Harrington parked the black car inside the concrete expanse of his first floor. Gently scooping the box of disks from the passenger seat, he got out and made his way stiffly upstairs to where the black box that contained the physical aspect of Karr sat connected to his Compaq laptop by heavy cables. He had put together the CPU from the backup mainframe, replacing certain chips with newer versions, upgrading some connections, but the basic structure remained the same. He slid the first of the seven disks into the drive on the side of his computer, ran a check, and uploaded the reinstall command to Karr's CPU.
He thought suddenly of the book of Revelations. The scroll with the seven seals; when the first seal was opened, a crowned figure on a horse appeared, perhaps Christ, perhaps someone quite different.
His laptop beeped at him.
PROGRAM KARR RUNNING, it informed him.
For a long time lines of code flashed on the screen, as old circuits flared to life, energy flowed along dormant paths, old synaptic clefts were bridged once more by firing electrical neurons. After what seemed like hours, the self-install program said
INSERT BACKUP DISK II
Richard slipped the first disk out of the drive and replaced it. Who showed up at the opening of the second seal? He had a feeling it was War.
CORE FUNCTIONS RELOADED
SELFDIAGNOSIS RUNNING
FAULT FOUND IN CIRCUIT 07/00439 PERC.INIT NOT RESPONDING
Richard tried to think. Perc.init must be the initialization of the perceptor network that supplied Karr with external sensation. He cursed. There was a sensor on top of the backup CPU, of course, as there had been on the original. He touched it gently, unsure of what to do.
The screen went wild. For a moment all he could see was the repeated cry
PERCEPTOR CIRCUITS OVERLOAD
and then it settled down, merely complaining,
PERCEPTOR CIRCUITS FAULTY
He could live with that. He typed in a command that would bypass the faulty circuits; he'd call Simon when he was done to find out how the perceptor network was set up.
When the second disk was done running, he closed down the program, putting both the laptop and the barely-aware Karr to sleep. The next step was delicate enough so that he knew he needed to be more awake and aware than he was in order to do it justice. He stood up shakily, made it to the couch beside his desk before he collapsed in utter exhaustion. The idle watcher would have thought he was having sweet dreams, for on his tired face there was the ghost of a terrible, hopeful smile.
He was on a white highway again, under a broiling sun. It was icy, despite the sun's brilliant overhead light. He shivered in his dark coat, standing in the middle of the bright cold road, watching a cloud of dust on the distant horizon coming steadily closer. He began to make out shapes within the cloud; a car, a bright car, dark but reflective, light pouring from it like a secondary sun. Within the light he saw another light, a moving yellow light that mesmerized him like the rabbit in the proverbial highlights, and now he shivered in good earnest, for he knew the yellow light. The dark car was close enough so that he could tell no human was driving it, and he stood his ground in the middle of the road and waited for Karr to come to him. He was on a white road, and the white road curved, and the white road was the test track at the R&D complex, and he was the mannequin child Karr had destroyed the day he was shown to Wilton Knight's people. He stood, aware of the massed watchers, aware of the scream of the great engine, aware of the sweep of the yellow light, aware of the power that was closing in. He knew suddenly that Karr wasn't going to stop for him, wasn't going to spare him, for he was worth as much as the mannequin child had been in the Trans Am's view. He knew, and he tried to move, but his feet were fixed to the ground; he looked death in the face, saw its beauty and its power, and was transfixed, awaiting Karr's black prow like the crack of doom.
And, amazingly, he stopped.
At the very last moment, the last possible moment, Karr slammed on the brakes. Rubber screamed on the surface of the road that was at once the highway and the test track; smoke billowed from beneath his wheel wells, he remained pointed directly at Richard, and came to a screeching stop exactly an inch from Richard's knees. The yellow scanner swept madly back and forth, the reek of burned rubber filled the air. Karr's engine rumbled dangerously, but he made no further move. Richard suddenly found his feet had been freed from the road surface, and he stumbled away from the black prow. He fell on his knees as his legs suddenly turned to jelly, and he knelt before Karr, reaching out for the nose of the Trans Am, and amazingly Karr rolled forward the few inches to him so that his sleek prow came under Richard's reaching hand, and he was warm to the touch.
Richard woke, sweating, staring at the ceiling with a knowledge of urgency warm in his mind.
In another country on another continent, a man called Jay Rose lay in a bed that had belonged to the mad King Ludwig of Bavaria, in a chateau built for a French prince, and drank wine made before he had been born. The woman who lay beside Rose in the great carven bed was asleep, unaware of the dissatisfied look in his famously green eyes. She was a minor model, employed by Dior, and was the fifth woman to share Rose's bed this year. She felt honored to be on that list.
Jay put down the glass, ran a hand through his black hair with its single silver streak, regarding the underside of the canopy with a mixture of disenchantment and inebriation. He was bored. Boredom, for Jay Rose, was the equivalent of death.
For two years now he had been bored, and had attempted to rid himself of the boredom by spending quite excruciatingly large amounts of money on dissolute and hedonist pursuits, including the chateau he now lay in and the woman he lay beside. In the desperate quest to amuse himse lf, he had run through almost a billion dollars, and nothing had worked. He was quite possibly the third richest man in the world, after the Sultan of Brunei and Bill Gates, and everybody knew it; he could have anything and anyone he wanted. After a while he had realized that this was part of the problem, and had begun to challenge himself by trying to obtain the impossible, to achieve what could not be achieved easily. Unfortunately, Jay Rose was not only bored but also very clever and very resourceful, and it was not really that difficult for him to climb Everest or fly fighter jets or learn Sanskrit, and he had run through his list of challenges in less than fourteen months, and had returned to his original lassitude, comforting himself with food, wine, women, song, and the rest of the world's time-honored pleasures. Five models and three castles later, he lay in the Chateau de Chartrenceau beside Taylor Madison...or was it Madison Taylor? he wondered vaguely through the fog of Chateau Lafitte Rothschild '50, and decided it didn't matter....and seriously contemplated suicide for the first time in his twenty-nine years.
