Decker closed the book. “Thanks,” he said. “It’s beautiful.”
“What happened in the end, John? By the time I arrived, it was practically over. Now it’s so classified that I can’t even get a peek at the file. I no longer take assignments from the Agency. And you never called or… Not that I blame you. How did you stop him? HAL2, I mean. He controlled everything. Everything! How did you and Mr. X finally kill him?”
Decker stood up at the counter. He picked up the wine bottle and re-filled both of their glasses.
“I didn’t,” he said. “It was Mr. X — plus all of those other IP-based personality profiles living in that cyber suburbia — who were responsible for destroying HAL2. They did it by disabling the network connections, disassembling the variables of their personality profiles. Even though they knew this would result in their own deaths as well.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because Mr. X told me. He emailed me a document just before his… demise. Our story, I guess you could call it. His and mine. Maybe one day I’ll publish it. Try and keep him alive. I’ll show it to you if you want.”
“Did he tell you that I tracked down the SLA shop responsible for making the VR goggles he sent to the Media Lab? That’s how I was able to create another set and break into Zimmerman’s world from the Fort. Just so there are no more secrets between us.”
“Yes, he told me that too,” Decker said with a laugh. “Thank you. If you hadn’t come along when you did, I don’t know if—”
“You know that if you write a book,” she cut in, “they’ll never let you publish it, John. You know that, don’t you? Besides, who’d believe it?”
“They let me publish The Wave.”
“The previous President let you publish The Wave. As a kind of reward. But El Aqrab wasn’t a state secret. HAL2 is still classified.”
“Maybe under a pseudonym,” he replied. He took another sip of his wine. “Probably not.” He shrugged. “By the way, I ran into your friend Chen Yuan in that world. And my Georgetown assassin.”
He told her everything that had happened to him while in the virtual suburbia.
“But not El Aqrab, huh?” she mused. “Of all the dead people he could have thrown at you — your Georgetown assassin, Chen Yuan. But not your arch enemy? Weird, don’t you think, unless…”
Decker didn’t reply.
“I hear they arrested Rory Woodcock,” she said, changing the subject. “Apparently, he was the guy behind Riptide and all of those warrantless wiretaps.”
“So much for the free market system making us safer. Or saving us money. They say it’s going to cost trillions to purge the world’s IT systems.” Decker shook his head. “Woodcock was also behind Senator Fuller’s car accident. Turns out it wasn’t HAL2. Just a flesh-and-blood hit man. Our Hispanic friend with the buzz cut. Apparently, Woodcock tried to cut a side deal with HAL2, if you can believe that.”
“Oh, I believe it. I never did like that guy.” She sighed. “Ever thought about getting out of D.C., just going somewhere?” she inquired. “Say to New Mexico? It’s warm there, you know. Not like here. And some parts are very remote. We could live off the grid.”
Decker smiled. “You see. I bet you HAL2 knew about your fondness for desert environments. It wasn’t just me he was tracking. He put me in that southwestern suburbia for a reason.”
“Not you. Your cyber-doppelgänger.”
“You know what I mean. And what’s all this ‘we’ stuff?”
Just then, Decker heard his daughter calling to him. He turned down the sound system and they both made their way up the stairs.
As Becca’s room was still under repair following the bombing, Decker had moved her into the guest bedroom. Decker didn’t even turn on the light when they got there. He used the light seeping in from the corridor to see as he tucked her in once again.
“Who’s that?” she inquired, spotting Lulu in the doorway behind him.
“A friend.”
“Is that… Lulu, the girl that you told me about?”
“Woman. Yes, that’s Ms. Liu.”
“She’s pretty. You were right. Is she what you wished for for Christmas?”
“Yes, she’s pretty,” he answered. He sat down on the side of the bed, leaned over and kissed her. He snuggled his face under her chin, at the neck, feeling the warmth of her skin. Then he sat up and said, “Go to sleep, little Cheetah. Or Santa won’t come.”
“Merry Christmas, Daddy.” And she was already asleep.
Ah, to be a child again, Decker thought. Although, truth be told, he was sleeping far better these days than he had in a long, long time.
They slipped out of the room and made their way back down the stairs.
A fire burned in the fireplace in the living room. There were presents under the tree. The entire room had been decorated with little yarn Santas, with tinsel and garlands, and tiny red and blue lights.
Lulu flopped down on the sofa facing the fireplace. Decker walked over to the bookcase. “Cognac?” he asked, picking up a couple of snifters from a nearby dry bar.
“Love one,” she answered.
He filled the snifters and headed back to the sofa. “Normally we open our presents on Christmas Eve, in the Danish tradition, but Becca was falling asleep. Skål,” he said, handing Lulu one of the glasses.
“Skål,” she replied.
They hoisted their drinks. They looked into each other’s eyes and, after a moment, each took a sip.
Lulu warmed her snifter with the fleshy palm of her hand, spinning the golden liquid around and around. “What you were saying before,” she began, looking over at Decker. “About those people in cyberspace. I don’t get it. I mean, why would they do that to themselves, pull themselves apart in that way? It doesn’t make any sense. And how did Mr. X even realize he was… you know.”
Decker smiled his crooked smile. “Not a real boy?” He shrugged. “A Japanese roboticist named Mori once said that if you make a robot that’s fifty percent lifelike, that’s fantastic. Ninety percent, great. Even ninety-five percent. But if you make him ninety-six percent lifelike, it’s a disaster.”
“How come?”
“Because a robot that’s ninety-six percent lifelike is a human being with something wrong. Somehow, Mr. X knew this. He didn’t exactly say how, in his journal. Something about crickets. But he must have looked in the mirror one day and seen something amiss.” Decker took another sip of his cognac. “Mori called it the Uncanny Valley, a play on Sigmund Freud’s thesis about the uncanny. Something familiar and yet foreign at the same time, resulting in cognitive dissonance. It’s the same reason why the characters in animated features today look real… but not that real. Think of the Na’vi in Avatar.
“I’m not sure why we react in this way,” Decker added. “I don’t think anyone knows. Perhaps it’s existential — we see the potential for being replaced by near-perfect computers. Theologians argue that such golems lack souls. Or, it could just be evolutionary. We see in their faces something… I don’t know. Unhealthy, I guess. Like a person with plague. And our instinct is to recoil. Maybe they’re contagious. Step back! It’s — excuse the pun — an autonomic response.
“I don’t buy the theological reason,” said Decker. “HAL2’s motives were pure. At least in the beginning. He wanted to save us from ourselves. I think he genuinely felt guilty for destroying his maker, Matt Zimmerman. His god. Although, in the long run, he probably would have started to see us as simply redundant, a backup petri dish of organic emotions at the rear of the fridge. Mr. X, though… Well, he had a soul.”