Death Match

FIFTY-SEVEN

For a moment, Lash could not reply. He felt stunned.

All this time, he’d been sure he was listening to a murderer’s confession. Instead, he’d been hearing a condemnation of someone — something—else.

“Oh, my God…” Tara began. Then she fell silent.

“I began to suspect just after the second couple died.” Silver’s voice had begun to tremble. “But I didn’t want to believe it. I wouldn’t let myself think about it, do anything about it. It wasn’t until you were named as the suspect that — that I finally took steps to learn the truth.”

Lash struggled with this revelation. Could it be true?

Perhaps it wasn’t true. Perhaps it was Silver, still trying to save himself. And yet Lash had to admit that, no matter how hard he’d tried to pigeonhole Silver into the profile of a serial murderer, the man never quite fit.

“How?” he managed. “Why?”

“The how would be all too easy,” Tara answered. She spoke slowly. “Liza knows everything about everybody. She had access to all systems, internal and external. She could manipulate information. And because everything was in the digital domain, there would be no paper trail to follow.”

Silver did not respond.

“Was it scolipane?” Lash asked.

Silver nodded.

“Liza would have known about the reaction with Substance P, the catastrophic results of the early trials,” Tara said. “It would have been part of her dataset from the days when PharmGen was our parent company. She wouldn’t even have needed to search.”

It seemed incredible. Yet Lash had seen Liza’s power, firsthand. He had witnessed the Tank, witnessed the intelligence at work. And if he had lingering doubts, all he needed was to look at Tara’s expression.

“I understand how Lindsay died,” he said. “The drug interaction, the high-copper condition from the antihistamine. But what about the Thorpes?”

“The same,” Silver said without looking up. “Karen Thorpe had a blood disorder that caused her to take prescription vitamins. The vitamin prescription was changed to a high-copper formulation, and the dosage increased. I checked her records. Karen Thorpe had recently undergone a physical exam. Liza took advantage of that not only to change the vitamin formulation, but to add a prescription for scolipane. On the heels of the physical, Karen would have no reason to doubt the new prescription.”

“What about the third couple?” Tara asked. “The Connellys?”

“I looked into them, as well,” Silver replied, his voice very low. “Lynn Connelly is passionately fond of exotic fruit. It says so on her application. Just last week, Eden sent her a basket of red blush pears from Ecuador. Extremely rare.”

“So?”

“There was no record of anybody from Eden authorizing such a present. So I looked deeper. Only one grower in Ecuador markets that particular brand of pears for export. And that grower uses an unusual pesticide, not approved by the FDA.”

“Go on.”

“Lynn Connelly takes only one medication regularly. Cafraxis. It’s a migraine prophylactic. That pesticide contains the base chemical that, when combined with the active ingredient of cafraxis—”

“Let me guess,” said Lash. “Substance P.”

Silver nodded.

Lash fell silent. It was outrageous. And yet it explained a lot of things — including the annoyances in his own life that started out petty, then quickly escalated, as if somebody was trying to force his attention from the mysterious deaths. Could Liza have been behind everything — even Edmund Wyre’s parole? Wyre, the one person in the world who more than anything wants me dead? The answer was obvious. If Liza could have altered his own past history so radically, arranging Wyre’s parole would have been childishly simple.

But still, something didn’t make sense. “Couldn’t Liza have killed the Wilners in some other way?” he asked.

“Sure,” Tara replied. “She could have done anything. Tweaked medical scanners to deliver a fatal dose of X rays. Instructed a jet’s autopilot to fly into a mountain. Anything.”

“So why kill the couples in such a similar way? And why were their deaths so precisely timed, each exactly two years after they’d been matched? The similarity of deaths raised the alarm in the first place. It makes no sense.”

“It makes perfect sense. You’re not thinking like a machine.” It was Silver who spoke this time. “Machines are programmed for order. Since scolipane solved the first problem successfully, there was no need for further optimization when solving the second problem.”

“We’re not talking about a ‘problem,’ ” said Lash. “We’re talking about murder.”

“Liza’s not a murderer!” Silver cried. He struggled to control himself. “Not really. She was simply trying to remove what she perceived as a threat. The concept of hiding, of deception, came later, when… when you became involved.”

“What she perceived as a threat,” Lash repeated slowly. “A threat to whom?”

Silver didn’t speak, and he didn’t meet Lash’s gaze.

“To herself,” Tara said.

Lash glanced at her.

“Dr. Silver instructed Liza to remove his avatar from the Tank after the match with Lindsay Thorpe. But I don’t think she did. I think his avatar was in the Tank all the time. Unknown to the technicians or engineers. And it found a match exactly five more times. Karen Wilner. Lynn Connelly.”

