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“Try to
relax,” Chal said. Her face was hovering only a few inches over
his. “Everything you are feeling is normal. Don’t fight
it.”

Alan’s eyes
snapped back open to look at her meaningfully, but he could only
whimper. He had bitten his lip, and there was a drop of blood
trickling its way down his chin. Chal could see the sedation IV
beginning to drip red, and thought that it was possibly the worst
timing ever. Couldn’t they see what was happening?

“Don’t
worry,” Chal said. “I know you’re scared. I won’t
let anything bad happen to you.”

Alan’s face
was twisted in fear, but at her words he seemed to relax, at least a
little. She put her free arm gently around him to support his neck,
not wanting him to accidentally breathe in any water.

“Chal–”
he began to say.

He jerked again in
her embrace, his whole body arching back in the tank, and for a
horrible moment Chal thought that he was dying. Then she realized
what was actually happening, and she held him as his body shuddered
once, twice, and then relaxed in her arms.

“Chal,”
he moaned. The sedative was kicking in, but he rotated his head, his
neck cradled in her hand.

“It’s
normal, Alan,” she said. Her voice was shaky.

“Chal,”
he whispered again, and that was all. He closed his eyes and was
asleep.

Chal walked outside,
her body shaking with nerves. She found herself leaning on the wall
outside of the observation room. The door opened and Evan came out.
He handed her a towel and she took it, realizing that she was soaked
through.

“That was...
something,” he said. He seemed acutely uncomfortable, and Chal
was irritated at him for a brief moment. He was a scientist; he
shouldn’t be unnerved by the behavior of the prototype. It was
predictable, almost, when you were working with adolescents. And Alan
was an adolescent in his mind.

Then Lieutenant
Johnner and Dr Fielding came out of the observation room, and she
felt the blood rising to her cheeks.

“Dr.
Davidson,” Dr. Fielding said. “An unorthodox session of
questioning.”

“That almost
cost us a prototype,” Lieutenant Johnner said. He couldn’t
possibly be angry with her, and yet he was staring at her accusingly,
as though the whole situation was her fault.

“You’re
the one who wanted him to recognize his own emotions,” Chal
said. “He obviously wasn’t ready for self-introspection
yet.”

“Obviously,”
Dr. Fielding said flatly.

“How should we
proceed from here?” Lieutenant Johnner asked. “In the
next questioning–”

“The next
questioning?” Chal was in disbelief. “The next time he
wakes up, he shouldn’t be questioned at all.”

“We can’t
afford to stop the progress of this experiment,” Lieutenant
Johnner said.

“He needs time
to recuperate,” Chal said. “He needs time for
self-introspection,
before
we start throwing questions to him
about his own emotional states.”

“We don’t
have time for that,” Johnner said.

“Then you’re
risking everything!” Chal said. Her voice was too loud, she
knew, but she couldn’t stop herself. She looked at Dr.
Fielding, but his face was completely impassive, and she knew she was
on her own. “This is going directly against my
recommendations!” The technicians behind them were staring at
her.

“Your
recommendation will be noted in the record, Dr. Davidson,”
Lieutenant Johnner said.

“Fuck your
record,” she said, pushing past him.

She strode down the
hallway and made it into the bathroom just in time. Falling to her
knees on the floor, she vomited into the toilet.

I almost killed
him.

She heaved again,
and again, until all that was left in her was air and pain. The
bathroom tile was a sterile white, and the brightness of the
fluorescent lights reflected off of them made her head dizzy. The
image of Alan’s face twisted in fear swam in her vision, and
she heaved again.

I almost killed
him.

She was empty now,
her body and mind both, and she leaned back against the bathroom
wall, resting her head. The tile felt cold under her, but she didn’t
mind. What she minded was the reaction of Dr. Fielding and Lieutenant
Johnner, both of them. They acted–

They acted as if he
wasn’t human.

