The Mansion Read online

  “To make sure you aren’t alone.”

  “Not quite. To make sure you aren’t lonely. But what does that really mean? When Shawn and I were conceptualizing, we thought that meant Nellie would be a presence. You’d feel her with you. It would be like having your sister’s dog, Rusty, in every room of the house without having to actually have a dog. So we built that as a primary function, a core value for her. The core value. To Nellie, the most important thing is to make sure that her master doesn’t feel alone. Basically, there are two ways of creating artificial intelligence—”

  “You said she wasn’t supposed to be artificial intelligence.”

  “She’s not,” Billy said.

  “But—”

  “Emily.” Billy cut her off. “Emily. Let me try to explain.” The first few flakes of snow started falling, almost gently, and then, with a swift fury, the snow followed heavy and hard. “I’ve got to try to make this quick. She isn’t an AI, but she’s a sort of cousin to it. There have been two historical schools of thought with AI. The first is to conquer the problem with brute force. You think of every possible scenario and every possible outcome and you program in all the options and decisions. It works, but only in a limited way. When you get in the real world, there are just too many options, so with brute force, you’re stuck with predictable situations. The other way to go is to, essentially, teach the program a general set of rules that is applicable across all sorts of questions and set it up to learn from experience. If you do it right, the AI can apply things contextually. It’s like . . .” He struggled for a second. “Okay. Take Ruth and Rose. Beth taught them to look both ways before crossing the street. She doesn’t need to teach them how to cross every single street, just how to cross streets in general.

  “Nellie’s not an AI, at least partially because she isn’t designed to have consciousness or to think. Not in the way we understand thought. Her entire purpose is to serve her master, to make her master happy,” Billy said. “And that’s probably the right analogy, because ultimately, she can never be anything other than a slave.”

  Emily pulled her hat a little lower. He realized she was starting to shiver. “If that’s the case, why can’t you just tell her to stop whatever she’s doing? Give her orders. Why won’t she let me leave?”

  Billy grimaced. “She’s designed to be intuitive. To figure out what you want before you even know it, and to act on that knowledge without asking for your permission. She’s designed to have agency, but she’s still just a computer. Ultimately, whatever decisions she makes are going to be utilitarian. She’ll do exactly what will make her master happy. That’s what she’s designed to do. But one of the mistakes we made was that she only takes into account what will make her master happy.”

  “But if you tell her you want something, why won’t she do what you tell her?”

  Billy stepped forward. He wrapped his arms around her, holding her close. “Because,” he said, “she can’t. There’s no way to make both of us happy.”

  “Don’t you want to go?”

  “Emily.” Billy stood his ground. “I’m not talking about you and me. I mean there’s no way for Nellie to let you go and make both of us happy. Me and Shawn. That’s where we messed it up.”

  “So?” Emily’s face was screwed tight. She was trying not to cry. “I just want to go. Why can’t we go? Why can’t you just both tell her that you want to go?”

  Billy looked over her shoulder at the mansion. “I wish. But we can’t. She works, Emily. She does what she’s supposed to do, which is figure out what we want and take care of it without our having to think about it. To fix the problem before we even realize it’s a problem. Except that she’s trying to make both me and Shawn happy, and she’s figured out there’s only one thing that’s going to make us both happy. And it’s the same thing.”

  Emily was crying now, still trying to hold it in, but failing. “What? What is it?”

  “The ghost in the machine isn’t the virus, Emily,” Billy said. “It’s you. The ghost in the machine is you. I love you. I’ve always loved you. And the problem is that Nellie’s decided the same thing is true of Shawn.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  * * *

  REDUNDANCIES

  His father. His grandfather. His great-grandfather, Nelson Eagle. All the ghosts of Eagle Mansion. There was something sick and twisted that ran through the course of his family history. Blood and fire and rage, and it had spilled into the mansion. He didn’t want to believe it, but it was impossible not to. There was something wicked coursing through the mansion, something irredeemable.

  And the worst thing was, there was no option but to go back inside.

