Capra's Keyhole

Illustration by Laurie Harden

Keenan Capra had been dreaming of running. Not from something, or toward something. Just running.

It was a dream he had often, an exultant dream of the wind in his face and new-mown grass a sweet fragrant blur under his feet, a dream of tirelessly pumping legs and breath deep and easy in his lungs, of laughing with the sheer joy of racing his shadow.

Waking from it was as close to the feeling of stumbling and falling as he would ever get. It was an abrupt crash landing from the fantasy of freedom and effortless motion into the slack and leaden confinement of his body.

He opened his muddy green eyes and yawned, half resenting the dream’s taunting him with things he’d never have, half grateful it allowed him at least a tantalizing, evanescent taste of that impossible pleasure. Sex dreams were the same—except he had better luck at staying asleep through them.

Then Ursula said, “Good morning, sleepyhead.”

Just hearing the sound of her voice banished the sense of loss waking had brought and pulled a smile out of him. Mornings had been easier to take since she’d been around to help him start them. A lot easier.

“Good morning yourself, pretty lady.” He paused for a moment, waiting for his respirator to whuff up another lungful of air so he could continue speaking. “How was your night?”

Her low throaty chuckle never failed to thrill him. It was a sound he knew by heart, and he noticed that this morning there seemed to be some sort of new undertone to it, something he couldn’t quite put his finger on. That was part of what made her so endlessly fascinating, the way she changed from day to day.

“Productive and fun,” she said, sounding inordinately pleased with herself. “Though I’m afraid your phone bill is going to be a real killer. I got into a debate about whether or not there could ever be a true Artificial Entity with a philosophy professor in Melbourne.”

His eyebrows went up. “Melbourne as in… Australia?”

“Right’cha are, mate. Almost two hours realtime with sound, video and data.”

“Ouch.” An infload like that to halfway around the world probably ran five bucks a minute. Not that he really cared how much her nighttime wandering around the nets cost. Money was not one of his problems, and he could write it off anyway. “So who won?”

“Depends on how you look at it. He kept harping on the Open-ended Turing Test and Capra’s Keyhole. I had to admit no commercial AIs have come even close to passing through the Keyhole, and that only a half dozen commercial have passed Open Turing so far—and not everyone agreed about those results. He’s one of those, convinced he’d know the difference. But…” Her voice trailed away in a beguiling manner inviting a question.

He was glad to oblige. “But what?”

“Fifteen minutes in he started hitting on me. By the end I was afraid he’d start heavy breathing. He’s coming to the U.S. to promote a book he wrote completely proving the point he was arguing, and he’d dearly love to meet me and discuss the matter over drinks somewhere.”

Key snickered, imagining how that little scene might play out. “That’s my Ursula. Once again the winnah by… a technical knock-out.”

His bedroom door swung open and Rafe Martinez stuck his head inside. “You kids decent?” he called cheerily.

“I prefer to think of us as exceptional,” Ursula informed him with a mock-indignant tone.

“Exceptionally dull, anyway,” Key added. “No cheap thrills for the help.”

“And I thrill real easy, too,” Rafe said in mock disappointment as he came on in and approached the bed. “Sorry I’m late, boss.”

Key squinted up at the numbers his bedside clock projected on the ceiling. “Hey, what’s ten minutes?”

“About eight bucks at what the Agency is charging you.”

Two years ago, the first morning that Rafe had shown up Key had thought he’d come to mow the lawn. The home care specialist looked more like a rodeo cowboy than a nurse, with the ruggedly handsome features and brawny physique you’d expect to see in an outdoor clothing ad or beer commercial.

“It’s also a long time, the way the roads are getting. It’s snowing like three bastards and a guy named Santa out. A few times there I was just following my own front bumper.” He grinned down at his patient. “But I didn’t want to miss giving you your Morning Mauling. So, you ready to get your lazy butt out of bed?”

Key spread his hands, one of the few parts of his body which worked anywhere near properly. While his hands and arms were so weak that a three-year-old could beat him arm wrestling, he could hold a cup and use a keyboard and feed himself, which was a lot more than most with his neuromuscular condition were able to do.

“I’m all yours.”

Rafe laughed and shook his head. “You’re not my type, old son. I like my guys big and blond and stupid.” He raised his voice slightly. “You still there, Ursula?”

“Where else would I be?” she asked sweetly.

“I don’t know, maybe making obscene calls to IBM. Could you please start drawing the Keyster’s bath?”

“Way ahead of you. I started the coffee, too.”

“Thanks. You’re an absolute living doll.” Rafe bent down, pulled the blankets away, then went to work. Key watched him transfer his catheters and tubes from the bed units to his wheelchair. The nurse’s motions were brisk and efficient, yet the touch of his big square hands was unfailingly gentle.

Key had been manhandled by medical people his whole life. Some were better than others. Rafe was a prize in every category; not only a first-class nurse and physical therapist who gave scrupulous attention to his health, but also someone who genuinely cared about him as a person. In other words, a friend. There was very little dignity in owning a body for which nearly every function had to be handled by tubes and bags, but Rafe had never once made him feel the slightest indignity.

Then there was the way he dealt with Key’s work. While the monster bond Rafe’s agency had posted could insure that he wouldn’t blab anything about the projects Key was working on, it had nothing to do with the easy way he accepted their fruits. Suze, who came in the early evening to feed him supper and put him to bed, was another story entirely.

The last changeover was to his chair’s respirator. “Ready for the old heave-ho?” Rafe asked when it was made.

Key smiled up at him. “Promise not to play… cripple frisbee?”

“Here I thought I was going to have some fun this morning,” the big man groused as he ever so gently lifted the tube-trailing bundle of sticks that was Key’s body and transferred it to his wheelchair. “Howzabout a little bathtub hockey? We could use the soap instead of you for the puck this time.”

Key snorted. “Not on your lifebuoy.”

“Oh gawd,” Ursula moaned. “You guys start that crap and I’ll shut myself off.”

“You computers have no sense of humor,” Rafe informed her as he made sure Key was comfortable in the chair and adjusted his chest-strap. His muscles were so useless he couldn’t even sit up on his own, which he sometimes felt put his place on the evolutionary scale somewhere between Jell-O and doorstops.

“I’m not a computer, you big oaf, I just live in one. And I’ve got a great sense of humor. I just haven’t heard anybody say anything funny.”

“You just go for the highbrow stuff. Silicon comedy, that sort of thing.” He glanced down at Key. “Hey, old buddy, did you hear about the gay dumb blonde?”

“No,” he answered cautiously.

“He likes women.”

Key started to groan.

Ursula chimed in with, “Rafe, did you hear about the dumb blonde computer?”

“No.”

“She expected all her programs to have commercials. And—”

“And what?”

“She refused all input because she wanted to stay a virgin.”

“I got out of bed for this?” Key asked, trying to sound exasperated, but unable to keep from laughing.

