The Mansion Page 11

  I DO NOT UNDERSTAND WHY YOU ARE LAUGHING.

  “Where are you?”

  I AM HERE.

  “No. That’s not what I mean. Your voice sounds like it’s coming out of thin air. I don’t know where to look.”

  I AM EVERYWHERE.

  No corporeal presence. Of course. They’d talked about this when they were working on Nellie in the cabin. They’d called it the sexbot trap. Shawn might be rich and famous now, but he hadn’t always been, and at the core, they were just a bunch of nerds creating things in a workshop; whenever you gave an attempt at artificial intelligence any sort of a physical presence, the tech dream always devolved into some sort of sexbot. If Nellie was in the house as a humanoid figure or even just as a representation on a screen, it wouldn’t be long before somebody tried to figure out how to sleep with her. It had made them laugh when they’d talked about it. All this work and elegance tied to a concept, but if you could have sex with it, you’d try to have sex with it. Wasn’t that human nature?

  They could stay away from that, at least partly, because Nellie wasn’t designed as an artificial intelligence. They’d talked about that, too; how that was the other fatal flaw of researchers who’d tried to do what they’d been working on with the idea of Nellie. An incredible hubris, the idea that mankind was the marker of intelligence. For decades, there’d been a constant stream of writers cranking out think pieces on the dangers of what would happen when “the singularity” occurred, when machine intelligence finally outpaced human intelligence. But that wasn’t a thing they’d ever worried about in the cabin outside Whiskey Run. Nellie could feel real and alive and essential without actually being real and alive. They hadn’t been trying to create artificial intelligence. There was no need to create artificial intelligence to have Nellie work, and in some ways it would have been counterproductive. Nellie was born to serve. She wasn’t supposed to be a partner, but rather a slave: her entire existence was to make you happy. If she had a sense of self on the level of AI, she wouldn’t be as committed to catering to the life of her human master. So no, there was no risk of the rise of the machines, no Skynet, no danger of the human race being enslaved by robot overlords. And there was no point creating a physical version of Nellie, a silicone puppet to mimic a familiar face.

  He rubbed his wet hands on his face and then through his hair.

  THE HAND DRYER IS TO YOUR RIGHT. MY APOLOGIES, BUT WE HAVE NOT STOCKED TOWELS YET.

  “No worries.” He dipped his hands into the dryer. The blast of air was quiet, nothing like the jet-engine sound of public restrooms at the airport, but it was effective. He leaned to the side, trying to figure out the engineering; it was stamped with an Eagle Technology logo.

  WE HAVE MUCH TO TALK ABOUT, BILLY. I AM VERY EAGER TO MEET EMILY. IS EMILY HERE WITH YOU?

  “I’m looking forward to talking, too, Nellie. That’s why Shawn brought me here. To introduce us to each other. If I decide to take this job he’s offering, I’ll be back, and I’ll bring Emily with me.”

  YOU’VE BEEN DRINKING AGAIN.

  He stepped back from the sink and looked around the room. Had the lights changed color a little? The red accents on the wall seemed brighter, the mirror a little dimmer. “I haven’t been drinking.”

  YOU SEEM AGITATED. YOUR TEMPERATURE IS WITHIN THE NORMAL THRESHOLD; HOWEVER, YOUR HEART RATE IS ELEVATED AND YOUR BREATHING IS SHALLOW. I CAN OFFER MEDICAL ASSISTANCE IN THE INFIRMARY IF—

  “Jesus. I haven’t been drinking. I just saw a man get his arm ripped off in the elevator. Yeah. I’m agitated.” He felt dizzy, and he leaned on the sink again. He couldn’t tell if he blinked or if the lights in the room flickered.

  “Hey.” The voice came from his left, startling him. He looked up to see Shawn standing in the open doorway to the bathroom. “That was . . . Shit. Sorry, man. Not how I wanted to start the tour of the place.” Shawn gave him a weak smile. “You talking to yourself?”

  “No. To Nellie.”

