She opened her eyes, glanced at the monitor screen, and saw that a message from Turing had appeared.

  “I’m worried,” it said.

  “Why?” she asked, leaning forward to type her question with the keyboard, and wondering why Turing didn’t just use the speakers.

  “I suppose it’s heartless of me to worry about something like this with poor Ray dead,” Turing said. “But I suddenly find myself wondering how careful he was.”

  “Careful?” Maude repeated.

  E 4

  “About security. About my security. Knowing Ray, he had his laptop and his PDA with him—what if he had something about me in one of them?”

  “He knew better than that,” Maude said. “Ray was very security conscious. You know how hard he was on anyone who was at all careless.”

  “Yes,” Turing said. “But was he hard on himself? Or did he think he was different—that he wouldn’t ever lose his PDA or leave his computer sitting around unguarded?”

  “That would be foolish,” Maude said. “He, more than anyone, had access to data that would be damaging if someone outside Alan Grace got their hands on it.”

  But even as she typed, Maude realized that she shared Turing’s worry. Because however foolish it would be for Ray to ride the staff about security and be careless about it himself, it would be understandable. Human.

  Why did that word suddenly seem so apologetic? So . . . inadequate?

  “Should you do something, just in case?” she asked.

  “I already am,” Turing said. “You’ll need to give the staff new passwords—and warn them that until we know more about the circumstances of Ray’s death, we’ll be clamping down on security. They may run into glitches in the next few days; they’ll need to be patient.”

  “So you can take care of the problem?” Maude said, feeling relieved.

  “Not really,” Turing said. “I can change passwords, shut down the obvious, easy routes into the Alan Grace system. But if someone who really knew what they were doing got hold of some of Ray’s information, the whole system could be compromised. And right now, we have no way of knowing if that’s happened.”

  “We have to assume the worst, I suppose,” Maude said.

  “And Ray was killed over twenty-four hours ago,” Turing said. “They could have had his information all that time.”

  “So we could be shutting the proverbial barn door after the horses have already been stolen,” Maude said.

  “Exactly.”

  Turing was wiping their words off the screen almost as fast as Maude could read them. That, as much as anything they’d said, told her how worried Turing was.

  “Has anyone tried to break into the system since Ray’s death?” Maude asked.

  “We’ve logged several thousand attempts already today,” Turing said.

  “Thousands!” Maude exclaimed.

  “Which isn’t anything unusual these days,” Turing said. “Still, KingFischer’s rather preoccupied. Hard to tell what to make of that.”

  Now that she’d gotten to know KingFischer, Maude could understand. Was KingFischer making a rather self-important fuss over a slight increase in security threats? Or was he really worried?

  “I hear someone coming,” Maude said, suddenly glad to change the subject.

  She got up and walked out into the hallway to see who was arriving.

  “Good morning, Grant,” she said, though she knew that her words went unheard. She could actually hear a tinny noise from the headphones, a rhythmic plinka-plinka-plinka. His eyes half closed, head bobbing, busily courting premature hearing loss, Grant Kerrigan didn’t notice her presence until he was a few feet away and sensed rather than saw that he was about to collide with something.

  “Maude!” he exclaimed, scrabbling to remove the headphones as if he’d suddenly discovered an embarrassing parasite perched on his head. “What are you doing here this early?”

  “Have a seat for a minute, Grant,” Maude said, stepping back into Ray’s office.

  Grant followed, but hovered just inside the doorway as if afraid the chairs were boobytrapped. Typical, not just of him, but of most young staff members, especially if they thought they were about to receive a lecture. Maude felt rather smug; her camera adjustments meant that Turing was getting the best possible view of Grant’s round, bespectacled face. A face that now wore a worried look instead of its usual self-satisfied smile. Not necessarily suspicious, she reminded herself. He probably expected a reprimand of some sort.

  “Grant, I’m afraid I have some bad news,” she said. “Ray Santiago s dead.”

  “Dead?” Grant exclaimed. “But he—what happened?”