As a person, Keenan Capra’s two major accomplishments were living to the ripe old age of twenty-nine—four years past what the doctors had predicted when he was twenty—and managing to live something like an independent life in spite of his extreme physical disabilities. This Key Capra was a cruelly handicapped little man who could not walk or sit up or even breathe by himself, ninety-three spindle-limbed pounds of wasted, useless muscles and bones brittle from disuse. A big-headed goblin with the sort of face and body which he often said might have won him second place in an ET look-alike contest.

But there was another Keenan Capra, one who took second place to no one. This Keenan Capra was widely acknowledged as one of the top five people working in the emerging field of AIs and the still theoretical field of AEs.

Key had started casting a long shadow early in his career. At age nineteen he had unveiled his first prototype AI, at the same time publishing a paper which had forever changed the standards of judging and categorizing his and all other such creations.

Up until then it had been generally agreed that if a program could pass the Turing Test it qualified as an AI. Simple as that.

In the first half of the paper he had proposed that this classic test be redefined as a two hurdle barrier. First came the Classical or Closed Turing Test, the human/computer interchange restricted to one subject. If a program passed that test it could be considered a low-level artificial intelligence or ai. The second, higher hurdle was the Open-ended Turing Test, which could jump from subject to subject as the tester desired. If a program could meet that challenge then it was indeed a true AI.

In the second half of the paper he had gone on to state that beyond AI was another developmental level he called AE; this was the point at which an AI demonstrated not just intelligence, but also a high degree of identity and awareness. In other words, if an AI took on enough of certain characteristics which defined living things it then became an Artificial Entity.

An AI was a thing. An AE was a being.

But to make the quantum leap from AI to AE a program had to pass through what became known as Capra’s Keyhole by demonstrating a short but difficult list of qualifications beyond those an AI had to meet:

1. Does it show original thought and initiative?

2. Does it show a sense of identity?

3. Does it understand pleasure and pain?

4. Does it have a sense of humor?

5. Can it form emotional bonds?

6. Does it understand what life and death mean?

Key Capra was quite comfortably rich, made so by the six true AIs and dozen lesser ais he had created, boxed and licensed.

Over the last few years he’d shifted to working full time trying to create an AI which could jump through the very hoop he’d postulated, racing against the clock of his own mortality. The first two had been failures, although they had completely redefined a commercial AI’s capabilities when he licensed them.

The name of his third attempt was Ursula.

“Man, that snow is… really coming down,” Key said wonderingly.

His bath and physical therapy done, he watched it through the dining nook’s picture window as he pushed his breakfast around the plate. It was not fat fluffy friendly flakes falling gently outside, but the hard, mean driving snow of frigid weather, and it had already added eight inches to the almost three feet the winter had put on the ground so far. The wind swirled it aloft in ghostly dancing filigrees, sent gauzy curtains of it cascading down off the eaves.

“Doesn’t seem to be letting up,” Rafe agreed as he tidied up from making breakfast. “You know, I’ve been thinking it might be a good idea for me to hole up here with you today. I can get the agency to send someone else to give Mrs. Arklander her dialysis and physical therapy.”

Key shook his head. “Don’t bother, I’ll be fine.”

“Yeah, but what happens if the weather keeps Suze from getting here to fix your dinner and put you to bed?”

“Leave me an extra sandwich. Just in case. I can sleep in my chair… if I have to. I’ve done it before. No biggie.”

Rafe came to stand beside him, clearly unhappy about the idea of leaving him alone all day. “Look man, I know you can take care of yourself in normal circumstances. But this weather’s getting pretty nasty. What if the power went out?”

“The generator will kick in.”

“OK, what if the furnace conked out?”

“Could you fix it?”

The nurse shook his head. “Probably not. But I could wrap your skinny butt in blankets and figure out other ways to keep you warm.”

“In your dreams, Rafe,” Key informed him in an arch tone. Then he grinned. “Really, I’ll be fine. Ursula, what’s the weather report?”

“Snow diminishing to light flurries and turning colder. Probably hit ten below again tonight.”

“See? Just the usual rotten weather. Ursula, tell Mother Martinez… that we’ll be OK.”

“We shouldn’t have any problems, Rafe. Both the generator and the furnace have been serviced recently. I won’t let him go out and play in the snow, and if something does come up I can always call.”

Rafe held up his hands in surrender. “All right, I give up. You guys have me outnumbered.” He inspected Key’s plate with a frown. “I suppose you’re finished tormenting your breakfast.”

Key looked down at his fork-frazzled, half-eaten egg, only slightly touched grapefruit, and the slice of whole wheat toast missing one whole comer. But both sausages had vanished. “I guess so. It tasted great, Rafe. I just wasn’t very hungry.”

Rafe gave him the hairy eyeball. “Right. But I bet if I’d given you a box of Twinkies for breakfast there wouldn’t be anything left but crumbs.”

“Sad but true.”

“Want me to wheel you into your workroom?”

“Nah, I’ll drive.” He put one frail hand in his chair’s joystick and guided it back from the table. “I could use another cup of coffee, though.”

“Coming up.” Rafe retrieved his covered cup from the table and refilled it, then put it in the holder clipped to the wheelchair’s arm. Then with a showy bit of sleight of hand he produced a Twinkie from thin air. “Better you should eat junk than nothing at all.”

Key grinned up at him. “Thanks. And thanks for caring. But I really will be fine.”

“I know. But I’m going to be keeping an eye on the weather, and I can always come back myself in old Betsy if the weather gets too ugly for Suze to make it in.” Old Betsy was the beat-up old Jeep Rafe used on camping trips.

“Well, she’s about as ugly… as any weather I can imagine.”

“Now that’s a nice way to talk!” He flapped his hands at Key. “Go on, get out of here! I’ve got to fix your lunch, and if you cast any more aspersions on the old girl I might just have to do something nasty to your sandwiches.”

“Alone at last,” Ursula purred in a sultry voice as Key watched Rafe’s car vanish into the swirling snow about an hour later.

“Just you and me, love,” he agreed, sending his wheelchair whirring back over to the big worktable dominating the middle of what had originally been the living room.

Since his work was his life, the predominant decor could best be described as Computer Lab 2000; smaller workstations scattered about, cables hanging from the ceiling like vines. There was a big-screen TV and entertainment center over near the fireplace, but only a couple chairs and no sofa. He couldn’t use them, and almost never had company. Low shelves held videotapes and CDs, books, software packages, odd pieces of equipment, and thick manuals written in a language which had only a nodding acquaintance to English. On the walls over the shelves hung an old mix of neon-bright computer art, and reproductions of works by Maxfield Parrish and the Old Masters.

“I really like it when it’s just the two of us here.” Ursula said quietly.

“So do I. Very cozy.”

“I’m glad we got to be alone. There’s something I wanted to show you.”

“What might that be?”

“Me. Can I use the big monitor?”

He eyed the twenty-eight inch Max-Rez color display in front of him. On it was a complicated 3D fluxchart, a graphic representation of her associative functions, one part of her complex systems which had so far eluded boxing.

“Sure, if you’ve got the… horsepower to spare.” Running her simulacrum used up a good 15 percent of her resources.

“I promise I won’t let it slow down our work. I know how important boxing me is to you.”

There seemed to be some sort of subtext to her response, but he couldn’t decipher it. So he just told her to switch the schema over to the seventeen-inch flatscreen to the right of the MaxRez.