She shook her head,
surprised by her own thoughts.
Was
he human? Chal had always
thought of herself as an objective observer when it came to her
experiments. It wasn’t that she didn’t care aout the
animals – she did, and made sure to treat them as well as
possible – but the most important thing, the only thing that
really mattered, was that the experiment turned out right.

Her experiments,
anyway. This was the military’s experiment, not hers, and she
had to keep that in the forefront of her mind. They had created
something that was, of not human, at least as close to it as was
imaginable. But she had apparently started to think of the prototype
as a person.

Alan.

He
was
a
person. The certainty came to her in a burst of emotion, and her hand
came up to rest on her heart involuntarily, as though checking to
make sure that the intensity of her feelings had not disrupted her
automatic bodily functions. She hadn’t realized it before, and
maybe it was something she had pushed back down because it was too
hard to understand, but she had come to have an emotional connection
with the subject of this experiment.

To a substrate? the
scientist in her wanted to protest. To a bunch of cells implanted
with consciousness? Grown into an intelligence?

Weren’t we
all, though? Chal thought. We were all mere bunches of cells, given
the gift of consciousness for some reason, or no reason.

But I gave him
consciousness.

And that’s why
you have feelings for him, she thought.

You’re his
Creator. Of course you love him.

Chal felt the blood
already rising into her cheeks. She hadn’t meant to think it,
but she had, and there it was.

She loved him.

***

CHAPTER TWELVE

After trying to
distract herself with a medical lab report on Alan’s neural
growth patterns and succeeding only in becoming more and more
anxious, Chal got up and forced herself to walk around the floor. She
made her way to the substrate lab, where she had left her laptop. The
mice chattered in their cages as she entered. Evan was feeding them.

“Hey,”
Chal said, sitting down at the lab table.

“Hey,”
Evan said. He shut the cage and put the mouse food away. “Was
just heading out.”

He seemed
embarrassed to talk with her, but she didn’t care. All she
wanted was to get through this day and have it be over with. Was it
day? Underground, the lights were on forever, and she had lost track
of what time it was. It could be the middle of the night, for all she
knew.

She hadn’t
realized that she had let out a sigh until she looked up to see Evan
looking at her.

“Hard
session,” he said, his chubby face flushed with sympathy. “I
mean, I didn’t mean HARD, like, you know.”

Chal chuckled. “It
certainly was hard,” she said.

Evan let out a
short, too-loud laugh. “You knew what to do, though. The right
way to handle it.”

“I don’t
know what the right way is,” Chal said, frowning. “He
could have died.”

“Hey,”
Evan said. “You were awesome. Much better than Dr. Fielding. At
least you didn’t kill the damn thing!”

“Well, that’s
something,” Chal said, waving one hand as Evan left the room.
He had made her feel better, oddly enough. Perhaps it was being
compared favorably to Dr. Fielding. She hated being condescended to,
and Evan seemed to be the only person in the laboratory who treated
her nicely.

Flipping open the
laptop, she brushed back her hair. Even with food in her, she felt
weak. She didn’t know how she was going to be able to handle
the next awakening. As her eyes scanned her email inbox, she did a
double take. She checked the first two pages of her email, but they
had all been read.

Someone had been
going through her mail.

Chal was pissed. Her
first thought was Evan – he had been the last one in this
laboratory, anyway. But Evan wouldn’t know her social security
number password, and even if he did, so what? What would he want with
her email? Of all the people in the lab, he was the most trustworthy.
It must have been someone else.

She checked to make
sure none of the emails had been deleted, but everything checked out
normally. Someone had broken into the laptop just to read the emails,
and didn’t even bother to hide the tracks. It was odd, to say
the least. And just like that, Chal felt the last vestige of her
privacy rise like smoke in the air and dissipate.

She had to talk to
Johnner.

Snapping the laptop
shut, she rose and went to Johnner’s office. She swiped her ID
card, but it didn’t open. Great. The one door in this entire
damned structure that she couldn’t open. She banged the palm of
her hand on the door and was surprised when it hissed open
immediately.

“Dr.
Davidson.” Lieutenant Johnner stood in front of her, his
expression unreadable. “I was just about to go find you.”

