AI - Alpha Part 4

that were perfectly natural.

He wondered about her learning ability. Perhaps the Kitty Hawk thing had been a fluke. "Jamie?"

"Hmm?"

"Can you count?"

She yawned. "One, two, three, four." Opening her eyes, she looked up at him. "It would take infinity time to reach a thousand."

"That long, huh?"

She nodded solemnly. "Even longer."

"Do you know what infinity means?"

"Big number."

"How big?"

She held out her arms. "Bigger than the biggest anything."

Her ability to converse surprised him. She sounded older than three. Then again, he had no experiences with three-year-olds except his own children, and that was decades ago.

"How high can you count?" Jamie asked.

"Higher than a thousand."

Her eyes became wide. "Really?"

He grinned. "Really."

"You're smart, Grampy."

"Why, thank you."

Her look turned cagey, but with such innocence, he wanted to laugh. "'Kay, Grampy. What is four times six?"

That she even knew about "times" startled him. "What do you think, Moppet?"

"Twenty-four!" Her smile was sunlight glancing off a lake.

Good Lord. She could multiply. "What else can you do?"

"I like fractions."

"You do?"

She nodded vigorously, her curls bouncing. "One half plus one half equals one."

"That's right." He ruffled her hair. "Jamie, have your parents ever had you tested?"

"Tested?"

"Did they ever take you to someone who asked you questions about math and words?"

"No."

"They should." He pulled her into his lap. "Lovely, brilliant, and charming. You're going to break hearts when you get older."

"Never, Grampy!" She looked contrite. "I already broke the lamp when I jumped on the couch. Daddy was mad."

"We'll just make sure no lamps are around."

Jamie yawned again. "Can we watch a holovid?"

"I think you need to go to sleep, young lady."

"But you just come home."

"I'll be here tomorrow." Thomas stood up, lifting her in his arms. "Come on, Einstein. You need your rest."

He expected her to protest more, but she just leaned her head on his shoulder. He suspected he had let

her stay up past her bedtime. As he carried her to the guest room Lattie had prepared, Thomas pondered his granddaughter. He didn't know enough about childhood development to judge if she really was precocious or his impressions were just grandfatherly pride. Had Leila or the boys known multiplication and fractions at that age? He had been gone so much back then. He regretted it more now than he would have ever guessed in the fiery days of his youth.

His memories of his own childhood weren't much help, either. As a boy, he had never been able to concentrate. He had managed to get by in school because he found the work easy, but he had been forever bedeviling his teachers with his inability to sit still. It wasn't until high school that a counselor realized he had ADHD, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. She called him "twice exceptional"; all he knew was that he finally had a name for his restlessness. His parents helped him manage the ADHD with changes in his diet rather than medication, but for him, going into the military had been the real answer. The structure, the routine, and the order had helped him take control of his life.

As an adult, Thomas had partially grown out of the ADHD and learned to control the rest. Neither Leila nor his oldest child, Thomas Jr., had shown any sign of it. Fletcher, his younger son, had inherited the restless Wharington bug, but they caught it early. With a close watch on his diet and school counselors who understood his needs, Fletcher had managed far better than his father. It was too soon to tell with Jamie, but he sincerely hoped she inherited only the "exceptional" part of her grandpa's line without his learning disability.

He tucked the drowsy child into bed and read Cinderella until she nodded off hugging her stuffed cat. Watching her sleep, he realized he was glad Leila had needed his help. It was worth his clumsy uncertainty with children to have this time with Jamie. He liked his work, but these moments were what made life worthwhile.

The voice of C.J. Matheson came over the comm on Thomas's desk. "Senator Bartley on line one."

"Got it." Thomas switched channels, then sat back in his leather chair and swiveled to face the window, which looked over the gleaming buildings and quiet streets of the NIA.

An expansive voice with a Southern drawl came out of the mesh. "Good morning, Thomas."

Thomas swiveled back to his desk. "You're up early."

"d.a.m.n straight," the senator said. "We have to talk about your guest."

Alpha, again. Bartley was on the Committee for s.p.a.ce Warfare Research and Development, which

technically had nothing to do with Alpha. But they oversaw work that included the development of formas with Evolving Intelligences, or EI brains. The term EI had come into use for the rare codes that achieved sentience, as distinguished from run-of-the-mill AIs, which were neither self-aware nor mentally flexible. Only a handful of EIs existed. A few were in consoles or robots; a smaller number had android bodies. No one yet knew why one code became an EI and another didn't. None of the scientists working with Alpha believed she was self-aware; they considered her an AI. But Thomas wasn't so certain.

"The line's secured," Thomas said.

"You have to quit this 'debriefing' s.h.i.+t," Bartley told him. "When are you going to let the mech-techs

take apart her brain?"

Thomas stiffened. Bartley might as well urge him to execute Alpha. "We have no idea what would be lost."

"Lose what? You've got zilch in the hay from her so far."

"That's not a reason to burn the haystack."

"You need to take apart her matrix," Bartley said. "Find out what's inside of it. Kayle and Sarowsky

agree with me."

Thomas inwardly swore. Bartley had just named the other two senators who knew about Alpha. Unless Thomas headed them off, Sarowsky would keep pus.h.i.+ng, even as far as the President if he considered the need drastic. Fred Kayle's inability to acknowledge that Alpha was anything but an inanimate object chilled Thomas. Yes, she was a machine. But great differences existed between a typical robot and a

system as complex as Alpha, who might be on the verge of sentience. As far as Thomas was concerned, dismantling her matrix was tantamount to killing her.

"Taking her apart could destroy what we're looking for," Thomas said.

"The ol' quantum mechanics trick, eh?" Bartley laughed loudly at his joke. Just in case Thomas missed

the point, he added, "The act of looking at something changes it." The humor vanished from his voice.

"Except in this case it's bulls.h.i.+t."

"And if it's not?" Thomas asked.

"We're not getting diddly from her, anyway. You have any luck downloading her memory?"

"We're making progress," Thomas said, which was stretching the truth to breaking, given their lack of success. It was hard to crack a system that was itself actively opposing them. Alpha's "brain" was a matrix of filaments tangled throughout her body. It had two components: spherical buckyball molecules that acted as tiny biochips; and molecular threads that encoded data and transmitted signals. To copy her mind, either they had to convince her to transmit the data herself, which seemed as likely as the proverbial s...o...b..ll surviving in h.e.l.l, or else they had to remove the filaments and replicate their structure-which required taking her apart at a molecular level.

"What progress?" Bartley said.

"She's talking more," Thomas replied.

"Talk is no good."

"It's better than trying to synthesize the molecular structure of her filaments."

"Why?" Bartley demanded. "Yes, we'll lose data that way. But better half her mind than nothing at all."

Thomas was growing angry. "Her mind is more than data. I won't destroy one of the most sophisticated

android-AI combinations ever created because of impatience. We need time."

"Destroy, h.e.l.l. You'll back it up, right?" Bartley snorted. "We're not talking about a woman, Wharington. I don't care what she looks like, she's a machine."

Thomas wondered if he was losing track of that himself. By her own admission, she was neither self-

directed nor capable of emotion. But he wasn't so certain her claims weren't defenses raised by a prisoner who could neither escape nor defend herself. It was true, they could copy as much of her mind as they could recover. They might even make another android body, if they could get funding. But it felt

wrong.

"It isn't that easy to back up an AI," Thomas said. "Her brain consists of millions of microscopic threads.

We not only have to get them out intact, we have to reproduce their structure. No matter how careful we are, we won't end up with exact matches. At best, we'll have flawed, incomplete copies."