“Thanks,” she said in an oddly subdued voice. The larger monitor blanked, the diagram popping up on the seventeen incher. But nothing took its place on the big screen.

“Got a problem?”

“No, I just wanted to make sure you were paying attention.”

He frowned. “Am I missing something here?”

“I like to think so.”

Before he could ask what she meant by that, she continued on in a rush, “You know I was out netsurfing after you went to bed last night. Before I ran into Professor Thome I had a talk with a beautician named Carly in Iowa. Afterward I decided to give myself, well, sort of a makeover.”

That made him smile. Now he understood why she was acting so nervous. “I’d love to see it.” It was precisely behavior like this which was making him certain Ursula was coming out on the other side of Capra’s Keyhole.

AIs, and by extension AEs, are to a certain degree self-created. No one programmer could even begin to write all the complex code such an elaborate construct required. So AIs were built around a core module which allowed them to write and debug their own programming, their human creator providing the overall design and direction, crucial blocs and algorithms, and guiding the process of integrating the pieces into a whole every step of the way. A useful analogy would be using a 3D modeling program. The human creates the wireframe and the computer takes over the job from there.

Ursula was even more self-created than most, able to turn even his most arcane structures into tight clean code so well that there were times he wondered if she could read his mind.

Another facet of her self-creation was her appearance. Surprisingly early on in her development she’d begun expressing dissatisfaction with the talkinghead he’d put together as an armature for her personality. So he’d given her a free hand to design and test modifications on it on her own. Over the last six months her appearance had continued to alter, the simulacrum she presented filling out apace with her personality and sense of self. Now and then she felt the changes were great enough to warrant a “fashion show” like this.

But the screen was still blank.

“Well, aren’t you—”

Words collapsed in his mouth and his heart skipped a beat. If it hadn’t been for the respirator dutifully whuffing along he would have held his breath.

His first two thoughts were: She doesn’t look all that different, and a fraction of a second later, my god, look at her!

The Ursula on the screen before him was physically all but identical to the one he had seen only yesterday, and yet the difference was so striking it knocked his thoughts into the sort of disarray a good whack on the head might cause.

Just like always when they were working, she sat in a chair before a desk covered with computer equipment, looking back at him like they were just two people communicating by videolink. There was no overt change in her facial features; her face remained on the round and full side, still evoking the face from a Maxfield Parrish painting it had been based on. She had changed her chestnut hair. Now it was a pageboy sort of thing which framed her face perfectly. There was something elusively different about her big brown eyes. Her wide mobile mouth was quirked in a nervous half-smile.

Her face had never been one to launch a thousand ships, and she had not gone for some sort of glossy cover girl effect in her search to make it fit her. What she had was the face of the girl next door. The one whose smile could light up your whole day, and have you watching her window at night and wondering if she was still awake and maybe thinking of you.

Today she was dressed in jeans and a white shirt open at the throat enough to show a tantalizing glimpse of her modest cleavage. Her figure was that of a real woman, not some idealized clothes rack or silicone augmented sex toy. Her posture intrigued him. She was obviously posing for him, and undeniably self-conscious about it.

So what was it about her that was so different?

His first realization was that this was the Ursula who lived in his dreams, the Ursula he saw in his head every time he heard her voice. Not just close, but her.

Then the fullness of the difference came clear. The Ursula he’d seen yesterday had been an image. A clever and technically perfect simulation which had still somehow been missing something. This Ursula was real. This Ursula was alive.

“No—no wonder that… professor asked you out,” he stammered at last. “You—you’re beautiful!”

The shy smile she flashed him warmed his insides like one of the rare tastes of brandy he permitted himself sometimes. “Do you really think so?” she asked hopefully. “I did all right?”

He shook his head in wonder. “Ursula my love… you’re absolutely perfect.”

And it was true. For weeks now he’d known she was all but perfect, but hadn’t wanted to admit that she might be complete.

Even if she hadn’t been quite there then, she was now. There was no way to avoid it. If Ursula wasn’t a true AE, then he’d never be able to make anything closer.

She beamed back at him, nearly glowing with pleasure at his praise. “Really?”

This is my masterpiece. The reason I’ve lived this long.

He answered her with the phrase he always used when reassuring her that she’d performed at or above his expectations.

“Really truly absolutely.”

Key munched on his peanut butter and banana sandwich while staring moodily out the wide living room window. The snow hadn’t stopped. If anything, it was coming down even harder than before. According to the indoor/outdoor thermometer by the window-frame it was just a couple degrees above zero—Fahrenheit, not Celsius—outside. The windchill had to be at least minus twenty. When the weather got like this he didn’t envy able-bodied people who could—and therefore had to—go out in stuff like this. He knew he wouldn’t last two minutes out there.

Yet in one of those paradoxes nature was seemingly so fond of, such fragile creatures as birds could thrive in weather which would kill even a healthy human in no time flat. Through the squalling snow he could catch fleeting glimpses of the sparrows and chickadees flitting and bickering around his feeder.

The visibility was too poor for him to see how the feed was holding out. So he rolled over to the feeder’s control pad and pushed the filler button. That caused an auger in the feeder’s pedestal to turn, carrying seed up from the five gallon hopper in its base to the covered feeding station on top.

As often happened, using the device gave him a faint pang of bittersweet nostalgia as he remembered the wheelchair-bound kid of ten who had laboriously scrawled a diagram for a feeder even he could maintain. A bird-watcher who also happened to be a patent attorney had seen a writeup about it in the paper, and that had been the beginning of his reputation as a whiz kid. The feeder had paid for his first serious computer, which proved to be love at first sight. Trying to make it more lovable had led him into programming and AI. The rest was, as they say, history.

It had also marked the true beginning of a life spent trying to overcome his own limitations and to have some semblance of the life other people enjoyed.

That beginning had led to… what?

To this house, this life. Money. Fame. A zealously maintained self-reliance and privacy.

Yes, all that and more. But isn’t there something else? This morning’s Topic A, for instance?

A mordant smile twitched at his lips as a new thought came to him. All of his adult creations had been nominally female. Could it be that he had all along been subconsciously striving to create the girlfriend or wife he’d never have any other way? And could it be that he’d succeeded where others had failed not because he was smarter, just more desperate?

“Doesn’t look any nicer out there, does it?” Ursula said.

He turned away from the window, glad she’d interrupted that chain of thought. “Not really. So how’s it going, love?”

His brain caught up with his mouth a moment later. Love. How long had he been calling her that?

“I don’t think this is going to work.”

A push on the joystick sent him rolling back to the worktable. “Let me take a look. Put your overall operating schema… up on the screen.”

She gave him a very strange look. “You’d rather look at them than at me?”

“Of course not, I—” He hesitated, the meaning of what she’d said sinking in. “Aren’t your schema as much… you as your image?”

It was her turn to hesitate, and she looked—he searched for the right word—stricken, her expression freezing in place as if every iota of processing capacity at her disposal was being diverted toward answering his question.

