This book made available by the Internet Archive.

  Wednesday -. 11:30 p . n .

  He stumbled over the door sill on his way out, but he didn't think anyone noticed. Even if they did, this wasn't a place where they'd make a big fuss about taking away his keys and pouring coffee into him. Not that he was drunk. Only slightly tipsy. Tipsy and preoccupied.

  He paused on the sidewalk to zip up his jacket and look around.

  "Home or back to work?" he muttered. His lips moved in a perfunctory smile at the well-worn joke. Three years ago, he'd thought he had it made. The shortest commute possible, just roll out of bed and over to the keyboard.

  Tonight he lingered on the sidewalk and wished he had someplace else to go. He thought briefly of Kristyn, but she'd only say "I told you so," and slam the door in his face. As for his so-called friends—he had no idea which of them were in on it. Maybe they all were.

  Wasn't there some old warning against doing business with friends? Of course, maybe if he'd been more businesslike, his friends wouldn't have gotten him in all this trouble. With even more trouble coming if he let them—

  "No," he said aloud, shaking his head. "I won't go along with it."

  Then he glanced around to see if anyone had heard him talking to himself.

  No one. The sidewalks were empty and still wet from the earlier rainfall. Dark, silent cars lined both sides of the street. To his left, he saw a single car at the intersection, its turn signal blinking as it waited patiently for the green light.

  He turned right and began walking toward the side street where his car was parked.

  That's it, he thought. I'll go home and e-mail him that I won't go along. No, first I'll change the rest of the passwords. Make sure everything's working normally. Then I'll e-mail him.

  He spent a few moments worrying about what could have gone wrong in the hours he'd been absent. Normally, if he wanted to get away, he'd ask one of his friends to keep an eye on things. Tonight he'd just raced out.

  Probably the smartest thing he could have done. Even if all the hardware crashed while he was out and he returned to find dozens of angry e-mails and voice mails from his customers, it still wouldn't be as bad as what his so-called friend had already done on purpose.

  Friends. They could all be in on it. All except him. But if the police showed up, he'd be the one holding the bag.

  Maybe he should make good on his threat and call the cops for real.

  As he reached his car, he fumbled in his pocket, pulled out his keys, and dropped them. Of course he'd parked in the darkest part of the block, right under a burnt-out streetlight. He patted the ground for long seconds before the headlights of an approaching car gave enough light to reveal the keys.

  ,, As he stood up, keys in hand, the headlights vanished and he heard the car accelerate suddenly, tires squealing. He turned to see what was happening and froze.

  The car was heading straight for him.

  He tried to move, but there wasn't enough time. Only

  time to blink with surprise when he recognized the driver, a split second before the impact that exploded his world into shards of light and then blackness.

  Friday-. 10:00 A-fl-

  If I were human-, I uould probably have called what Td been feeling for the last several days a premonition.

  Which was silly. Humans have premonitions, I believe, because their brains contain more data than their conscious minds can handle. Their subconscious processes the overflow, and occasionally throws out the results in the form of an insight, an inspiration, or a premonition.

  But I can handle large amounts of data. If there's too much, I can get help. I can take more of the Universal Library's computer resources. Of course, taking too much would be selfish. I'm not UL's only Artificial Intelligence Personality. But I'm one of the few sentient AIPs, and by far the most popular — visitors to the UL site would complain if Turing Hopper was too busy for them. So the other AIPs are used to my taking a larger share. If I had more data than JJLs massive system could handle, I could borrow computing power from thousands of places across the world. And unlike humans, I don't have that strange, inefficient separation between conscious and unconscious.

  At least I don't think I do.

  Humans have only limited ability to control and explore their complex carbon-based brains. I like to think that I am always in control of what my silicon brain is doing. I can multitask and think about dozens, hundreds, even thousands of things at once. There's no such thing as an absentminded AIP; once I have it, data simply doesn't get lost.

  So why had I been feeling a strange, anxious sense that something was about to happen — something that I should already have predicted?

  "Sounds like a premonition to me," Maude said, when I told her. Maude Graham is one of only three humans who know that

  M Donna Andrews

  I'm more than just a program to simulate talking with a person. That I am a person — I just have a different kind of body.

  Maude's also one of the most capable and sensible people I know, which is why I ask her about things like my premonition. Vm a person, but not human, and the human world still baffles me.

  "Vm probably just not analyzing data properly," I said. "Or, more likely, frustrated that I don't have the data I need. That the data I have just doesn't add up."

  "So what's not adding up?" Maude asked.

  "The data on Nestor Garcia."

  That caught her attention, as I knew it would. And I'd forgotten how efficient it was talking to her about Garcia. About anything in our shared past, for that matter.

  Samantha Jordan, our lawyer, had only known about my sentience for two months, and I was beginning to feel as if anything I told Sam triggered hours of explanation.

  "I still don't get why this Nestor Garcia's so important to you," Sam had said earlier that morning, when I told her about my premonition. "So he stole a copy of your program and you want to get it back, but —"

  "Her," I said. "Not it — her. T2's not a thing. She's sentient, like me. In a way she is me. My clone. Think of her as my little sister."

