“Hey,” he said.
“I saw you in the courtroom,” I said. “You didn’t stay. How’d you know the session wouldn’t continue after chambers?”
“Uh, actually I didn’t. But I wanted to get back to this. I think I might have already found something good.”
He nodded toward the screen.
“I could use something good,” I said. “Show me.”
McEvoy opened a folder on the screen that contained a list of files.
“Okay, so these are some of the emails that were in the discovery download,” he said. “They all went out to stakeholders on Project Clair, starting when it was in early development through training and testing. There’s forty-six of them. Most are innocuous and involve scheduling meetings and Zooms and so forth, but some are more important because they carry content about testing and project guardrails.”
“Just tell me you found the smoking gun,” I said.
“Uh, not quite, but maybe the smoking witness. Or at least someone who might take the place of Rikki Patel for you. Someone who might actually be better.”
“Okay. Who?”
McEvoy picked a file on the screen seemingly at random and opened it. It was an email, and I leaned down to read the subject line.
Reminder: PC progress meeting at 1 p.m. in conference room A.
“What’s PC?” I asked.
“I’m pretty sure it means Project Clair, but that’s not what matters,” McEvoy said. “The content of the message doesn’t matter either. It’s the mailing list we’re looking at here.”
McEvoy clicked on the mailing-list link in the header and it displayed the email addresses of the sender and the recipients. It had been sent from PCM1@tidalwaiv.com to a list of more than a dozen people, all of whose emails ended in tidalwaiv.com. It was an internal message. Midway down the list, an email address had been blacked out by the redaction program.
“So we have these forty-six group emails regarding Project Clair and in all of them one email address is redacted,” McEvoy said.
“Any way of knowing if it’s the same email redacted each time?” I asked.
“Well, it always falls between these two emails, Isaacs and Muniz. So it is likely the same person, but there’s no way of knowing that for sure with the information we have here.”
“So it couldn’t have been Rikki Patel?”
“I don’t think so, because he was a coder, not a stakeholder, as far as I can determine, and these people are all upper management, and because this email list was generated in alphabetical order by last name. You see the names?”
I leaned down closer to the screen to read the names of the email recipients: Alpert, Bastin, Bernardo, Davidson, Harlan, Isaacs — the list was indeed in alphabetical order.
“Got it,” I said. “This is good. We need to find out who that is and why they were redacted.”
“I think I might know,” McEvoy said.
“Then tell me. Make my day.”
“Well, if you start with the idea that they’re trying to hide the identity of this person from you, then you have to assume the person has information or knowledge detrimental to the company’s cause, right? To me, that adds up to this person being separated from the company at some point after these emails. They left or were forced out. Maybe even fired.”
“That makes sense, but how the hell do we find out who it is? Patel could probably have told us, but he’s gone.”
“Right, so what I did was go to TheUncannyValley to look—”
“Wait. What’s the uncanny valley?”
“Well, in the digital world, the uncanny valley refers to the psychological leap humans must make in accepting robots and digital imaging as real — you know, like with a game or a chatbot. Robots and digital images that look almost but not quite human make people very uncomfortable, and if they’re uncomfortable, they don’t believe. That’s the uncanny valley. But what I’m talking about here is a social platform a lot like LinkedIn that is called TheUncannyValley — all one word. It’s for people who work in AI and in coding for digital games and so on. It’s essentially a social and business network with a résumé databank.”
“Got it. So you went to TheUncannyValley, and then what?”
“I did a basic search for former employees of Tidalwaiv. There were a couple dozen, including Rikki Patel, but only one whose last name falls between Isaacs and Muniz: Naomi Kitchens. Her résumé says she worked for Tidalwaiv for about two years beginning in late 2021. The public rollout of the Clair AI companion came at the end of ’22. And, get this, her résumé says she’s an ethicist.”
“An ethicist?”
“All these AI companies have them now. A lot of the time, it’s simply for window dressing, CYA stuff, but sometimes not. Technically, they’re supposed to monitor ethical standards and guardrails in the development of their AI programs and products.”
I felt a jolt of electricity go down my spine. I clapped McEvoy on the shoulder.
“Goddamn, McEvoy,” I said. “One day on the job and you find this? Did you search through the rest of the discovery for this Naomi Kitchens?”
“I did,” McEvoy said. “There’s nothing.”
“Twelve terabytes of documents and not one mention of Naomi Kitchens, the supposed ethicist on this project?”
“None.”
“They’ve completely scrubbed her from the discovery?”
“Looks that way. In documents dated after she left the company, you have a different person listed as the project ethicist — Francis Ross.”
“So they got rid of Kitchens for some reason, scrubbed her from all records, and then brought in Ross.”
“Looks like it. I guess you’ll be able to rake the Masons over the coals in court for this, right?”
“I could, but I probably won’t.”
“Why not? I thought you—”
“I don’t want them to know we know about her. Not yet. Which reminds me, there’s no Wi-Fi in the cage. How’d you search for her on TheUncannyValley?”
“On my phone. I stepped out to do it. I thought that would be okay.”
I thought about that for a moment. McEvoy’s finding Naomi Kitchens alleviated my suspicions about him, so it was unlikely that the Masons or Tidalwaiv knew about my decision to allow him to join the team. My main concern now was hiding from them that we had discovered the identity of the ethicist they were trying to hide from us.
“When you say you stepped out to search on your phone, how far did you step out?” I asked.
“Uh, I actually did it in the courtroom while we were waiting for the judge to come in,” McEvoy said. “Why, what are you worried about?”
“That they might have a sniffer here.”
“A sniffer? Really? That seems kind of extreme.”
“Believe me, Tidalwaiv will go to extremes to win this case. Any idea where Naomi Kitchens is now?”
“Yes, I found her. She’s up in Palo Alto teaching at Stanford, and one of her classes is called Ethics in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.”
I nodded. Things were coming together.
“Then that’s where we’ll go to talk to her,” I said.
“Really?” McEvoy asked. “When?”
“Right now.”
“Don’t you want to call her first?”
“No. They might be watching her like they watched Patel. Besides, we call her and it might scare her away. She’s got to know about this lawsuit, but she hasn’t come forward. Why? Another NDA? I think it’s something else. She’s scared.”
10
“Right now” turned out to be the next morning. McEvoy and I took a JSX flight from Burbank up to Oakland, picked up a Go rental car, and made our way across the lower bay to Palo Alto and Stanford University. On the plane, McEvoy had searched online for Professor Kitchens’s office and schedule. He found both and learned that she gave only one lecture on Tuesdays. The class was called History of Machine Learning.