Death Match

FIFTY-SIX

Silver led the way down the corridor to a door he unlocked with a simple, old-fashioned key. Brusquely, he directed them into a tiny bedroom, spotlessly clean, without decoration of any kind. The narrow bed, with its thin mattress and metal rails, resembled a military cot. Beside was an unvarnished wood table on which lay a Bible. A single bare bulb hung from the ceiling. The room was so spartan, so unrelievedly white, it could easily have passed for a monk’s cell.

Silver closed the door behind him, then began to pace. His face was contorted by conflicting emotions. Once he stopped, turned toward Lash, and seemed about to speak — only to turn away again.

At last, he wheeled around.

“You were wrong,” he said.

Lash waited.

“I had wonderful parents. They were nurturing. Patient. Eager to teach. I think of them every day. The smell of my father’s aftershave when he’d hug me coming home from work. My mother singing as I played under the piano.”

He turned away again and resumed his pacing. Lash knew better than to say anything.

“My father died when I was three. Car accident. My mother outlived him by two years. I had no other family. So I was sent to live with an aunt in Madison, Wisconsin. She had her own family, three older boys.”

Silver’s pace slowed. His hands clenched behind his back, knuckles white.

“I wasn’t wanted there. To the boys I was weak, ugly, a figure of scorn. I wasn’t Rick. I was ‘Fuckface.’ Their mother tolerated it because she didn’t like having me around, either. Usually I was excluded from family rituals like Sunday dinner, movies, bowling. If I was brought along it was an afterthought, or because my absence would be noticed by neighbors. I cried a lot at night. Sometimes I prayed I’d die in my sleep so I wouldn’t have to wake up anymore.”

There was no trace of self-pity in Silver’s voice. He simply rapped out the words, one after another, as if reciting a shopping list.

“The boys made sure I was a pariah at school. They enjoyed threatening the girls with ‘Silver cooties,’ laughing at their disgust.”

Silver stopped, looked again at Lash.

“The father wasn’t as bad as the rest. He worked the night shift as a keypunch operator in the university computer lab. Sometimes I’d go along with him to work, just to escape the house. I began to grow fascinated with the computers. They didn’t hurt you, or judge you. If your program didn’t run, it wasn’t because you were skinny, or ugly, but because you’d made a mistake in your code. Fix it, and the program would run.”

Silver was talking faster now, the words coming more easily. Lash nodded understandingly, careful to hide his growing elation. He’d seen this many times before in police interrogations. It was a huge effort to start confessing. But once they got started, the suspect couldn’t seem to talk fast enough.

“I began spending more and more time at the computer lab. Programming had a logic that was comforting, somehow. And there was always more to learn. At first, the staff tolerated me as a curiosity. Then, when they saw the kinds of system utilities I was starting to write, they hired me.

“I spent nine years under my aunt’s roof. As soon as I could, I left. I lied about my age and got a job with a defense contractor, writing programs to calculate missile trajectories. I got a scholarship in electrical engineering at the university. That’s when I began studying AI in earnest.”

“And when you got the idea for Liza?” Lash asked.

“No. Not right away. I was fascinated by the early stuff, John McCarthy and LISP and all that. But it wasn’t until my senior year that the tools had matured sufficiently to do any real work towards machine learning.”

“‘The Imperative of Machine Intelligence,’ ” Tara said. “Your senior thesis.”

Lash nodded without looking at her. “That summer, I didn’t have any place to go until grad school in September. I didn’t know anybody. I’d already moved to Cambridge and was lonely. So I began banking time at the MIT lab, spending twenty or thirty hours at a time, developing a program robust enough to be imprinted with simple intelligence routines. By the end of the summer, I’d made real progress. When school started, my faculty advisor at MIT was impressed enough to give me a free hand. The more subtle and powerful the program became, the more excited I got. When I wasn’t in class, all my time was spent with Liza.”

“You’d given her a name by then?” Lash asked.

