The calls were being intentionally initiated by someone who had access to Tasha’s computer. There was no way this was a ghost in the machine or a connection routing error. Malware was still a possibility, given the generic avatar; someone could be spoofing the machine into opening the call, then overlaying the woman onto the backdrop of Tasha’s dining room. I didn’t know what purpose that would serve, unless this was the warm-up to some innovative denial-of-service attack. I kept digging.
“Hello? Hello?”
My head snapped up. The voice was coming from the main computer in the dining room. It was somehow less of a surprise when Billie answered a moment later: “Hello! How are you?”
“Hello, hello, I’m fine. I’m good. I’m hungry. How are you?”
I rose from my seat, using the table to steady myself before walking, carefully, quietly, toward the next room. There was Billie, seated in front of the terminal, where the strange woman’s image was once again projected. Greg was nowhere to be seen. He was probably off somewhere busying himself with toddler projects, like stacking blocks or talking to spiders, leaving his sister to unwittingly assist in industrial espionage.
“Billie?”
Billie turned, all smiles, as the woman on the screen shifted her focus to me, cocking her head slightly to the side to give herself a better view. “Hi, Mom!” my daughter chirped, her fingers moving in the appropriate signs at the same time. “I figured it out!”
“Figured what out, sweetie?”
“Why we couldn’t understand each other!” She gestured grandly to the screen where the black-haired woman waited. “Mumma showed me.”
I frowned, taking a step closer. “Showed you what?”
“Hello, hello; can you hear me? Hello,” said the woman.
“Hello,” I said, automatically.
Billie was undaunted. “When we went to see Aunt Tasha, Mumma used her speaking words and her finger words at the same time, so Greg could know what we were saying. She was bridging.” Her fingers moved in time with her lips. ASL doesn’t have the same grammatical structure as spoken English; my daughter was running two linguistic processing paths at the same time. I wanted to take the time to be proud of her for that. I was too busy trying to understand.
“You mean she was building a linguistic bridge?” I asked.
Billie nodded vigorously. “Yeah. Bridging. So I thought maybe we couldn’t understand each other because the neural net didn’t have enough to work with, and I turned off the avatar setting on this side.”
My heart clenched. The avatar projections for Billie and Greg were intended to keep their real faces hidden from anyone who wasn’t family. It was a small precaution, but anything that would keep their images off the public Internet until they turned eighteen was a good idea as far as I was concerned. “Billie, we’ve talked about the avatars. They’re there to keep you safe.”
“But she needed to see my hands,” said Billie, with serene childhood logic. “Once she could, we started communicating better. See? I just needed to give the translator more data!”
“Hello,” said the woman.
“Hello,” I said, moving closer to the screen. After a beat, I followed the word with the appropriate sign. “What’s your name? Why do you keep calling my house?”
“I’m hungry,” said the woman. “I’m hungry.”
“You’re not answering my question.”
The woman opened her mouth like she was laughing, but no sound came out. She closed it again with a snap and said, “I’m hungry. I don’t know you. Where is the other one?”
“Here I am!” said Billie, pushing her way back to the front. “Sorry about Mom. She doesn’t understand that we’re doing science here.”
“Science, yes,” said the woman obligingly. “Hello, hello. I’m hungry.”
“I get hungry, too,” said Billie. “Maybe some cereal?”
I took a step back, letting the two of them talk. I didn’t like the idea of leaving my little girl with a live connection to God-knows-who. I also didn’t like the thought that this call was coming from my sister’s house. If she was out back with the birds, she would never hear an intruder, and I couldn’t call to warn her while her line was in use.
Angie was in the kitchen. “Billie’s on the line with our mystery woman,” I said quickly, before she could ask me what was wrong. “I’m going to drive to Tasha’s and see if I can’t catch this lady in the act.”
Angie’s eyes widened. “So you just left Billie on the line?”
“You can supervise her,” I said. “Just try to keep her from disconnecting. I can make this stop, but I need to go.”
“Then go,” said Angie. I’d be hearing about this later. I knew that, just like I knew I was making the right call. Taking Billie away from the computer wouldn’t stop this woman from breaking into my sister’s house and calling us, and one police report could see Tasha branded a security risk by the company, which couldn’t afford to leave software patches that were still under NDA in insecure locations.
Tasha lived fifteen minutes from us under normal circumstances. I made the drive in seven.
Her front door was locked, but the porch light was on, signaling that she was home and awake. I let myself in without ringing the bell. She could yell at me later. Finding out what was going on was more important than respecting her privacy, at least for right now. I felt a little bad about that. I also knew that she would have done exactly the same thing if our positions had been reversed.
I slunk through the house, listening for the sound of Billie’s voice. Tasha kept the speakers on for the sake of the people who visited her and used her computer to make calls. She was better at accommodation than I was. The thought made my ears redden. My sister, who had spent most of her life fighting to be accommodated, made the effort for others when I was willing to focus on just her. I would be better, I promised silently. For her sake, and for the sake of my children, I would be better.
I didn’t hear Billie. Instead, I heard the throaty croaking of a crow from somewhere up ahead. It continued as I walked down the hall and stepped into the kitchen doorway. And stopped.
The pied crow that Tasha had been rehabilitating was perched on the back of the chair across from the computer, talons digging deep into the wood as it cocked its head and watched Billie’s image on the screen. Billie’s mouth moved; a squawk emerged. The crow croaked back, repeating the same sounds over and over, until the avatar was matching them perfectly. Only then did it move on to the next set of sounds.
I took a step back and sagged against the hallway wall, heart pounding, head spinning with the undeniable reality of what I had just seen. A language the neural net didn’t know, one that depended on motion and gesture as much as it did on sound. A language the system would have been exposed to enough before a curious bird started pecking at the keys that the program could at least try to make sense of it.
Sense enough to say “hello.”
An air of anticipation hung over the lab. The pied crow—whose name, according to Tasha, was Pitch, and who had been raised in captivity, bouncing from wildlife center to wildlife center before winding up living in my sister’s private aviary—gripped her perch stubbornly with her talons and averted her eyes from the screen, refusing to react to the avatar that was trying to catch her attention. She’d been ignoring the screen for over an hour, shutting out four researchers and a bored linguist who was convinced that I was in the middle of some sort of creative breakdown.