“Sorry. I’m busy.”
She recognized the lie but hid any feeling of rejection. “Okay. Maybe another time.”
“Thanks anyway.”
That was it. A nothing encounter. But it left him feeling fragile, and he hated that. The only thing that had gotten him through the last year was the opposite of fragility: controlled, resolute, carefully modeled action.
After his encounter with Laura, he threw himself into work, trying to figure out why MAIP hadn’t detected Cassie McAvoy’s social pretense of enjoying her piano lesson. He found a few promising leads, but nothing definitive.
How far they still had to go was made clear by Jenna Carter.
Jamie was good with the children who came to the machine lab. Sometimes Ethan thought this was because Jamie, brilliant as he was, was still a child himself: enthusiastic, sloppy, saved from terminal nerdiness only by his all-American good looks. Untested, as yet, by anything harsh. Other times Ethan felt ashamed of this facile assessment; Jamie was good with kids because he liked them.
Not, however, all of them equally. While Jamie had no trouble with Trevor Reynod, he had to hide his dislike for Jenna, who wasn’t even a test subject, only the babysitter for her little brother Paul.
They came in after school on Tuesday. Paul, at eight years old their youngest subject, went straight to the small table where Jamie had set out a wooden puzzle map of the United States.
“Hey, Paul,” Jamie said. “How’s it going?”
“Good.” Paul had a thin face, a shock of red hair, and a sweet smile.
“Can I put the magic bracelet on you? Have to warn you, though, it might turn you invisible.”
Paul looked uncertain for a moment, caught Jamie’s grin, and laughed. “No, it won’t!”
“Well, if you’re sure—let’s see if you can put this puzzle together. Recognize it? It’s our country, all fifty states. Wow! That’s a lot of states! What a challenge!”
“I can do it!”
Jenna pushed forward. “He can’t do that! It’s too hard! He’s only in the third grade!”
“Yes, I can!” Paul picked up Maine and fitted it into the upper right corner of the wooden holder. “See?”
“That one’s easy, dingleberry! Anybody can get Maine!” She turned to Jamie. “Our mother said I was supposed to do the puzzles today.”
Paul looked up, outraged. “No, she didn’t!”
“Did too!”
“Did not!” Jenna grabbed her brother by the shoulders and tried to pull him out of the chair.
“Hey! Quit it! Dr. Peregoy!”
Jamie detached Jenna’s hands. “Paul, let Jenna try the puzzle. I’ll let you do the flight simulator.”
Paul’s mouth opened and his eyebrows rose: surprise, one of the basic facial-recognition patterns. The flight simulator was a treat usually withheld until the end of each session.
Jenna cried, “No fair! I want to do the flight simulator!”
“Maybe later.” Jamie slipped the sensor bracelet off Paul and onto Jenna, and pushed her gently onto the chair. “After all, your mother said you should do the puzzle, right?”
Jenna glared at him. “Yeah!”
“Then let’s see how fast you can do it.”
Jenna hunted for a place to fit Iowa. Paul ineptly piloted the transparent bubble. (“You have crashed the jet, Paul,” MAIP said.) Ethan wondered what Jamie was doing. Then he got it: Jamie wanted to see if MAIP could detect the fact that Jenna was lying. Ethan studied his displays.
MAIP worked with what was, basically, a set of medical data. It didn’t have the context to interpret what that data might mean. To detect social pretense—which it also couldn’t do yet—its algorithms used a subject’s baseline data, observed data, and contradictions among the ontologies of emotion. But MAIP hadn’t “learned” Jenna, couldn’t yet do cold readings without a subject’s baseline data, and had neither context nor algorithms to detect lies. So it was no surprise that MAIP didn’t recognize Jenna’s lies.
“Well,” Jamie said after the children left, “it was worth a shot.”
“Not really,” Ethan said.
“Mr. Negative.”
“MAIP didn’t even register social pretense for Jenna, no matter how much you led her into lying. We’re just not there yet.”
Jamie sighed. “I know.”
“What you just did was no better than a polygraph, and there’s a reason polygraphs aren’t admissible in court. Not reliable enough.”
“Yeah, yeah, you’re right. But there should be some way to do this.”
“We need to solve the problem of social pretense first, and with subjects that we do have baseline data for.”
Jamie said, “Maybe if we…no, that wouldn’t work. And—oh, God, I just thought of another problem. Jenna clearly knew she was lying, but what if someone has convinced themselves that they feel one thing but are actually feeling something different? Like, say, a woman who convinces herself she’s in love, even though all she really wants is to have babies before her biological clock stops ticking? She doesn’t really feel love for some poor schlump but thinks she does, to ease her conscience about trapping him?”
Was this a glimpse into Jamie’s personal life? If so, Ethan didn’t want to know about it. He said, more primly than he intended, “Oh, I think most people know what they really feel.”
Jamie gave him a strange look. “Really, Ethan?”
“Yes. But the point here is that MAIP didn’t know.”
Jamie picked up Texas and fitted it into the puzzle, his head bent over the small table, his hair falling forward over his face and hiding his expression.
December, and still raining. Ethan went to the modeling lab late on a Sunday afternoon. He was alone in the building; it was almost Christmas. Water dripped from his raincoat and umbrella onto the floor. “Lights on.”
“Hi, Daddy.”
“Hi, baby.”
Allyson smiled, and the recording ended. He clothed her in artificial health, pink cheeks, and lustrous hair, and started it again.
“Hi, Daddy.”
“Hi, baby.”
He stroked her cheek. Soft, so soft in his VR glove. But Allyson had not been a soft child. Not noisy and obnoxious like Trevor or Jenna, not hidden and falsely polite like Cassie. Allyson had been direct, opinionated, with a will of diamond. She and Tina clashed constantly over what clothes Allyson would put on, what her bedtime was, whether she could cross the street alone, why she drew butterflies instead of the alphabet on her kindergarten “homework.” Ethan had been the buffer between his wife and daughter. It seemed ridiculous that a five-year-old had to be buffered against, but that was the way it had been. Allyson and Tina had been too much alike, and when Tina had blamed not only Ethan but herself for exposing Allyson to Moser’s Syndrome, Ethan had not seen the danger. Tina, dramatic to the end, had thrown herself under a Metro train at the Westlake Tunnel Station.
Allyson would not have grown up like that. As she matured, she would have become calmer, more controlled. Ethan was sure of it. She would have become the companion and ally that Tina had not been.
“Hi, Daddy.”
“Hi, baby.”
The recording stopped, but Ethan talked on. “We’re having trouble with MAIP’s ability to attune, Allyson.”
She gazed at him from solemn eyes. Light golden brown, the color of November fields in sunshine.
“‘Attune’ means that two people are aware of and responsive to each other.” And attunement began early, between mother and infant. Was that what had gone wrong between Allyson and Tina? He and Allyson had always been attuned to each other.
Ethan reached out both arms, one in the VR glove and one bare. Both arms passed through the model of Allyson that was made only of light. The gloved hand tingled briefly, but it still moved through the child as if she did not exist.