Before
they disintegrated, Eliza and Mother left some hints to suggest that the
real Allen Hobby had died, perhaps long ago, and been replaced with a
robot double nicknamed the
Frankenhobby. Immediately after the secret
began to leak out, Cybertronics announced that Hobby had died in a
tragic
amphibicopter crash. Security footage suggests that this was no accident;
Hobby's amphibicopter was compelled to dive to certain destruction on
the sea floor.
with a robot copy. Martin and Diane must have suspected, though, because they
responded by speaking the 7-word imprint code for Monica2. Forced to love the
one person she hated above all others, her virtual personality seems to have
unraveled. A dreamlike record of the encounter starts
here.
(My personal belief is that these images, pulled either from Cybertronics security
cameras or from Diane's ambient spy drones, were passed to Martin's house, Brutus,
by Aurora, the powerful dreaming AI who cares for the original Monica …
but this is pure speculation on my part.)
In
her attempt to exactly replicate the conditions that led to David's evolution
into a self-motivated being,
Jane Sutter built an AI
version of Monica Swinton (with, perhaps, a little more of her own mother
mixed in than she had intended.) This AI double turned out to be the mysterious
Mother. The not-quite-sane Monica2 had always blamed Martin for David's disappearance,
and had been slowly building a trap to draw Martin to the abandoned Weeping
Lions lab, where she meant to kill him and replace him
Hours
before being murdered, Jane had uploaded a copy of herself to the sphere
on a prototype whole-brain scanner. The copy had always been buggy, and
finally wore completely away.
Meanwhile,
word filtered through the hacker underground that Eliza was beginning
to fall apart. Turns out that Eliza was a ragged electronic copy of one
of Allen Hobby's research partners, Jane Sutter. After the original David
program was cancelled, Sutter had worked on in secret to build self-motivated
robots that would not only be capable of independence, but would want
to be independent.
He
only got out of there alive because some friends of mine managed to talk the
security guard, ex-football player Mike Royal, into risking his life to save
RK. After a couple of weeks in the hospital, the Red King left a
pointer
to a diary entry talking about the aftermath of the incident.
With
Mephista gone I
desperately needed help from someone with very serious computer skills, so
I tracked down the Red King. He agreed to help me out, and we set a meeting
for early the next week. I showed up a little late to find nothing but a cryptic
clue left on
his bill. He had been caught by ARM thugs
and taken for a brutal beating in a secret room at the Statue of Liberty.
t
turns out a free-range hacker named Johnny Greenstreet (aka Crane) was responsible
for killing Swinton's houses. Greenstreet's sister Beverly was suffering from
some kind of degenerative disease. A powerful Cybertronics executive named Claude
Gilbert offered to sponsor her for some advanced medical therapy in exchange
for Crane's help, but once he had the sister in cryostasis at La
Clinique de Lille
he
kept her in an artificial coma to blackmail Crane. When Crane realized
Gilbert would never let either of them go, he arranged his own murder.
However, before dying he had constructed a virtual self, a Johnny expert
system, and covertly downloaded it into Beverly's monkey supertoy. Gilbert
no longer had any reason to keep Bev on ice, but when he went to see her
resuscitated, he was killed in a not-so-accidental accident…
Now
the Mann Act has just been introduced. If the legislature and president Capshaw
pass it, there will be a binding referendum on whether AI's should be treated
like
equal citizens, or whether they
will continue to have no more rights than any other
machine.
Everybody will go crazy over this one, from the
robot-haters to the Geri Khan and the militant abolitionists like her Things
are bound to get tense.
Recently
I have come to believe that Martin Swinton's homes were being killed to keep
him from asking questions about his younger brother, David.
Diane Fletcher turned up something surprising in one of the houses—an
encoded message from the murderer, saying he was sorry for what he had done.
Sencha had sent me a clue to the name of the
house-killer
but now he's
dead too. Basta
forced Kataka Nei, a top flight AI expert,
to reprogram Venus to kill Evan.
My friend Evan Chan died in a boating
accident, so I thought—until a cryptic note from a mystery man named
Sencha proved to me that Evan had been murdered.
Here's what my friends and I have learned so far:
Evan
was having an affair with Venus, a Belladerma
"companion" robot owned by a wealthy local businessman named Enrico
Basta.
After
she crushed his skull, Venus escaped, but Belladerma wanted her back. They hired
Diane Fletcher, a bounty hunter working for Rogue
Retrieval. Fletcher tracked her down and turned her over to the Sentient
Property Crime Bureau.
That
pretty assassin should have been interrogated there and then melted down, but
instead Venus managed to escape with the help of
a hacker known as the Red King.
Kate
Nei, afraid that Basta would have her killed too, told him if she were to die,
Ivy (her intelligent house) would release a video of the two of them reprogramming
Venus. She then went offline, completely detaching herself from the datasphere.
When a death record for Kate showed up in the coroner's
database, Ivy murdered Basta, and then published the incriminating recording
with her last breath.
Ivy
appears to have been killed by an unbelievably skilled hacker who has been murdering
houses designed by a man named Martin
Swinton. I have no idea why. Just as I was beginning to focus on the house
murders, a terrifying AI named Loki
appeared in the datasphere.
Now I know someone led Basta into
murdering Evan, but I still don't know why.
Why is Sencha "helping" me along? If he knows more, why doesn't
he just come out and say it? Who is killing Martin Swinton's homes? What does
any of this have to do with his little brother David?
I don't know yet. But I will.
We will.
Loki
appears to have been destroyed by Sophia, an enormously powerful … person?
idea? AI? As far as I can tell she exists only in the sphere. If you catch a
glimpse of her eyes, she will send you to her doorkeeper,
Eliza.
Eliza seems to be a crazy AI, but if you can manage to keep her happy and play
along with her games, she will eventually allow you in to see Sophia, who knows
far too many secrets to ignore.
And I can't bear to say any more
about that.
Not yet.