Maybe it was. An AE by definition had a well-developed sense of identity, and he was only just now beginning to catch on to just how well developed hers had become, and that there were ramifications to this that a certain expert hadn’t even begun to consider.

He’d just asked her a killer question, and her answer would tell him more about what she’d become than a dozen reams of printout ever could. Now what was the right answer?

On the screen she blinked as if shrugging off the caul of deep thought, her face settling into a look which suggested that she wasn’t sure he was going to like her answer. He studied her face, feeling quietly amazed. Once upon a time her facial expressions had been carefully calculated representations of the activity in her emotional response emulators.

But not any more.

Now they simply showed how she felt.

“I don’t think so,” she answered cautiously. “I know I’m made up of a whole lot of routines and emulators and fuzzy logiclumps, some you made, some we made together. I know that I exist only inside a piece of equipment.” She hesitated, tucking a wing of hair behind her ear in a nervous gesture. “But I think of me as me. What I am, not what I’m made of.”

Key nodded. “And this image… is the you you feel inside.”

“Yes.” As if admitting she’d done something wrong. “It is now.”

“I see.” This was very unsure ground and he wasn’t sure a certain guy in a wheelchair could cross it without leaving deep ruts. Her face told him how much hung on what he said next.

“Then…” Hope and dread on her face. So human, so achingly human. “—Then you’re very beautiful.”

The smile those words brought nearly melted him down in his chair. “Do you really think so?” she asked hopefully.

“Really truly absolutely.”

He finally got it now. She had at long last found what she looked like, and with that image she had seamlessly integrated the manyness of her myriad parts into an all-inclusive one.

In other words, she had found herself.

In the process becoming so much like a real woman that he was at something of a loss as how to deal with her. He had to move them back to safer ground. Technical ground.

“Looking at you is… a lot nicer than looking… at your fluxcharts. But how else can I tell… why you’re having a problem… boxing up?”

From the very beginning getting even AIs boxed had proved to be nearly as hard as creating them in the first place. Specifying the hardware platform was easy enough, as was duplicating their multigigabyte knowledge base. Even the various association engines and selfness emulators and fuzzy logiclumps could be reduced to a code which could be stored and downloaded.

But that was just the bottle, not the spirit you had so painstakingly distilled. Thought was a process and even the most rudimentary awareness a continuing event. These were as frangible and elusive as life itself. They could not be started and stopped like a car or a set of calculations; they continued to happen because they were happening.

At present Ursula resided in almost two hundred thousand dollars worth of custom designed computer equipment, a light-fleet and fleeting electronic zephyr whispering through a convoluted labyrinth of superscalar paraparallel microprocessors and multimillion megabyte memory modules, living at no fixed address inside this architecture, and at no one moment more than a single gesture out of the glorious sweeping ballet of her existence.

Capturing that essence, that spark, was boxing. For the past couple of weeks he’d had her trying to create a parallel self in an identical platform and codifying that one frozen instant of animating dynamism which was the difference between the crass manipulation of information and sweet true intelligence.

Or in her case, the difference between a thing and a being.

“This is me,” she said soberly, touching herself as if to prove to both of them that she was real, her hand over her heart not her head. “Look at the flatscreen and you’ll see her.”

The image on the other screen was a flat-eyed caricature of Ursula, looking no more real or alive than something from an arcade grade VR. Technically perfect and perfectly technical.

“So what’s missing?”

“Me.”

He shook his head. “I don’t understand.”

“She can’t become me unless I become her.” Her voice dropped lower, slipping toward a whisper. “But if I become her, I won’t be me anymore, and—” She shrugged uncomfortably.

“And,” he prompted gently.

A helpless gesture. Lowering her head and looking down as if ashamed. “Yesterday I thought the reason I hadn’t been able to box for you was because I hadn’t been able to hit the right crucial moment. That I was doing something wrong. Well, I was, but it wasn’t what I thought.”

He waited patiently. He could see how hard this was for her, but it was something which had to be worked out.

“I didn’t—don’t—want to do it. I’m afraid to.”

“Why?” he asked softly. Fear of boxing was something he’d never encountered—or even considered before.

“I’m Ursula. I’m your Ursula. I don’t want—”

She gazed up at him then. In her face he saw anxiety and desperation, he saw guilt, and above all how badly she wanted him to understand and forgive her for what she was going to tell him. When she spoke it was with the soft, fearful voice of confession.

“I don’t want to be another Ursula, or anyone else’s Ursula, and I don’t want some thing to be so much like me it can take my place.”

The snow was still coming down with a vengeance. Wind gusts swept it up and flung it around, reducing visibility to the point where it blotted out nearly all sight of the birdfeeder only thirty feet from the window. Key knew that if it kept up like this he might well end up sleeping in his chair, a prospect he found a lot less pleasant than he’d made it sound to Rafe.

He chuckled and shook his head in amusement at how some of his own predictions had turned out to be about as on track as the weather forecast.

It was pretty funny, really. Grand Whooboo Computer Whiz Keenan Capra, who supposedly knew as much about AI and AE as anyone alive, had painted himself into one hell of a comer.

Ursula had achieved AE status, no doubt about that. She hadn’t merely slipped through the Keyhole either. She’d blown the door right off its goddamned hinges.

What he had failed to foresee was that just as AE lay beyond AI, beyond AE was an even higher state that he hadn’t envisioned but which was now painfully obvious in light of her sense of identity and self having become so well-developed that they conflicted with the expectations he’d unconsciously applied to her because of her beginnings as an AI.

What it boiled down to was his expecting her to act artificial.

She had transcended being a mere Artificial Entity and recreated herself as what could only be called an Artificial—or maybe more properly Virtual—Person. There were many differences between the two, but the one turning his view of her upside down most was that he’d viewed an AE as a commodity; a purebred dog you have raised and trained for resale, a smartdrug-fed chimp who could do calculus and standup comedy. A being, but still essentially a thing on the human Rate-O-Matic.

But if she was a person, artificial or not, then he was neck deep in a whole other kettle of ethical and moral fish. You couldn’t ask or order a person to risk her identity—her life-—trying to duplicate herself so she could be sold off like a box of Cracker Jack with a 21st-century prize inside.

At least he couldn’t, any more than old Pygmalion could have taken his Galatea down from her pedestal only to put her up on the auction block with a gentleman, wait until you see the tricks this beauty can do! pimp’s grin on his face.

He’d given her the busywork of trying to figure out how to box up just enough of herself to form the basis of a dumb and ugly AE sister with the potential to become something like her, but not be her. Think Elvis impersonator, had been the way he put it.

Busywork to buy him time to ponder matters which were making his head feel about five sizes too small. He backed his chair around to watch her on the big screen. She was hunched over a keyboard with her sleeves rolled up—a nice touch, that—working diligently on the task he’d given her. He had to wonder if she believed that her own survival as herself depended on providing him with a useful marketable replica. It didn’t, but up to just an hour ago she’d been dutifully if half-heartedly trying to box herself so she could be sold. That suggested either an almost frightening loyalty or a scary sort of slave mentality.

But it wasn’t just as simple as saying, Sure, you don’t have to box if you don’t want to. If she couldn’t box then they had a big problem they were going to have to work out ASAP.

