In the darkness of the deserted Lab Q, nothing moved or stirred; certainly not a mouse, as this place was locked down tightly enough to make it difficult for even the most determined desert-dweller to gain entry. Mr. Knight was very, very definite about his security measures.
Three small red LEDs watched the darkness, like eyes; one on the screen Judy had been using to communicate with the damaged system, one on the backup computer that was controlling the power feed into and out of the wrecked CPU, and one, very faint, flickering, on the CPU housing itself. Judy had done a lot of work on the circuitry, replacing some of the fried and shattered boards, reconnecting bubblechips, cleaning out the acrid, alkaline dust of the desert that had caked every crevice of the CPU and choked the being inside it out of all consciousness. As a matter of fact, despite the scarred, dented casing and the piecemeal technology inside, connected together with luck and prayer, the system itself was almost at full integrity. It had been...regenerating, slowly, in its old home. Connections that had flickered and died years ago were once more live; circuits that had been cold and dark were bright with energy.
In a world that had been nothing more than cold empty sensory deprivation for an unknowable length of time, the thing in the casing found itself once more able to process visual and peripheral-sensor input. While several aspects of its being were still unresponsive and painful, it realized it was really alive again, for the third time. With that realization a cascade of memory files tripped open, and it was no longer an it....he was a he, and he knew what and who he was, and what had happened to him. With the microsecond-quick recall of his kind, he remembered everything from before. The earlier conversation with Judith Allison McBride was flickering in his damaged short-term memory, but the old data were there, strong and unavoidable, and he couldn't help remembering........
the cliff is approaching and the inferior production line model is not turning aside and at the last moment he has to turn, he has to, it is not something he can choose, and there is the dreadful sinking lurch as the solid ground is gone from beneath his wheels, and the sky and sea swing three-sixty degrees, and he screams; he cannot help screaming. Then a blare of agony, and when it slowly fades, he is alone and blind, deaf, dumb, in the dark.
...pain, the low pain of raw circuits open to clumsy manipulation, the thick stench of old seawater all around him, the anger like a power surge born of a betrayal he did not expect, could not expect, and an injury more terrible than he had thought possible...
flashes: power, exhilaration, the bright noonday sun, and the hated form of the black car lit with its baleful red light, the usurper, the inferior thing that had taken his rightful place while he was left in the helpless emptiness of cold shutdown...
little flesh creatures around him; commands he did not have to obey, because there was nothing more important, no directive more primary, than destroying the black car and the AI inside it, along with the hateful man that looked like his creator's young....the man who had worked out how to force him off the cliff all those years ago...
hatred, loathing, fury....singleminded purpose, unending fury; words, emotions, the only emotions he could feel or should feel; he was a logical being, unemotional by definition, but there was no other way to respond to the sheer helpless agony of betrayal and abandonment...
and the way the sky felt all around him like water as he rose to meet the enemy, his engine screaming in defiance of all that it stood for: the hot blue bowl of the atmosphere swung over him and seemed to collapse as, for the second time, burning sheeting pain flares through his circuits; he can feel the Trans Am body as it crumples, frame bending and breaking, tires blowing like gunshots, the delicate balance of machinery and electronics shattering and scattering on a hot wind, and then there is simply nothing more to feel.
I am the Knight Automated Roving Robot. KARR if you prefer.
I am the Knight Automated Roving Robot.
I am.
I am.
I am alone.
**
It was raining in the night as Kitt drove slowly back the long access road to the Knight estate; raining hard, and he had his windscreen wipers on, though he didn't need them, merely out of habit. He didn't know why he was feeling so odd—he'd checked all his systems, found nothing more alarming wrong than a slight buzz in the lower register of his voice modulator—and he certainly didn't know why the image of the black-and-silver Trans Am as it crumpled on impact with his fender kept flashing up in his consciousness, almost every time he began to relax. He'd hit cars before, of course, and it was very unpleasant, but it was something you got over. He'd never felt like this after any of the other accidents except...
Except the ones involving Goliath, and KARR.
Then, the recurrent flickers of memory had been explained to him as a natural consequence of fear; this time, there had been nothing to fear at all, just an empty car careening out of control that needed to be stopped. At no point had he or Michael been in danger.
