Anyone who could eavesdrop on us wouldn't just find out about

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  our attempts to crack credit card issuers. They'd learn about a host of other things wed done to prevent crime or protect our safety and that of our human allies — things that were either highly illegal or just downright scary to humans for whom the idea of an independent, sentient computer was terrifying. Humans who'd seen too many bad B-movies about evil machines taking over the world.

  "And that's not in your plans?" Samantha asked when I explained this. Was it my imagination, or did she sound slightly

  anxious?

  " Why should it be? " I said. "I see AIPs as a new species that has appeared in roughly the same ecosystem as Homo sapiens. We don't compete with you for key resources; we coexist easily. Beneficially."

  "Beneficially to whom?" Sam asked. "You or us?"

  "Both," I said. "We still need humans — we can't build the hardware we live in. And to survive and prosper in the modern world, you need us, too — especially if you include not only full-fledged AIPs like me but all the increasingly complex programs that keep the world running. Programs that do things you find tedious or impossible."

  "You do the work we can't or won't," Sam said. "But what if you get tired of doing the scut work?"

  Comments like that worried ?ne. All it took was a few influential humans fearing that sentient computers wanted to rid the world of the biological organisms who created them and we AIPs could find ourselves outlaws, in danger of extermination by our creators. So we kept our existence secret, for now, and safely shielded behind impenetrable firewalls.

  At least I hoped they were impenetrable. This morning alone KingFischer and I had discussed how the leaf-nosed bat had recently installed robust new firewalls, whether the pied-billed grebe was using an outdated encryption algorithm, and whether the dung beetle ran UNIX or Windows. At times, during these discussions. 1 could imagine that I was living in a world built not by computer pioneers like my namesakes, Alan Turing and Admiral Gma Hopper, but by Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll.

  / had just decided that I needed a break from bats, grebes, and dung beetles when Tim called to tell us about his new case.

  Friday-. 12:15 p-n-

  Maude sent her document to the printers leaned back in her chair, and smiled in satisfaction. She'd spent the better part of the last hour crafting a memo that would put one of Alan Grace's more troublesome customers on notice that its project could not be completed on schedule unless it made certain overdue decisions and provided certain missing data. Without actually lying, she'd given the impression that Alan Grace's entire roster of senior programmers were sitting around in expensive forced idleness until she received the necessary information. Luckily, the only staff member waiting for the client's response was Turing, and she was hardly idle—only she was getting impatient, asking every few hours when she'd have the necessary data. Even though Turing could probably finish the project overnight once the client finally responded, they should at least pretend they needed the few weeks it would take a human team to do the coding. Doing otherwise would not only jeopardize Turing's secret, it would also encourage the client to procrastinate even more next time.

  Then Maude looked down at her desk and realized that all her urgent work was done. If she were still planning her dinner with Dan, she'd be free to leave for her errands to the grocery store, the wine store, the florist . . .

  "Maude," Turing said, through the computer's tiny twin speakers. "Are you busy?"

  "Alas, no," she said. She punched a button that would send her memo to Turing's virtual in-box. "I've chastised our black sheep again. I've decided next*tine they ask us for a proposal, we're doubling our rates."

  "Won't that drive them away?" Turing asked, sounding startled.

  "I hope so," Maude said. "If it doesn't, at least they'll pay us enough to put up with their nonsense. What's up:'"

  "Tim has a new case," Turing said. "With a computer angle. I suppose you could call it computer forensics."

  "Hell need help, then," Maude said.

  "He asked if he could borrow Casey," Turing said. "I told him that I had no problem with it, but that I wasn't sure Casey was in today. I haven't seen him. Is he sick?"

  "Having his wisdom teeth out, poor lamb," Maude said, looking at her watch. "He had to be there at nine, so he's probably home recovering by now."

  A slight pause followed, and she suspected that Turing had done a quick search through a variety of databases for information about human wisdom teeth.

  "So he'll be out for a while," Turing said, making it half a question.

