” The voice was flat, toneless.

“Do you feel happy? Sad?”

Again, the blank look in the dark almond-shaped eyes. “I know the meaning of those terms. I do not know how to apply them to myself.”

You will. Unfortunately
. “That’s fine, Maria.” She turned to Franklin. “Let’s get her dressed.”

“I’ll be outside,” Franklin said, and stepped through the door.

Kelly opened the bathroom and turned to Maria. “Come here.” Inside the door was a full-length mirror. Maria obeyed, stopped when she saw the mirror. “Take off your gown.”

Maria pulled it off over her head, stood there naked, letting Kelly appraise her. Slim body, narrow hips and waist and slender buttocks, full breasts with large dark aureolas.

Crane hadn’t missed a trick — even the full dark triangular thatch between muscular thighs and long legs. Her face was a narrow oval, with high cheekbones, dark almond eyes and full brows. She was olive skinned, with a long cascade of curly raven hair, all of which bespoke a mixed genetic heritage. Some Oriental mixed in with Amerindian and eastern European.

Where did Crane find this cell line
?

Kelly went to the small dresser, withdrew a pair of underwear, a brassiere, a set of light blue cotton scrubs and sandals. “Put these on,” she said.

“Why? This is more comfortable.”

“It’s something people do,” Kelly said. “It’s proper.”

Maria did as she was told, totally unselfconscious. Franklin obviously hadn’t programmed in a nudity taboo, and she hadn’t developed one. She could walk stark naked down Colfax Avenue and not bat an eyelash.

“Come with me,” Kelly said, holding out her hand. Maria took it without hesitation, and Kelly led her into the hallway, with Franklin in tow. “Is there anywhere outside where we can take her without too many gawkers?”

“Got a little green space outside, in the quadrangle,” Franklin said.

“Perfect.” Kelly led Maria by the hand into the hallway.

The American Cybernetics campus was built like an old Roman villa, a square formed by the four lab buildings connected by a wall. From the orientation materials she had reviewed in the weeks before coming here, she knew that each lab had a different biohazard level. Level 1 had about as much containment capacity as an ordinary college chemistry lab. Level 4 was right out of
The Andromeda Strain
, with airlocks and self-contained pressure suits; it housed the nanotech that had been used to create Maria. Once she had been activated, and a checkup completed, Maria had been moved to a special section of the Level 1 lab. The green area was located in between the four labs.

Maria attracted a few glances from passersby in the hallway, especially the men. She looked at everything with all with the same wide-eyed fascination. Kelly immediately felt protective of the naïf who walked beside her, holding her arm as she went. Franklin keyed in his code, and the series of three doors at the end of the hallway opened, and they brought her into the open.

Maria froze and Kelly was afraid she’d overloaded. Going from a clean lab to the outdoors was refreshing — she did hiking in the north woods over the weekends to unwind. But for someone who had never experienced the open air before, it might cause a cascading feedback loop.

But Maria moved her head, taking in the small space of neatly groomed lawns crisscrossed by concrete sidewalks with small spots of landscaping — a stand of birch here, an oasis of columbine there, a small rose garden — sprinkled about the grounds. She stared up at the cloudless spring sky, the sun still rising in the east.

“Blue” was all she said, then she looked at Franklin. He led them on to the admin building, in through the main lobby where she attracted more stares from the AC personnel and delivery staff, and into the large courtyard beyond the glass-and-chrome reception area.

“It’s beautiful,” Kelly said.

Within an enclosure formed by three stories of smoked glass and composite concrete walls lay a small paradise. Pines as tall as the building provided shade, a grove of birches stood in one corner, a small waterfall cascaded from a rock outcropping and flowed into a small stream that wended its way through the area and disappeared into another pile of rocks. Hibiscus and columbine, rhododendrons and azaleas were a riot of color against greenery like hostas and shrubberies.

“They spent a lot of money and time on this,” Franklin said. “Same people designed a lot of the newer zoos. AC’s management thought of it as a meditation spot. And it gave off a green image.”

“I’d never leave here,” Kelly said, awed. “My grandmother had a farm in New Hampshire, and I spent summers there when I was young. I’d spend all day, out in the quiet and the sun.”

She paused and looked around. A bird called from one of the birches, answered by a warbling from another in the pines.

“Western meadowlark,” said Maria. “
Sturnella neglecta
, an icterid. The fluted warbling song distinguishes it — ”

“It’s a pretty song,” Kelly said, taking Maria’s hand and smiling as a parent would with a precocious child. “That’s all you need to know. Or say.”

Maria cocked her head. “Yes. It is.” She smiled. “Pretty.”

Kelly smiled. “That’s your first lesson, Maria.”

Franklin watched the exchange.
It’s gonna be a long haul
, he thought. Data retrieval was there. Interpretation was something else again.
Six months
?
Lotsa luck, Doc
.

They stayed in the garden for several hours, letting Maria wander on riverstone paths through the forest. She touched everything, leaves on the hostas to the smooth bark on a birch, the prickly Frasier fir needles and smelled every flower, cataloguing the odors of roses, honeysuckle and lavender, and expanded her descriptive vocabulary.

Hidden in the greenery, mounted high on the walls of the admin building, tiny cameras recorded it all and sent it to Crane’s office, where he sat staring at the video screen.

4

Kelly and Franklin took Maria back into her room just before five, as the techs and researchers and higher-ups were filing out of their offices. They had a dress code here, she noted — ties and slacks for men, rather than business casual over beer guts; skirts and dresses for the women, hemlines knee length or below. All no doubt carefully screened, given the nature of the work here, names cross-referenced with credit scores and law enforcement databases, social networking sites combed by name and face recognition software for embarrassing posts of college drink-till-you-puke contests or dorm room orgies, filtering a certain class of people out and leaving the cognitive elite.

Maria changed back into her shift as Franklin waited outside. “That was — pleasant,” she told Kelly.

“I thought so too, Maria,” Kelly said.

Though Maria was a child, Kelly kept her voice adult, didn’t change her vocabulary. She had cousins who centered their existence on their children, and she grated her teeth when they used their over-excited, gushy child voices. Kelly hated grown women who reverted to children.

“Can we do it again?”

“Of course. I’m going to be here every day, working with you.”

“Working on what?”

“I’ll be teaching you things.”

“What sorts of things?”

“You’ll have to wait until tomorrow.” She kissed Maria on the forehead, and left her in the room.

“Got her all tucked in?” Franklin asked.

“I presume they have people to check up on her.”