“I kept pushing myself, trying to expand her capabilities for carrying on realistic conversations. I’d type. She’d respond. At first it was just a way to encourage her self-learning. But then I found myself spending more time simply talking to her. Not about specific programming tasks, you know, but… but as a friend.”

He paused a moment. “Around this time I was working on a primitive voice interface. Not to parse human speech — that was still years away — but to verbalize its output. I used samples of my own voice. It started as a diversion, I didn’t see any real significance to it.”

The rush of words suddenly ceased. Silver took a deep breath, began again.

“I still don’t know why I did it. But late one night, when my coding temporarily hit some brick wall, I started playing around. I ran the voiceprints through a pitch-shifting algorithm somebody left in the lab: raising the frequency, fiddling with the waveform. And suddenly the voice began to sound like a woman’s.”

Like a woman’s. Now, Lash understood why, when he’d first heard it, Liza’s voice had seemed familiar. It was a feminine re-creation of Silver’s own.

“And her personality?” Tara asked. “Was that yours, as well?”

“Early on, I thought that hard-coding personality traits into Liza would jump-start machine consciousness. I didn’t know anybody I could ask to volunteer. So I got some personality inventories from the psych department — just the MMPI-2, really — took the test myself, and scored it.”

Lash caught his breath. “What were the results?”

“What you’d expect. Uncomfortable in social situations. Superachiever mentality, driven by low sense of self-esteem.” Silver shrugged as if the answer wasn’t important. “It was an experiment, really, to see if personality could be modeled, as well as intelligence. But it didn’t get me very far. It was only later her neural matrix developed enough to retain a persistent personality.” Then he stopped speaking, and a stricken look crossed his face.

The look told Lash several things. Silver had been exonerating himself: describing his painful past, rationalizing his crimes. It was the standard pattern. Soon he’d shift to the crimes themselves and what led up to them.

And yet something didn’t fit. Silver’s expression, his body language, still screamed conflict. That time should have passed. He was deep into his confession. Why was he still conflicted? Was he, even now, undecided about turning himself in? This did not fit the pattern at all.

“Let’s move on to the present,” Lash said in a calm, matter-of-fact voice. “Want to tell me what happened with the supercouples?”

Silver started pacing again. He remained silent long enough for Lash’s guarded elation to ebb away.

When Silver finally spoke, he did not look at Lash. “What you want to know began when I founded Eden.”

“Go on,” Lash said, careful not to let his voice betray anything.

“I’ve told you some of this already. How Liza eventually proved herself capable of just about any calculation that business or the military could throw at her. I’d made enough money to choose her next direction myself. That’s when I chose… chose relationship processing. It was a huge undertaking. But I was able to team up with PharmGen. They were a pharmaceutical giant, they had enough seed money to fund just about any start-up. And their scientists developed the early psych evaluations I used for the matching algorithms. It was subtle work, probably the most difficult programming I’ve ever done outside Liza herself. Anyway, once the core programming seemed stable, I moved on to alpha testing.”

“Using your own personality construct,” Tara said.

“Along with several dummy avatars. But we quickly realized more sophisticated avatars would be necessary. The psychological battery was greatly extended. We went into beta testing, using volunteers from the graduate programs at Harvard and MIT. That’s when—” Silver hesitated. “That’s when I had my own personality construct reevaluated.”

The tiny room fell into a tense silence.

“Reevaluated,” Lash prompted.

Silver took a seat on the edge of the bed. He glanced up at Lash, an almost pleading expression on his face.

“I wanted my own construct to be as complete, as detailed, as the others. What’s wrong with that? Edwin Mauchly shepherded me through the process. That’s how we first met. He was still employed by PharmGen back then. The evaluation was painful, horrible — nobody likes to see their vulnerabilities exposed so coldly — but Edwin was the picture of tact. And he clearly had a visionary eye for business. In time, he became my right-hand man, the person I could trust to take care of everything necessary down there.” And Silver indicated the tower beneath their feet. “Within a year I’d bought back my interest from PharmGen and made Eden a private company, with its own board of directors. And—”

“I see,” Lash interjected smoothly. “And when did you decide to reintroduce your updated avatar into the Tank?”