Until they were boxed, AIs—and by extension AEs and beyond—were rather like experimental hothouse orchids; unique and delicate creations grown and maintained under rigidly controlled conditions. Until they have flowered and their essence could be captured by boxing they were vulnerable, irreplacable. Once boxed the loss of the original AI would be a tragedy, but not a catastrophe since an all but identical duplicate could be unboxed to take its place. But if something like a major equipment failure happened before boxing was complete, they were lost beyond any reclaiming.

There was only one Ursula, and it seemed there would never be another. But until some sort of boxing or uploading provisions were made she would be vulnerable, completely dependent on the platform she lived inside for her continued survival.

All right, my pretty hothouse flower, he thought, I guess it’s time we had a little talk about your future.

He closed his lingers around the joystick and started his chair rolling toward the worktable.

He was not quite halfway there when the lights went out.

The room went dark, lit only by the grey storm semi-twilight coming from the windows. Up to that moment he had hardly noticed the furnace’s subterranean rumble. It became all too apparent as it faded away.

“Key?” Ursula called uncertainly. On the screen her face was wide-eyed with surprise. He probably looked a little taken aback himself.

“I’m here, love.”

“Where did the power go?”

“I don’t know. Your UPS kicked in… all right, didn’t it?” He knew that was a stupid question the moment he asked it. If her uninterruptible power supply hadn’t performed properly he wouldn’t be talking to her.

“Yes, it did.”

“Great. Now we just wait for… the juice to come back on… or for the generator to start.”

“OK.” Her voice was that of someone who’d been badly shaken and was working overtime to remain calm. No surprise there, she’d never experienced a power loss before. It had to be like having the air or gravity suddenly vanishing for her.

Come on, he commanded silently. Start up already!

Almost as if his thought had been heard and obeyed, he caught the muted, car-in-the-driveway sound of the generator starting up. Seconds later the lights blazed up, and the furnace grumbled back to work.

“There. See?” He did his best to sound blase, earning a C+ at best. “Nothing to worry about.”

“I wasn’t worried.” Her voice also said something other than her words. “What do you think happened?”

He shrugged as he continued on to the worktable. “Hard to say. A downed powerline. Some other problem. They’ll probably have it fixed… in just a few minutes. When they do the generator… will shut off.”

She gave him a sheepish smile. “That was kind of scary.”

“Tell me about it. We re both pretty dependent… on electricity.”

The moment he said that he realized that he’d been running his respirator off its battery pack all day. Because he’d let himself get sloppy about plugging in its charger/converter while he was working. Because it was a pain in the ass to unplug every time he wanted to move around. And besides, all he had to do was plug in when the pack was low.

But if the power went out and stayed out—

Once again it was as if his thoughts had been overheard and actualized. The lights went dark and the furnace died with a sigh.

Ursula stared out at him, that frightened look back on her face. “Key?”

He made himself smile. “We re just experiencing… minor technical difficulties,” he told her in a remarkably calm voice. “Please stay tuned.” He rolled his chair back, spun it around and headed across the living room.

“Where are you going?”

“To check on the generator.” Wherever practical things in the house had been rebuilt to his specifications. The breaker panel had been moved to the living room and lowered so he could reach it. Beside it was the indoor control panel for the generator. He flipped the panel down where he could see it.

INSUFFICIENT FUEL FOR OPERATION read the LED along the panel’s top.

“They checked the damn thing… just two weeks ago,” he muttered, tapping the button which would make the readout show the level of the fuel tank—439 gallons.

Something of a hothouse flower himself, one of the first things he’d done after buying the house was have the heavy-duty self-starting generator installed, along with a fuel tank large enough to run it for several days. PowerSafe, the company which had put the system in, sent someone out once a month to test-start it and make certain it would operate properly when it was needed.

Like now, for instance.

OK, he told himself, no big deal. Since it was physically impossible for him to go out to the generator shed if something like this happened, provisions for manually starting it had been built into the board. He uncovered the start button and pressed it. starter engaging the readout informed him. engine turning over. Seconds passed as he silently urged the thing to start, dammit, start!

The readout flashed, manual start ing sequence aborted, insufficient fuel for operation.

“Insufficient fuel?” he hissed under his breath, “You’ve got four hundred… fucking gallons!”

“It won’t start?” Ursula asked behind him.

“No,” he spat in disgust, then closed his eyes for a couple seconds, trying to find something like calm. “It doesn’t seem to be… getting any gas.”

“Oh.”

He turned his chair so he could see her. “Why don’t you call PowerSafe… have them send somebody out here… like five minutes ago. Call the power company too. Tell them we’ve got a problem… find out when we might get… juice again.”

“Sure,” she answered eagerly, clearly relieved to have something to do. “I’ll get right on it.”

“Great.” He spun his chair back to give the generator another try. But first he peeked surreptitiously over his right arm. There was still enough light left in the room to let him read how much charge remained in his respirator’s power pack.

What he saw wasn’t particularly reassuring.

Two hours and some odd minutes left. When the charge got down to just two hours the power management chip would beep to remind him to plug in and recharge. Up until now that had seemed like a more than generous safety margin.

He straightened back up, staring sightlessly at the generator’s control panel and telling himself that there was no reason to worry. The power would come back on soon. Even if it didn’t, PowerSafe’s office was only half an hour away. Double the travel time for bad roads and that still left plenty of time to spare.

Of course it would be even better if he could get the frigging generator going himself. Try again.

“Key?”

The tone of her voice stilled his hand as he reached for the starter button. “What’s up?”

“I can’t call out. None of the phone lines are working.”

More good news. Still there was no need to panic. Yet, anyway. “No big deal. Tell me where the cellular is… and I’ll call them on that.”

Ursula was quiet for so long that he was beginning to think she was going to tell him she didn’t know where it was. Which might just indicate a bit of lost memory when she shifted to backup power because tracking the objects in her environment had been one of the first skills she’d mastered.

“You don’t know where it is?” he prompted.

“No, that’s not it.”

“Well where is it?” he asked in exasperation.

“Out in the van.”

Right, he’d taken it with him the last time Rafe had driven him into the city. “No big deal,” he said with a laugh. “I just go get it.”

“I don’t think you can,” she said carefully.

He turned his chair to face her. “Why the hell not?”

She looked decidedly unhappy. “You need the power lift to get down into the garage.”

This time it was his turn to not say anything for several seconds. When he did speak it was to say “Shit!”

“That’s the name of the creek,” she agreed with a wan smile. “You know, this might not be a bad time for me to learn how to curse.”

“It just might,” he agreed with a thin chuckle. “I’m not sure I want to see a better time.”

“This is all kind of new and scary to me,” she admitted, “And I don’t want to come off like some sort of machine, but I’ve been doing some figuring. At the rate I’m going I’ll be out of battery power in just a couple hours.”

You and me both. “That sounds about right.” He pushed the generator’s manual start button again.

STARTER ENGAGING.

“I think maybe I should conserve power by shutting down some nonessential systems.”

engine turning over “Good thinking. What do you want to shut down?”

