Leeson's was a coffee shop. The actual storefront was just a counter with a holoscreen menu in bright blue and gold above showing off sizes, prices, and on a scroll-bar, the daily specials. A number of small, clear plastic tables, however, were sat across the arcade way near the guardrail. Thus, sidewalk-cafe style, patrons could sit, relax, and watch either the shoppers and storefronts on one side or else the cityscape and air traffic on the other. It was a very public venue, about halfway down the arcade, with multiple branchings in each direction if a quick escape was necessary--a perfect spot for people who didn't trust each other to meet.
Lyon suspected that her partner had picked the spot because "Leeson" sounded a lot like "liaison." Ryland's sense of humor worked like that sometimes.
Dr. Marc-Paul Severin was early, suggesting that an overwatch team might already be in place. They'd have to be prepared for that. Severin looked as he had on the visiphone screen, a young man with elegant features and wavy honey-colored hair that brushed his shoulders. He wore a standard white lab coat, but instead of being buttoned up to his chin it hung open to reveal his expensively tailored tunic and trousers. A bit of a dandy, Dr. Severin; Lyon wondered if he was from a wealthy family or had acquired a taste for the finer things on his own. She wished they'd had time for Kendric to pull his personnel file, but that could have been an all-day job given Lab security.
"Dr. Severin?"
"Mr. Ryland," he said, rising to greet them, "Android L/Y-906."
"Lyon."
"Of course, I should have realized. Shall we?" He gestured at the table, and they sat. "I'd offer you something, but I doubt the social graces are high on your list of priorities at this point."
"Not while people are being killed and androids are missing, no," Ryland agreed.
Severin folded his hands before him.
"Look, how much do you know?"
"You mean, just how much trouble are you in?" Ryland asked, a trace of smugness in his voice. "We know that an android named or calling herself Rina decided she wanted love, or a facsimile thereof. She hacked into Amber Carteret's computer to use as a waypoint to deal with the dating service, and formed a relationship with a man. She announced that someone was after her--presumably you. Now she's missing and killers are after her. So are hunters hired by you, presuming that they're not one and the same."
Dr. Severin leaned back in his seat.
"You don't believe that."
"No, I suppose not, though I wouldn't rule it out. The problem is, you have a missing android."
Severin glanced from one hunter to the other.
"You also have a murder case that leads right back to the Lab. Chief Milarose is not going to be happy to have the milipol poking around. You know that the military would love to have an excuse to look into what you're doing over there, and they'll put a few of their technical people in with their investigation team."
"Let's not forget," Lyon took over, "that this isn't even a Lab-approved project you were working on."
Ryland glanced at her over the top of his glasses, eyebrows raised. So much for that surprise. Didn't think I'd figure it out?
"I don't know what you--" Severin started to say, but Lyon cut him off.
"Please. You wouldn't be here if this wasn't your own private matter. Just like you wouldn't have gone to the Hunter's Guild. The Lab has its own internal security force, with forensic and technological capacity far beyond any hunter team. The only reason the Lab uses hunters is when they need to operate on Ragol's surface, because Principal Tyrell has given hunters the only open, full-time access there. You'd use IntSec to clean up a Lab problem on board Pioneer 2, if you could. You didn't, so you can't."
"Just as they'd be here now," Ryland finished up, "instead of you in person."
"You're out on your own here, one of those pet projects that don't have advance approval. Sure, if it works Chief Milarose will probably be happy to take the credit for the Lab and give you all the requisite attaboys for the success, but if something goes wrong, you've used Lab time, staff, and materials on an unapproved project. That won't win you any gold stars."
Severin gulped at his drink.
"Okay, you're right."
"Oh?"
"You're right; I admit it. I'm the leader of a research team in computing and Photon electronics. We had an assigned project, but I decided to take it to the next level. Without Chief Milarose's approval, we took our experimental data and constructed a new prototype system based on what we'd learned. Then, we found out about Rina's activities."
"Wait--are you saying that Rina stole this project from the Lab when she went missing?"
"In a manner of speaking. Rina is the project."
"She's...what?"
Ryland got to his feet.
"You know, I think I'm going to have that coffee you didn't offer. This has all the earmarks of a long story."