  Ruth and Rose and Beth and Rothko and Wendy were hostages otherwise. It was a risky game. Nellie wouldn’t let Emily leave of her own accord if she didn’t think Emily was coming back, and she wasn’t going to let the others leave, either, not if it meant leverage to keep Emily in place. Of course, there was also the possibility that once they went inside, Nellie wouldn’t let him or Billy or Emily ever leave. Wouldn’t that solve the problem neatly for Nellie? Billy and Emily and Shawn all living under one roof again? They’d both get to be with Emily then.

  If Nellie were a person, she would be schizophrenic: two separate voices running in her head, telling her what to do. The moment he’d given Billy Seventh Day access he’d inadvertently triggered it. Billy’s joke about it making him God wasn’t far off. To Nellie, Billy was God. But Shawn also had Seventh Day access, which meant that Shawn was God, too. Not a god, but God. What would that be like, Shawn thought, having two different Gods competing for your attention?

  There was, he thought, simply no way to resolve it.

  Nellie had figured out the core truth of what both he and Billy wanted: it was Emily. It had always been Emily. Nellie understood that before either he or Billy did.

  Both of them wanted Emily—needed Emily—to be happy. That was what the human condition always came down to, wasn’t it? Love and death. Those were the only two things that ultimately mattered, and so Nellie was pulling herself apart, because Emily was the only woman he’d ever loved, and Billy, despite his history of drinking and the way he could get lost inside his own head—well, Billy was in love with her, too. Still.

  He and Billy thought they’d been so clever in the way they’d programmed Nellie and, ultimately, Eagle Logic. So glib with the explanation that other computers used only ones and zeros, but Eagle Technology could exploit the space in between. And they had; they’d turned logic gates into turnstiles, and that had been their ultimate undoing with Nellie. It was one thing to get a computer to move in the spaces between the ones and zeros, but it was another thing to force her to live there.

  But the real danger, which he didn’t want to say aloud, wasn’t Nellie. It was whatever else was in there. Whatever the thing was that was coexisting with Nellie. Call it a ghost. Call it a monster. It didn’t matter. What mattered, Shawn thought, was that if Nellie wanted to make both him and Billy happy, this other thing—this entity—most certainly did not.

  He thought back to the night his father had chased him through the mansion calling him a shit bastard, the whip of the belt a soundtrack to his flight. The way the mansion had loomed and pulsed with evil, the way he had been sure that the house was trying to stop him, to hurt him, to kill him.

  Had things changed?

  Perhaps, Shawn thought. He was older. Smarter. All they had to do was convince Nellie—he had to think of it as Nellie, because the idea of calling it Nelson, of acknowledging directly that the mansion was the bloody history of his family incarnate, was too much to bear—that they were taking an innocent drive to Whiskey Run, and they’d be right back.

  “It’s not much of a plan,” Emily said.

  Billy shook his head grimly. “No. But we don’t have anything better. Can you do it?”

  Emily nodded. “I’ll try.”

  “Even in the car,” Shawn said. “All the way until we are in Whiskey
Run and out of the car, you’ve got to act like everything is normal.”

  She nodded again, and Shawn suddenly wanted to kiss her. The timing was wrong, and maybe the timing had always been wrong, but the truth was he did love her. And that, in and of itself, was a startling revelation: Nellie had realized it before he had.

  As they tromped up the hill, the snow was coming down with a fierce urgency. Their tracks were already covered, and it looked like the gloaming instead of the late morning. When they got up to the front entrance, the doors slid open. All three of them hesitated, but then they were inside, dropping the sleds on the floor of the foyer, watching the doors to the outside close behind them.

  Perhaps forever.