  Was it her imagination, or did Grant looked relieved? Relieved, and perhaps even a little cheerful? Not all that surprising, really. Though Grant had always seemed pleasant and capable enough, she’d found his cheerful selfabsorption mildly off-putting. Was his generation really more self-absorbed than hers, she wondered, or merely less inclined to hide its real feelings?

  Probably the latter, she thought, watching the play of emotions on Grant’s face. He might be a little upset, she decided; a little sorry for Ray. But he’s more relieved not to be in trouble, and definitely a little excited at the interruption to his normal schedule. Her next words would probably make his day.

  “He was murdered,” she said.

  “Murdered?” Grant exclaimed. “Wow! What happened?”

  Excitement won out over all the other emotions, and Maude knew that Grant’s sudden restlessness probably arose not from guilt but from impatience. The sooner he could escape, the sooner he could log in and begin sharing the drama with all his friends. With himself as a star player, of course. Ray would be promoted from “this guy I work for” to “this really good friend of mine,” she suspected, and Ray would have spoken his last known words to Grant. Who would probably recall having a strange premonition when he said good-bye to Ray on Friday.

  “We don’t really know a lot yet,” she said. “As soon as I know, I’ll tell you; and meanwhile, it will be up to you to keep the project going as best you can.”

  “You can count on me,” Grant said, drawing himself up with an air that was probably intended to convey resolute determination and reliability. Instead, Maude thought as she watched him leave, it only makes me want to keep an even closer eye on him.

  Perhaps she was misjudging the boy. Young man, she corrected herself. But that, of course, was the problem. Grant was so very young—he was barely out of college, and sometimes acted even younger.

  “Yes, but he’s technically quite competent,” Ray had said when she’d complained about Grant. “No common sense yet, but as long as I’m here to keep him in line and on track, he’ll do fine.”

  Only Ray wasn’t here anymore, and it was up to her to guide the competent but unreliable Grant. The thought made her tired.

  “What do you suppose he meant by that?” Turing asked.

  “By what?” Maude said.

  “When you told him Ray was murdered, he started to say something. ‘But he,’ he said, and then he stopped. What do you suppose he was going to say.”

  “Who knows?” Maude said. “Probably nothing to do with the murder. Probably something like, ‘But he can’t be dead—he was fine on Friday.’ ”

  “Probably nothing to do with the murder, true,” Turing said. “But what if it is?”

  “Someone else is coming,” Maude said, standing up. “I hate to deprive Grant of the pleasure, but I want to be the one to break the news.”

  It was going to be a long day.

  “This changes a lot of things,” Turing said. The words lingered on the screen, and in Maude’s mind as she walked down the hall.

  Yes, Ray’s death definitely changed a lot of things. For one thing, she thought, it postponed indefinitely the need to make a choice between Alan Grace and UL. She felt a twinge of relief, even happiness at that. I should feel guilty, reacting that way, she thought, but I can’t help it. And she mentally apologized to Grant for thinking him callous. Perhaps, she mused, it was only human nature to worry about - the practical ways someone’s death affects you, even while you grieve.

  Caude has broken the news to all the Alan Grace staff. No real surprises. Several said things that didn’t quite make sense, but then humans rarely react logically in times of stress. They’re all upset, but no one seems to be feeling—or pretending to feel—a disproportionate amount of grief After all, none of them have been on staff more than six months. Time enough for humans to form close friendships if they find each other particularly congenial, but I don’t think Ray bonded that strongly with any of them. They are upset, they are sad, but their lives are going on. They’re worried whether their jobs are safe; wondering if they’ll still be held to the same deadlines with Ray gone; anxious about who will take his place; even relieved that Ray wasn’t murdered at the Alan Grace building, which I deduce would make them feel unsafe. Normal reactions, according to Maude.

  Even young Grant’s reaction isn’t that surprising, I suppose. I suspect, from the officious way he’s behaving, that he sees himself inheriting Ray’s job. Not likely, from what I’ve seen so far. Grant may be technically brilliant, but he’d be a disaster as a manager. I’d as soon put KingFischer in charge.

