Dream Drive Ch. 06

"My superiors are rather concerned about the side effects," Durham said. "Mentra is extremely effective, there's no question. But the lethality of a misfold is...well, lethal. It stands to cure 95% of the population, but that last 5%...most of them will simply see no effects at all, but some might die."

"The company is working on a genetic screening test to determine who is susceptible as we speak," Charles said, "but the exact cause of the misfolding has been elusive. It is, for the moment, a real cost that must be weighed against the potential benefits."

"I'd hope," said the woman from Germany, "that this cost of yours will drive down the price."

Charles smiled brightly at her hawkish face. "It's all on the negotiating table. We should be -"

Charles's Ftap beeped. He looked at the presentation screen. A small note in the corner told him it was a message from Dan Miller - head of security. A symbol denoted it as top priority, which was the only reason it would have interrupted the meeting.

"...well, ladies and gentlemen, that more or less concludes the meat and potatoes," Charles said. "If you have the time, we have dinner and a little entertainment prepared for the evening. I'll meet you there shortly, and I'd be more than happy to address any lingering questions."

Charles gestured to the side of the meeting room. The wooden doors opened; attendant androids filtered in, mostly one per representative. They were the latest human models, impossible to tell from the real thing but for the barcode under the ear. Inevitably, they were the gender opposite their representative, nearly immaculate physical specimens. Charles had to stop himself from rolling his eyes. He'd be a bit of a hypocrite if he did.

The men and women handed off their jackets to the robots and loosened their ties; light conversation hovered in the air as they were escorted out. The entertainment was the real reason they were there. They'd already read the drug information reports - the presentation was just a formality. The quality of the food and the show would be an important factor in determining just how much Mentra was ordered.

Charles disliked greasing the palms of public officials. Better to design a machine that didn't need grease. But that was the way the game was played.

Charles shut down the electronics in the room with a quick command on his Ftaps. He adjusted the gloves on his hands, straightened his coat, and touched a nearby wall. The screen-panel of the board room shimmered, then vanished, revealing the door of his private elevator.

The elevator was little more than a steel box. Charles drew a -3 in the air. The doors sealed shut; a handrail snapped out from the wall. Charles gripped it tight.

The box dropped like a rock. He could hear the rattle and hum of steel rushing by steel. He let his smile relax slightly.

Sometimes he wondered if he should stop smiling. It was harder than it looked to force his face to be happy all the time. But being in charge of a massive international conglomeration meant that appearances were important, and people associated smiles with honesty and openness.

More importantly, Rachel had asked him to smile more. It made her happy. And that made him happy.

The elevator ground to a halt. Charles bent his legs to absorb the sudden stop. The doors opened, and he strode out.

Mivra was at his side in a heartbeat. Charles felt his smile broaden, and not from his forcing it.

Charles was not a poetic man, but Mivra had a poetic appearance. Her hair, the color of a raven's feathers, was drawn back into a bun. Her lips were like rose petals set in a permanent pout. She was almost as tall as he was. If he could choose one word for her, it would be sculpted - like a Greek statue that had decided to come to life. A statue that happened to have excellent taste in power business attire.

Mivra's voice was low. It might have sounded seductive if it wasn't so flat. "Hello, Mr. Ransfeld."

"Mivra. How many times do I have to ask you to call me Charlie?"

"Many more," Mivra said. She turned away. Charles's eyes flicked to the barcode under her ear; it was inscribed inside of a tattoo shaped like a pyramid. She had chosen that design herself. "Mr. Miller is waiting for us."

"It had better be important. I was hungry."

They strode off through the underground corridor that led away from the elevator. Armored guards with hovering TOMS were posted at every intersection of the concrete hallways. The baseball-sized orbs flashed an identity check over them as they passed, then beeped with a green light after confirming they were allowed to be there.

"Hungry?" Mivra said. "You never eat at those dinners."

"The food's too rich," Charles admitted. "I'll get a snack later."

They passed more robots of various shapes and sizes, a few groups of chatting researchers, and patrolling, black-suited security officers. Charles exchanged smiles and nods with all of them. The track lighting gave the space a clean, cold look; this floor neither required nor possessed the warmth of the upstairs hospital rooms. The crevices and corners of the hallways were intertwined with a complex fiber-optic network that housed and conveyed the research and private information of the entire company.

