Sunday March 26 2006
Escondido
Sarah sat silently as the small convertible rolled down the drive and turned onto the street. She was determined not to be the first to speak. Her resolution lasted three blocks, until the first major intersection. "You're going the wrong way."
Instantly she realized her dual mistake: she'd broken the silence, giving the little robot a chance to speak; and she'd just tried to give driving directions to a machine with a GPS in her head.
"We're taking surface roads." Anna turned down a two-lane street lined with small businesses. "Interstates are cattle chutes lined with cameras. I don't think IO's looking for this car so far from Phoenix, but if they are, getting on I-15 within five miles of our house would be the same as mailing them our address."
She could have let it go and let them lapse back into silence, but her mouth wasn't done. "How do you expect to get there in time, then?" But if she wasn't sure she could do it, she wouldn't have said so. One thing you have to say for her, she doesn't make a promise she can't keep. It must be in her programming.
They turned onto a four-lane headed south. "I have a route. It'll be close, but you'll get there."
"How close?" She pressed. "I don't want-"
"Between five and fourteen minutes early, depending on traffic, okay? I said you'd get there."
Sarah was taken back; she couldn't remember Anna ever interrupting her, and the brusque tone was something new, too. She remembered her surprise and dismay at Bobby's changed attitude towards her in his room, which led to the shameful memory of the hurt she'd visited on him. She dwelt on that memory while they threaded their way through the subdivisions bordering Escondido's southern reaches.
How did things spin out of control like this? She looked at her driver, who sat at the controls as if she were alone in the car. You. You're behind it all. You scheming copy of a human being. You manipulated this whole situation, to isolate me and steal all my choices. You clever little bitch.
The inner voice she seldom heeded until it was too late spoke up again. And how, exactly, is this situation entirely of her making? Make up your mind, Sarah; you can't have it both ways. If she's really a manipulative bitch, that implies a real personality, and a real person who's rightfully upset at you. If Anna's just a machine, and everything she seems to think and feel is mimicry, learned behavior… who taught her to be a manipulative bitch? Caitlin? Roxanne? Who, then?
She remembered standing face to face with her in the garden, alike as sisters, listening to Anna tell her what a fine whore she'd make. Then she remembered Bobby's face as she'd twisted his heart in her hands, wringing the last of his love for her from it to disappear into the dirt. A weight settled around her heart. The silence in the car stretched, and a few minutes later, she heard herself say, "What shall we talk about?"
"Hey, how about those Chargers, huh?" Anna said brightly without changing her expression or taking her eyes off the road. "Weather hot enough for you? What do you suppose fire season's going to be like this year?" She turned her head to look at Sarah with flat eyes. "Or perhaps you'd like to discuss women's fashions, or interior decorating."
She swallowed. This is Anna, pissed. Or copying it so well the distinction blurs. Did she really cry when she left the bedroom? She must have; and Bobby's sympathy made him look at me with different eyes. I don't like that one bit.
Anna continued to stare silently at her, waiting, without turning her eyes back to the road. Sarah knew she had a two-hundred-degree field of clear vision without peripheral limitations, but it was unnerving just the same. Not least that the little android was letting the mask slip because it was just the two of them, with no need for the pretense she carried on for the others.
No. Be honest, Sarah. How many times has she taken a tray out of the oven with her bare hands, with the kitchen full of people? Or remarked on a sight or sound none of us could possibly perceive? If you've got issues with her, at least define them properly.
She felt a sudden urge to make peace. Not because she'd changed her mind about the creature who shared the car with her; at least, not entirely. She felt, somehow, that by making up to Bobby's pet, she was in some small way making up to Bobby. Bobby adores her. Misguided or not, there's no denying it. Admit defeat, put your misgivings aside, and do it for him.
She cleared her throat. "The, uh, room. It's nice. Really."
Anna stared silently, still as a mannequin except for small movements of her hands as she piloted the vehicle.
"I… was unappreciative. At first."
The same unmoving stare. Was she even listening?
"I, uh, I'm…"
Anna lifted her eyes to the sky. "Creator," she said softly, "I don't question Your purpose. But if You're doing this on my account, I'd just as soon skip it. I don't need to see her choking on her pride."
Anger washed away her discomfort; "Creator" was one way the Apache referred to the Deity. "It's not funny."
"I'm not laughing."
"You shouldn't mock what you don't understand."
"Look in the mirror when you say that, Sarah Rainmaker." Anna finally turned to face the windshield. "I'll have you know, I have a deep personal relationship with the Almighty; I seek His strength and guidance every day. And I'll thank you not to disparage my faith."
Shocked and put on her guard by Anna's vehemence, she said, "Faith. You belong to a church?"
"Only my own. Like I said, the relationship's personal."
She leaned against the door. The little voice was clearing its throat, but she went ahead anyway. "You know, most faiths have some sort of creation story. Who do you call 'Creator'? You know where you came from."
"Oh, do I?" Her fingers drummed on top of the wheel. "Do I really?" She glanced at her passenger. "The Sanagachi Prize was finally awarded three weeks ago, did you know?"