The stricken look returned to Silver’s face. His shoulders slumped.

“I’d been thinking about it for a long time,” he said quietly. “During alpha testing, my avatar never got matched. I told myself it must be something to do with the crude dummy avatars. But then Eden got off the ground, the Tank filled with clients, and the number of successful matches began to climb. And I wondered: what would happen if I placed my avatar back in there with those countless others? Would I find a perfect match, too? Would I remain that guy all the girls recoiled from in school? It began to torment me.”

Silver drew in a deep breath. “Late one evening, I introduced my avatar into the Tank. I instructed Liza to create a back-channel, transparent to the monitoring staff. But there were no hits, and after a few hours I lost my nerve. I withdrew it. But by then the genie was out of the bottle. I had to know.” Silver looked up, fixing Lash with his gaze. “Do you understand? I had to know.”

Lash nodded. “Yes. I understand.”

“I began introducing my avatar into the Tank for longer periods. An afternoon here, a day there. Still nothing. Soon, my avatar had logged whole weeks in the Tank without success. I began to feel despair. I contemplated tweaking my avatar somehow, making it more appealing. But then, what would be the point? After all, it wasn’t so much the match itself — I would never have had the nerve to initiate real contact — I just wanted to know that somebody could care for me.”

Lash felt a ripple of shock, faint but uncomfortable. “Go on,” he said.

“And then, one afternoon in the fall — I’ll never forget, it was a Tuesday, September 17—Liza informed me of a match.” As he spoke, the pain, the anxiety, melted from his face. “My first feeling was disbelief. Then the room seemed to fill with light. It was like God turned on a thousand suns. I asked Liza to isolate the two avatars, run the comparison routines again, in case there was some mistake.”

“But there was no mistake,” Tara said.

“Her name was Lindsay. Lindsay Torvald. I had Liza download a copy of her dossier to my personal terminal, here. I think I watched her initial video a dozen times. She was beautiful. Such a beautiful woman. And so accomplished. She was leaving for a hiking trip in the Alps, I remember. To think that such a woman could possibly care for me…”

As quickly as it had gone, the pain returned to his face.

“What happened next?” Lash asked.

“I erased the dossier from my terminal, instructed Liza to reinsert Lindsay Torvald’s avatar into the Tank, and removed my own avatar. Permanently.”

“And then?”

“Then?” For a moment, Silver seemed confused. “Oh. I see what you mean. Six hours later, Edwin called to tell me that Eden had matched its first supercouple. It was something we’d theorized about, of course, but I never believed it would actually happen. I was even more surprised when I learned that half of the couple was Lindsay Torvald.”

Lash’s uncomfortable feeling returned. “And did that exacerbate things?”

“What things?”

“Your feelings of frustration.” Lash chose his words carefully. “Having Lindsay matched in a supercouple could only have added fuel to the fire.”

“Christopher, it wasn’t like that at all.”

The uncomfortable feeling grew stronger. “Then perhaps you could explain it to me.”

Silver looked at him in genuine surprise. “Do you mean that all this time — despite everything I’ve told you — you still don’t understand?”

“Understand what?”

“You’re right. Lindsay was killed.”

The statement hung in the air, a dark cloud that refused to dissipate. Lash glanced again at Tara.

“But Christopher, I didn’t kill her.”

Very slowly, Lash looked back at Silver.

“I didn’t hurt Lindsay. She was the one person who gave me hope.”

Lash was suddenly afraid to ask the next question. He licked his lips. “If you didn’t kill Lindsay Thorpe — who did?”

Silver rose from the bed. Even though they were alone in the room, he glanced uneasily over his shoulder. For a minute he said nothing, as if in the grip of some internal struggle. And when he spoke, it was in a whisper.

“Liza,” he said.