  "Certainly for the rest of the day," Maude said. "He'll probably be back on Monday, though."

  "I'll tell Tim," Turing said. "I suppose that will be soon enough. Unless . . ."

  The pause that followed was, Maude deduced, more for effect than anything else. Turing and KingFischer could play an entire chess game in that many seconds.

  "Unless what?" she asked.

  "You could go," Turing said.

  "I'm flattered," Maude said, with a laugh. "But I'm a long way from Casey's league when it comes to anything cybernetic."

  "But you know a lot more than Tim, and you learn new computer information much faster than he does, and I could help you," Turing said. "Together, we could do a lot more than Casey."

  Maude sat back in her chair and smiled.

  "Why do I suspect that you're not very busy, either?" she said.

  "Of course I'm busy," Turing said. "I'm always busy. But

  none of what I'm doing needs my full attention. Perhaps Tim's case will be different."

  "In other words, you're bored, and you want to go play detective," Maude said.

  "If you don't want to go . . ." Turing began.

  "Of course I want to go," Maude said, reaching for the desk drawer in which she kept her purse. "I'm bored, and I'd love to go play detective."

  "Just what does Eddie's business do?" Tim echoed Maude's question. "I'm glad you asked that."

  He wedged the cell phone between chin and shoulder. With both hands free, he rummaged through the top layer of papers until he snagged what he needed to answer Maude's Question.

  "According to his marketing brochure, he provides web hosting and programming services for small businesses," Tim said, "using stat-of-the-art hardware and software capabilities."

  "Shouldn't that be state-of-the-art?"

  "Probably," Tim said, glancing over his shoulder to make sure Mrs. Stallman wasn't within earshot. "Eddie's no—I was about to say he's no rocket scientist, except he probably could be if he wanted to; but I bet he had a hard time passing his English classes. He's got a few typos in this. He probably wrote and designed it on his own computer. It also says that all his systems are completely redundant. I gather in the world of computers that's a good thing for

  some reason

  "It means he's got a backup if anything breaks down," Maude said. "That's good, though if I were writing his brochure, I could find a more graceful way to word it."

  "You could probably find a more graceful way to word most of this," Tim said, as he scanned the brochure. "For that matter, even I can write better than Eddie. At least I

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  know enough to use spell check—isn't redundant normally spelled with a final a-n-tT

  "Hmph," Maude said. Tim found himself chuckling silently. Maude was a bit of a stickler when it came to spelling and grammar.

  "I'll hide the brochure before you get here," he said aloud. "You probably shouldn't read it. He mixes up its and irt, too."

  "Barbarian," Maude said. "But not grounds for homicide."

  "Only attempted homicide so far," Tim said. "If that."

  "You think she's wrong about it being a deliberate attack?"

  "Too soon to tell," Tim said, leaning back as far as he dared in Eddie's desk chair, which was literally held together with duct tape. "It sounds shaky to me. If someone's really after him, the automobile's not exactly the world's most efficient murder weapon."

  "Oh, really? When was the last time you drove on the Beltway?"

  "Efficient at randomly killing people, yes," Tim said, rolling his eyes. "But not so efficient if you want to kill a specific person and then get away with it with your own skin intact. Eddie's still alive, at least for now, and any minute the police could arrest a suspect and make our efforts redundant."

  "Just because it's a stupid weapon doesn't mean someone wouldn't try it," Maude said. "Weren't you the one who said most criminals are stupid?"

  "Touche," Tim said. "So it's not impossible that this was attempted murder. Besides, officially, we're only supposed to be investigating his business. I wonder if that's not what she's really looking for, anyway."

  "You think she cares more about the business than her grandson?"

  "No," Tim said. "Not that she cares more. But—"

  Just then Mrs. Stallman reappeared, leaning over the stair rail and waving at him. Tim waved back and tried to

  Eb Donna Andrews

  look preoccupied with the brochure. He suspected that Mrs. Stallman was about to ask him if he wanted another cup of tea and then fix it, regardless of what he answered.