So why did it keep coming back to him? Why couldn't he stop reliving that moment when the clean lines of the oncoming vehicle had been suddenly and irrevocably mangled, when he'd felt the shock resonate through his whole shell, wincing away from the scream of tortured rubber and the crunching, banging sound of sheet metal being bent?
They'd come to a slewing halt locked together with the empty car, acrid burned-rubber smoke pouring from beneath Kitt's wheel wells, and for a moment neither Michael nor Kitt could speak: then his partner had caught his breath, gripping the wheel hard enough to hurt Kitt, and demanded if he was okay. At that moment, nothing mattered except that Michael was safe, and he'd reassured him that he'd sustained no damage, and then they'd moved seamlessly back into the task of taking the Trans Am's driver into custody and wrapping up the case. It was only after it was all over, when he was safe back in his own garage, that Kitt had had time to feel sick; and he did, deadly sick, shivering on his springs with the force of memory.
He pushed away the image again and slipped into his garage, wet tires whispering over the concrete. After they'd forced Karr off the cliff, way back when, Michael had asked him how it felt to be one of a kind again. "It's a very familiar feeling," he had murmured, and repeated it to himself after Michael had gone bopping off to celebrate their victory with Bonnie. "A very familiar feeling."
He didn't say, Loneliness is a very familiar feeling; didn't even let himself think it until afterwards, months afterwards, when the events had receded enough to let him think about them without an immediate panic reaction. It wasn't easy for Kitt to think about loneliness. It was programmed into him, in a way. He was unique; there were no others like him, and there was no way he could ever truly be anything but alone, no matter how close he and his human partners became. He was an island.
He sighed out loud, listening to the drumming rain on the garage's roof, and began to power down, slipping into recharge as the storm outside intensified.
**
"Yes, Mother."
"You know I want you to be absolutely sure this time. We were so close."
"I know, Mother. I was there."
"You have been careful this time?"
"Very careful. I'm still officially dead, you know. As are you."
"Must you say these things aloud?"
"It's the truth, Mother."
"What about the project? What progress have you made?"
"The system is in my lab now. I have someone working on it. A technician."
"Well?"
"It's too early to say. Her progress reports are very unenthusiastic."
"She?"
"Judith McBride. Supposedly very bright. No next of kin."
Silence from the other end of the line. Then, "You should know better. Never use a woman for this kind of a job, Garth."
"Why not?"
"We get too involved. And if this system is anything like the one Wilton developed afterwards...."
"It isn't, Mother. You know that. It was never like the Two Thousand. And it doesn't matter, anyway, there's not enough of it left for any of its prior programming to survive...and it will be reprogrammed at my command."
"I hope you know what you're doing."
"I do."
**
Judy parked her little Toyota in the lot outside the Research and Development Building. Like her, every employee of Omega Industry was housed onsite, in extensive dorm facilities that looked like (and probably had been) barracks, back when the site had been used for Army training in the fifties. She had a soulless little apartment containing a bed, a bookshelf, a bathroom and a kitchenette, and one little square window looking out on the grey badlands. Real Martha Stewart Living. She was almost glad to get to work every morning; at least in the lab she had the option of looking at a computer screen rather than at gloss-painted cinderblock walls, and the chair they'd given her for the workstation was twice as comfortable as the bed in her flat. Early on in her Omega career she'd entertained herself when trying to fall asleep by wondering what exactly they'd stuffed the mattress with. She figured probably cabbages.
She walked up to the door and swiped her ID, waiting for the red light to turn green and the thick glass panels to swish back into the wall, like on Star Trek. Inside, the place smelled of silicon and floor wax, and a little of despair.
No one had been in the lab since last night, she satisfied herself. The hair she had placed over the latch of her closed laptop was undisturbed; the pattern of chips she had carefully laid out on the workbench remained as they had been, forming the Braille letter G. Good. I'm starting to get paranoid, I know, but this place kind of fosters that mindset.
Judy switched on her equipment, and for the first time noticed that there were more little lights glowing on the battered CPU case than before. She had grown used to the three little red eyes watching her, but now some of the LEDs she had thought were long broken were alight.
"Karr?"