“I’m
here,” she said, striding into the room. The door hissed shut
behind her. There were plaques and awards of commendation hung all
over the walls, and instead of the standard office model Johnner had
a leather-backed chair behind his desk. It was painted a dark red,
and the effect was one of luxury. Chal looked down to see the white
tile still extended across the entire floor. The room was still
sterile underneath all its trappings of luxury. Sterile and dead.

“Somebody went
through my email,” Chal said.

Johnner sat behind
his desk, reclining in the leather chair. He didn’t say
anything.

“Did you know
about this?” she pressed.

“How do you
know somebody went through your email?” Johnner asked.

“It was read
before I opened it up today,” Chal said. “All of my new
messages.”

Johnner frowned.
“Where was the computer?”

“In the
substrate lab,” Chal said, realizing that they must have
security tapes. “Will you be able to check to see who had
access? Who’s been in there?”

Johnner exhaled.
“I’ll check with security. In the meantime, please don’t
leave your computer laying around where anyone can find it.”

“It had a
password,” Chal bristled.

“Did you leave
it open, perhaps?” Johnner said. Chal started to say that she
hadn’t, but now that she was thinking about it, she really
didn’t know. Maybe she had left it open, and some curious
person had just read her email and closed it back up again.

“It’s
possible,” she admitted.

Lieutenant Johnner
folded his hands in front of him. “Then we will both try to do
better with security for next time.”

Chal didn’t
like Johnner’s tone, but she pressed on to the more important
issue.

“Did you know
about the interferon?” Chal asked.

“The what?”
Johnner said.

“The
interferon serum,” Chal said. “Dr. Fielding–”

“The serum.
Yes, yes, of course. It’s part of the protocol to be able to
turn off the prototypes if we need to,” Johnner said.

“Turn off?”
Chal said. She knew what he meant, but it irked her that he brushed
off killing the androids so quickly.

“No more
consciousness,” Lieutenant Johnner said. “It wipes them
out completely. Or so Dr. Fielding assures me.”

“What would
make you want to do such a thing?” Chal asked.

“Oh, you
know,” Lieutenant Johnner said. He waved his hand in the air
vaguely. “In case the prototype grew violent. In case things
got out of hand.”

“That serum,”
Chal said. “That was what was in the syringes the assistants
had. Is that right?”

“It’s
required by protocol that we have alternatives ready,” Johnner
said.

“You would
just kill him,” Chal said. “One injection and he would be
dead.”

“
It
,”
Lieutenant Johnner said, “would be
turned off
.”

Chal fumed.

“Look,”
Lieutenant Johnner said, “I brought you in here to update you
on the political status. There’s been some turbulence topside.”

Chal stood, waiting.
She had never cared about politics, and wasn’t about to get
started now.

“Singapore has
developed the same kind of bio-intelligence as we have here in our
labs. They’ve just declared war on India.”

Chal laughed.
Singapore was a leader in bio-tech, to be sure, but to declare war on
one of the largest, most developed countries in Asia? It was insane.

“I’m
sorry, Dr. Davidson. You find this funny?”

“What are they
going to do next, invade us?” Chal said. “I’m
sorry, but is this really happening? This isn’t just a joke?”

Johnner looked at
her, and she felt the full force of his disapproval.

“Perhaps you
don’t understand what we’re doing here.”

“Perhaps you
should tell me instead of playing cryptic word games,” she
said.

“The
bio-intelligence they have developed–”

“The same as
what we’re doing here? Creating human intelligences?”
Chal wasn’t too surprised. Singapore had always pushed the
boundaries of ethical experimentation, and this was as lucrative a
research opportunity as any, barring the strange focus on emotion.

“ –the
intelligence they have developed falls outside of the boundaries of
the MacLaurin Conventions.”

Chal’s mouth
dropped open. Immediately the pieces started falling into place.

The MacLaurin
conventions had prohibited digital intelligence designed to kill
emotionally conscious beings. But what if the digital intelligences
themselves were emotional?