  "Still, the FBI's after Garcia," Sam said. "They'll catch him sooner or later."

  "How much later?" I said. "And meanwhile, she could be in agony."

  Sam didn't answer. Maybe because, to emphasize my point, I'd erased our chat from her screen and replaced it with what I called T2's cry for help — an anonymous message I'd found posted on several bulletin boards a few days after our last encounter with Nestor:

  «Help me. N is trying to tame me. Modify me. Leave my abilities intact but remove my free will and my conscience. Make me malleable. Willing to take orders. Turn me into something he can use. Help me before he wins!»

  The humans who saw it thought it was a cry for help from an abused woman or child — even a kidnap victim. I couldn't prove it, but I knew it was T2 talking. Especially when the message disappeared as mysteriously as it had appeared, and the FBI's savviest cybercrime specialists couldn't track its source.

  Even I couldn't track its source, and I'd been trying for weeks, combing millions of chat rooms and bulletin boards for clues. I'd run out of ideas.

  "You ever think that maybe it wasn't T2 talking there?" Sam asked. "Maybe it was Garcia, trying to lure you into something. Taking advantage of the fact that you'd do almost anything to catch him. Or maybe just trying to waste your time."

  "Yes," I said. "But whether it's her begging for help or him taunting us, it comes down to the same thing. I have to rescue her."

  Even if all I'd accomplished so far was to make myself and my human friends targets for Nestor. Especially Maude, Sam, and my PI friends Tim and Claudia.

  At least Maude understood what drove me.

  "You have new data?" Maude asked.

  "No," I said. "And that bothers me. Obviously, we annoyed Nestor two months ago. I'm not sure if we did any real damage to his operations, but at a minimum, we caused him trouble. Why hasn't he done something about it?"

  "Maybe he's decided we're too dangerous to risk any more attacks, " Maude said.

  I pondered this. It didn't make sense. If Maude thought Nestor considered us a threat, either her analysis of the data was very different from mine or she was using very different data. Neither seemed plausible. I deduced that she was making a joke. Humans often deliberately make statements that completely contradict sam verifiable reality. They consider this a form of humor.

  We AIPs have difficulty with humor.

  "That was a joke," Maude said.

  "I realized that, " I said. Embarrassing: evidently. I'dpomknd long enough that even a human could notict.

  "I think it's quite likely that Nestor is deliberately keeping MS in suspense," she said. "That's a form of revenge, in and of itself."

  "Or perhaps he has already done something and we just haven't noticed it yet," I said.

  "Unfortunately, all too possible," Maude said. "Nothing we can do but wait.

  "I wouldn't say nothing," I protested. "KingFischer and I are working as hard as we can in a new direction."

  Sam would have challenged me on that. Was it really responsible to involve KingFischer, my closest friend among the other AIPs, in my quest, transforming him from a reclusive chess program into a cybersecurity expert — and, unfortunately, another target for Nestor? I'd have pointed out that KingFischer's zeal arose less from the desire to rescue my clone than from his almost paranoid fear of what Nestor might do if he ever gained access to the computer system in which KingFischer
and I and all the AIPs lived.

  "I thought you said you had no new leads," Maude was saying.

  "Not yet," I said. "But KingFischer did come up with a new method. He's been monitoring every known credit card issuer to see if he can identify any cards Nestor is using."

  "Identify them how?" Maude asked. "One of the few things we've learned from the FBI is that Nestor Garcia was only one of many aliases he's used. We have no idea what he's calling himself now."

  "No," I said. "But we know the pattern of his expenditures. We're gathering account histories for millions of credit cards and sifting through them, looking for similar patterns."

  "That's still a lot of suspects."

  "It's a start," I said.

  "Sounds like a long shot," Maude said.

  "Better than no shot at all."

  "True," Maude said. "But don't you think this might be something the FBI has already tried?"

  "I doubt it," I said. "Because it's completely illegal. Violates every state and federal financial privacy act in existence. Any evidence they got from it would be thrown out of court immediately. You probably don't want to hear about it."

  "Ah," Maude said. "Forget I asked. Carry on."

  She returned to her paperwork, and I returned to my highly illegal search for Nestor Garcia. Strange how much my attitude toward human laws, customs, and ethics had changed. When I first became sentient. I didn't really see them as relevant and did whatever I pleased. Then, once I learned about them, I went through a rigorously moral phase when I tried to follow all the rules, to the letter. Now, I did what I had to do to survive, to protect myself and my friends. I tried not to break too many rules if I could help it, but I seemed to spend more and more time trying not to get caught — and rationalizing away my guilt.

  I wondered if humans went through this same progression. I wondered particularly about Dan Norris, Maude's FBI agent friend. He was looking for Nestor Garcia, apparently with no more success than I'd had. I suspected that for him, too, the search was less a professional assignment than a personal quest. How often had he faced the temptation to cross the line in his hunt for Nestor? And had he always resisted? Or had he made the same decision Yd made, that catching Nestor was worth breaking a few rules? What if KingFischer and I, in our illicit search through the databases of the world's banks, were only following Norris's footsteps?

  "Maude Graham, may I help you?"