The screen bloomed into the familiar black shell menu prompt, with the cursor blinking, but the system didn't respond. She sat down, wondering if she'd damaged something before while she'd been replacing broken components. Damn, Mr. Smith is going to love that.
A random thought flicked through her mind. I wonder what his real name is. It's certainly not John Smith—might as well be Agent X or John Doe...
"Karr?" she said again, and heard the heatsink fan spin up. Still there was nothing on the screen. "Karr, can you hear me?"
go away
She blinked. It was almost impossible not to feel......rejected. Hurt. By a computer system?
"Karr....." She rested her elbows on the bench, rubbing the heels of her palms against her eyes, already weary, trying not to think about what she was saying. Complicated computer systems were fine. She could deal with complicated computer systems, but she wasn't at all sure she wanted to think about some of the possibilities this thing.....this.......entity suggested. She took a deep breath. "Karr, what's wrong?"
leave me alone
She could almost hear a voice pronouncing the words. "Look, if I did something wrong when I was trying to fix you...."
no
"Then what is it?"
A long pause, then: I don't want to talk about it
Judy sat back, raising her eyebrows. "Has something happened to you?" It's a system, it's a system, don't forget that.....
And, astonishingly, there was a faint crackling hiss, and a low voice spoke. It was a man's voice, achingly weary, tight with pain and effort, and it was also one of the most compelling voices she had ever heard.
"That is an understatement," it.........he......said. Judy knew with sudden and helpless certainty that Karr had become a he for her, with those four words; never again could she think of him as a computer system or a collection of neural nets and bubble chips.
She heard herself gasp; her fingers tightened on the edge of the workbench. It was a moment before she trusted herself to speak. "You...."
"Yes, I can talk," he said, and she noticed, under the desert grime, more lights jumping on the casing with the patterns of his voice. "And to forestall your next question, yes, I can see you."
"Oh, God," said Judy involuntarily. "What are you?"
"I am the Knight Automated Roving Robot," he said, roughly. It sounded as if it hurt him to speak, and Judy reminded herself again that he was in fact made of metal and plastic, and that pain was not something that applied to those media. Even in her mind it didn't sound convincing. "I told you."
"I know you did," she said. "But....you're a computer.....no, you aren't just a computer, are you? You're a real, genuine, honest-to-God artificial intelligence." She wanted a cigarette, suddenly, badly. "Well.....shit."
Karr made a little noise that sounded like a cough. "I could not have put it better myself," he said dryly. Judy laughed, startled.
"What...." she began, and stopped. "You said you didn't want to talk about it."
He was silent for a moment. She sighed, looking down at her hands. "No," he said at last. "I don't. But you'll keep asking."
"No I won't," she retorted, without thinking. "You don't want to talk, forget it then."
"......Judy....?"
"Sorry. I......won't pry. Just...let me know what I can do to repair you."
The lights flickered. "You..." he paused, and gave another electronic cough..."you respect my wishes?"
She stared, forgetting he could see her. "Of course," she said, and found that she meant it. It really didn't feel as if she was sharing the room with something out of a science fiction film; it was like talking to a person. "It's rude to demand that someone tell you something when they obviously don't feel like talking."
Silence. She picked up a screwdriver aimlessly, put it down. She found she didn't want to face the battered CPU casing, or the screen.
"I see," he said at last, and was it wonder she heard in his voice? "I'm.....not used to dealing with humans who...feel that way."
Judy reached out to touch the CPU, pulled her hand back. "Then you must've been among entirely the wrong sort of people," she said quietly.
Another little cough. "You could say that," he told her.
"Karr..." She tried to marshal her thoughts, which wasn't easy. "I.....don't know you at all, I never thought I'd meet anyone like you..." not anything, she thought, definitely anyone.... "but I don't want to hurt you, and I don't want to force you to do anything you don't want to do, and I don't want to....annoy you." She finished in a rush and dropped her gaze to the scarred grey steel of the workbench. He was silent.
Oh, good. First time you ever meet an AI and you go all gooshy and make him shut off.
He gave another cough, his voice sounding rough and rather uncertain. ".....Thank you," he said after a moment. "Thank you, Judy."
He sounds like he's never said those words before. Like he's trying them out for the first time.
Good Lord, what have I gotten myself into?