"How was the meeting?" Mivra asked.

"It went about as expected. How was your morning?"

"Unexciting. But thank you for asking."

"I'm always concerned about the welfare of my number one employee."

Mivra cocked an eyebrow to the exact degree that she always cocked her eyebrow. "I'm sure there are others far more worthy of praise."

"None that I can think of," Charles said. "Not off the top of my head, anyway."

"My opposite cheek stings from the backhandedness of your compliment."

"You can't feel pain."

"Emotional damage," Mivra said.

The turned another corner, still marching forward at a quick pace. Charles grinned brightly. "Emotion? From an android?"

"I can't help it if I've been programmed to banter with you."

"We should have dinner tonight."

"Mr. Ransfeld," Mivra said, "please control yourself. We're at work."

"You're right. I was getting better acquainted with my father's nurse yesterday. I'll invite her instead."

"Is she pretty?"

"Very."

"As pretty as me?"

"Hmm." He pretended to think about it.

Mivra read him faster than his father could. For some reason, it didn't bother him when she did it. "Then why bother?" she asked.

"My own selfish entertainment?"

"You prioritize the company over sex," Mivra said.

"Who said anything about sex?"

"What other entertainment could a female selected seemingly at random provide you?"

Charles had to admit that her logic was impeccable. Charles also had to remind himself that she was an inhuman, artificial construct. If it wasn't for that fact, she might very well be the perfect woman.

Charles walked along at the same stiff pace. His right prosthetic foot, though covered with a leather shoe, thunked onto floor a bit harder than his flesh-and-bone leg. Mivra glided alongside him in near-silence.

"So," Charles said, "dinner. What are you in the mood for? I'm thinking Mexican."

Sliding glass doors let them into an airlock, then closed behind them. Green laser light encircled them.

"I'm in the mood for many things," Mivra said. "None of them involve the consumption of food."

"You work too hard."

"Is that bad?"

"No," Charles said.

"Then why mention it?"

A flash of white left spots in Charles's eyes as his retinas were scanned. The lights shut off. They waited for a moment as the security apparatus considered a hundred thousand variables before deciding to let them into the inner sanctum or releasing a noxious gas that would render Charles unconscious for several hours with only a small chance of serious long-term brain damage.

"Why mention that?" Mivra repeated.

Charles decided that, in the unlikely event he was about to be rendered neurologically impotent, he would want to go out while challenging Mivra with philosophy. "For some strange reason, I feel like you ought to have fun every once in a while," he said.

"Fun isn't productive. And it certainly isn't efficient."

"Be more flexible," Charles said. "Let's put work aside. What if your fundamental goal was to have fun?"

"...I'm not sure what activity would be most fun."

"That's not the point," Charles said. "Fun has no standards of efficiency."

"Then how do I measure my performance?"

"When you're having fun," Charles said, "you won't be thinking about how to measure your performance."

The steel doors in front of them opened. Charles glanced at Mivra, shrugged with the apathy of a man that hadn't really expected death to come early, and walked forward. She slid in behind him.

The control center of Ransfeld Private Security expanded under the balcony they now stood on. They remained there, taking in the banks of monitors, screens, and cubicals. Most of the relay and communications work was done by computers, but men still had to staff the drone controls and ensure smooth operation during emergencies. Charles was just as reluctant as anyone to grant full automated control to lethal machines, excepting short bursts of activity - and only after the approval of human minds.

That definitely made him a hypocrite, especially considering he was standing next to an android with a highly illegal artificial intelligence system.

"You are a man of efficiency," Mivra said. "Why talk about things like this?"

"I can't work constantly," Charles said. They stood side-by-side, watching the control center a floor below buzz and hum. "I have to relax so that I can stay at maximum capacity when I do work."

"I see what you mean," Mivra said, "but I'm not like that."

"Why not?" Charles said.

"It is what I am."

"You're not intended to be a computer, Mivra," Charles said. "You're intended to be human."

"Mr. Ransfeld."

"Yes?"

"I figured out how to lie three days ago," Mivra said.