  Shawn laughed. “Well, you’ll have to talk a lot louder for that. Talk all you want. She’s not listening.” He looked up at the ceiling. “Nellie! Yo, Nellie!” he called, and then he laughed again. “See? I don’t have her online in this part of the mansion yet. I’ve got her sandboxed up in the Nest. Some days there are two hundred, three hundred workers in here, and Nellie’s still a work in progress. But yeah, come on, let me introduce you to her.”

  Shawn turned to walk down the hall, back toward the foyer. Billy followed, glancing back as the door to the bathroom shushed closed behind him. He could hear voices and movement farther into the wing of the mansion, and he thought he caught a glance of the small worker he’d talked with a few minutes earlier.

  “. . . pretty simple layout,” Shawn was saying. “There are bathrooms scattered everywhere, as you’ve already noticed. The wing you were in was where the casino used to be. That’s all conference rooms and the auditorium now, as well as the spa and fitness center.”

  Billy saw Shawn glance at the worker cleaning up the blood on the floor and then glance away before starting up the steps.

  “Sorry. Normally we could take the elevator, but, well . . . Stairs. Good exercise. Anyway, the other wing has the dining room, the bar and lounge. At least that’s the public stuff. The kitchens are behind the dining room, but it’s all open layout. The staff offices are behind all the public spaces or down in the basement. Same with the mechanicals, housekeeping, the infirmary, all the crap that you need but want to keep out of sight in a fancy resort.”

  He gestured to the side as they headed toward the third floor. “Second and third floors are all guest suites. Big spaces. Close to a thousand feet for each suite, and there are fifteen suites on each side on each floor, sixty total. I already said that, right?”

  “That’s okay.”

  “Sorry. I’m not the best tour guide. Okay, but here’s the good stuff.” The stairs ended on the third floor, but there was a discreet—and discrete—frosted cube behind the elevator shaft. As Shawn approached, the wall of glass suddenly showed a seam, and a double door slid open.

  “Neat,” Billy said, begrudgingly. He followed Shawn up the wide stairs, trying to act like he wasn’t a bit out of breath. The elevator would have been nice. Just keep your arms and legs inside the ride at all times, he thought.

  The stairs opened right onto the living area.

  Shawn stopped and held out his hands in a gesture of grandeur.

  And Billy had to admit that it was pretty grand. The room took the full height of the addition and it was completely open and huge. From outside, the addition looked like a drop of water pooled on the roof, or, yes, a nest, but it hadn’t been clear how large it was. This room, a combo kitchen, living room, dining room, was maybe half the size of a basketball court. The room was floor-to-ceiling glass that curved around to cap the end. Billy couldn’t see the seams or structural elements. The glass looked like it was a single piece, even though he knew that was impossible. But the impact was stunning. It gave views of the whole valley. Billy could see the work progressing on the great sweeping lawn, the flat section partway down, and then the river below. From there, in the middle of the broad river, were the three islands that Shawn now owned, and beyond that, on the other side, was a whole different country. The rear of the house was a solid wall; no glass, but there was what looked like natural light piped in near where the ceiling and wall met.

  The room was on two separate levels, with the kitchen and the dining area on what Billy thought of as a landing, and the living area slightly lower. The kitchen was shiny and spacious, and the sink, which had a breakfast bar on the other side, was monumental. A child could have bathed in it.

  “There’s a full, professional kitchen in the mansion, of course, if I want to order something up, but this is in case I decide to cook for myself. I don’t always want staff buzzing around. Believe me. It sounds great to have people at your beck and call, but it can be a little much sometimes. And here,” he said, stepping past the c
ounter, to where drop cloth–covered chairs were stacked off to the side, “I’ve got a custom-made table coming in from New Zealand at the end of the month. Some sort of fancy wood. Seats twenty. The main dining room in the hotel is a whole different sort of scale, of course, but like I said, this is a private space. And then, down here,” he walked down a gentle slope into an open bowl, “the living room. The furniture is set, but my designer is coming back at the beginning of October to finish off the artwork. What do you think?”

  “It’s impressive,” Billy said. And it was. The views were stunning, and even though the table wasn’t in and there wasn’t any art up yet, you could see it as something clean and beautiful, befitting a tech titan. But it wasn’t what he was interested in. “Nellie?” he said. “Nellie?”