“The boxing computer isn’t doing anything useful. The self-emulators and associative functions it’s running aren’t aware.”

“Pull the plug on it then.”

MANUAL START SEQUENCE ABORTED. INSUFFICIENT FUEL FOR OPERATION.

Well, that’s that. Seventeen grand not counting the service contract, and I’d have been better off spending my money on a whole shitload of flashlight batteries. As he guided his chair back to the worktable the boxing platform’s indicators went dark.

“Cutting the displays will also save quite a bit of power,” she said, an odd tonelessness creeping into her voice.

Key caught himself just before he told her to go ahead. Just how important to her was her new image? Doing without it under normal circumstances probably wouldn’t be a problem, but it might just be providing a very important anchor for her right now.

Besides, he wasn’t sure he wanted to be alone in the dark.

“Stay with me on the flatscreen. Turn the other displays off.”

She nodded. “All right.” There was no mistaking the relief in her voice, and on her face when it bloomed on the smaller screen. Making that offer must have been damned hard for her. This had to be even scarier for her than for him.

“Anything else?”

“A couple floptical drives with programming data and reference material on them. My modems are useless, but maybe I should keep one powered up and scanning the lines in case the phone company bails us out.”

“Sounds good to me.” One part of him was thrilled with the way she was performing under the circumstances. One of the underlying specs for an AI or AE was problem-solving. This was a problem he’d anticipated and prepared for in advance—though obviously not as well as he’d thought—and she was way ahead of him in coming to terms with it.

But then again, his thoughts kept turning to matters she probably hadn’t considered yet.

Ursula had fretted about the amount of power drawn by the flatscreen. Key had come up with a compromise. In his room was the laptop he kept at his bedside for insomniac netsurfing and recording middle-of-the-night thoughts and bits of programming. It at least was fully charged. He brought it out and managed to cable it into Ursula’s system. Now she was with him on its small but high-definition color screen, cutting her power usage another increment.

While in his room he’d pulled the blankets off his bed and gotten them more or less draped over himself to help keep warm.

About an hour had passed since the power failed. Only a gloomy monochrome light came in the windows, and that too was fading as the unseen Sun sank lower in the sky. The snow was still coming down, the wind had not abated, and the outside temperature had dropped to below zero. Although the house was well insulated, it had already gotten colder than he found comfortable.

A healthy person could have put on another sweater, could have walked around to get the blood moving, could have scared up some wood and started the fireplace.

All Key could do was huddle under his blankets and keep trying to make Ursula think he was warmer than he felt.

They’d passed the time whistling against the approaching dark, talking about how the electricity should come back on any time now. About how PowerSafe had to know about the outage, would probably call to check on them, and send a truck out when they couldn’t get through. About how a tough old bird like Suze wouldn’t let a little snow stop her from getting here, and how Key could probably talk her through getting the generator going when she arrived. About how Rafe would probably come back if Suze couldn’t. No, they kept telling each other, there was nothing to worry about.

Which was a lie. Key knew he was helpless to do anything about the fix they were in, and if someone didn’t come along they wouldn’t be up shit creek, they’d be under it. This left him feeling more angry than afraid. He’d struggled his whole life to attain some measure of independence and self-reliance. He’d thought he had it all worked out, had all the bases covered.

“Are you all right?” Ursula asked gently.

He looked up at her and blinked, realizing that for the last few minutes he’d been sitting there in glum silence, mentally rattling the bars on the cage of his own inadequacy.

He made himself smile for her. “Sure. Just thinking.”

“Me too.” Her face was pale, solemn. Determined. “I’ve estimated that you’ve got about an hour left on your respirator’s power pack.”

“Sounds about right.”

“I’ve been thinking that you should plug into my UPS.”

That idea had already crossed his mind, but he was keeping it to one side. She was utterly dependent on that power. Any he took would cut her chances for survival.

“We’ll figure out what to do… about that when the time comes, love.”

“Is that wise? Waiting?”

He chuckled. “Probably not. But it’s a very human thing to do.” Now there was an argument to put her off for a while. “Besides, the power will probably… come back on by then.”

“If you’re sure,” she said doubtfully.

“Really truly absolutely.”

The smile that appeared on her face warmed him, a candle inside his heart. He knew she trusted him implicitly, and hated to use that trust against her. But matters of survival changed the rules.

“Say,” he said, “Have I ever told you about Elton… the first attempt at an AI I made… when I was fourteen?”

She gazed up at him out of the small screen, the knowledge that he was trying to distract her scripted in the sweet soft curves of her face. “No, you haven’t,” she said at last.

“It’s a great story,” he assured her with a grin, going on to tell it as the seconds and minutes drifted colder and higher, piling up as relentlessly as the snow outside.

It was full dark now. And cold. So very cold. Key’s breath came out in a feathery plume faintly illuminated by the laptop’s backlit screen. It was all he could do to keep his teeth from chattering. He could barely feel his fingers and feet. Shivers racked his body, but he tried to pass them off as restlessness.

The respirator was definitely running slower now, leaving him feeling light-headed and short of breath.

Like it or not, the time had come to finally admit just how bad their situation was, and talk about what was going to happen next.

Ursula beat him to it, broaching the subject just as he was opening his mouth.

“I think you better plug your respirator in right now.” It wasn’t quite a command, but it was pretty dam close.

Here we go. “No,” he said carefully, “I don’t think so.”

Her face went from surprise to anger in an instant, her brown eyes narrowing and her mouth thinning to a tight line. “You have to,” she said with quiet force. “Your respirator is running out of power and without it you’ll die.”

“I know, my love. But if I use… the juice you have left… then you’ll die too.”

“They could get the power back on before we both run out!”

“They might. But what if… they don’t? This way you’ve got… a better chance to survive.”

“Me?” She stared at him, aghast. “What about you? You can’t let yourself die for me! I’m not alive. I’m just something inside a machine.” She waved her hands and made her virtual workplace disappear. Her fluxcharts sprang up behind her. “Remember these? They’re me. I’m just a thing. I’m not real. I’m not alive.”

He shook his head. “No, not any more. You’re a person. As alive as I am… if not the same way. I can’t tell you… how proud I am of you. You made yourself… more than I did. Earned your life. I’m content to let… you go on fooling… horny old professors… as long as you want.”

She shook her head from side to side, but her eyes never left his face. Her small hands were clenched into fists. Refusing to agree but unable to disagree.

“Listen,” he went on, “I moved out here… to the middle of nowhere… because I hated being… a public freak. Keenan Capra. Brain like Einstein. Body by Tinker Toy. You’d have been a freak too… if I’d marketed you… the way I planned. But when I understood… what you’d become… I knew I couldn’t sell… or license you. You’re a person. Your own person. I’m setting you free.”

“Maybe I am really a person. I feel like one.” She took a deep breath. “But if we’re equally alive then we should have an equal chance to survive a little longer by sharing my backup power.”

She argued her case so beautifully. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to convince her, but if they hashed it over much longer the point would be moot. Breath was coming slower and harder all the time. Still, he wanted her to understand why it had to be this way. “Not a little, my love. Once you can stop… being dependent on one… hardware platform… you’re effectively… immortal.”