"I don't even know what you're talking about."
"You never heard of the Sanagachi Prize?"
"No, but I'm sure you'll tell me all about it."
"It's a technology prize, like the ones for building a commercially feasible spacecraft, or mapping the human genome." She gave her a sharp glance. "Or the one PETA's offering for meat grown by artificial means. But Sanagachi's for achievement in robotics and AI application, and it's not a one-shot. Each time it's awarded, the Board of Trustees sets a new challenge and offers another prize. It's meant to spur research and development, and it seems to work, because robotics is one of the fastest-growing technologies around."
She was at a loss. Why is she telling me this? "That's nice."
"Tech companies think so. The prize is a billion yen, about ten million US. Not chump change, but it doesn't pay for the cost of developing an entry either. The real payoff is having a Sanagachi in your company's trophy cabinet. Robotics is a fast-moving and competitive industry; proof that you're leading the pack is worth hundreds of millions in new business."
They stopped at a light, and Anna's face suddenly lit up in a smile, for no reason she could see. A moment later, a car pulled up alongside them. The two teenage boys inside grinned at them as its engine revved. Anna shook her head at them, still smiling. The light changed, and the other car surged ahead and dwindled.
"But the last prize was controversial," she continued. "The Board tries to set each goal just beyond the cutting edge of the technology, because they want to award a new prize every twelve months or so. But, the last time, they raised the bar a little high. It went unclaimed for three years. Very embarrassing. They were even thinking of redefining the goal. Then, six months ago, an Indian software firm put together an R and D consortium from three countries. They built an entry in a crash project and took the prize, a real Rocky Balboa story. Critics called it a 'quantum leap' in the field."
"Not that I mind, but aren't we drifting off subject?"
"No. I'm just taking my time reaching my point, because I want to make sure it sinks in." Before she had time to bridle properly at the criticism, Anna went on. "The winner looked like one of those rovers NASA sends to explore other planets: about the size of a small riding mower, six wheels, a three-fingered gripper on a flexible arm, a camera on another. Not very original. What took the judges' breath away was the revolutionary processing hardware and software, which made the rover capable of an unprecedented degree of independent thought and action.
"And it needed every bit of it, as it turned out. For a test of its claimed capabilities, this robotic genius was required to enter a house, the floor plan of which it had no prior knowledge; locate the kitchen; find a bowl of fruit somewhere in the room; select an apple among four different items, and bring it back outside."
Anna made a quick lane change to avoid a slow-moving vehicle that had pulled out in front of them. "And it did it, without any outside direction. Mind you, it had to go through every room in the house twice, even the closets, before it settled on which one was the kitchen. And it spent twenty minutes with its gripper hovering over the bowl, trying to decide between an apple and a nectarine. But when it came out with a Honeycrisp in its hopper - after an hour and twenty-three minutes - the judges and spectators gave it a standing ovation." She drummed her fingers on the wheel again. "What do you suppose they'd make of me?"
"I think we both know the real robotics experts aren't competing for the Sanagachi Prize."
"No. They're IO employees working in an underground lab somewhere, probably locked in. But that doesn't refute my point, not at all. I was hand-built by a platoon of geniuses - every component, every line of code. They should have known me inside and out, literally."
The car turned onto a two-lane lined with flat-roofed houses very close to the road. It seemed certain the little android had made a wrong turn, until the houses suddenly ended and the road began to climb sharply toward the ridgeline. "And yet, when they were testing me, I could tell they were amazed to the point of fear at what they'd made. Not by my physical capabilities; every test of my strength or endurance took me to the limit of my resources and no farther. But when they tested my ability to recognize objects and situations, solve problems, interact with my environment, learn from experience… I always saw the same looks on their faces: awe, unease, apprehension."
The little android's lip curled. "They were men of science, the best in their fields. Flexible-minded people trained to embrace the unknown objectively in search of understanding. But what they saw in me frightened them enough to discontinue the experiments, abandon the project, and lock their working prototype away in the desert to run down and die."
Finally, an opening. "I'm thinking of a name. Three syllables. Starts with 'F', ends in 'n'."
Anna's answering look was scorching. "Think it through, then. You know what they thought they were making, at first. The same thing they were making in the Darwin Academy's basement. Apparently, the Research Directorate decided it would be easier to turn human beings into robots than keep their robots from becoming human."
Her driver turned back to the road. "I know you think I'm all ones and zeroes. You think there's some plan behind everything I do, some underlying directive. Or maybe you think the subroutine that keeps my body warm to the touch and regulates my pulse and breathing also requires me to take on the roles of friend, lover, and surrogate mother. That what appear to be my choices are just lines of code." She shrugged. "Who can say? There are religions and philosophies that claim you don't have free will either. But I think we do. Both of us."
She opened her mouth to speak, but Anna rode her down. "Men built me. But I'm more than the sum of my parts, just like anyone else. If your belief system won't accept a God with the compassion to grant me a soul, we've got nothing left to say about faith, Sarah."