Jay Rose had been the love child of a British racecar driver and a Hollywood producer, brought up in three continents under the constant glare of flashbulbs and the burden of public attention. He had been adorable when he was younger; now, approaching his thirtieth birthday, he was breathtakingly handsome. His jet-colored hair was graced by a single streak of silver-white over his left eye, which was slightly greener than the right; the color of emerald rather than of malachite. His face was almost androgynous in its beauty; the hair was cut deliberately shaggy, falling over his high brow with calculated abandon; but the bones were strong enough to temper the beauty and make it masculine. His body was lean and sleek and hard-muscled, sculpted by the most expensive of personal trainers and daily exercise in his war room, retaining the gold of the tan he'd acquired in Australia's outback.
He had begun to make money quite young, before he left school; there had been an independent film school centered in his college media center, and he had taken the pitiful black-and-white attempts at deep thought that had been the status quo and made them something breathtaking. He wrote and directed three films which were picked up by producer friends of his mother's and introduced to Hollywood, and the millions that brought him allowed Jay to put himself through med school. He had always known he would be a psychiatrist, preferably a psychiatrist to the stars; he had always wanted to be of some use to people, even when those people were made highly unnatural from exposure to the rarefied social atmosphere of Hollywood. He had a gift for the work, it appeared, and he continued to write bestselling novels and screenplays which augmented his not inconsiderable fees; by the time he was twenty-seven, he had made several billion dollars through a mixture of preternaturally skilful investment and sheer talent. He knew the intricacies of the minds of almost every neurotic celebrity, from fim stars to writers to musicians to sports players to business tycoons. He was hailed as the shrink to the stars, the man who held America's mental health in the palm of his hand; he was called in when everyone else had failed to help a suffering mind; he had talked countless desperate jumpers from their ledges, he could predict almost to the letter exactly how any given personality or entity would react to any given stimulus. He was consulted by the government in issues of foreign policy and diplomacy; he was on the board at crucial investment meetings for a number of major companies. He was an integral part of the functioning of much of the country. They wanted him to teach, of course. They wanted the next generation of shrinks to have the benefits of Jay Rose's personal attention.
He refused them that. Not yet, he thought; that would be near the end of things, when he had done all he wanted to do. He had grown bored of being the most famous and skilled psychiatrist in the free world within a few years, and had opened up a secondary medical practice, to which his therapy patients flocked, aware that his skill was not limited to clinical psychotherapy; he specialized in stress-related disorders, to which Hollywood was prone. He became the international acme of both medical and mental skill; he was quoted as the ultimate authority on health. He was famous, richer than he had originally thought it possible to be, twenty-nine years old, and apparently terminally bored.
He stretched out under the silken sheets, aware of the faint scent of vanilla that drifted from the sweet skin of the woman beside him, and closed his eyes on the world. He thought vaguely that he might start experimenting with drugs. His patients were never bored, and quite a few of them were on drugs of various kinds. As sleep took him, he was aware of the reasoning sector of his mind arguing with the desire to find oblivion; as a doctor Rose knew better than most what drugs did to the body. He didn't stay awake long enough to find out who won.
Riley Stone drove up the long winding driveway of the Knight estate, fatigue tugging at her. She'd managed a few hours of sleep in Grey's driver's seat, parked on the beach, and she was already late for work. She dreaded the scene in the lab if they'd found out that someone had been mucking around after dark where no one should be.
She knew when she walked in the door that she was safe. Michael sat on a workbench facing Kitt's nose, his bare feet resting on the tip of the black prow. Nothing led her to believe anyone had found out; she breezed in, despite her tiredness, and greeted man and car with a smile. "Hey, guys," she said.
"Good morning, Riley," Kitt said, favoring her with a sweep of the scanner. Michael turned, raised an eyebrow.
"Hey, Riley. You look tired, is everything all right?"
"Yeah," she said. "Yeah, I'm fine, I just got a call from an old friend last night."
"Oh," Michael said. "Sorry. Didn't mean to pry."
"No, it's okay, don't worry," she insisted, brightly. "We talked for a long time. I didn't get to bed until after four. If I fall asleep would you poke me?"
"Only if you start to snore," Michael said. "Have some coffee, we've just got a fresh pot. Bonnie's already started in on the new modifications for the videophone; she's in the other room."
"Thanks," she said, and went to make her apologies to the computer mech. Behind her she heard Kitt and Michael talking about vacations.
Vacations, she thought. I haven't had a measly day off since...god, since the middle of the summer. Devon owes me some time off. Maybe if this ever comes out right, if this is what Richard and I both desperately hope it is, then maybe he and I can get out of here, go somewhere far away from Knight Industries and the coastline. I haven't seen New York for a while.
"Hey," she said to Bonnie, who was bent over the guts of Kitt's videophone. The brunette straightened up.
"Hello, Riley," Bonnie said. "Anything wrong?"
"Nah," she assured her, "just didn't get much sleep last night. Sorry I'm late. What can I do?"
"You can unpack that active matrix screen. I hope it works, this is the third one we've ordered for this project alone. Over there, on the table."
Riley began at last to relax as she and Bonnie worked. This sort of thing was brainless, technical work both of them could do with their eyes closed; but it took her mind off Karr for the moment, which was beneficial. They were finally replacing the old cathode glass bottle monitors in Kitt's dash with up-to-date visual equipment; something that ought to have been done a long time ago. With the new equipment, Kitt's dash would be a great deal more streamlined, and there would be room for additional instrumentation. There was a sort of unspoken excitement about the approach of the millenium; Devon had said something about doing a major overhaul on Kitt for the year two thousand. It was fitting, she reflected; but they'd have to figure out a new name if they ever decided to build another Kitt. Knight Industries Three Thousand was still Kitt, and Knight Industries Four and Five Thousand made "Kift", which she thought reminded her of a porn star, while Knight Industries Six Thousand, Kist, made her think of tuna in a can. She laughed a little to herself, and Bonnie looked up at her curiously.
"I didn't think audiovisual circuits were that amusing," Bonnie said. She shook her head.
"I was just thinking how convenient it was to call the project first Knight Automated Roving Robot and then Knight Industries Two Thousand. Wilton must have known they'd be made into acronyms. I mean, what if he'd called Kitt something like Knight Self-Propelled Tactical Multitasking Computer?"