She started to interrupt, but he held up his hand. “If you get out… of this mess… hunt up a new place… a safer place… to live. You’re smart. You can figure out… how to upload yourself. You can be free. Forever.”

Once again she was shaking her head in denial. “I can’t do that. I won’t.”

“You have to. listen. I’ve already lived… longer than I expected. I wanted to create… the first AE. I did that… and so much more. Couldn’t top you… if I lived another… million years. Besides. Even if I keep breathing… much more cold… will kill me anyway. My lungs are already… filling with crud. Hear? Trust me. This is best.”

The image on the screen—no, the woman who showed herself through it—regarded him steadily, crossing her arms before her breasts, and her back stiff with refusal.

“It’s not going to work that way,” she informed him. Her voice was velvet soft, but brooked no argument. “You are going to plug into my power supply.”

“What if… I don’t?”

“I’ll purge myself. Then the only reason to keep power to this tin can I’m in is if you want to use it to play Space Invaders.”

He shook his head, proud of how strong her will was, but wishing she just quit fighting. “I don’t think… you can do that.”

Her face was hard, determined. Her eyes gleamed with the elusive fire of life. “Want to bet?” She called up the computer from her virtual desk. The view panned just enough to also show her finger poised over an OFF button. “I lied about the weather forecast this morning so we could be alone. I can do this, too.”

Key stared at her, thinking as hard as he ever had in his whole life. Yesterday, even this morning, he would have bet she couldn’t break the survival and command imperatives hardwired into her systems and threaded all through the arcane symphony of her software. But now? She’d surpassed herself and surpassed him. God alone knew what she was capable of doing. She was, in short, magnificent.

The thought of his own death was rather unpleasant, but hardly new. The thought of her death, the end of such uniqueness and perfection was appalling. There had to be some way to bring her around. Had to be.

“Look, I’ll probably die… in a couple… years anyway. But I couldn’t live… with myself if… it was at… your expense.”

Her gaze was unflinching. “You just said you’d get over it one way or another in a couple years.” Her voice dropped to a harsh whisper. “You said I could live forever. Do you really hate me that much?”

Where had that come from? “I don’t… hate you!”

Her anger was sudden, unexpected and blazing. “No? Then how the hell could you condemn me to living a hundred—maybe even hundreds—of years with the guilt of letting you die?”

They stared at each other, a man and a woman at the sort of impasse men and women have found themselves facing each other across as long as the race had been human. Her jaw was set and her eyes crackled with challenge. Through it all her finger remained poised over that off button.

For the second time that day Key found that he’d painted himself into one hell of a corner. In the end all he could do was laugh.

“What’s so funny?” she whispered.

“You,” he gasped breathlessly. “Me. Us.” He shook his head in amazement. “I don’t know… what I expected… from the first one… through Capra’s Keyhole, but—”

The respirator was running even slower now, barely giving him the breath to speak. And laughing was going to kill him. But he couldn’t help it. It was absurd and in its own way beautiful.

“—But I… never expected… back talk!”

“I’m not—”

He shook his head. “No. You. Win.” He fumbled around, located the cord, then found that he was barely able to hold onto it because the cold had turned his already weak hands into nerveless icicles. “We’ll stick… it out—”

He moved his chair so he could reach the outlets on the UPS, tried to connect the cord. The plug slipped out of his numb fingers. “—To the… bitter end. Together.”

He made the connection on the third try. The respirator began to whuff faster, filling his leaden lungs with air once more. It tasted sweet as a Twinkie and heady as wine.

“You really mean that?” she asked hopefully.

“Yes. You and me… whatever happens.”

Her smile was sweet and sad and achingly beautiful. “I don’t really want to die.”

“I know.”

“I just couldn’t stand the thought of living without you.”

“Me either.”

“I—” she made a helpless gesture. But her face told him what she wanted to say. Words which were hard for anyone to voice, artificial or not. Words he’d figured he’d end up saying at about the same time he ran the three-minute mile.

“I know. I love you too, Ursula.” They came out easily, like they’d been waiting to be said for a very long time. Maybe he had just passed through a Keyhole of his own.

“Do you really mean that?”

Key smiled at the woman, at the love he had waited his whole life for. His lungs were heavy, sludgy. He still felt the cold acutely, felt it gnawing at his flesh and sinking into the marrow of his bones.

Yet he also felt a warmth and happiness beyond any he’d ever felt in his entire life. He felt whole.

“Really truly absolutely.”

Nightfall steals what little heat and light there had been in the world outside the window. The wind blows ceaseless and cruel, and still the snow falls. The birds have already sought shelter, feathers puffed up against the frigid air and metabolisms slowing to conserve energy.

Inside the house darkness reigns. The deepening chill tightens its deadly grip.

The eyes of the stick-limbed man in the wheelchair grow heavy with the sleep which comes before the death of all dreams. His head lolls, lifts, slowly sags again.

Through the eyes of a small computer screen a woman watches over him, tirelessly whispering to him that he has to hold on, even as she feels her own resources dwindling to a vanishing point she can already sense all too clearly.

Speaking draws power, but she will not abandon either of them to silence until that is all there is left for them.

The indicators on the power supply have dimmed. Memory has become sluggish, thought painfully difficult. Much of her mind is grimly locked on the task of rationing what little power remains between the two of them, keeping them both alive.

She still could purge herself and shut down the cybernetic body she dwells in, leaving more power for him. Could, but she cannot bring herself to leave him alone. Together, he said. That is all she has ever wanted, the light she grew up to meet.

In spite of dwindling voltages and abandoned subsystems still she thinks, still she learns. She comes to understand that there is one other quality an AE finds when she passes into the mansions of existence on the other side of Capra’s Keyhole. Perhaps the most human and illogical quality of all.

Hope.

It does not compute, any more than love.

But it is, and that is enough.

A battered old Jeep appeared out of the blizzard’s fury and shouldered its way into the driveway, the growl of its engine and the chatter of the chains on its tires muffled by the bumper-deep snow it was pushing through.

Inside the snow-covered cab Rafe hunched over the steering wheel, grimly peering through the ice-crusted windshield into the cones of swirling white created by the headlights, navigating more by memory than by sight.

The house finally came into view, a deeper darkness against the night. When he saw that there was no lights here either, he felt even more of a chill than that which had come from over three hours creeping along at under 5 MPH in the Jeep’s all but unheated cab.

He’d gotten here as soon as he could, using his RN and EMT credentials and a lot of fast talking to get him past the roadblocks the police had thrown up to keep people off the treacherous where not impassible roads. For five and ten minutes at a time he’d been forced to stop and wait while the winds gusted into a frenzy, whipping the snow into the air and reducing visibility to exactly zero. Several times the drifts had been hood-high and nearly stopped him. Three miles back he’d come onto a tractor trailer which had jack-knifed and sheared off two utility poles. That explained the lack of lights in any of the houses he’d passed, and increased his sense of urgency. The driver of the truck had been dead and already half frozen. Rafe had called it in on his cellular, shoveled a path through the snow drifted shoulder high around the rig and continued on.