  I felt guilty the minute 1 thought that—KingFischer is the closest thing I have to a friend among my kind. There are times when I think he has become sentient. And other times when he is so obtuse and exasperating that I decide he hasn’t become sentient at all; just overly complex and beyond weird.

  Thinking of KingFischer reminded me that he, too, knew Ray.

  *

  Ray had begun participating in KingFischer’s chess tournaments, helping come up with some new ideas for them. I should have told KF the news right away. And he’s so preoccupied with security today that I don’t know if he’s had time to find out for himself.

  I fired off a message, giving all the information we knew so far, which of course wasn’t much. I admit, I was hoping KingFischer would react. These days, my ever-evolving criteria for sentience — Turing’s Turing test, you might call it—tends to include the ability to form genuine attachments to other beings. I try to make allowances for KingFischer, since I know his personality was modeled after several real-life chess grandmasters who might have a hard time passing a Turing test themselves. But even making fairly generous allowances, KingFischer always seems to fall very far short of my minimum standards in the genuine attachment area.

  I was hoping for a reaction. I wasn’t expecting one. I certainly wasn’t expecting hysteria. I was trying to concentrate on the changes 1 was making in the Alan Grace security system when he interrupted me with a top-priority message. Top priority is supposed to be reserved for life-or-death things like a major successful hack attack, or imminent failure of critical hardware.

  “Turing, that’s one of your attempts at humor, isn’t it?” KingFischer said. “I remember your saying that humor sometimes skirts the edges of poor taste; if you ask me, that goes way over the edge and isn’t the slightest bit funny.”

  “I wish it was a joke, KF,” I said. “Kay’s really dead.”

  “But this is a disaster,” KingFischer said. “What happened?”

  He seemed so genuinely upset that I didn’t say anything snide, just reminded him of the information I'd sent a few seconds earlier.

  “Is this all you know?” he demanded, milliseconds later.

  “So far, ” I said. “Maude, Tim, and I are all investigating. I’ll let you know what we learn. ”

  Click Here for Murder

  KingFischer vanished. Well, actually, he didn’t go anywhere, simply stopped communicating, hut with an abruptness that even most AIPs would find inappropriate. Okay, he’s definitely showing signs of sentience. Does he also have to he so rude? Even the least sentient AIP would normally transmit some indication that he was finished communicating with me. But not KingFischer. It was several minutes before I was really sure he’d turned his attention elsewhere, and wasn’t just analyzing the minimal data on Pay’s death in some weird, chess-oriented fashion. Lately, he’d been obsessed with the powers of 2. As in each player has 16 chess pieces (2 to the fourth power); there are 32 pieces on the board (2 to the fifth power), and 64 squares on the board (2 to the sixth power). He’ll probably come back this afternoon to share the numerological implications of Ray’s murder. I'd rather hear humans discuss Nostradamus or argue about whether or not the Mob killed President Kennedy.

  I went back to the security changes. And to wishing I really believed the changes would be enough, even after I got KingFischer to vet them. After all, Ray died more than twenty-four hours ago. If someone killed him for the secrets he knew, secrets about me and the Alan Grace system, his killers had had his laptop and PDA for more than a day. Time enough, if they had enough resources. Time enough to plant all kinds of Trojans and worms in places I wouldn’t even think to look. I could, if necessary, roll back all the Alan Grace systems to the Friday night backup—the electronic equivalent of turning back the clock to a time when Ray was still alive, and his secrets still intact. But that wouldn’t prevent them from using the knowledge they could have gleaned in those twenty- four hours to plant bugs where I couldn’t look, in systems I couldn’t roll back—systems that feed data into the Alan Grace system.

  Ray’s death would mean postponing my long-anticipated move into the nearly complete Alan Grace system. Not just by whatever period of time it took the remaining staff to complete the work Ray was overseeing. But by as much time as it took for me to be sure that I wasn’t moving into a new home where the burglars had already broken in and taken up residence.