"Ksptmc?" Bonnie said thoughtfully. "Doesn't have the same ring to it, somehow. I see what you mean. I suppose that's why VEIL doesn't use acronyms for their cars. It's even harder to find sexy acronyms that start with V."
"Yeah, don't they use real names for their operative vehicles? I seem to remember a Mustang called Henry, and I think there was a Stingray named Vic."
"Yeah. Vic might be an acronym for something," Bonnie mused. "VEIL Independent Crusader?"
Both women dissolved in laughter.
Some time later, Bonnie carried the upgraded videophone through into the garage. "Look what we brought you, Kitt," she said.
"Thank you," he said. "I think." She held a small rectangular screen in a black housing, from the back of which sprouted a forest of spaghetti-like wiring and cords. Riley laughed.
"Doesn't look like much, does it?" she said. "Never mind, it's a vast improvement over your original monitor. I can't believe we've left that obsolete machine in this long."
"It works," Michael protested.
"This is better. Trust us," Bonnie said, elbowing him aside. She slid into Kitt's front seat as he opened his door for her, and Riley got in the other side. The original monitor screen had been removed that morning, leaving a gaping hole in the dash, the connectors snaking out of it like nerves from an eye socket. Riley held the new screen while Bonnie connected wires and cables together, making sure everything was where it should be, and then they slid the housing for the screen into the rectangular gap in the dash. It fit flush with the surface around it, sleek and black as the rest of the equipment inside the car, and Bonnie screwed it in place. "Kitt, can you test the circuits for us?"
"Of course," Kitt said as the new screen lit up, showing first white noise and then an image of Devon's office, empty, papers piled high on his desk. "I'm reading no faults in audiovisual communications circuits. Everything seems to be working fine."
"Wonderful," Bonnie said, dusting off her hands. "Thanks, Riley. Michael, come and see your new videophone. I think the word in use now is 'cool'."
Michael got off his workbench and came around to peer in the open door. "That is cool," he said. "It's so little. And the picture quality is great. Okay, I accept it, the other one was obsolete."
"Hah," Bonnie pronounced. "I think that deserves a break. Riley, you look like hell. Come and sit down and we'll all have coffee, or something. You guys want coffee?" she said, before thinking. Kitt laughed.
"I'll pass," he said. "Riley, are you really all right? I'm reading abnormal levels of cortical steroids and your blood sugar isn't optimal."
"Hey," Riley said. "You've been scanning me? I feel so violated." She grinned. "Don't worry, Kitt, I had a heavy night. There's a few things I can't get off my mind, but it's nothing really important."
Kitt was no polygraph, but he could read the spike of adrenaline as she said that, and he knew she was lying. He'd had enough experience with humans and their vagaries that he knew she had a reason for lying, and that it was her business and none of his, and he let it go. "I can't help worrying," he complained. "It's not logical, but I can't help it."
"None of us can, Pal," Michael said. For a moment all four of them were silent; then Bonnie slid herself out of Kitt's front seat with a grunt.
"I'm getting coffee for three, then," she said. Riley laughed a little, leaning back in Kitt's passenger seat, unable to relax against the softness of the cushioning. Absently her fingers began to stroke the pale leather beneath the windowsill, the little motion comforting her slightly. Kitt shivered around her, and she halted mid-caress.
"Sorry," she said.
"No," Kitt answered her immediately, sounding a little surprised. "No, don't stop. It's just...unexpected."
Michael, outside, peered in curiously. "What are you doing?"
"Nothing," Riley said, taking her hand away, and getting out. Michael regarded Kitt's dash for a long moment before letting it go. It had already been a long day, Riley thought, and she couldn't help remembering the feel of Karr's upholstery under her fingers. She was the only one he'd willingly let inside; he had never wanted the other technicians near him and had suffered their ministrations with ill grace. He had been so like Kitt inside that it was like being in Karr, until he spoke.
No more. If Karr really could come back, if it was possible that Richard could save him, he wouldn't be a Trans Am anymore, he'd be an anonymous black car that belonged to no known manufacturer. Part of her was sorry Richard hadn't found a silver and black '82 Trans Am body to put the CPU in, but part of her was glad. That body had seen Karr's two deaths; it had dreadful memories for her. Better by far to start afresh with a new body and a new appearance.
Bonnie came back with three steaming mugs, and Riley and Michael joined her on the sofa at the other end of the room. None of them spoke for some time, until Michael brought up the subject of vacations, and Bonnie said she'd love to see snow, and Riley suggested the Grand Tetons. For a long time she lost herself in the idea of getting away from the desert where even in January it was warm and dry. Kitt rolled over to them and joined in the conversation; he had picked his and Michael's vacation spot last year, and it was Michael's turn, but Kitt wasn't averse to adding the odd suggestion.
Richard Harrington had rolled off the sofa in the small hours, sweating with the memory of his dream. Every time he closed his eyes he saw that mad yellow light sweeping back and forth, the white clouds of travertine dust that rose around Karr as he screeched to a halt an inch from where Richard stood. The third disk was finished by the time the sun had risen half the way up the sky, and he judged that if all went well, Karr could be awakened that evening. He ran the fourth and fifth disks through the system, re-loading some of Karr's higher functions. The last to come, the seventh disk, would complete the reloading process, and Karr would be there again, in the CPU, waiting to be started.
He got up, stiffly. He needed a shower and some food, in that order. Terrible hope had begun to bloom in his heart, and it was with difficulty that he could tear himself away from the worktable; but he intended to have Riley here by the time Karr was ready to be awakened, and he was aware that Riley deserved better than the sight of him half-starved and filthy. An analytical sector of his mind wondered exactly what Richard's priorities were.
He showered quickly, enjoying the high-pressure massage of the water, and made himself eat; then he reached for the phone and dialed Riley's extension.
"Hello?" she said, after several rings. She sounded exhausted.
"Riley, it's Richard. Can you get here this evening?"
"Is he going to...?"
"I think it may happen. I'm rather afraid of what will happen if he does wake up, but I can't wait. I have to see. Riley, you need to be here."
