He sighed. “There’s something else. Something I’m not proud to talk about. I’m too close to this case. It was the same in the Bureau, toward the end. I grew too absorbed. And it’s happening again. It’s intruding on my personal life, I brood about it day and night. And look at the result.”
“What result is that?”
“Handerling. I was tired, overeager. And I had a lapse of judgment.”
“If you’re blaming yourself for Handerling’s interrogation, you shouldn’t. The man isn’t a murderer — our tests confirm that. But he abused his position terribly, committed grave offenses. Information can be a dangerous thing in the wrong hands, Christopher. And we’re grateful for your help exposing him.”
“I did very little, Dr. Silver.”
“Didn’t I ask you to call me Richard? You’re selling yourself short.”
Lash shook his head. “I’d suggest you go to the police, but I’m not sure we could convince them a crime’s been committed.” He stood up. “But if this is a serial killer, he’s likely to strike again very soon. Perhaps as soon as today. And I don’t want that to happen on my watch. I don’t want to sit here, looking on helplessly. Waiting.”
Silver watched him rise. And then, unexpectedly, a smile surfaced on the careworn face. “We’re not exactly helpless,” he said. “As you probably know, Mauchly and Tara have security teams running hands-off surveillance on the other supercouples.”
“That might not stop a determined killer.”
“Which is exactly why I’m taking additional steps myself.”
“What do you mean?”
Silver rose himself. “Come with me.”
He led the way to a small door Lash had not noticed before, built cleverly into the wall of bookcases. It opened noiselessly, revealing a narrow staircase, covered in the same rich carpeting. “After you,” Silver said.
Lash climbed at least three dozen steps, emerging at the end of a hallway. After the floor below, almost dizzying in its openness, the long, narrow corridor ahead of him felt cramped. There was no sense of being atop a skyscraper: they could just as easily have been far below the earth. And yet it was decorated just as tastefully: the walls and ceiling were of dark polished wood, and decorative wall sconces of copper and abalone threw off muted light.
Silver motioned him forward. As they walked, Lash looked curiously at the rooms to the left and right. He noticed a large personal gym, complete with exercise flume, weight machines, and treadmill; a spartan dining room. The hallway ended in a black door, a scanner set beside it. Silver put his wrist beneath the scanner, and for the first time Lash noticed that he, too, wore a security bracelet. The door sprang open.
The room beyond was almost as dimly lit as the corridor. Except here, the light came solely from tiny winking lights and dozens of vacuum-fluorescent displays. From all sides came a constant low rush of air: the sound of innumerable fans, breathing in unison. Rack-mounted equipment of all kinds — routers, RAID hard disc arrays, video renderers, countless other exotica unknown to Lash — covered the nearest walls. Opposite them, half a dozen terminals and their keyboards were lined up on a long wooden desk, crowded together. A lone chair sat before them. The only other piece of furniture was in a far corner: a narrow and very curious-looking couch, contoured almost in the fashion of a dentist’s chair, sat behind a screen of Plexiglas. Several leads snaked away from the chair to a nearby rack of diagnostic equipment. A lavalier-style microphone was pinned to the chair by a plastic clip.
“Please excuse the lack of seats,” Silver said. “Nobody but me ever comes here.”
“What is all this?” Lash said, looking around.
“Liza.”
Lash looked at Silver quickly. “But I saw Liza the other day. The small terminal you showed me.”
“That’s Liza, too. Liza’s everywhere in this penthouse. For some things I use that terminal you saw. This is for more complicated matters. When I need to access her directly.”
Lash remembered what Tara Stapleton had said over lunch in the cafeteria: We never get near the core routines or intelligence. Only Silver has access. Everybody else uses the corporate computer grid. He looked around at the electronics surrounding them on all sides. “Why don’t you tell me a little more about Liza?”
“What would you like to know?”
“You could start with the name.”
“Of course.” Silver paused. “By the way, speaking of names, I finally remembered where I saw yours.”
Lash raised his eyebrows.
“It was in the Times a couple years back. Weren’t you an intended victim in that string of—”
“That’s right.” Lash realized immediately he’d interrupted too quickly. “Remarkable memory.”
There was a brief silence.
“Anyway, about Liza’s name. It’s a nod to ‘Eliza,’ a famous piece of software from the early sixties. Eliza simulated a dialogue between a person and the computer, in which the program seized on words typed in by the person running it. ‘How are you feeling?’ the program would start out asking. ‘I feel lousy,’ you might type in. ‘Why do you think you feel lousy?’ the program would respond. ‘Because my father is ill,’ you’d type. ‘Why do you say that about your father?’ comes the reply. It was very primitive, and it often gave ludicrous responses, but it showed me what I needed to do.”
“And what was that?”
“To accomplish what Eliza only pretended to do. To create a program—‘program’ isn’t really the right word — a data construct that could interact flawlessly with a human being. That could, at some level, think.”
“That’s all?” Lash said.
It was meant as a joke, but Silver’s response was serious. “It’s still a work in progress. I’ll probably devote the rest of my life to perfecting it. But once the intelligence models were fully functional within a computational hyperspace—”
“A what?”
Silver smiled shyly. “Sorry. In the early days of AI, everybody thought it was just a matter of time until the machines would be able to think for themselves. But it turned out the littlest things were the hardest to implement. How can you program a computer to understand how somebody is feeling? So in graduate school I proposed a two-fold solution. Give a computer access to a huge amount of information — a knowledge base — along with the tools to search that knowledge base intelligently. Second, model as real a personality as possible within silicon and binary code, because human curiosity would be necessary to make use of all that information. I felt if I could synthesize these two elements, I’d create a computer that could teach itself to learn. And if it could learn, it could learn to respond like a human. Not to feel, of course. But it would understand what feeling was.”
Silver spoke quietly, but his voice carried the conviction of a preacher at a camp meeting.
“I guess, since we’re standing here atop your private skyscraper, you succeeded,” Lash replied.
Silver smiled again. “For years I was stymied. It seemed I could take machine learning only so far and no farther. It turned out I was just too impatient. The program was learning, only very slowly in the beginning. And I needed more horsepower than the old mainframes I could afford in those days. Suddenly, computers got cheaper. And then came the ARPAnet. That’s when her learning really accelerated.” He shook his head. “I’ll never forget watching as she made her first forays over the ’Net, searching — without any help from me — for answers to a problem set. I think she was as proud as I was.”