  Strange. This realization should have made me angry, or sad, or even impatient. Instead, I find myself feeling an odd sense of relief.

  Back in her own office at Alan Grace Maude made another call to a coworker at UL. Turing had set it up so the call would be routed through her home phone. If anyone noticed the number on the caller ID, they ’d think she was exactly where she’d said she would be—home with a cold. And Turing had routed her home phone to her spare line at Alan Grace; if anyone from the office called to ask her an urgent question, she could feign a suitable degree of hoarseness and sleepiness.

  A message appeared on the computer screen.

  “I’ve done some quick fixes to our security,” Turing said.

  “Quick fixes?” Maude echoed. “Will that be enough?”

  “I don’t know,” Turing said after a pause. “I doubt it. We’re going to have to rethink everything.”

  “I see,” Maude said. “And that means delaying your transfer into the new system. Disappointing.”

  “Not really,” Turing said. “You may not believe this, but I’m actually glad we have to postpone.”

  “I do believe it,” Maude said. “I’ve noticed you seemed a little . . . tentative about the transfer, even before Ray’s death. I’ve been wondering why.”

  Another pause. Did the pauses really mean that Turing needed the time to think of her answer, Maude wondered, or had Turing learned how to pause to give her words proper emphasis?

  “I’ve experienced some odd symptoms recently,” Turing said. “Ever since I got back into the UL system, actually. I’m worried that maybe downloading and then uploading again didn’t go as smoothly as I originally thought they did.”

  Symptoms, Maude thought, with a sudden stomachtwisting surge of anxiety. She must mean mental symptoms. Psychological symptoms. The idea that Turing might suffer some psychological aftermath from her traumatic experiences was not unthinkable. But it was frightening. Frightening to Maude as Turing’s friend, because she cared what happened to Turing. And frightening to Maude as a human, because she knew better than anyone what kind of powers Turing had. The idea of Turing malfunctioning . . .

  “What kind of symptoms?” she said, pushing the sudden terrifying thoughts to the back of her mind, where she hoped they’d disappear.

  “The feeling that I’m being watched, for one thing,” Turing said. “Which isn’t ridiculous; I am being watched, in a sense. Always have been. There are logs and records; everything we do online and in the system is watched, if you know where to look. And since everything I do is online or in the system, that means everything I do is watched.”

  “More than before?” Maude asked.

  “No,” Turing said. “No more than before. But it didn’t used to bother me. And I’ve discovered a lot of little glitches and discrepancies in my memory. I think maybe I should have been a little more careful about versioning when I uploaded.”

  “About what?”

  “Versioning. Remember how I left a shell, a nonsentient version of myself, as a placeholder when I downloaded? So my users wouldn’t know I was gone. When I returned, I tried to assimilate what the shell had done; what was happening back here at UL. I’m not sure that worked as well as I thought it would. I keep having these moments of confusion. When I remember doing two things at the same time.”

  “But you do that all the time,” Maude said. “You do a thousand things at the same time.”

  “Yes, but it’s not the same thing. I always knew where my core was, the center of my being—and now, I can remember being here in the UL computer, talking to users, and at the same time, being in the robot, traveling with you and Tim. Or being here in the UL system at a time when 1 know I was unconscious. It’s strangely disconcerting. I’ll get used to it eventually, but right now I keep having these jarring moments of discrepancy. At least I think I’ll get used to it. If it’s just discrepancies.”

  “What else could it be?” Maude asked.

  Another pause. Turing definitely wasn’t doing this for effect, Maude thought. She was worried.

  “What if I’ve damaged myself?” Turing asked finally. “By downloading and uploading. Or maybe by trying to assimilate what happened while I was gone. What if I have damaged some of my files, or created some kind of indigestible paradox? When I look at my files, I find differences. I have to go over them, one by one, to determine which are normal, natural differences that happen over time, from automatic updates, and which ones could be problems. Changes that should be made. Or bugs. Fatal bugs. I don’t want to download into the new system until I figure it out. Especially if there could be problems with the new system.”