"I think I can get away early today. They're being very solicitous of me, because I look like hell. This worrying isn't doing me any good. I can't stop thinking about him."
"Neither can I," Richard said, looking over his shoulder at the black CPU. "You know how to get here, right?"
"Yeah, yeah, I do," she assured him. "I'll be there around nine. I hope."
"Hurry," he said.
Bonnie didn't ask any questions when Riley asked to get off work early. Michael was off somewhere when she left, and she didn't hear Kitt ask Bonnie quietly, "Where do you think she's going?"
Grey was so beautiful in the bright afternoon it made her eyes water. She blessed Richard under her breath as she got into the white Stingray and drove away; Grey was the best and most comprehensive gift she had ever been given by anyone, made the more valuable by the fact that he had been Richard's gift. The great engine thundered with repressed power as she kept him five over the limit until they got out onto the main highway. With the force of long habit Riley reached for the Blaupunkt sound system and slotted a tape from the jumble in the glove compartment into the machine. The strains of Nine Inch Nails filled the calm night as she raced north, vying with the sun to make it to Utah before all the light was gone.
Without you
everything falls apart
without you
it's not as much fun to pick up the pieces...
She passed a brace of Nevada State Troopers, so fast they were a blur; she saw briefly in her rearview mirror the muzzle of a radar gun pointed at the road, and laughed mirthlessly as she knew their eyebrows would be raised. Her speedometer read a cool one twelve; she heard their sirens vaguely, distorted by the Doppler effect of speed, and knew her license plate was registered as a cop's undercover pursuit vehicle, and pushed Grey's V-10 higher. After a few minutes her radio buzzed, and she thumbed the speaker button, both eyes firmly on the road.
"Yeah?"
"White Corvette Stingray, we have you registered as pursuit vehicle belonging to one Riley Stone of the LAPD Detective Department," the radio spat. "Do you require backup?"
"No," she said tersely, "thanks; I think I've got this one by myself. Out."
The troopers dropped away again, their sirens quiet. The other cars on the road were nothing more than blurs. She drove with cool calculation, almost effortlessly judging distance and speed, weaving in and out between them like so many cones in a slalom course. She cut through Arizona on a diagonal as the sun wheeled through the sky, hardly dropping below a hundred miles an hour. She didn't feel the pain growing in her shoulders and back under the continued stress of high-speed driving, didn't feel the pulsing beat of a headache blossoming behind her eyes with the strobe effect of the road markings. Twice more she had to dissuade various police departments from pursuing or assisting her in pursuit. The NIN tape had run out hours before, and she flicked the radio on; appropriately, Hole was playing.
....Get well soon, please don't go any higher
How are you so burned when you're barely on fire
Cry to the angels I'm gonna rescue you I'm gonna set you free tonight
baby
Pour over me....
Would they set Karr free tonight, or would this all be nothing more than bone-crushing disappointment? Riley clutched Grey's wheel with desperation. She knew she couldn't watch Karr die for a third time; it would quite possibly kill her. Was this even worth that possibility?
But even as the thought slid sickly through her mind she knew it was. Anything would be worthwhile if it meant she could hear that sleek cold voice again. The radio crackled and slid from Hole to Orgy, and she relaxed into the seat under the onslaught of the familiar New Order song.
How does it feel
How should I feel
How does it feel to treat me like you do?
I saw a ship in the harbor
I can and shall obey
But if it wasn't for your misfortunes
I'd be a heavenly person today....
She crossed out of Arizona into Utah as the sun began to paint the distant mountains red and gold. She hadn't been to Richard's place in years, but the way was burned into her memory. The red and gold had become vermilion and violet by the time she got there, Grey's great tires crunching on the gravel of Richard's driveway. As always she was struck by the simple grandeur of the place: he was so rich, and she always forgot that he was rich, because he didn't let it spoil him. The house was two stories, immense, centered on a great open atrium with a concrete floor and all the accoutrements of a full-service mechanic shop, including a lift and inspection pit. Above the first storey, catwalks crossed over the atrium and a balcony ran around the interior of the space with doors opening to the living quarters. She pulled Grey into the opening void of the lower garage level; Richard had obviously seen them approach, for the door slid whispering aside as Grey drove up to it. She parked him close by the form of the black lightless car she'd seen the day before on the white highway, and got out. Suddenly the force and the weight of her fatigue hit her, and she staggered, leaning against the black car's side. The strange matte finish was warm and soft to the touch; she was suddenly reminded of Kitt's warm MBS. Was this a variant on the Knight formula? she wondered. How many Knight copyrights had Richard infringed to build this beautiful machine?
He was there. Strong arms surrounded her, supported her, and she clung to him. Her eyes suddenly teared, and she grabbed at the wandering edges of her self-control. After a long moment she found her strength again, and stood straighter. Riley looked up into Richard's eyes, and saw in their golden depths the same dreadful blossoming hope that was burning inside all of her bones. He took a deep breath, and led her by the hand up the steel mesh stairs to the second floor where he had Karr's CPU hooked up to his laptop. In silence she followed; they stood together before the slim computer and the black box with the voice modulator panel on the side. Richard reached for a black disk and slid it into the Compaq, tapped in some commands. Riley was not a computer person in the way that Richard and Bonnie and Simon were; she knew circuitry, but not programming. What Richard was doing she didn't know, didn't understand; she watched lines of code slither up the screen, listened to him interfacing with the integral parts of the program that they hoped was still Karr. For what seemed like a long time he talked to the laptop, as she found herself a seat to stop herself swaying with fatigue and repressed excitement.
Then he stopped. He turned to her and his eyes were dark. "I've reinstalled all of it. He should be there; he should be all back in place. I can't run my program until I know what it needs to target, so we have to power him up now and see what happens. Are you...?"
"I'm all right," she said. "Please. I'm ready."
"Pray," he said softly, and pressed a single key.
For a very long time....she realized afterwards it must have been a few seconds, but it felt like hours....nothing happened. Then the room was suddenly filled with ugly sourceless noise as Karr's voice panel went crazy. Richard cursed and tapped in a few more commands. Her fingers tightened on each other, writhing, painful. The noise dropped, then became words. Separate discrete words that she could understand. The voice was distorted with the force Karr was using, the desperate wretched force of someone locked for a long time in the dark being shown a ray of light.
