Ethan knew he didn’t love his work on MAIP, no more than a castaway loved his raft. Depended on it, was grateful for it, needed it. But love was nowhere anymore, unless it was here.
“Hi, Daddy.”
“Hi, baby.”
The mannequin from Zhao Tailoring wore one of Allyson’s dresses, which had still been hanging in her closet at Ethan’s apartment. The mannequin had jointed arms and legs. Ethan carefully adjusted it into a sitting position. It was a little too tall for the projection, and he had to wrap the bottom four inches of plastic with his raincoat. That was all right; when he projected Allyson onto the mannequin, it looked as if she had plopped herself down onto his coat. Maybe after playing dress-up, maybe just with five-year-old mischief. Ethan set the lights to low, put the stuffed Piglet into her arms, and added the projected overlays, one by one. Healthy skin, glossy hair, bright eyes.
“Hi, Daddy.”
“Hi, baby.”
Ethan’s knees trembled. Slowly he knelt beside her, the coat buttons lumpy under his calves. Lightly—so lightly, the VR glove on his right hand feeling her skin but not the hard plastic below—he used his left arm to hug his daughter.
“Hi, Daddy.”
“What the fuck?”
Lights crashed on full; illusion crashed with them. Ethan jumped up. Jamie said, “What the hell are you doing? Laura called me; she saw you go into—”
“Go away. Leave me alone.”
He didn’t. But Jamie’s face, always so confident, turned a mottled maroon of embarrassment. “Hey, man, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—” Then confusion and embarrassment vanished. “No, I’m not sorry! Ethan, somebody has to level with you. You can’t go on like this. I know—we all know—what you’ve been through. As tough as it gets, yeah. But you have to…. This isn’t normal. That model isn’t Allyson. You know that. You have to let go, move on, accept that she’s gone instead of…. This is a perversion of technology, Ethan. I’m sorry, but that’s what it is. And also a perversion of Allyson’s mem—”
He didn’t finish the sentence. Ethan crossed the floor in a mad dash and knocked him down.
Jamie looked up at Ethan from the floor. He wasn’t hurt or even winded; Ethan was no fighter, and Jamie outweighed him by at least forty pounds. Ethan had merely pushed him over. Jamie got up, shook his head like a pit bull hurling away a carcass, and left without a word.
Ethan began to tremble.
His fingers shook so much that he could barely shut down the programs. He left the mannequin sitting in the middle of the floor, a lifeless hunk of plastic, and left his coat and the stuffed Piglet with it. He couldn’t bear to touch any of them.
Outside, in the dark and blowing rain, there was no sign of Jamie. Ethan lurched to Building 18. He had nowhere else to go. He couldn’t drive; he could barely see. The tarry mist was back in his brain, filling it, chilling him to the marrow. There had never been anyplace else to go, not for a year. It frightened him that he couldn’t feel the sidewalk beneath his feet, couldn’t hear the raindrops strike the ground.
In the AI lab, lights burned and the flight simulator was running. Jamie must have been working late. But Jamie wasn’t here now, and if Ethan didn’t do something—anything—he would die. That was how he felt—how Tina must have felt. Thinking of Tina only made him feel worse. He stumbled to the game console and squeezed himself into the small chair in front of it. His hands gripped the controls. At least he could feel them, solid under his fingers: the only solid thing in his world of black mist and tarry cold. Black mist as a train sped into Westlake Tunnel Station, as an unseen virus ate into nerve and tissue…
“You have just crashed the jet,” MAIP said. “Let’s try again!”
Train speeding forward at forty miles per hour…“Hi, Daddy”…keep going keep going don’t give in or you’ll explode you will be Tina…damn bitch how could she leave me like that not my fault Moser’s Syndrome not my fault…don’t give in….
“You have crashed the jet. But I know you can do this—let’s try again!”
Over and over he crashed the jet, even as MAIP made it harder and harder for him to fail. He smashed the jet into mountains, into deserts, into the sea. Again and again and again. Someone spoke to him, or didn’t. There was noise again, a lot of noise; there was destruction and death, as there should be, to classify reality, to match the ontology of everything he had lost—
And then, finally, he realized the noise was his own screaming, and he stopped.
Into the silence MAIP said, “You were very angry, Ethan. I hope you feel better now.”
He gave a little gasp, first at MAIP’s words and then because he wasn’t alone. Jamie stood beside him with Laura Avery.
She said gently, “Are you all right?” And when Ethan didn’t answer, she added, “Jamie called me. After I called him, I mean. I saw you carrying something into Building 6 and—”
Jamie interrupted. “When did you input your data into Maip?”
Ethan said nothing. The tarry cold mist had receded. No—it had vanished. He felt limp, drained, bruised, as if he had fallen off a cliff and somehow survived. You were very angry. I hope you feel better now.
“You didn’t, did you?” Jamie demanded. “You never gave your baseline data to Maip! She did a cold reading on you, extrapolating from free-form observation! We didn’t teach her to do that!”
“Be quiet,” Laura said. “Jamie, for God’s sake—not now.”
MAIP said, “Ethan, I’m glad you feel better. You were both angry and sad before. You were sad even when you smiled.”
Jamie drew a sharp, whistling breath. “Detection of social pretense! I’m sorry, Ethan, I know you’re upset and I said some things I shouldn’t have, but—detection of social pretense! From cold readings! She’s taken a huge step forward—she knows you!”
Ethan said, not to Jamie but to the complexity of machinery and electrons that was MAIP, “You don’t know me. You’re a nonlinear statistical modeling tool.”
Laura said, “But I’m not.” She put a tentative hand on his arm.
Jamie said, “Maip’s not, either. Not anymore. She learned, Ethan. She did!”
Ethan looked at the flight simulator, which flashed the total number of jets he had crashed. He looked at MAIP. He saw the mannequin, a pathetic lump of plastic that he had left in Building 6.
Ethan rose. He had to steady himself with one hand on the game console. Laura’s hand on his arm felt warm through his damp shirt. He didn’t, he realized, know any of them, not really: not Laura, not MAIP, not Jamie. Not himself. Especially not himself.
He would have to learn everything all over again, reassess everything, forge new algorithms. Starting with this moment, here, now, to the sound of rain on the roof of the building.