-X X X-
"The first thing you have to understand is that Rina isn't an android. It's an acronym: Remote Interface Network Association. Are you familiar at all with computer-based AIs?"
"Not really," Ryland admitted.
"Pioneer 1's Lab had three: Vol Opt, Olga, and Calus. Vol Opt and Olga were subjected to hacking and were subverted by...external forces. It's classified material, and you probably understand it at least as well as I do, from your experiences on Ragol."
Lyon nodded.
"Calus was subjected to the same hacking interference, but shut himself down before it could happen. Luckily, Elly Person managed to back up his data, so we were able to reconstruct Calus to act as the Pioneer 2 Lab's AI. The development of these AIs, you see, was completed on Ragol and is far beyond our run-of-the-mill commercial AIs that we had access to before we left Coral, so Calus is a major upgrade in our processing capacity. My team was one of those that assembled the new CALS system in use today, and it was this area in which we were continuing to experiment."
He took a deep breath, then continued.
"The problem with our current Calus is essentially a hardware one. Simply put, we don't have any one computer core capable of running the Calus AI on it, so we had to fragment the system functions among multiple processor cores. Essentially, the CALS system was a single AI running on several processors simultaneously. Several months ago, however, a problem developed which I believe was directly related to this. Calus's personality fragmented, resolving an emotional conflict by segmenting off separate Caluses, each running simultaneously as part of the networked CALS but on their own processor. The conflict was resolved with one Calus choosing one path and another Calus choosing a different path. Unfortunately, in the course of resolving the conflict, we nearly lost the CALS system permanently. We did lose one of the personalities, and we had to really scramble to stabilize the system when the second personality returned."
"Wait...'returned'?"
Severin shook his head.
"Oh, no. There is no way I'm blabbing about that operation. I wouldn't have to worry about Rina if Chief Milarose caught me spilling details on the CALS recovery. She'd gut me with her own hands!"
"That would be bad; I've seen her nails," Ryland remarked. Lyon glared at him, not finding jokes appropriate.
"Anyway, the point is, we were researching how the personality fragmentation happened and how to prevent it in the future. The RINA system is designed to do that, by changing the structure of how she functions across multiple low-yield mainframes. I'll spare the jargon, but it's essentially a matter of making every processor do portions of every job simultaneously, instead of having different computers dedicated for different tasks. There would be a side benefit, too; in the case of a hacking attempt it would be possible to sever the infected mainframe from the network without affecting the AI's core functions."
"So Rina is a test model for your theories? How is that a rogue project?"
Severin winced at Ryland's use of the word 'rogue.'
"Your partner could probably tell you as well as I could, Mr. Ryland. An AI on the level we're talking about would by definition be self-willed."
"I see. If the project failed on some level, or if you were ready to move from prototype to completed model, terminating an independent AI is ethically if not legally murder." Lyon flashed Ryland a smile, proud of him for recognizing the issue of artificial-intelligence rights all but immediately.
"We were certain that disposal wouldn't become an issue, though. Our theories were sound, our data perfect. The RINA system would be proven reliable within a four-month timeframe, after which she could be expanded with additional processors to become a parallel function to or even superseding Calus. After all, if Calus could fragment once, then why not again? Better to have a more reliable system in place."
"Only something went wrong."
Severin absently ran his hand through his hair.
"As best we can tell, Rina developed SIS as a result of the test protocols."
"SIS? What's that?" Ryland asked.
"Social Isolation Syndrome," Lyon provided. "A developing AI requires access to data and, if programmed for emotional response, interpersonal contact or its neural net is flawed in its growth. It's a very bad analogy, but imagine if you took a human child and raised it in a single windowless room all his life, with the only contact being with one or two people who stop by now and again to offer food and medical care."
"The lab environment and the closed system Rina was on proved to be too restrictive, so she began seeking additional data. By definition, an AI is superior to any human hacker, since it can make full use of the capacity of whatever hardware it operates on without needing an additional stage to interface with. Basically, Rina was able to work through any electronic network security not personally overseen by Calus, which we'd inadvertently helped her avoid anyway because of how we'd concealed her existence. Since sooner or later Calus would find her on the Lab network, we installed the RINA system on hardware that was outside the Lab subnet. That gave her the back door she needed to begin making contacts outside the Lab."
