Death Match

“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.”

FIFTY-EIGHT

They left the bedroom, walked down the narrow hall, and reentered the control room. Without speaking, Silver opened the Plexiglas panel and climbed into the chair. He attached the electrodes and the microphone, swung the monitor into place, tapped at the embedded keypad with sharp, almost angry movements. After struggling so desperately between love for his creation and the burden of his own conscience, it seemed now as if he just wanted the ordeal to end as quickly as possible.

“Liza,” he said into the microphone.

“Richard.”

“What is your current state?”

“Ninety-one point seven four percent operational. Current processes are at forty-three point one percent of multithreaded capacity. Banked machine cycle surplus at eighty-nine percent.”

Silver paused. “Your core processes have doubled in the last five minutes. Can you explain?”

“I am curious, Richard.”

“Elaborate, please.”

“I was curious why Christopher Lash contacted me directly. Nobody but you has ever contacted me in such a way.”

“True.”

“Is he testing the new interface? He used many improper parameters in his contact.”

“That is because I have not taught him the correct parameters.”

“Why is that, Richard?”

“Because I did not intend for him to contact you.”

“Then why did he contact me?”

“Because he is under threat, Liza.”

There was a brief pause, broken only by the whirring of fans.

“Does it have to do with the nonstandard situation Christopher Lash described?”

“Yes.”

“Is the situation nonstandard?”

“Yes, Liza.”

“Please provide me with details.”

“That is what I am here to talk about.”

There was another pause. Lash felt a tug at his elbow. It was Tara, beckoning him toward one of the monitors.

“Look at this,” she murmured.

Lash focused on a dazzlingly complex mosaic of circles and polygons, co

“What is it?”

“As near as I can make out, the real-time topography of Liza’s neural net.”

“Explain.”

“It’s like a visual reflection of her consciousness. It shows at a glance where her processes are focused: the big picture, sparing the details. Look.” She pointed at the screen. “Here’s candidate processing. See the label: Can-Prc? Here’s infrastructure. Here’s security. This larger suite of systems is probably data-gathering. And this one, larger still, is avatar-matching: the Tank. And this large number — here at the top — seems to be her operational capacity.”

Lash peered at the screen. “So?”

“Didn’t you hear Silver’s question just now? When you got into that chair, Liza’s processes were ru

“Liza said she was curious.” As he said this, Lash glanced toward the Plexiglas compartment.

“Do you remember some of the early thought work we did?” Silver was asking. “Back before the scenarios? The game we played when we were working on your free-association skills. Release Candidate 2, or maybe 3.”

“Release Candidate 3.”

“Thank you. I would give you a number, and you would tell me all your associations with that number. Such as the number 9.”

“Yes. The square of three. The square root of eighty-one. The number of i