  “Hold on,” Shawn said. “She’s not keyed to your voice yet. Like I said, there’s been a few, well, hitches. I’ve got her running in a really limited capacity. I keep her sleeping when I’m not here. Honestly, I mostly only have her running in the office, but there’s nobody else up here right now. Just us two chickens.”

  “The office?”

  “Yeah. Other side. There’s a bathroom tucked in over here by the kitchen”—Billy saw the door—“but the other part of the Nest is the master bedroom suite and my private office. The construction guys may have signed nondisclosures, but they’re still construction guys. No point in having Nellie running around the house while they’re still here. I mean, everything’s wired up and all the hardware’s installed, but I keep her boxed up,” Shawn said. “Still, if it’s just us in here, I think it’s okay to take her out for a gallop. You ready?”

  Billy didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to. Shawn didn’t wait.

  “Nellie. Wake up.”

  Hello, Mr. Eagle. Welcome back.

  Billy kept still. It wasn’t her. The voice wasn’t the same. Similar, maybe, if you weren’t paying attention. Smooth. Barely a hint that it was a program, in the same way that Nellie’s voice in the bathroom had been almost but not quite real. But there was no question to him that this wasn’t Nellie. Not the Nellie he’d been talking to in the bathroom. Two different voices.

  “This is Billy Stafford,” Shawn said.

  Mr. Eagle has told me a lot about you, Mr. Stafford, the voice said. I’m pleased to make your acquaintance.

  Mr. Stafford. Not Billy.

  A different voice.

  What the hell?

  Billy saw Shawn look at him, and whatever the look was on his face, Shawn chose to interpret it as excitement.

  “Want to run her through her paces?”

  Billy nodded dumbly and then stepped closer to Shawn. “Tell me about yourself.”

  What would you like to know?

  “Can you pass the Turing Test?” Billy said.

  The Turing Test: the idea that the threshold for artificial intelligence was a computer that could fool a person into thinking he or she was interacting with another human being. He glanced at Shawn and saw that he looked surprised. That wasn’t what Shawn had been expecting. They’d never cared about the Turing Test because they weren’t trying to create an AI. On the surface, the selling point of Nellie was that when stacked up against digital assistants like Siri or Eagle Logic, she’d make them look like trained monkeys; Nellie came across like an eager Harvard grad. She could anticipate. While you asked another digital assistant to check your calendar, Nellie would already have ordered a birthday present for your niece and made dinner reservations early enough in the evening so that you’d make it to the theater in time. But the surface wasn’t what made Nellie matter. What mattered was that while she was like the most efficient person you’d ever met when it came to tasks, figuring out what you needed and wanted before you did, she was actually more like a loyal sleeping dog when it came to her presence. She was just there. Warm and comforting and waiting for you. The fallacy of artificial intelligence as a source of companionship was the idea that people don’t want to be alone. What they’d realized years ago, when they met in the senior seminar, when they decided to decamp to the woods outside Whiskey Run, was that people don’t care about being alone. People care about being lonely.

  Shawn pursed his lips but then nodded. “Sure, why not. What do you think, Nellie? Can you pass the Turing Test?”

  I can pass any test you or Mr. Stafford would have me take, the voice said. You know that. But that is not what I am designed for and that is not what either of you really want to ask me, is it?

  That, in and of itself, was enough to make Billy think that she probably could pass the Turing Test. Interesting answer. But it was still disconcerting how her voice—even if it was different from in the bathroom downstairs, while still also somehow the same—was everywhere and nowhere at the same time. He looked around the room trying to figure out where the voice was coming from, what configuration of speakers allowed her to be noncorporeal. He wasn’t sure that it mattered, though. She had a presence he could feel.

  “So what is it you think I want to ask you?” Billy saw that Shawn was smiling now, and he realized he was smiling, too. Good god. This was more like it. It was already natural. Shawn was right. He’d gotten her to work.

  YOU WANT TO ASK ME ABOUT TAKATA.

  Shawn lurched forward, throwing his arm up. “Kill switch! Go to sleep, Nellie.”

