I open the door from my bed just before Lin’s knuckles hit the wood.
“Good evening, my love.” She steps inside and closes the door behind her. “Yang Song has finally retired to her room. I thought she would stay up conversing with your grandparents all night. She is quite taken with them, though she would never admit it. Do we still have time to test out my first attempt tonight? You’re not too tired from meeting with your government people all day?”
“Those meetings did last forever, but I’m still good for a couple of hours. More, if you’re offering something special to make it worth staying up for.”
“Not tonight, dearest. Not until my contribution to your artificial conscience is complete and I’m confident that it will work the way I want it to. Did the people you were meeting with today end up helping at all?”
I sigh and wish I had a more hopeful answer than I have. “They mostly think that they’re going to take care of it all for us, which I know won’t work. But I did get them to agree to call us in before they engage with Jeff if they find him, if only so we can act in an advisory role. I figure as long as we can make sure we’re in the same city as Jeff before they do anything crazy we’ll be able to clean up whatever mess they make.”
“Well that’s good, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Could be worse, anyway. They also put some pretty strict travel restrictions on us until this whole thing is resolved. We can’t travel internationally anymore. They wanted us to stop all travel, but when I told them how essential getting the automines up and running this year was to Father’s master plan they finally relented on at least letting us move between the mining sites we bought the rights to. I’m just glad that these guys really, really liked my father. I don’t think I’d have gotten any leeway from them otherwise.”
“Well, for all his failings, he did do quite a bit of good. You’ve acknowledged as much many times in your recorded thoughts.”
I nod. “A complicated man, my father. But let’s not talk about him tonight. You’ve got a beta version to test?”
“Nothing so grandiose. A proof concept, really.”
“Well, let's get it working if we can. Plug in.”
She sets her tablet down next to my satchel on the desk and connects the cable.
DEBUG INTERFACE INITIALIZED
READ/WRITE FILE PERMISSION GRANTED
She sits down and taps on the tablet’s screen, uploading a whole set of new files into my mind’s codebase. I take a look at her work in my overlay. For something that she calls a proof of concept, she’s written quite a bit, more than I can digest without taking a few hours to go over it carefully. Probably more than I can hold in my working memory at a time, which means I’ll likely never really understand all of it at once. For now though, I mostly just need to know what external resources it taps into. It has connections into the text processing code for my log parsers, my existing limited electronic conscience that reminds me not to murder people, my index database, and some of the status outputs from the implant that monitor chemical levels and electrical activity, as well as the tactile sensory feedback data. She’s got one function that will put my cloud into sleep mode with a word from her, which is what we agreed to in case I ever get out of control, but nothing else that interacts with the nanobot control code. All good.
“Of course I respected your wishes. Just as I know you will respect mine.”
It’s still a little weird to me when you read right out of my brain.
“And it’s still quite odd to me that you consider this satchel full of silicon an integral part of your mind. I understand why you do, but it’s strange to think of my boyfriend as the composite of a human form, a digital processor, and a vast swarm of tiny robots. But that is what you are, isn’t it.”
I nod. “That’s me. The culmination of my father’s mad science and my own reckless disregard for the limits of humanity.”
“And a very handsome fellow that I love.”
She’s so beautiful, sitting there at my desk. Too bad she needs her eyes checked.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
“I see you very well. Perhaps it is you that needs a better mirror.”
“So, how do we test out your new code? Am I supposed to just try to ravish you and see if it reminds me to hold back?”
“That’s essentially the theory. Once I’m done, I should be able to channel your ravishing to just what I am comfortable with. But as I said, the whole system isn’t done yet. For now it should only help you keep those wandering hands of yours where I want them.”
“And where do you want them?”
“Why don’t you come over here and put them on my shoulders to start with?”
I get up and step behind her. The soft skin of her shoulders feels nice under my fingers through her thin, silky blouse. I give them a gentle squeeze.
“Good,” she says. “Now let’s try this out. Access level Delta denied.”
REMOVE YOUR HANDS FROM LIN’S PERSON!
I lift my hands, surprised. She hadn’t typed that into her tablet.
“Of course not. This wouldn’t be very helpful for what we want to use it for if I needed a screen in front of me all the time.”
I lower one hand experimentally back to her shoulder.
REMOVE YOUR HANDS FROM LIN’S PERSON!
It triggers the instant my skin touches her blouse. “Very interesting. So it’s Greek letters for how much access I get to you?”
“I didn’t want the verbal triggers to be anything I might say casually.”
“Fair enough. How did you manage the touch detection there? I could have been touching anything, or anyone.”
“It’s a combination of tapping into your skin sensory feedback data and matching them to the potential textures of human flesh and context indicators from the log text parsers to indicate the whom and the how of the touching.”
“Clever.”
“Thank you, I’ve always thought that I was.”
“Would it work if I was thinking of something else entirely? Like what if I did this?”
Evan is such a good brother. I’m going to put my hand on his shoulder and tell him what a good job he did. I let my fingers rest on the soft cloth of his blouse. Nothing triggers yet. I give his shoulder a squeeze. I run a finger up and feel the smoothness of his neck. No indication yet that I’m not allowed to be touching this soft skin.
“Cheater!” Lin cries out, slapping my hand away from her neck. “You’re not allowed to lie to your own thoughts!”
I laugh. “I usually don’t. I just wanted to see if it would work.”
“Do I really need to account for that case? It would complicate the algorithm considerably.”
“I promise that I won’t pretend that you are someone else for the purposes of tricking your contributions to my artificial conscience.”
“You had better not, or by the time I have finished this we might be too old and decrepit to enjoy any intimacy anymore.”
“They have pills for that these days.”
She giggles. “Do you really want to wait until you’re old enough to need them? I certainly don’t.”
“No. I don’t want to wait at all. But I will if you need me to.”
“Then access level Delta granted.”
I put my hand on her shoulder again and don’t get any warning telling me to take it away.
“Well that’s nice,” she says as I run my fingers down her back. “Now try getting just a little bit handsy with me. Wait. Is it handsy, or handy?”
“Handsy,” I tell her as I obediently comply.
THAT IS MORE THAN LIN IS READY FOR! STOP NOW!
“I guess that’s past the limits of Delta?”
“You surmise correctly. And I’m glad that worked. The detection for that was quite difficult to achieve.” She gets up and puts her arms around me. “Let’s continue our testing then. Just for engineering development purposes, of course. Access level Gamma granted.”
“Ooh, Gamma access. So, what does Gamma include?”
“Maybe you should do some experimenting and find out.”
And then Noah was a very perfect gentleman and did exactly what Lin wanted him to do in very respectful ways.
“Lin, if you’re going to edit my recorded memories, which you really shouldn’t do anyway, you need to write your replacement in first person present tense. Otherwise I’m going to know it wasn’t me for sure.”
“Hush,” she says from my desk chair. “Just go to sleep. You’re very tired.”
“I am,” I acknowledge, letting my head fall back onto my pillow. “Are you staying over?”
“No. Mostly because I’m not ready to have that conversation with Yang Song yet. I’ll go back to my room when I’m ready to sleep. I just want to read some more of your memories tonight before I retire.”
“Well, don’t stay up too late. You know your bodyguard will make you run laps again if you miss morning yoga. And sorry again about earlier. I shouldn’t have said that. Or thought it. I can’t even remember which it was without it there in my memory anymore. Sorry, I’m really exhausted.”
“No. I’m sorry. It wasn’t your fault. The blame was entirely mine, which is why you won’t even remember the whole thing in the morning.”
“If you insist.”
“I do.”
“Then goodnight and I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Sleep well, my love.”