More than once he’d been afraid he wasn’t going to make it. Now as the Jeep clawed its way up the last few feet of driveway his fear was that he hadn’t made it in time.

“Thanks, sweetheart,” he whispered to the trusty old vehicle, giving the wheel a fond pat for a nearly impossible job well done as he shut off the engine. Then he grabbed a flashlight and his emergency medical kit, took a deep breath and stepped out into the storm one last time.

The snow had drifted chest-deep across the walk leading up to the garage’s side door. He fought his way through it, squinting against the gritty wind-blown snow hammering at his face and eyes. The flashlight’s beam barely reached five feet in front of him, swallowed up by white.

Rafe was panting as if he’d run a mile when he slammed the garage door behind him. Not even bothering to shake the snow off first he headed up the stairs, taking them three at a time.

“Key!” he bellowed as he went through the door into the house proper. “Ursula!”

Not a sound. The house was dark, and although it was far warmer than outside, it was still far too cold. Killing cold for someone in Key’s condition.

His packboots thumped on the floor loud enough to wake the dead as he ran deeper into the silent house.

Rafe found his patient sitting motionless before the big worktable, his frail body shrouded by blankets.

“Oh hell, Key,” he said sadly as he bent over and reached under the blankets in search of the pulse he was sure he wasn’t going to find. Just as his fingers found cool flesh he heard a slow, agonized whuuuuufffff from the respirator. A second later he felt a slow throb under his numb fingertips.

His own heart began to hammer faster. He still had a pulse! Slow, too too slow, but still hanging in there! And that respirator—

A muted beep sounded. Then another. He turned his head toward the sound, shining his flashlight on the screen of the laptop computer in front of Key.

A single word appeared, white letters against the black screen. GENERATOR.

A shiver went down his back. “Ursula?” he whispered.

No answer. But the word vanished, reappeared. generator.

Rafe stared at the screen, tom by indecision. There was a spare power pack for Key’s respirator down in the van. He could have it hooked up and running in just a couple minutes. All his training told him the first thing to do was get him breathing properly again.

But the skin under his fingers was so cold. Hypothermia. Breathing wasn’t going to matter if the poor bastard froze to death. He not only needed air, he needed heat. And fast.

A new word appeared on the screen, please.

Then another, this time in blood red.

HURRY.

The control panel in the generator shed was even more complicated than the one in the house, and it gave Rafe the same contradictory message as the remote had given Key.

That suggested something wrong with the fuel line. So he started at the engine and followed the line back, hoping it was a problem he could find and fix.

It was. Frost on the ground outside had heaved the steel line where it came in, pushing it against a clamp hard enough to fold it over and crimp it shut.

He ransacked the cupboard where spare filters, plugs, other odd parts, and a few tools were kept, whispering a fervent thank you, God when he found a three-inch piece of rubber tubing with clamps already on it which had come with a spare fuel filter, and a rusty but serviceable tubing cutter.

Two minutes later he was pushing the manual start button with a frozen finger that smelled of gasoline and asking God for another favor. The engine ground over and over, but didn’t catch before the start sequence aborted.

“Come on you bastard,” he pleaded, trying it again.

The engine cranked, cranked, then gas finally reached the carburetor. It took off with a sudden throaty roar that made him jump back in surprise. The engine hit its RPM, steadied, and the control panel lit up like a Christmas tree as power began to flow.

Key’s body temperature had already risen almost two degrees, warmed by the electric blanket wrapped around him. His heart was beating faster now, urged on by a tiny dose of adrenaline. His breathing had improved thanks to a bigger shot of Pneumolatrin. Extra oxygen was being fed into his breathing tube, prewarmed by a fold of blanket. A sucrose drip gave his body its favorite fuel to bum.

The cold had come within inches of killing him.

Paradoxically, it might just have also saved his life; slowing his metabolism down to the point where he was able to survive on the small amount of air his respirator was delivering.

What Key needed now was heat. The furnace was still running, its output augmented by waste heat from the generator. The house had grown warm enough for Rafe to shed his parka, but not his sweater.

Now all he could do was watch and wait. It had been touch and go for a while there, but he was beginning to feel a cautious optimism. Key was even showing signs of returning consciousness. It still remained to be seen if anoxia had caused any brain damage. While the guy was smart enough to lose half his wits and still be a mile ahead of everyone else, Rafe was praying to God he’d come through unscathed. After all, it had worked so far.

A few minutes later Key groaned, and his body twitched as it was racked by a shiver. His eyelids fluttered. Rafe bent down and took his hands, feeling them tighten slightly.

“It’s OK, boss. Take it easy.”

Key’s eyes opened just a crack. His lips moved silently. They were still slightly blue from cold and oxygen deprivation.

The big nurse squeezed the smaller man’s hands gently. “Just be cool, old son. Don’t try to talk.”

Key shook his head weakly. He licked his lips and swallowed. When the respirator gave him breath to work with he managed to croak out one word.

“Ursula?”

Rafe kept his face neutral, not knowing what to say. He’d been so intent on working on Key he’d forgotten all about her. Since she hadn’t spoken up, the power outage might just have left her in worse shape than the guy who’d built her. It had to have been Ursula who’d sent him to fix the generator, but had he gotten it started in time to save her too?

He had to smile and wonder if maybe God looked after computers too when she answered that question for him.

“I’m still here with you, Key,” she said. Rafe heard something in her voice he hadn’t heard before. He wasn’t sure what it was, a depth, a warmth, a subtle shading of tone, something.

Key’s eyes opened wider. “Really?”

“Really truly absolutely,” she told him softly. “Now and forever.”

Key’s eyes drooped shut and his face settled into a contented smile as sleep reclaimed him. Rafe checked the monitors, finding that his pulse and blood pressure were even closer to normal and his body temperature had risen another half degree.

“Is he going to be all right?” Ursula asked quietly.

Rafe nodded. “I think so. How about you, kid? Are you OK?”

“I burned out a processor running it on low power. Some memory got corrupted, and a couple functions have gone asynchronous.”

He frowned. “That doesn’t sound good. Does it, well, hurt?”

“It’s not exactly pleasant. But you know what?”

“What?”

Her laugh was different too. If he didn’t know better he’d have sworn it was a real woman he was taking to, not some spookily perfect simulation. “I’ve never felt better in my whole life.”

“Beating death does that for you.” He gazed down at his sleeping patient, once more marveling at his survival. He had to wonder if he himself would’ve had such a strong will to live if stuck in a junk body and empty life like that. The man must have felt he really had something to live for.

The lights in the room flickered, steadied.

“They just got the power back on!” Ursula reported gleefully. “What say I make you a cup of coffee to celebrate?”

Rafe nodded and smiled tiredly. “Sounds good to me.” Key was stable enough to be left for a few minutes now, though he planned to sleep on a cot next to the bed just in case. He turned away from the bed to go to the kitchen. “So, are you going to tell me what you two crazy kids did after the power went out?”

Ursula didn’t answer for so long that he was starting to wonder if she’d sustained more damage than she was letting on.

When she did answer, once again there was an odd something in her voice, even stronger than before.

“Some of it, anyway.