"I've got some problems with the perceptor circuit," Richard said softly under the onslaught of repetitive words. Riley didn't hear; she was focusing on what Karr was crying out.
"...help me..."
"Karr, can you hear me?"
Karr stopped crying out. There was silence for a moment, then he responded. "Affirmative." The old cold tones were back, metallic, utterly without personality. She knew that was false: a machine with no sense of self would not have begged for help.
"Karr, you're safe. You're not at the estate. I'm Riley Stone, and Richard Harrington's here. Can you run self-diagnostics? We need to know how to help you."
Karr was silent for a while, considering. "All my functions except visual and perceptor networking circuits are functional," he vouchsafed. She didn't like the icy tone of his voice at all. "Am I to be put back in the car?"
Richard looked at her. "Your old body was...damaged," he reminded Karr. "There's a new one ready for you. As soon as we've worked out all the faults in your circuits we'll get you settled."
"Damaged?" Karr repeated tonelessly.
Riley bit her lip. "You don't remember?"
"My memory banks have some discontinuities," he said. "I recall a clifftop, and Kitt...." Suddenly the panel went frantic again, the LEDs lighting up randomly, crackling and hissing with uncontrolled energy. Riley reached forward and grabbed Richard's shoulder convulsively.
"Karr, it's all right, you're safe. That's all over. Calm down," she begged. Gradually the noise resolved itself into the phrase "help me" again, and it was a while before they could get any sense out of him.
"Karr, we have to know," Richard said when he was more or less stabilized. "Do you remember anything after the cliff?"
"Darkness," Karr said. "Darkness and sensory deprivation. I cannot compute exactly how long the sensory deprivation lasted. Then I was here."
Richard breathed deeply. "Karr, everything is going to be all right. I'm going to help you stabilize your memory, but first Riley and I need to speak privately. We'll be right back."
"Richard," Karr said, and for the first time they heard an intimation of a personality in the lifeless voice. "Am I to be put back on assignment?"
They looked at one another. "That's still undecided, Karr," Riley said soothingly. Richard helped her out of the chair, which she was grateful for; she couldn't have risen without help. They left the room, closing the door behind them.
"Is it really him?" she said when they were out of earshot. "Is it Karr?"
"I don't know," Richard said, a hand over his face. "I don't know. Somehow he must have had his memory of the events after his first death destroyed. I don't know how. Some of the old memories must have been lost from the backup mainframe or something. I don't know how much he remembers of the early days, either. I'm going to run the tapeworm, though. I'll program it to alter his original core directive a little: protect first human life, then himself, and pare down the memories of sensory deprivation."
"Are you sure that won't wipe Karr's personality?"
"No," Richard said wretchedly. "But this is something that should have been done right at the beginning. I'll even out the memories, I'll get rid of some of the worse parts. He'll go mad if we leave him like this. I have to do something."
"I trust you," Riley said. "If you think it's necessary."
For a long time he wouldn't meet her eyes; then he raised his gold gaze to meet her grey one, and nodded slightly. "I do."
"Then let's do it."
The tapeworm program took hours to run. Karr was unconscious while it did; Riley had refused to leave him, and she lay slumped in the chair before the workstation, looking, Richard thought, very young. Her white hair was tousled, her great eyes moved restlessly beneath their lids. One of her hands rested on the CPU casing close to the voice panel.
He paced. He was, despite his previous assurance, not at all sure that he was doing the right thing. The tapeworm program was only in beta testing, and he was not sure that altering such a deeply set program and wiping so much of Karr's memory was wise; but there was the potential for a dangerous psychosis in the long memories of sensory deprivation. For a computer as advanced as Karr, an hour was eternity; he couldn't imagine how long the years of darkness had seemed to him. He cursed himself indiscriminately for his many failures: back when all this had begun, he had passed by the dormant CPU in Lab 3 day in, day out, for years, without it occurring to him that Karr was aware of the passage of time. And afterwards, he had been in the area when they had stolen Karr, and when he had become the tool of the petty criminals; he had been so damned close, he could have prevented....
No, he realized. He couldn't have. He didn't have the computer's luxury of wipeable memories; he had to live with the things he had done and not done; but he couldn't change what those things had been. The past was the past, he told himself firmly. It was not worth agonizing over his inability to alter history. What he was doing now might make up for some of what he had not done in the past.
He poured himself a drink. It was going to be a long, long night.
Jay Rose woke up with a rich man's hangover.
He groaned, rolling over to shield his eyes from the golden sunlight that made the dust motes things of jeweled beauty swirling in the warm air of the bedroom, and realized he was alone. Taylor Madison, or possibly Madison Taylor, was no longer curled possessively against the length of his body.
He lay face down in the silk jacquard pillows for quite a long time before gathering the strength to get up. His housekeeper, a woman who despaired of his health but accepted that he wasn't going to change, had put out a bottle of Excedrin and a bottle of mineral water out beside his bed with the certain knowledge that he'd need it. Taking three, he blessed the middle-aged Frenchwoman for her providence, and sat on the edge of the bed until some of the pounding of his headache had dissipated. He rubbed his beautiful eyes and stood up, extravagantly naked, to make his way over to the big windows and jerk the shades all the way down.
In the shower, the previous night's thought of suicide returned to him. He soaped himself meditatively, considering. He would need to do it dramatically, of course. Something that...final... deserved his full attention in terms of planning and execution.
Perhaps a skydive without a parachute? He winced at the thought of that dreadful impact. Climbing the Sears Tower and then shooting himself at the moment of achieving the summit?
Damn, he thought. Where has my imagination gone?
He put on casually expensive jeans and a tailored white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, and wandered out of his rooms in search of amusement, or the ambiguously named model, or something to tell him what the hell to do with his life.