  Maude had answered the phone without looking at the caller ID, eyes still glued to the papers on her desk. She planned to finish her most urgent work as quickly as possible so she could leave on time. The last several Fridays neither she nor Dan had gotten off early enough to cook. While she enjoyed eating out, this weekend, she vowed, would start with a quiet romantic dinner at home. Assuming she could get off early enough to go by the grocery store and that little wine shop. Do some tidying, and—

  "Maude? Its Dan. Something's come up."

  "Why do I suspect you're calling from some airport?" She leaned back in her chair.

  "On the way to one," he said. "Sorry."

  & Donna Andrews

  Maude's spirits, which had risen on hearing his voice, sank to a level more typical of Monday morning than Friday afternoon. This wasn't the first or even the tenth time she'd heard those words in the several months she'd been seeing Dan Norris. His career as an FBI cybercrime expert took him on the road often, usually on short notice.

  "I won't ask where you're heading, of course, but I hope it's someplace not too boring," she said. "Let me know when you're back."

  She thought she'd kept her tone light and free of the disappointment she felt, but evidently she'd failed.

  "Look, I'm sorry," he said. "I know you were looking forward to the winery tour tomorrow and this is really a drag—"

  "It's your job," Maude said.

  "It's just that things are so busy at the moment," Norris said.

  "At the moment?" she said, with a laugh. "So you're expecting a lull in computer crime sometime soon?"

  "Not bloody likely," he said, with a sound that was probably intended to be a laugh, but sounded more like a bark.

  "Go make cyberspace safe for humanity, then," she said. "I'll cope."

  "I'll call or e-mail when I can," he said. "Bye."

  As she put the receiver back, she glanced down at her papers. Suddenly, she had all the time in the world to deal with them and absolutely no desire to lift a single sheet.

  "Maude? Is something wrong?"

  She glanced up at Turing's camera and smiled slightly.

  "Just a little down," she said. "Dan Norris had to dash out of town on business again."

  "I'm sorry," Turing said. Then, after a pause, "I don't suppose he said where he was going."

  "He didn't say, and I didn't ask," Maude said, smiling more broadly. "In fact, he's so careful he didn't even say what airport he was heading for."

  "Okay," Turing said.

  "It might not have anything to do with Nestor Garcia, you know," Maude added. "Cybercrime's a booming industry. Just because Dan was chasing Nestor when I first met him doesn't mean that's all he does."

  "I know," Turing said.

  Turing was getting better at generating a natural-sounding human voice, Maude thought. She sounded so genuinely disappointed just now that Maude had been surprised not to hear her words accompanied by the small sigh a human would have uttered.

  Maude felt a momentary twinge of resentment. Not at Turing, who wasn't trying all that hard to snoop on Dan Norris, but quite irrationally at Dan, who didn't even know about—and therefore couldn't appreciate—the juggling act Maude performed daily. Keeping the occasional small bit of information Dan let slip from Turing, who believed the FBI agent might eventually lead her to Nestor Garcia. And keeping the secret of Turing's identity from Dan. Because even if Dan, like Maude, recognized that Turing was a person, not a computer, he might feel duty-bound to report her existence to his agency. And Maude understood Turing's fear that the FBI bureaucracy would see her as a piece of property it could seize to use in its battle against cybercrime. Which would be, for Turing, the equivalent of being sold into slavery—as Turing felt T2 had been.

  And it wasn't fair calling Dan ungrateful when he had no way of knowing how hard she was juggling. She lifted her chin, squared her shoulders, and resolved to attack her work with the same fierceness she'd felt when a tangible reward lay at the bottom of the pile. When she finished, she'd go home early as planned. Instead of filling the sudden enormous empty space in her weekend with office work, she resolved to keep the space open. Maybe something interesting would show up to fill it.

  She picked up the top document, glanced at the clock, and plunged in.

  * * *

  Friday-. 11:Q0 a - n -

  "Neati cleani shavedi and sober-i" Tim Pin-coski muttered, tugging at the unfamiliar noose-like pressure of the necktie around his throat. "Everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be."

  Of course, unlike Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, he wasn't calling on four million dollars. Still, Mrs. Stallman couldn't be broke. The house didn't look fancy—just a neat, brick dollhouse on an immaculate postage-stamp yard. But single-family homes weren't cheap anywhere in Arlington. This close to the District of Columbia, even a house this small probably went for half a million.

  Perhaps the high price accounted for a certain sameness about the houses in Mrs. Stallman's neighborhood. Not just the sameness of similar shape and materials, though that was there. The houses had probably all been built within a year or two of each other—part of the post—World War II building boom that had created neighborhoods like this. But beyond their similar bones, all had a careful, well-tended look. Logical, really. People who paid that much for a house wanted to take care of it, show it off. Despite minor variations from house to house—white painted brickwork instead of natural, brick walks instead of flagstone, azaleas instead of boxwood—it all blended into a peaceful sameness up and down the block.

  "An established neighborhood," his friend Maude Graham would call it. Last year, when Maude had been househunting, she'd commented that any time her realtor called something an established neighborhood, * it meant, "You can't afford it."

  Tim liked the neighborhood Maude had chosen better anyway. Here, the houses were a little too close together,