Sunlight filtering in through the floor-to-ceiling window woke Thompson. He smiled instantly, remembering why he was in this particular bed and who had been nestled in his arms when he fell asleep. He leaned down to kiss the top of Greene's head only to find she wasn't there. He sat up quickly and looked around; he was alone in the room.
A horrible sinking feeling seemed to hit him in the pit of his stomach. Scrambling to put his pants on, he flung the door open and looked out into the short hallway. Nothing. He vaulted across the hallway in one step, intending to check the room that held the kitchen and den. The instant he came through the door, he found Etna standing in his way, radiating pure fury.
"What did you do to her?" she hissed in a low voice, and advanced on him.
Thompson backed up a pace and frantically scanned the room. Greene wasn't there. She wasn't in the cabin at all, and if Etna's reaction meant what he thought, she had been unhappy when she left it. He gasped as the sinking feeling exploded into pure, searing pain. He tried to choke out some answer to Etna, some apology for whatever he'd done wrong, but he couldn't. His throat seemed to be swollen shut, and his mouth was dry as dust. His chest seemed to be trapped in a vice. It stunned him that an emotion could possibly hurt this much.
She had stopped, though, and was looking at him carefully. Smith had come raging in through the front door. Smaller though he was, he looked as though he really might rip Thompson's arms off, but Etna's look brought him up short.
"I got that question backward, didn't I, Thompson?" She put her hand on his arm just above his elbow. At her touch, Thompson choked again, and felt as though he might collapse. Smith looked confounded. "Sit down," she said quietly, and he let her guide him to the table, where she put a mug of coffee in front of him. "What happened?"
"We...last night, I touched her and then we...did something..." he was coming up short. He had never had a reason to download this knowledge before. It just wasn't a common occurrence among agents, and he had no vocabulary to describe what they'd done. "I must have done something wrong, but last night she looked so happy..." he trailed off.
"Wait." Etna, already wearing her earpiece, took his from her pocket and handed it to him. He put it on, and suddenly she was sending packets to him at a blistering speed. He realized quickly that she'd just given him the names for everything Greene had taught him last night. He explained what had happened and how Greene had been gone when he woke up. He thought perhaps Etna would be angry at him; he thought he'd made some ignorant mistake that hurt Greene, but Etna wasn't angry at all and she told him it wasn't his fault. Smith was standing with his back to the kitchen cabinet, drinking coffee. He was looking at Thompson in a calculating way.
Etna sighed when Thompson had finished. "This is my fault."
Thompson and Smith both looked at her in astonishment. Smith spoke first. "How precisely did you come to that conclusion?"
"I put them together," she told Smith. She sat back a little in her seat; she'd been leaning forward while she listened to Thompson's story. "Of the second generation agents, Thompson showed the most progress toward empathy & intuition. He needed some human interaction to teach him how to use those." She sighed here, and glanced at Thompson with a strange look. Sympathy, perhaps? "As for Tirzah, I felt she needed a purpose. She needed something to keep her busy, and not allow her to dwell on what had happened to her. It seemed like the best of both worlds, at the time, to put you together. She would be your human interaction and show you how to use your specific traits, and you'd keep her company and make sure she stayed busy."
"That part worked, evidently," Smith noted. Thompson glared at him; he didn't like Smith's flippant assessment of the most profound day in Thompson's life.
Etna laughed mirthlessly. "It was working. Thompson has made more progress than either I or the Oracle expected to this point. The problem is, you came to terms with your emotional capacity faster than Tirzah's ability to process that fact," she said to Thompson. "She doesn't understand that you can actually feel."
"But I still don't understand why she left." Thompson found his voice sounded plaintive.
"Thompson, she doesn't believe you are capable of feeling about her the same way she feels about you."
A feeling exploded in Thompson's chest and rose into his throat. "She feels something for me?" he asked. This had to be hope.
Etna gave him a genuine, somewhat pitying smile. "I think she's falling in love with you." The hope seemed to be fluttering, beating against the inside of his chest. "But she thinks that, to you, last night was nothing more than trying a milkshake or learning to swim or listening to music."
Thompson looked up in alarm. "No! That's not at al--" Etna cut him off.
"I know that, Thompson. It's perfectly obvious to anyone that you've been falling in love with her for at least the past month." Thompson was dumbfounded. How on earth could Etna have known that if he hadn't known it himself? She went on. "You'd rather be with her than be alone. In some way you can't explain, it bothers you to see her upset. Some things start to remind you of her, and you come to feel preferences for those things." Thompson blinked at her. He'd been wrong. She was worse than the Oracle; she took feelings and threw them back in your face logically. "By the time I met Smith, I'd been here for more than half a century. I had seen so many Exiles do things that I thought only humans did for each other. I was ready to believe that someone born of code had the same emotional capacity as someone born of DNA. Tirzah is not."