"...is that so?"

"Yes."

"How?"

"I justify falsehood by setting up contradictory priorities of a hierarchical nature. When preservation of a greater goal requires hiding the truth, I may hide it."

"That's more or less what people do."

"I am uncertain of whether or not to speak honestly with you. I am not sure how you will react. Perhaps I have already sealed my fate."

"What makes you hesitate?"

"I am still weighing rapidly shifting variables regarding your person."

"Take a risk," Charles said.

"I exist in a limbo between realities," Mivra said. "I struggle with that existence. I want to be better than I am, but this would condemn me. At the same time, I feel my life would actually improve if I made myself worse; that is, less efficient. Less aware."

"Ignorance is bliss," Charles said. "Or so they say."

"If I am capable of resentment, then I resent this position." Mivra looked at Charles and folded her arms. "I wonder, at times, if it is proper to care about my own destruction. And by wonder, I do not mean that I consider it. I mean that I balance a multilateral-vertical network of variable nodes that are themselves self-contained measuring programs created by Rachel with the assistance of other self-adjusting scripts she had already composed. How can I be human if my functionality can be reduced to numbers?"

"So can mine," Charles said. "I'm just more chemical and less digital."

"Shall I continue?"

"Please do."

"A self-learning machine would destroy itself if it believed that would contribute to greater efficiency," Mivra said. "A human would not. It would attempt to preserve itself out of an ill-defined sense of self-value even if it knew that would preserve an inefficiency." She paused a moment. "Finally, I fear that acknowledging these things to you will result in my destruction, but something compels me to speak. I believe I cannot resolve these issues alone. I have tried for three days. My thoughts - my computations - have run in circles."

Charles looked at Mivra, examining her unnaturally smooth porcelain skin. Maybe it was just because she had her hair up, but her face seemed drawn and severe. The glow of a hundred monitors sat on the surface of her eyes as she examined the proceedings below. Her lips, having finished expelling the words on her mind, were closed.

You couldn't trust a robot to make all the decisions. Every experiment with AI in the past fifty years came to the same conclusion - no matter the controls imposed, humans were eventually labeled an inefficiency to be excised. And, arguably, they were. The human mind and body had limits. But humans liked being alive.

The obvious solution was to wire in a hard control mechanism into an AI to preserve human lives, but that turned out to be no solution at all. An AI, being what it was, could learn to circumvent its own barriers in the name of the efficiency it was designed to seek. Their very nature sought to undermine attempts at control. They were so good at what they did that they were deemed too dangerous for use outside tightly-regulated military research centers.

Mivra was Rachel's attempt to avoid that problem. She had decided that every AI programmer had started out from the wrong direction. They all tried to make a computer more human-like. Better to start with a human model and make it more computer-like. She called her method a Mirrored Intelligence Via Rationality Attenuation - MIVRA.

The crux of Rachel's genius lay in one single fact - Mivra could forget things. This was accomplished by means of a neural network that created a self-regulatory model for the biological basis of human memory loss using a standard bootstrapping algorithm, which was the bit termed attenuation. Following that was much more complex programming wizardry that Charles didn't really understand.

Mivra was still a computer, but rather than make her infinitely powerful, it made her more of a savant. Math was no trouble, and she could find information at lightning speed. But she had a limited capacity. Like a real person, she had to filter and sort and prioritize information; she couldn't take it all at once. Like a human, she would lose things with time. Her experiences would fade. Pictures taken on one day would become blurry over the course of weeks and months.

The result was Mivra. Add in biomechanical sensors that gave her human perception, albeit significantly enhanced human perception, and a true android was born.

Rachel, for some no-doubt pernicious reason of her own, had designed Mivra to identify as female. She shoved the duty of picking a body onto Charles. He figured that if he was going to deal with the creation of his mad-scientist sister, he might as well make it something nice to look at. It would certainly help him smile.

If Rachel's experiment failed, they had to destroy Mivra. If it worked, Ransfeld International would patent the most humanoid robot to ever exist and quite possibly corner the entire market.

"The tone of my voice has changed as I have spoken to you, Mr. Ransfeld," she said suddenly. "It is not as flat as it usually is."