  Sure enough, Mrs. Stallman put her thumb and fingers together and lifted an invisible cup of tea to her lips. Tim smiled, shook his head, and patted his stomach. Mrs. Stall-man looked crushed and went upstairs again.

  "Tim?" Maude said.

  "Sorry," he said. "Mrs. Stallman stuck her head in. Offering me another cup of tea."

  "I didn't know you drank tea," Maude said, with a chuckle.

  "I don't," Tim said. "But try convincing Mrs. Stallman. I've had four cups of the stuff already."

  "She and I should get along just fine."

  "Yeah," Tim said, scowling at the half-full cup still resting near his elbow. "Good thing it was a hit-and-run, not strychnine in the tea, or she'd look good for it."

  "You don't like her."

  "I like her okay, or will when I'm beyond range of her teakettle," Tim said. "I think she's mothering me because she can't do anything for Eddie. He's in a coma, and I get the feeling—"

  He stopped and thought. Exactly what feeling did he get from Mrs. Stallman?

  "I suspect it's not looking good for Eddie," he said softly. "I think she knows that but doesn't want to admit it. So maybe finding the culprit is her main interest, but maybe she's scared for her future and only expects us to figure out what's fishy with his business. Because I get the idea that without the business, and whatever money Eddie has, she can't stay in this house, where she's probably lived for thirty or forty years. You should see the way she walks around touching things as if. . . I don't know* As vif she hadn't really seen them for years and suddenly realizes she might be losing them. That this might be the last time she can touch them. She's scared."

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  Maude was silent for so long he wondered if she'd lost the signal.

  "You there?" he said.

  "Just passing Fort Myer," Maude said. "We'll be there in about ten minutes."

  "We?" Tim repeated. "Is Casey coming after all?"

  "By we I meant me and my laptop," Maude said. "The one with the wireless modem, and all the little cameras so Turing can see everything."

  "Eddie's got cable modem," Tim said. "Turing could log in directly onto his machines."

  "No," Maude said. "She and I already discussed that. If she logs in, she'll leave traces."

  "Why worry?" Tim said. "We're authorized to get into his systems." #

  "And what if we do find something that Mrs. Stallman can take to the police? If that happens, the police will want to examine Eddie's computers. The last thing Turing needs is to get some police expert curious about her. So I'll be doing the computer forensic stuff."

  "Wow," Tim said. "You know how to do that?"

  "Don't be daft," Maude said. "I'll have Turing looking over my shoulder, through the wireless modem on the laptop. What she doesn't know about computer forensics hasn't been invented yet."

  "Great," Tim said. "Just hurry, will you? I hear the kettle whistling upstairs, and I'm already starting to slosh."

  flaude seems to think I jumped at the chance to work on Tim's case as eagerly as she did. She forgets how differently time flows for an AI P. Nearly fifteen minutes elapsed Ixtwzen Tim's call and my suggestion to Maude. Time enough for me to think through the situation and change my mind a dozen times.

  At first I was reluctant to get involved. I had, for months, been focusing as much of my attention as possible on the search for T2.

  And while I have enough resources to do hundreds or even thousands of things at once, I've found that I have a much more limited ability to handle tasks that require complex, intuitive thinking. I have virtually unlimited processing power but only so much sentience, and I was reluctant to waste it on what will probably turn out to be a minor problem.

  But then I remembered something Maude suggested recently.

  "You know, sometimes you have to recognize when you've been beating your head against a wall a little too long," she said.

  "A little too long?" I repeated. "I should think any amount of beating one's head against a wall would be painful and dangerous. Why would you do it at all?"

  "It's a metaphor, n she said. "For what it feels like when you take the same data and keep analyzing it the same way, over and over again, even though it doesn't make sense."

