Death Match

“Mr. Mauchly?” Sheldrake called up from below.

Mauchly roused himself, took a fresh grip on the ladder, and — turning his eyes from the baffle — climbed up through the security hatchway and into the vestibule of the penthouse.

His first impression was the simple relief of setting foot on solid ground again. The second impression, following immediately, was of unrelieved dark.

“Dorfman!”

There was a rustling in the dark beside him. “Here, Mr. Mauchly.”

“Why haven’t you turned on the lights?”

“I’ve been looking for a switch, sir.”

Mauchly rose, feeling his way forward until he touched metal. He felt along the wall until he reached a door — closed — then continued along the walls until he returned once again to the security hatchway. His circuit of the small compartment yielded no light switch.

There was a clatter, and a dark shape suddenly thrust its way into the hatchway, obscuring the dim light filtering up from below.

“Sheldrake?”

“Affirmative.”

“Call down to some of your men. Get some torches up here.”

The shape descended again out of view.

Mauchly paused, thinking. The penthouse compartment was six stories high. Silver’s quarters occupied the top two stories. This huge space below housed the machines that made up Liza.

Silver had always been easygoing about Eden’s business matters, leaving day-to-day operations to the board of directors. The one thing he was extremely possessive about was Liza’s physical plant. He’d been up here every day during construction, overseeing the installation himself, sometimes even physically moving equipment in from the cranes through the unfinished walls. Throughout, Mauchly remembered, Liza had been kept ru

A similar anxiousness lay behind the precautions Silver took to guard Liza from the outside world. Mauchly knew that, for whatever reason, Liza’s intelligence had never been transferred from one computer to another: instead, newer and larger computers had simply been linked to the older ones, creating an expanding sprawl of “big iron” hardware of several vintages and makes. The powerful cluster of supercomputers that did Eden’s outboard processing — data gathering, the client monitoring, all the rest — were housed in the i

Mauchly had never set foot within Liza’s physical plant since earliest construction, and now he cursed himself for the oversight. In retrospect, his lack of knowledge was a severe breach of security. He thought back on what he knew about the four-story space beyond. He realized he knew very little; Silver had protected it jealously, even from him.

Mauchly edged back to the door he’d noticed before. For a moment, he feared Silver might have locked it from the inside. But the simple knob turned beneath his grasp. As the door slid open, light at last returned: not lamplight, but a vast thicket of diodes and LEDs, winking red and green and amber in the velvet darkness, stretching ahead into what seemed limitless distance. There was sound here, too: not the banshee-like howl of the building’s power plant below, but a steady hum of backup generators and the subtler, measured cadence of electromechanical devices.

Instructing Dorfman to wait for Sheldrake, Mauchly stepped forward into the gloom.

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 di

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 ski

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.”