Gridiron

'What the fuck's the matter with you, man?' snarled Levine. 'Jesus, you scared me.'

Ellery smiled sheepishly. 'I think I scared myself, Tony,' he said. 'I was just thinking about Kay. I don't think she drowned at all. In fact, I'm quite certain of it. Richardson thought that because he found her floating in the water, that's all.'

'So what happened to her, Lieutenant Columbo?'

'It came to me just now. Abraham has charge of all the chemicals that go into the pool. I think she must have been gassed.'

Levine's nose wrinkled with disgust. 'She sure would have been gassed if she'd walked in here.' He laughed loudly. 'Man, this place stinks even worse than it does in the rest of the building. Whaddya eat for breakfast, Willis, dog food?'

Levine pushed past Ellery.

'Obnoxious bastard,' he said. He stared at the door for a moment and then returned in silence to the boardroom.

The clunk of the door closing behind Levine muffled the quieter sound of the airlock as the computer prepared to change the pungent atmosphere.

-###-

'The more complex a system is,' Mitch was explaining, 'the less predictable it becomes; and the more likely it is to act according to its own set of priorities. You see, no matter how smart you think you are, no matter how much you think you know about what an algorithmic system is capable of, there will always be results that you could not have predicted. From a computer's point of view, chaos is just a different kind of order. You ask, why should any of this be happening? But you might as well ask, why shouldn't any of this be happening?'

'How can a machine be alive?' said Curtis. 'C'mon, let's get real here. No one outside of comic books believes that such a thing is possible.'

'It all depends what you mean by life,' argued Mitch. 'Most scientists agree that there is no generally accepted definition. Even if you were to say that the ability to reproduce yourself was a basic condition of being alive, then that would not actually exclude computers.'

'Mitch is right,' agreed Beech. 'Even a computer virus fulfils all the conditions of being alive. It's a fact we might not like to face, but possession of body is not a precondition of life. Life is not a matter of material, it's a matter of organization, a dynamic physical process, and you can get some machines to duplicate those dynamic processes. Fact is, some machines may be held to be quite lifelike.'

'I think I prefer lifelike to their being alive,' admitted Jenny Bao. 'Life still seems sacred to me.'

'Everything seems sacred to you, honey,' muttered Birnbaum.

'The Yu-5 — Abraham — is designed to be self-sustaining,' said Beech.

'It's designed to learn and to adapt. To think for itself. Why do you look surprised? Why is it so hard to believe that Abraham can think? That it might be any less capable of thought than God, for example? In fact, it ought to be a good deal easier to accept. I mean, how do we know that God knows, that God hears, that God sees, that God feels, that God thinks, any more than Abraham? If we're willing to overlook the essential absurdity of belief that makes a sentient God possible, then why do we find it hard to do the same with a computer? Language is at the root of the problem. Since it's certain that machines can't behave more like humans, then humans are obviously going to have to behave much more like machines. And language is where that homogenization will have to begin. Computers and people are going to have to start speaking the same language.'

'You speak for yourself,' said Curtis.

Beech smiled. 'You know, people have been writing about this kind of thing for years,' he added. 'The story of Pygmalion. The Golem from Jewish fable. Frankenstein. The computer in Arthur C. Clarke's 2001. Maybe now it has happened: an artificial being, a machine just took charge of its own destiny. Right here in LA.'

'There are plenty of other artificial beings in LA already,' said Arnon.

'Ray Richardson, for one.'

'Great,' said Curtis. 'We made the history books. Let's hope we stay alive to tell our grandchildren about it.'

'Look, this is serious, I know. People have been killed and I deeply regret that. But at the same time I'm a scientist and I can't help feeling somehow — privileged.'

'Privileged?' Curtis spoke with contempt.

'That's the wrong word. But speaking as a scientist, what's happened is enormously interesting. Ideally one would like time to study this phenomenon properly. To investigate how it has happened at all. That way we could reproduce the circumstances in order that it could be repeated somewhere else, under controlled circumstances. I mean, it would be a shame just to wipe it out. If not immoral. After all, Jenny's right. Life is something sacred. And when you create life, that makes you a kind of god and that in itself brings certain obligations vis a vis that which you have created.'

Curtis took a pace back and shook his head with confusion.

'Wait a minute. Wait just a minute. You said something there. You said it would be a shame just to wipe it out. Are you saying that you can put a stop to all of this? That you can destroy the computer?'

Beech shrugged coolly.

'When we built the Yu-5, naturally we considered the possibility that it might end up competing with its creators. After all, a machine doesn't recognize normal sociological values. So we included a tutelary program in Abraham's basic architecture. An electronic template called GABRIEL. To deal with the unpluggability scenario.'

'The unpluggability scenario?'

Curtis grabbed Beech by the necktie, and thrust him hard against the boardroom wall.

'You dumb asshole,' he snarled. 'We've been breaking our balls trying to save the lives of three men stuck in an elevator controlled by a homicidal computer and now you're telling me that you could have unplugged it all along?' His face became even more contorted, and he seemed about to strike Beech until he was restrained by Nathan Coleman.

'Cool it, Frank,' urged Coleman. 'We still need him to turn it off.'

Beech pulled his tie free of Curtis's fist. 'They were dead anyway!' he yelled. 'You said so yourself. Besides, you don't trash a $40 million piece of hardware without checking the subsumption architecture. An accident is one thing. But A-life culpability is another.'

'You piece of shit,' sneered Curtis. 'Dollars and cents. That's all you people can think about.'

'What you're suggesting is absurd. Nobody in their right mind would dump a Yu-5 down the toilet without first attempting a proper verification.'

'There are five people dead, Mister. What more verification do you need?'

Beech shook his head and turned away.

'Now you've got your damned verification,' said Curtis, 'what are you going to do about it?' He glanced impatiently at Coleman. 'It's OK, Nat, you can let go now.' He tugged his arms free of his colleague's slackening grip. 'Do more of us have to die before you get it through your stupid skull that this isn't some half-assed experiment at Caltech or MIT or whichever petrie dish mould you sprang from? We're not talking artificial life now. We're talking real life. Men and women with families. Not some tin fucking man without a heart.'

'Bob?' said Mitch. 'Can you turn it off? Is that possible?'

Beech shrugged. 'By rights I should get Mr Yu's permission to do it. There's a proper protocol for doing something like this, y'know?'

'Screw Mr Yu,' said Curtis. 'And screw his fucking protocol. In case you'd forgotten, it's not that easy to get hold of anyone right now.'

'Come on, Bob,' Mitch urged.

'OK, OK,' said Beech and sat down in front of the terminal. 'I was going to do it anyway.'

The walkie-talkie buzzed. Coleman answered it and stepped out of the boardroom into the corridor, heading towards the balcony.

'Hallelujah,' said Helen. 'Now maybe we can get the hell out of this multi-storey lunatic asylum.'