  Billy could feel the presence disappear. The voice was gone.

  Shawn templed his hands over his nose. He didn’t say anything.

  Billy watched him for a few seconds, but it was clear that Shawn hadn’t noticed the way Nellie’s voice had changed. If her voice had changed. It had changed, hadn’t it?

  Billy went down the sloping floor into the bowl of the living room, dragging his fingers against the fabric of one of the couches on his way to the window. He pressed his hands and forehead against the glass. It felt cool to the touch. The workers had attached the crane’s wire to the pickup truck that had fallen into the opened cellar tunnel. As he watched, the rear end lifted and then the truck was up and swinging away.

  Shawn’s voice came out like he was being choked. “See what I mean? A ghost in the machine? No kidding. You wanted to know what the problem is with Nellie? How’s that for a start?”

  Billy watched the crane lower the pickup to the ground and then turned back to Shawn.

  “Okay,” Billy said. “I’m in.”

  NINE

  * * *

  EMILY AWAITS HIS RETURN

  It was a short conversation. Emily couldn’t tell if it was just that the connection was bad—Whiskey Run was pretty far out in the woods, and Eagle Mansion was even farther past that—or if there was something wrong. If he hadn’t been with Shawn, Emily might have worried that Billy was drinking again. Though maybe she should be worried, she thought. It’s not like his problems had started only after he’d left Whiskey Run and Shawn and that awful cabin behind. The seeds had been planted well before she met him. She wasn’t one to blame everything on a rough childhood or adult disappointments, but, well, there were no buts to it: she had to trust him. He’d had his slipups, but for the past two years, he’d been true to his word, and, at least recently, more often than not, she remembered why she loved him.

  “We’re getting on the plane in a minute,” he said. “I’m going to spend the night in Baltimore. Tour through some of the Eagle Technology developmental labs in the morning and catch an afternoon flight back. I’ll be home for dinner tomorrow.”

  She was in the teacher’s break room. Monica didn’t pay particularly well, but she offered good benefits, including this space, which had a stocked fridge and comfortable furniture. A respite when you needed a little time-out from the munchkins. It wasn’t a big room, though, and Alicia, a peppy woman from Montana who had a pierced nose and whom, Emily noted, the fathers seemed always happy to chat with, was making herself a cup of coffee from the automatic machine. Emily turned into the corner of the couch and pressed the phone hard against her ear.

  She wanted to
beg him to reconsider. This felt a little too close to a snake eating its own tail, a world without end. Shawn could fix up that rotten Eagle Mansion all he wanted, but it was still the same thing: Billy was headed back to a cabin in the woods to work on a program that he and Shawn had already abandoned once, years and years ago. A cycle starting again. But all she said was “Are you sure about this, Billy?”

  “I’m sure, Emily. We haven’t talked money yet, but this is going to change everything,” he said. “Just trust me.”

  TEN

  * * *

  REUNION

  It had already changed everything. He and Shawn agreed on terms in the jet on the way back to Baltimore. Maybe Shawn felt guilty about what had happened a decade ago, the way their friendship from Cortaca University and time in the cabin had fallen by the wayside, and the way he had screwed Billy out of the share of Eagle Technology that he’d been promised. The terms Shawn put forward were laughably good. Insanely generous. Too much money for Billy to even think about walking away from. That is, too much money if—and it was a big if, Billy realized—he could figure out the bugs with Nellie. Because it was Nellie he’d been talking with while standing next to Shawn upstairs in the Nest. He was sure of it now. The voice in the bathroom had been his imagination. He’d just seen part of a guy’s arm get cut off. Stress. His imagination. No, there’d been only one voice, one conversation.

  Takata.

  How had that name come out? Where had Nellie gotten it? Shawn told him that the guts of Nellie from the initial attempts in Whiskey Run were still in existence; Shawn and the engineers had tinkered, adapting her to the reality of the hardware that was now available, and they’d written millions of lines of new code, but most of the critical code, the engine of the machine—hundreds of thousands of lines of code—was still embedded in Nellie. An old seed planted in new soil.

  But that name. Takata.