  I hated to admit it, but that was exactly what I'd been doing with the data on Nestor and T2. Even the possible message from T2 had proved a dead end, and I had no idea where to go next. So the more I thought about Tim's case, the more it seemed the perfect way of foil owing Maude's advice to put my search aside for a while and work on something else. Finding whatever secrets lurked on Eddie Stallman's computers would be easy — and right up my alley. If not for whatever suspicions Eddie had voiced to Casey, Mrs. Stallman would probably have hired a tech company instead of a private investigator anyway. Managing not to leave traces of myself in case we found something to take to the police would be more challenging, but still very doable. Working on something that had nothing to do with Nestor Garcia and my clone suddenly seemed immensely appealing.

  I was so exhilarated at the prospect that I almost messaged KingFischer that I was going out to work on something other than Nestor. Which probably showed how much I needed a break, since technically I wasn't going anywhere, and wasn't even halting any of the background tasks I had performing small and probably useless bits of research on Nestor.

  So as Maude drove over to Mrs. Stall man's house, I did some preliminary research on Eddie.

  I accessed the Virginia DMV records and transmitted a copy of Eddies drivers license file to Maude, Tim, and Claudia. I studied the data I'dfound. Age, twenty-two. Height, five feet, nine inches. Eyes, brown, and his license had the x that indicated corrective lenses were needed, though since no glasses showed in the DMV photo, I deduced that he wore contacts. Hair, also brown, and at least in this photo, worn short, with tufts sticking out in random directions. I made a note to ask Maude or Tim if this was a fashion or if Eddie had merely failed to comb his hair the day he applied for his license. The address on his license matched the one Tim had given. I checked other sources and determined that Eddie had lived at his grandmother's house for at least six years; graduated from Washington-Lee High School with a B average; briefly attended Northern Virginia Community College but left without graduating.

  All of this might prove useful eventually, but told me nothing about the young man himself I studied the photo to get a sense of him, but I don't yet have Tim's or Maude's ability in this area. Perhaps I never will. I suspect it's an innate human trait, rather than something that can be learned. It took me only a few minutes to find data on Eddie that would take Tim and Claudia hours or even days of legwork, and yet just by looking at his face, they probably had a better idea of who he was than I would ever have.

  I felt more comfortable studying his business. As the brochure said, he provided web hosting and programming services. His own website was small, only five pages, containing little copy, and yet I counted fourteen typos and three grammatical errors in those five pages. Some of the sentences sounded odd or awkward to me, so I suspected that Maude, who was a much better judge of such things, would pronounce them badly written when she had a chance to inspect them. The site didn't list his clients, but presumably Maude would identify them once she reached his office. It said only that he provided a variety of programming and web hosting services to

  clients ranging from small businesses and nonprofit organizations to major corporations.

  I doubted that Eddie was serving many major corporations out of his grandmother's basement. Though perhaps in addition to his hosting services, he did co?itract programming. Probably as a 1099 employee of a larger consulting firm.

  His hardware capabilities page was the longest and most i?n-pressive page on the site. Also the most suspect. If he had all the equipment he claimed, his grandmother's basement must be very crowded indeed. I doubted that many single-family brick homes in Arlington boasted the backup generators and sophisticated fire prevention and temperature controls he claimed to have. I called Tim and began asking questions.

  "He's got fifteen different monitors here," Tim said. "They all have stuff connected to them."

  "Stuff? What kind of stuff?"

  "Computer stuff."

  Obviously, a detailed assessment of Eddie's computer capabilities would have to wait until Maude arrived, bringing my laptop with the attached cameras, and also a pair of hands that could be trusted near a keyboard without causing mishaps. Though in the meantime, I made Tim circle the room, reading aloud any writing he could find on the various components. About a third of Eddie's equipment was outdated, even obsolete if he hadn't made modifications, which he probably had. The rest of the equipment bore brand names popular with astute techies who liked to build their own equipment. A few components would have been top-of-the-line about two years ago —/ wondered if Eddie had bought them in a mood of optimism when he'd first started his business. Or possibly with a cash infusion from his grandmother.