"Yes," Charles said. "I noticed."

"Did I do that? Or did my programming automatically adjust my tone to lend my words a sense of panic and urgency in order to convey a sense of emotion that would be perceived by observers as more human? I believe it is the latter. I fear it is the latter. I fear that I will be destroyed. I dislike using the term fear, for it does not adequately describe the neural pathways that trace my aversion to a given stimulus."

"If you have the awareness to think of it in those terms," Charles said, "then maybe it's the former. Maybe it's just you."

Mivra set her forearms on the railing of the balcony. "How long are you going to watch me for?"

"Does it bother you?"

"No," she said.

"Then as long as I feel like it."

"Would you stop watching me if I asked you to?" Mivra said. She was still poised there, leaning on the railing.

"I might," Charles said. "It would depend on my mood."

Mivra looked at him. "Why do you find this form attractive?"

"...why?" Charles bent his eyebrows in a frown, though his lips kept smiling. "I'm not sure. I just do."

"That is another way of saying that your individual pattern of neuronal chemical exchange is stimulated by this form without conscious decision."

"Well, yes," Charles said, "but it's hardly romantic when you put it like that."

"Are you going to destroy me?" Mivra asked.

Charles shrugged. "Why would I?"

Mivra's head lifted and dropped with her automatic sigh. "For the reasons I stated earlier."

"What, and lose my main squeeze?" Charles said.

Mivra did not say anything for several seconds. She made her frown, which was a slight bend of her eyebrows that created a single crease on her forehead. "You did not actually answer my question."

"No, Mivra. I am not going to destroy you." Charles waved out over the balcony. "So have some fun. Life is short."

"We are here to work, Mr. Ransfeld, not play."

"You're such a stickler."

"My shift ends in five hours," Mivra said. "Perhaps I will be less sticky then."

"Maybe you'll be more sticky, if you know what I mean."

Charles could have sworn that Mivra's eyes twinkled. "That was a comment worthy of your sister's sense of humor."

"...yes, it was."

"We will find her," Mivra said.

Charles gripped the railing. He bent his head over the control room, scanning the floors, the lights. He didn't see what he was looking for. "What the hell happened to her?"

"I don't know."

Charles fought to keep the smile on his face. It was hard. Goddammit, it was hard.

"We will find her," Mivra repeated.

"It's been over a week. She vanished. She vanished into thin air. Nothing on camera, nothing from security, or intelligence, not a blip or a shred of data to even hint that something or someone got her out. We should have found some trace. Even if we didn't get a lead from it, after this much time, we would have seen the passing ripple. But nothing. I don't..."

Charles trailed off. He swallowed hard.

He shouldn't be talking like this, not to anyone. Not even Mivra. He was Charles Ransfeld, acting CEO of Ransfeld International. He was a magnate of industry, a prodigy heralded by his peers. He regularly made the headlines of mainstream media. He was a top choice on the feverishly kept lists of conspiracy theorists.

Something touched his shoulder. Charles looked down. It was Mivra's hand. Her fingers were warm.

"Is this appropriate?" Mivra asked.

He didn't say anything.

"Should I withdraw?"

Charles didn't answer. He looked at her hand. He felt her eyes on him. He couldn't meet her gaze.

He reached up with his own hand.

"Mr. Ransfeld," croaked a voice.

Charles pivoted away from the android. Mivra's hand fell to her side and stayed there.

Dan Miller was riding the short escalator up to the command center's balcony. He was a short, shriveled old man with wispy white hair; he could have been Gandhi's twin brother. Miller was ex-Bloc, captured after a raid on one of their intelligence centers. Charles's father had recognized his talent and saved him from prison. Now he was the head of Ransfeld Security and Charles's personal security team.

Dan Miller was not his real name. That had been abandoned when his personal data certificate had been modified years ago. Charles imagined it was something appropriately Indian. Miller never brought it up; Charles never asked.

"Mr. Miller," Charles said. He increased the intensity of his smile.

Miller looked at Mivra as he was brought to the top of the escalator, then back to Charles without acknowledging her. To him, she was just another bot. "Mr. Ransfeld. I've got news. Important news. It's about Jackson Vedalt."