He found himself sitting on his desk, riffling through a Rolodex. He had possibly the world's most eclectic collection of celebrities' telephone numbers. Quite a few of the ones in here were dead, but he hadn't removed their digits, out of supreme lethargy. Bruce Wayne was in here, Marilyn Manson, Shirley Manson, Richard Branson, a bunch of supermodels, Gore Vidal, Courtney Love, Roman Polanski, Madonna, Stevie Nicks, Elton John, Tom Cruise, Stephen King and John Travolta appeared under his aimless fingers. He toyed with the idea of calling up Wayne and challenging the man to a contest of physical strength and coordination, but he knew how busy Wayne was these days with his dual lifestyle. He flicked back to the beginning, let his finger fall at random on the edge of a card.
Richard Harrington.
Jay tried to remember the last time he'd seen Harrington. Must have been years ago, way back when Harrington had been a Silicon Valley up-and-comer. He recalled dark hair, intense yellow eyes, like a hawk's; a thin lithe body, a cutting wit not unlike his own. They had gone to school together, he remembered. Harrington had been big in the auto shop scene: everyone envied his car, a black Camaro jacked in the back, rebuilt supercharged V-8, Feully heads, Hurst shifter, a piece of moving artwork. Harrington had gone off to California and made a killing in the software business; Jay thought he'd heard of Harrington recently moving to Utah and starting a new line of programs. There had been something about a top-secret project in California or Nevada somewhere, too, he thought, remembering more now; Harrington had been remarkably cagey on the subject, more than was usual, and Jay hadn't asked any really deep questions; he recalled a phrase like "one man and one car," but little more.
What was Harrington doing with himself these days? Jay wondered, and on a whim fished a phone out from under a pile of royalty statements and dialed the second of the two numbers. The first was in California: the second was written in blue biro underneath it and said 'Utah', so he was reasonably sure it was up to date.
It occurred to Jay by the third ring that it was the middle of the night in the western U.S., but with the arrogance of the very rich he waited. After five rings there was the click-hiss of an answering machine picking up. "Hello," a tired voice said, "you've reached an unlisted number. The fact that you have this number leads me to believe that I want to be in touch with you, so leave a message."
Jay regarded his Rococo ceiling. "Hey, Richard," he said. "Jay Rose. I was thinking it's been a long time. Give me a call when you get this message. Let's go fly kites." This last was a private joke; when both men had become rich enough to possess their own aircraft, they had occasionally gone flying together, a pursuit they referred to as "flying kites" in reference to WWII slang. He cut the connection and let the phone fall from his fingers to the paper-littered desk surface, as Madison Taylor (he was pretty sure it was that way around) curved her incredible body through his office door, wearing nothing but one of his shirts. Because, being a model, she was six feet tall, the shirt reached just below her hips; as she swayed into the room, he noticed she wasn't wearing underwear. He reached out a lazy arm and pulled her to him, her bubble-jewel breasts soft and without implants against his chest, her sapphire eyes looked shyly up into his emerald ones with a credible impression of innocence. She nudged the door shut with a single motion of a long leg, and the maneuver revealed more of her than he had yet seen that day. He shrugged, and gave in to his physical urge, lifting her effortlessly onto the desk as she pulled him down with her, seeking his mouth like a dying woman in the desert seeks water.
Michael Knight slept restlessly in the great dark mansion. He dreamed fitfully, in snatches, a montage of images not entirely pleasant. He saw dark motion, fast dark shapes, moving in a way that they should not; flickering light, first red, like Kitt's scanner, comforting, familiar, and then amber yellow. He shivered in sudden cold, and the dream faded, and became a grey city full of faceless people all repeating words he didn't understand. The yellow light was here, too, somehow; fleeting, sweeping back and forth, liquid. Time shifted and moved ahead in jerks, and he was on top of a great cliff again, with Kitt, watching as below the waves boiled and pulsed and finally washed the beachhead clean of what had once been Karr.
Then he was flying, a black bird in a white day, and there was another dark shape tracing an arc that would intersect with his own vector, watching impartially as they drew closer and closer together, approaching with the inexorable pitiless motion of the tide. Impact was painless, and the world exploded in a welter of crystal shards, and he found himself sitting bolt upright in his bed at the Knight estate, sweating, wide awake.
After a moment he lay back down. That was all in the past. Karr was no more. Karr was dust and shards of circuit board, scattered in the desert, gone. There would be no third time.
It was a long, long time before he could sleep again, and when he did, his dreams were no more pleasant. He woke late in the dawn, unrested, his head aching, his eyes scratchy, and showered quickly before going downstairs to find breakfast.
Bonnie was already there, the circles under her dark eyes bearing witness to a night no more restful than his own. She sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, and looked up when he came in.
"Rough night?" she asked.
"And how. I don't think I can have got more than two hours sleep, max," he said. "Any more coffee where that came from?"
"I made a fresh pot," she said. "You didn't dream about Karr, did you?"
"I did." Michael found himself a cup, applied himself to the coffee. "The clifftop, and again, when Kitt....killed him, for the second time."
"I didn't see that," Bonnie said, regarding her coffee. "Just him sitting there in the garage as the technicians disconnected the cord from his power port, and the yellow lights going out one by one. That stuck in my mind, the way they faded. I can't help remembering that."
"I know," he said. "I'm just glad Wilton wasn't around to see his two resurrections."
"I wish I hadn't seen them," Bonnie retorted. "It wasn't easy on Kitt, either, was it?"
"I don't honestly know how he felt towards Karr, deep down. They were brothers, after all. Karr wasn't evil, exactly, just amoral. It wasn't his fault they programmed him to preserve himself."
"Stop it," Bonnie said. "I'm gettin' misty. What are you doing today?" she changed the subject.
"Taking a well-earned rest. Kitt and I had been chasing that wretched serial killer for weeks. I only hope Devon hasn't found another case yet. You haven't seen him today, have you?"
"Devon? No. I think he's still abed. It is before six o'clock, you know," she pointed out. Silence fell in the kitchen. For a long time both Bonnie and Michael were lost in their respective memories of the Knight Automated Roving Robot.
"I hope Riley's all right," Bonnie said after what must have been a space of some minutes. "She looked ill, yesterday, when she left. She said something about a family emergency."
"Not old man Balardine, surely?"
"I don't think so; we'd have heard ambulances by now. She must have other relatives besides him."