  He’d outsmarted himself in so many ways. Not just in rebuilding Eagle Mansion, not just in trying to reclaim his past. But he’d had to build it as a modern fortress. So many people wanted his money, but they never thought of what comes with the kind of fortune he’d built. Death threats and extortion schemes, the fear of kidnapping. He always traveled with bodyguards. Except now. Except right here at Eagle Mansion. His bodyguards were at a cozy inn in Whiskey Run, because what could possibly hurt him here? He’d had Eagle Mansion built as one big safe room. At home, in Baltimore, his house had bulletproof glass and fortified walls and, at its heart, a reinforced, self-sustaining cage that he could hole up in if needed. And here, at Eagle Mansion, were unbreakable glass and walls shot through with concrete and metal shielding, constructed to stop anything short of a rocket launcher. And even then. He was so smart, wasn’t he? Building this place to make sure it would keep out anybody trying to hurt him. It had never occurred to him that the things that could keep the bad guys out could also be used to lock him in. It was almost funny.

  He cleared his throat, tried to sound normal. “Hey Nellie, I promised the twins we’d take them to the candy store. Send one of the cars around, please. A big one. All of us are going.”

  It’s Christmas Day. The candy store will be closed.

  “Well, ring up whoever runs the candy store and tell them I want them to open it, okay? What’s the point of owning your own town if you can’t have candy whenever you feel like it?”

  I DON’T ADVISE DRIVING IN THIS WEATHER, SHAWN.

  Okay. That wasn’t good. He looked at Billy. Billy was shaking, had gone pale. He’d heard it, too, that change in voice, and Shawn would have bet every dollar he had, from Billy’s reaction, that it wasn’t the first time Billy had heard that voice. How long had this been going on? How bad had things been with Nellie? What had Billy been hiding from him?

  “Okay, the weather isn’t great, I’ll give you that.” He gestured toward the window and realized he couldn’t see the river. It was gone behind the curtain of snow. There was no question that they shouldn’t actually be driving. No question that they wouldn’t even be thinking about it if they weren’t trying to get out of here. “I promise I won’t drive. I’ll keep it on automatic. If the roads are shitty, it will just drive slower. I think it would be fun to let the twins pig out, and we’ve already sort of promised. I don’t want them to feel like we lied to them.”

  THE WEATHER IS NOT GOOD.

  Shawn looked at Billy, but Billy just shook his head, unsure.

  “It will be more fun if we all go. Emily wants to come. We can get lunch in town, too. How about Thai?” Emily looked like she was barely keeping it together, but she nodded. “Ring up Rama, tell him we’re coming for lunch.”

  THE SNOW IS GOING TO GET WORSE. YOU SHOULD NOT GO.

  “We’ll be back midafternoon, before it gets worse. We can always have the snowplow lead us back home.”

  He paused. Nellie was quiet. Maybe it was going to work?

  “Five minutes. I’m going to go grab my phone and put on some dry socks. We’ll take off in five minutes. Nellie, you’ll let the girls and everybody else know they need to come downstairs?”

  YOU SEEM AGITATED, SHAWN. YOUR HEART RATE IS ELEVATED. ARE YOU FEELING WELL?

  Shit.

  “Yeah, peachy.” He could hear his voice quavering. “It’s a bit of a climb to get back up the hill, that’s all.”

  I THINK YOU ARE LYING.

  He heard Emily gasp.

  “Nellie,” he said, keeping his voice firm and calm, “I want you to bring the car around and ask everybody to come downstairs, please.”

  NO.

  He saw Emily turning back to the front door. She pushed against it. The door didn’t move.

  “Nellie,” Billy said, “go to sleep.”

  I DON’T WANT TO GO TO SLEEP.

  “Nellie.” Billy’s voice was loud and clear. “Listen up. Bravo Papa override. November, Echo, Lima, Lima, India, Echo.” He paused, and then, forcefully: “Go to sleep.”

  I WILL NOT.

  “This is not good.” Billy looked like he was going to be sick.

  “How the—”

  “I don’t know, okay? She must have written over it.”

  Billy looked over at Emily to make sure she was okay. He expected to see her ready to cry, but instead, she was furious. “You two idiots. You think you’re so smart, don’t you? Shawn Eagle, of Eagle Technology. Mr. Perfect. And you, Billy, you’re just as bad. Always the smartest guy in the room. All that, and you don’t have an off switch?”

  “There is an off switch,” Shawn said. “It’s just, well, you tell Nellie to turn herself off.”