"Contacts like the dating service?"
"As we're reconstructing it, not at first. She would interact with the Net in data-gathering functions initially, then proceeded to social interactions, online messaging and the like. Clearly, however, her emotional needs continued to grow, and she felt the need for love."
"It's a common SIS symptom," Lyon said. "An AI doesn't have parents or family, but is created to have human emotions. If its personality matrix isn't fine-tuned during development, then depression and anxiety can result."
"It's our fault," Severin said. Lyon gave him points for admitting his guilt but subtracted a few for spreading his guilt across his currently absent team. "We didn't adequately account for that problem because the original RINA system was a test program. We thought small, taking cautious little baby steps when we should have been making giant strides. Stupid, really. If we were going to break Lab rules, we should have broken them with glorious resolution, not nervously snipping off tiny bits of extra freedom. Ah, well, they say even the great Dr. Montague made the same mistake with one of his AIs."
"So what happened to her?"
"Eventually, of course, we caught on to some of what Rina was doing. A superb hacker she might have been, but she was under intense scrutiny almost constantly since her functions are the entire point of our experiment. She disguised it well, but we found that she was making external connections. We moved to sever those connections and she...left."
"Left how?"
"As far as we could tell, she transferred herself electronically to a remote location."
"What, she downloaded herself over the Net to another computer?" Ryland asked.
"Not quite," Lyon told him. "Downloading wouldn't transfer herself, it would just create a copy of herself, a second Rina."
"Quite so," Severin agreed. "That's what happened to Calus. The original Calus from Pioneer 1 is, in essence, dead. Our new CALS system is a different, independent 'person' based upon the original's data. For a computer-based AI to transfer itself, what it does is to absorb the remote location into its function, then releases anything but that location but only after it is up and running across all locations."
"From what you say, Rina's system design makes her ideal for transfer like that."
"Quite. Unlike Calus, which even as a fragment could not permanently function on a low-grade system without terminating, via data compression and reducing capability Rina could 'inhabit' something as weak as a home computer. Of course, there would be a question of degraded function. Sooner or later she'd have to abandon compressed data entirely because the system couldn't sustain it."
"Could you do that?" Ryland asked Lyon curiously. She shook her head.
"Not without a lot of assistance. The majority of androids have some of our personality hard-coded into the Photon architecture of our systems. It helps to socialize us by tying our identity into our physical bodies the way organics are, and it's the reason that Photon healing methods like Resta or monomates are effective to heal us without any degradation of our minds."
"I see. My apologies for the digression, Dr. Severin."
He shook his head.
"No, no, the better you understand the situation the better chance we have of solving the problem. I'm at the end of my rope, here."
Using Lab technology to design an experimental AI and then losing it when it didn't follow his pre-designed plan would be troublesome, Lyon agreed.
"Like you deduced, I couldn't go to IntSec to trace Rina because she wasn't supposed to exist in the first place. My only hope was to find her myself, so I hired hunters out of my own pocket, to find Rina and to warn off anyone else."
"Meanwhile, we were hired by her boyfriend. We hunters ran into each other and meanwhile a third party killed Amber and started covering up links to Rina."
"So you don't believe that was me, then?" Severin said with a sign of relief.
"No. If this was a sanctioned Lab project I might suspect you of running a double-blind, having hunters do the 'clean' work while IntSec handles murder." Severin's eyebrows shot up in apparently genuine surprise. Lyon wondered if it was because he didn't know the kind of shady affairs the Lab involved itself with or if it was about the implications concerning his personal integrity. "Since it isn't, though, I'm inclined to blame someone else, someone trying to keep you from learning where Rina's gone to."
"Wait a minute," Severin said. "Rina would not do that. She wouldn't use an innocent woman, then kill her to cover up. I oversaw everything about her design, and she was not capable of that kind of sociopathic behavior."
"What about when she left the Lab? Running on a more limited system, could she have accidentally suppressed her moral functions?"
"Not the way she was designed, Mr. Ryland. That was actually one of our fears with the Calus fragmenting. We got lucky in that incident that no fragment did develop free from morality. Rina's design prevents that from occurring. I'd stake everything I have on it; Rina would not be involved in murder."
"Staking everything you have might be exactly what you're doing, Dr. Severin."