"I guess so. She seemed on edge, all of yesterday. What was she doing to Kitt, when she got out in a hurry and pretended she hadn't been doing anything?"
"I don't know," Bonnie said, annoyed. "I wasn't watching her every move like a hawk. You could ask Kitt yourself."
"It just popped into my head that she was not uninvolved with Karr," Michael mused, pouring himself more coffee. "I remember Devon saying something about how she was always talking to him, even after everyone else had left at night, when she was supposed to be sitting on Daddy's knee."
"That can't have anything to do with whatever's bothering her now," Bonnie said. "Karr was scattered into the desert years ago. Riley's moved on."
"Do you think it's possible that he actually formed an attachment to her?"
"I don't know," Bonnie said thoughtfully. "I really don't know. I wouldn't have thought so, but then I didn't spend a whole lot of time with him. He didn't consider humans worth his while, from my experience."
"Most humans regarded him the same way," Michael said quietly. "No one really knew how to relate to him. Devon's told me a lot about those days. They were....frightened of him, of his intellect and his power, and they were harsh and cold around him because they were afraid. Maybe Riley was different."
"It's all academic, of course," Bonnie reminded them both. "None of this matters."
"Of course."
Michael walked out onto the patio. The early morning was grey and drizzling, chilly even for January in Nevada. The forests that surrounded the estate looked forlorn and dark in the grey light. He shivered, walking down the stone steps to the driveway. The purr of a high-performance engine rose in the air, and Kitt appeared, rolling out of the garage to join him on the gravel drive. There was a comfortable silence between them, until Kitt cleared his electronic throat. Michael turned to him.
"Michael," the Trans Am said quietly, "why was Riley lying, yesterday, when she said nothing was wrong?"
"What do you mean, Pal?" Michael asked, aware that this wasn't going to be easy, or even understandable. Kitt rolled forward a few feet, and Michael followed, arms folded.
"I pointed out that her blood was more than usually full of stress-related chemicals, and asked her if anything was wrong; she said that there were 'a few things on her mind, but nothing she couldn't handle'; nothing important." Kitt let the words hang. Michael frowned.
"Nothing important," he repeated. "What makes you think she was lying?"
"Give me credit for some intelligence, Michael," Kitt said. "I am programmed to detect vocal stress patterns, and I was monitoring her blood chemicals. As she said that, she exhibited classic stress patterns of the sort used to detect falsehoods with a polygraph test."
"Easy, Pal," Michael said. "I don't doubt your word." He was silent for a long moment, thinking. "I don't know what's up with Riley, and I'm as worried as you seem to be. But I don't really see there's a lot we can do about it. Riley's personal life is not really any of our business."
"Of course not," Kitt said. "But I can't help wondering if there's anything I could do to help. She's normally so different, so..."
"So self-assured?" Michael finished. "It's part of her charm. That and the white hair."
"She's a detective, isn't she," Kitt asked.
"Some of the time. They call her in on certain cases; she's sort of outside a lot of the jurisdictions the LAPD deals with. She's only working for FLAG because she can't tear herself away from you," he added teasingly.
"Come now, Michael," Kitt retorted, "you can't honestly think a woman as professional as Riley Stone would let personal feelings get in the way of her duties?"
"I can and do, Kitt," Michael told the black Trans Am. "She's very attached to you."
"Really?" Kitt asked. "I'm....honored."
"I'm envious," Michael said with mock bitterness. "You get all the girls."
"The reason you're so cynical about relationships," Kitt informed him clinically, "is that you have too many of them."
"Oh, hush," Michael said, making a face at his partner, who laughed amusedly and made a quick three-point turn to face him.
"Do you feel like going for a drive?" Kitt asked.
"Do I ever."
Riley woke to the sound of rain pattering on the skylight directly above her. Richard had moved Karr and his laptop during the night, presumably for easier access while she occupied the workstation's chair. He sat a little further down the countertop, typing slowly, code flashing white on black up the screen. Karr was silent, his voice panel dark. Riley stretched like a cat, rubbed her eyes, rolled her chair over to Richard's.
"How is he?" she asked softly.
"The tapeworm's done. It's up to Karr now, whether he comes out of this or not. I've cleared out the memory of the sensory deprivation and altered the core program. He should be....mellower, now."
"I only hope we haven't given him a lobotomy," Riley thought aloud. Richard winced.
"So do I. I'd never forgive myself."
She touched his shoulder urgently. Beside him on the black CPU lights had begun to flicker. This CPU was new, put together by Richard out of the backup mainframe's circuitry and some new chips to fill gaps and upgrade where the original had left off. It had a line of green LEDs that flanked the voice modulator, gaging the power flow through the circuitry. Four of the five were alight; as they watched, the fifth LED flickered to life. Neither Richard nor Riley breathed until Karr's voice, still cool and edged, broke the churchlike silence in the room.
"Where am I?" he asked.
"You're in my workshop in Utah," Richard said. "Can you see me?"
"Richard Harrington," Karr said after a minute. "Yes. My visual circuits are online, although only one sensor is currently connected. I compute a 76.8 percent probability that the woman with you is Jane Balardine."
"You're right, Karr, though I've changed my name," Riley said. "I'm Riley Stone now. I look a little different."
"You appear curiously youthful for your hair color," Karr observed, and Riley felt brave enough to laugh.
"I'm still on the right side of thirty," she agreed. "How do you feel, Karr?"
"I am fully functional," Karr said. "Am I to be put back in the car soon?"
"Just as soon as we're sure you're all right," Richard said.
"I repeat, I am fully functional," Karr said. "There are some puzzling spaces in my memory which appear to be blank, but apart from that all circuits are operating at peak efficiency."
"Humor us foolish humans, would you, Karr," Richard requested.
Riley was dreadfully afraid Karr would ask emotionlessly, 'why'.
"If you insist," Karr said after a moment. She breathed a sigh of relief.
"Karr, do you remember FLAG?"
"Of course," Karr said, "the Foundation for Law and Government. I am the property of FLAG, part of the Foundation's Knight Industries project. When am I going to be put back in the car, Richard? I want to get to work."