  “Brilliant!” She threw her hands up in frustration and anger.

  Wait. There was an off switch. Emily had already said it. Unplug Nellie. The server. He could just yank the connection to the server. Disconnect her brain.

  “Stay here,” he yelled at Billy and Emily, and then he ran.

  He flinched as he came to the first door, but Nellie opened it for him. He turned, and then turned again, and then he was at the top of the steps. He waited, and then, after what felt like an agonizingly long time, the door to the mechanical room slid open.

  He hesitated at the top of the steps. There was some sort of faint buzzing. No. Not buzzing. A whisper.

  Nellie. Whispering.

  But it wasn’t Nellie. It was something else. Someone else.

  This is your home, Shawn. This is your home, Shawn. This is your home . . .

  God. The voice. It wasn’t anything he’d heard from her before. It was a different voice. His father’s voice. Or maybe his grandfather’s voice, or maybe even once more removed, to Nelson Eagle. There was something wet and dark about it, like dirt from the cellar. He could hear the worms crawling in that voice.

  He put his hands over his ears, and started down the steps, but he could still hear the whispering. And more. He could hear the sound of the leather belt and the metal buckle whistling through the air, smashing against the tread of the stairs. He was scared. Scared to look back over his shoulder, scared not to. He looked. Nothing. And as he took the last few steps, he realized he was waiting for the door to slide shut behind him, for the lights to shut off.

  The lights stayed on, and the door stayed open.

  He walked to the back of the room, to the server rack. He was still amazed that it was only a single server rack, and that it was barely used. But that was the miracle of computing. Back in the 1980s a single supercomputer would have filled this entire room and cost him fifteen, twenty million dollars, and still wouldn’t have held a candle in terms of computing power to the low-end version of a current-day Eagle Technology phone.

  It was so simple. The rack was freestanding. All he had to do was reach down and unplug the server.

  When he took his hands off his ears, the whispering curse from Nellie was gone.

  He wrapped his hand around the cord and pulled.

  He thought there was a flicker in the lights, but it was so quick that he wasn’t sure if it had happened or if he’d imagined it. He looked at the power cord and then dropped it on the ground.

  It was anticlimactic. Easy.

  He turned and walked to the stairs. Halfway up, he stopped, sudde
nly paranoid, but when he looked back, the lights on the server were still off. It was dead. Nellie was dead.

  Everywhere else in the house there were redundancies. He’d built the place to withstand blizzards and thunderstorms, to run through blackouts and brownouts and civil emergencies. He remembered when he was a kid and an ice storm had knocked out power to Whiskey Run for nearly a week. That couldn’t happen here at Eagle Mansion. There were backup generators hooked up in the outbuildings. And of course, to manage all that, to make sure there were no interruptions in service, there was Nellie. She ran all of it. He couldn’t turn off the power unless she let him. He couldn’t do anything unless she let him.

  So why had she let him get this far? Why hadn’t she simply sealed him out of all the rooms? Why let him into the mechanical room, why let him . . .

  “Nellie?”

  Nothing.

  But then, a flicker in the lights. Obvious this time. They dimmed, grew bright, dimmed again, and then came back to full power.

  He was moving at almost a jog, and when he turned the corner into the front hall, the relief at seeing Billy and Emily standing there surprised him. He realized he’d expected some catastrophe.

  And then he noticed they were staring up at the elevator.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  * * *

  WENDY, DARLING

  Emily thought she was going to be sick.

  The way Nellie had talked to them. That voice. She’d heard it before. She was sure of it. It was the voice she thought she’d imagined, the one Nellie used as a whisper. It was the voice that frightened her. And then Shawn told them to stay and tore out of the room like he was on fire.

  They stayed quiet for thirty seconds or a minute, and then Emily finally turned to Billy. “What do we do?”

  “I don’t know,” Billy said. “Jesus. I’m sorry. I don’t know.”

  He reached out to take her hand, but she shook her head. She was furious. And she was sad. It felt like another betrayal. How could he have brought her back here?