“Each of the women in the supercouples.”

“Yes. Although I’m not sure they were supercouples, after all.” Tara looked over. “Dr. Silver?”

Silver, eyes on the ground, still said nothing.

“You know Liza’s been imprinted with personality traits,” Tara went on. “Curiosity, for example.”

Lash nodded.

“Jealousy is an emotion. Fear is another.”

“Are you saying Liza was jealous of Lindsay Thorpe?”

“Is that so hard to believe? What are jealousy and fear, except stimuli for self-preservation? If you were Liza, how would you feel when your creator — the person who programmed you, shared his personality with you, spent all his time with you — found a life mate?”

“So when Liza matched Lindsay Thorpe with somebody else, she marked it as a supercouple.”

“It must have seemed the most likely way of ensuring Lindsay would never again be a threat. The Thorpes were a valid match, of course — just not a perfect one. But the comparison process was so complex, nobody but Liza could know it wasn’t one-hundred-percent perfect.”

Lash struggled with this. “But if you’re right — if Liza matched Lindsay with somebody else, removed the threat — why kill her?”

“When Silver put his own avatar into the Tank, he added an element of risk Liza was previously unaware of. Now she realized there could be threats to her own sovereignty. So it was Liza who reinserted Silver’s avatar into the Tank. Who kept watching vigilantly for a match. And it happened again. And again. There must have come a time when Liza felt the number of existing ‘threats,’ married or not, were growing too numerous. And that’s when she decided on a more permanent solution.”

Lash turned toward Silver. “Is this true?”

Still, Silver did not answer.

Lash stepped closer. “How could you let this happen? You programmed your own personality flaws into Liza. Didn’t you see what you were doing, didn’t you see you’d only—”

“You think this is what I wanted?” Silver shouted abruptly. “To you it’s all black and white, isn’t it: a neat little package of diagnoses, tied with a pretty bow. I couldn’t anticipate how she’d develop. I gave her the ability to teach herself, to grow. Just the way any mind needs to grow. All that processing power. How could I know she’d take this direction? That she’d maximize negative, irrational personality traits over the positive?”

“You may have given Liza the machine equivalent of emotion. But you gave her no guidance over how to control that emotion.”

As quickly as it came, the emotion left Silver’s face. He slumped back. Silence descended on the little room.

“So why bring us in here?” Lash said at last. “Why tell us all this?”

“Because I couldn’t let you continue, talking to Liza the way you were.”

“Why not?”

“Whatever else she is, Liza is a logical machine. She will have rationalized her actions in some way we can’t understand. You talking to her like that, asking unexpected questions, introduces a random element — maybe a destabilizing element — into what I think has become a fragile personality structure.”

“What you think? You mean, you don’t know?”

“Haven’t you been listening? Her consciousness has been growing, autonomously, for years. It’s now beyond my ability to reverse engineer or even comprehend. All this time, I thought her personality had been growing more robust. But perhaps… perhaps it was just the opposite.”

“You fear some kind of defensive response?” Tara asked.

“All I can tell you is that, if Christopher here confronts her too directly, she’ll feel threatened. And she has the processing power to do the unexpected. To do anything.”

Lash glanced at Tara, and she nodded. “There’s a digital moat around Eden’s systems, patrolled by programs on the lookout for cyber-attacks. We’ve always feared some hacker or competitor might try to bring down our system from the outside. It’s possible Liza could use these defensives in an offensive posture.”

“Offensive? Like what?”

“Launch digital attacks on core servers. Paralyze the country with denial-of-service assaults. Erase critical corporate or federal databases. Anything we could think of, and more. It’s even possible that Liza — if she felt threatened, say, in imminent danger of termination — could use Eden’s Internet portal to replicate a subset of herself outside, beyond our network. We’d have no control over her then.”

“Jesus.” Lash turned back to Silver. “So what do we do?”

“You won’t do anything. If she trusts anybody, she’ll trust me. I have to show her I understand what she’s doing, why she’s doing it. But she must be told it’s wrong, that she has to stop. That she has to be — be held accountable.”

As he spoke, Silver looked at Lash very closely. Unless we let her go, his look seemed to say. Just let her go. Give her a chance to correct her mistakes, start again. She’s done wonderful work, brought happiness to hundreds of thousands of people.

The silence stretched on. Then, Silver broke eye contact. His shoulders sagged.

“You’re right, of course,” he said very quietly. “And I’m responsible. Responsible for everything.” He turned toward the door. “Come on. Let’s get it done.”