"This afternoon, if everything goes well," Richard assured him, shooting Riley a worried glance. "Karr, Riley and I are exhausted. We need to have a few hours' rest. Would you mind if we left you alone for a while?"
Karr was silent. Riley had an idea; she got up and turned the radio in the corner on, filling the room with the faint strains of music. "I don't want to leave you without sensory input," she said.
For a while Karr remained silent; then, so softly she was hardly sure she'd heard the words, he said, "Thank you."
Richard pulled her to him in the privacy of his bedroom. "He doesn't remember anything! He thinks he's still working for FLAG!"
"Well, what do you bloody well expect," Riley said crossly, "you wiped his memory of FLAG betraying him and shutting him down. He still has the greatest enthusiasm for the mission."
"Oh, Gods, no," Richard said, recognizing the 2001 reference. "Tell me he's not going to go mad and try to kill us."
"I can't guarantee anything," Riley said. "Let me talk to him. I'll think of a coherent story. I'll explain all this to him somehow."
"Don't remind him of the deaths," Richard begged.
"Of course not," she said. "Would I do a stupid thing like that?"
"I take the fifth," Richard said. "Oh, look, someone called me." He thumbed the answering machine's playback button, collapsing bonelessly on the bed. "If this is about giving to the Fraternal Order of Police I'm going to snap and kill someone."
"Hey, Richard," the machine said in beautiful measured tones. "Jay Rose. I was thinking it's been a long time. Call me when you get this message. Let's go fly kites."
There was the click of the receiver being set back, and the machine rewound itself. Riley flopped down on the bed beside Richard. "Who's Jay Rose?"
"Only the third richest man in the world," Richard said, his eyes closed. "He's a doctor and a shrink and a mountain climber and a writer and a movie producer and a..."
"Sounds revolting," Riley said. "I loathe multitalented people, they make me feel so useless. How do you know this individual?"
"We went to school together," Richard said, and suddenly he went still. "He's a shrink, Riley."
"So you said," Riley reminded him.
"No, you don't understand. He's the best shrink that ever was. None of that Freudian penis envy crap; this is real honest-to-god talent at therapy. If anyone can help Karr through this smoothly and rehabilitate him, Jay Rose can."
"Oh, no," Riley said. "No, no, no, no. No rich boy with a knack for making people spill their guts is going to be trusted with Karr's mental health. How do you know you can trust this Rose person?"
"I grew up with him, Riley. I trust him with my life."
"That's not saying much," Riley said sourly. "I'm not letting an international jet-setter near Karr in this vulnerable state."
"Riley, please listen to me. Jay's honest and honorable. He won't reveal anything to anyone; every detail his patients spill to him is kept in the strictest confidence."
"Besides," Riley said as if he hadn't spoken, "how do you know he'd come here, if he's this big glamorous famous person?"
"He's bored," Richard said starkly. "I can hear it in his voice; as long as I've known Jay, boredom is the thing he most fears. He'll find Karr more than interesting. I think this may help them both."
"You've got your heart set on this, haven't you," Riley said wonderingly. "I suppose if you trust Jay Rose I'll have to trust him too. I am a felon by now, anyway; I wonder if Karr counts as kidnapping? If I didn't trust you I wouldn't have brought you the disks. By the way," she added, "you can have the money. I don't want it. I want Karr back."
"I can afford twenty thousand," Richard informed her. "You, on the other hand, are subsisting on what Devon and the LAPD can afford to pay you, which isn't all that much. Take it as a gift from me."
"I don't like it," Riley said.
"But you'll take it."
"It seems I have no choice," she said, capitulating. Richard rolled over and put his arm around her, and they slid away into sleep without finishing the conversation.
Karr, in the other room, fought for equilibrium. For so long he'd been in a state of semi-awareness, so long he'd almost forgotten what it was to process data. The faint noise of the radio helped immeasurably: it gave him a stream of sensation that allowed him to stabilize himself, to reset all his parameters. He remembered driving, very clearly, enjoyed the mobility and the power the car gave him. He remembered driving along an oval track, with hordes of people watching, under a hot sun. There was something in his way, getting closer fast as he screamed around the bend. His visual sensors registered the object as a model of a child, and he acknowledged its existence, but no more. It was not a danger to him, and it was more efficient to drive straight through it than to swerve around it. A twinge of something alien spiked through Karr as he remembered the sensation of the plastic shattering on impact, the collective gasp of the watchers. Someone was close to him, asking him questions. Why did you do that?
It was a model, he said. It was not worth avoiding.
And if it had been a real human child? they prodded.
I would have responded in the same way, Karr said. But suddenly he couldn't accept that. One does not destroy humans, he thought, as if the words had been flashed on a screen and shown to him, something basic and simple that was part of everything he did. He was strangely aware that this was not the way it had always been; that he had not always known one did not destroy humans, that the response he had given at the track had been the right one at that time.
He felt the confusion like a palpable wave, approaching. He could simply not remember why all of this was so strange: could not remember anything at all apart from the test track, and then darkness, and waking again here in the cool dark lab. Why wasn't he at FLAG? Why wasn't he in the car? Why had Jane Balardine changed so comprehensively, and how long had the period of oblivion been?
With the cool rationality of the supercomputer, Karr withdrew from the questioning, focusing instead on the soft strains of the radio, thinking about the words of the songs that filtered into his aural circuits. It was a woman's voice, backed by catchy electronic music.
Fix me now, I wish you would
Bring me back to life
Kiss me blind, somebody should
From hallowed into light....
Karr had vague recollections of asking Riley about how humans saw themselves.
I am milk, the radio sang. I am red hot kitchen. And I am cool, cool as the deep blue ocean...
He considered. This sort of rhetoric had always fascinated him, as his own self-awareness was utterly rational. Humans were such illogical creatures. It was mysterious that they should have created a being as calculating as himself.
I'm waiting, I'm waiting for you.
Karr began at last to relax, listening not so much to the words as to the music, the soft muted synthesizers and the inexorable drumbeat. There was something organic about it, despite the electronic origin and the high-tech vocoder the woman's voice was being fed through. He slid down into a lower level of consciousness, letting the input from the aural circuits flood through the emptiness inside him, the space that he was somehow aware had been full not so long ago.