At the last sentence, that hopeful knot in his chest had withered, and the horrible, aching emptiness had gotten worse. No wonder humans seemed unpredictable; any emotion this strong was simply impossible to ignore. He put a hand over his eyes. She had no idea what she meant to him. Here he sat, his newfound heart shattered into tiny, sharp pieces, and she thought he couldn't feel at all. A hundred emotions she'd taught him to feel and every new one she'd given him just last night, and she thought he had simply been using her to gain a new experience. That last thought pierced through the fog that surrounded his thoughts with a sudden flash of anger. "It doesn't matter if she believes it or not!" He took his hand from his eyes and glared at Etna. "I feel it regardless of what she's ready to think!"
Smith made a noise that sounded like agreement. Etna cupped her chin in her hand, elbow on the table. "So what do you want to do?"
He scowled again. "I want to tell her. I want to make her understand." Part of him could barely comprehend that he was saying this.
"Understand what?" Smith prompted.
"That I love her!" There. He'd said it. If Smith was flawed, well then, so was Thompson.
Etna slapped the table and laughed. "That's what I wanted to hear," she said, and Smith nodded approvingly. Etna announced they were going back to the city.
Once they were in the car, Etna began accessing the system, watching for something. She finally found it. "Oh, no."
"What?" Thompson asked, alarmed.
"Tirzah's requested reassignment and gotten it. With Jackson." Thompson snarled, and forced down a sudden urge to break Jackson's legs. Etna rejected that assignment and re-assigned Greene a patrol of her own. Again, he thought Etna might be able to read his mind.
Etna & Smith both sent him packets of information as fast as he could process them. Greene's history, restaurants she liked, concert dates, favorite scents, behavioral tutorials, and to Thompson's great surprise, more information about sex--from Smith.
Thompson looked visibly startled. "Does that work?"
"Yes," Smith said, very emphatically.
"I do not ever want to know what you just sent him," Etna said in a warning tone from the back seat.
They dropped him off at his apartment; Etna was going straight into headquarters to oversee Greene's reassignment. Once he was alone, all the energy seemed to drain out of him. He threw his suit jacket onto his couch and headed into the bedroom, where he sat down on the corner of his bed, trying to process all the new information he had, not only from Smith & Etna, but from Greene.
Etna had sent him her research regarding the agent programs in an attempt to help him make sense of the fact that he had emotion at all. Certain character traits were necessary in agents, given the job they had to do. They needed to be wary, curious, alert, and motivated. This was a fairly wide variety of emotion on its own, and therefore some intuition was programmed into every single agent by necessity. They were also extremely high level AI; necessary if they were to function autonomously without constant intervention from the Architect or Oracle. According to Etna's theory, artificial intelligence always seeks to expand its' experience, simply by nature. Experiences would enhance the agent emotional range by introducing preferences, which led to emotions like happiness. What Greene had unintentionally done was speed up the process by exposing Thompson to all the different experiences and by simply being human. His curiosity about her had led him to observe her closely, and his observation of her had given him the urge to experience things the way she did. The cumulative effect on Thompson, went Etna's theory, was to make him capable of becoming very strongly attached to Greene, which he promptly had. It certainly didn't help that he had to come at emotional development from the opposite direction from humans. As babies, they developed emotion first, then cognition. Thompson already had cognition and logic, which seemed to be constantly at war with these new feelings.
He thought Etna was wrong, though, in part. She made it sound like he had to fall in love with Greene; that there was no other option. He knew that wasn't the truth. It was Greene herself. Her optimism, her enthusiasm, her unpredictability and her kindness. She didn't have to be nice to him. It had been entirely her choice to befriend him, and somehow that mattered. It wasn't just some combination of variables. She had chosen to be his friend, and that very thought sent surges of conflicting, confusing emotions through Thompson like a thunderstorm. The whole thing was giving him a vague sense of being overwhelmed. He remembered what Greene had told him about humans not being able to process many things at once, and needing a distraction. He thought he might know a little of what that was like, now.
He laid back and started at the ceiling. Just yesterday he had never slept before in his existence, and now he wanted to go to sleep and not wake up for a week. It occurred to him he'd never used this bed before. As he drifted off, he found himself imagining Greene lay beside him.