CHAPTER 15

In the world of the Mikes, light meant survival. The more sunlit ground surface a Mike controlled, the more food he could create, and thus the more power he wielded in the community. When Naomi introduced the solar cell into their world, she revolutionized their civilization.

The solar cell could be made simply from readily available substances. A semi-magical device, it operated both as a collector and a battery, storing sunlight that could then be shined out of the cell at a later time, with no loss. It didn’t provide them with more sunlight, but it did provide them with the ability to save it and move it around. In only a few generations, sunlight became currency. A solar cell filled with light could be exchanged for just about any object or service available in their world, and since the need for light was constant, the value of the currency remained stable.

It gave her a simple mechanism by which to put them to

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work for her. Anything she wanted done, she could motivate them to accomplish by paying them in light. The job she set them to accomplish, of course, was to run Black Knight’s fleet of self-driving cars.

Throughout the Mikes’ world, millions of booths suddenly appeared one morning. In a booth, a Mike could play a video game in which he controlled a car somewhere in New York City. Whenever a real-life customer used their app to summon a car, the Mikes that were closest to that location in the city received a solar cell as a reward. The closer they were, the more light they would receive. The Mikes could use whatever means they wished to decide where to drive: app use history, customers’ current locations, car-summoning patterns, personal information, the locations of their family members, jobs, favorite places to visit, and the times of different events in the city—any data stored by Black Knight or available on the Internet.

At the same time, Naomi reduced the output of the sun itself, causing a worldwide famine. Car driving became essential for most Mikes, the only way to get enough light to survive. As the generations passed, evolution again made its mark, favoring those who did it well with health and offspring, and weeding out those who couldn’t compete. As a group, the Mikes became experts at anticipating and predicting when and where customers would want a car. Most of those millions of car booths were just simulations, little more than video games, there to create competition and increase skill. The best of them, however, unbeknownst to the Mikes, directed the real cars on the streets of New York City.

The results were staggering, even to Naomi. Whenever she wanted to drive anywhere, she found that the Mikes had anticipated her. No sooner did she press the button on her app to summon a car than one would pull up to the curb. Sometimes the reason was obvious—she always drove to work at this time of day—but on other occasions, she had no idea what cue they had used to predict her desires. It was easy to feel like they were reading her mind.

As more and more customers used their service, Brandon poured their profits back into the company, buying new cars and expanding. She and Brandon were the only two profit-sharing employees of the company, though they also employed a cadre of automotive engineers to install the sensors and steering controls, and retained a lawyer, a PR firm, and a financial consultant. They talked about the possibility of buying their own repair shop instead of using outside mechanics, to keep costs low and make sure their work was prioritized. Naomi was the only developer. She wrote and maintained their apps for use in multiple mobile devices, tracked usage and analytics, and, of course, monitored the Mikes as they drove the cars.

Despite paying out relatively few salaries, costs were not low. The cars themselves were expensive to buy, of course, as was parking most of them outside the city at night. The electric bill to recharge them added up as well. Their largest expense, however, was the immense and growing amount of cloud computing bandwidth the Mikes’ world required.

She had hoped that by reducing the strength of the sun, she would retard their rapid growth somewhat, but the opposite had proved true. Less sunlight meant more acreage was required to support each Mike. Faced with this fact, they had expanded their world even faster, not to increase in number but to spread out to more land. She could increase the sunlight, of course, but that didn’t help either. More sunlight supported a larger population, which would spawn faster, and thus need more space. Either way, the Mikes benefited by growing.

There was nothing for it but to pay the cost. She hadn’t told Brandon about the Mikes or how it all worked, but he believed her that the computing bandwidth was necessary. Still, it couldn’t go on forever. They would have to contain the world. One way would be to build their own data center instead of buying it from an external company, thus limiting its size. The Mikes couldn’t grow into computers that didn’t exist. That would be far more expensive in the near term, however, far beyond their capabilities, and would involve hiring a lot more staff.

No, the real answer was much simpler. She hated to contemplate it, but really, it was the obvious solution. A large percentage of the Mikes would have to die. She could kill off the worst of the drivers, but it might be best to kill them randomly, so as not to eliminate too much diversity.

Her earlier thoughts about sapience came back to haunt her. If they were intelligent, self-aware beings, wouldn’t it be wrong of her to end their lives? If that were the case, however, wasn’t she responsible for ending their lives all the time? She had created the world with limited resources, so that only a limited number of Mikes could survive. Millions of them had died already. Without that competition, however, they never could have developed whatever level of intelligence they possessed. It was the cycle of life and death that had caused them to become who they were.

She was their god, and the ethics of godhood were invariably sticky. Was it wrong for her to take their lives when she had created them to begin with? Ultimately, if she didn’t cull their numbers, they would surpass her ability to pay for their data usage, and their entire world would be destroyed. The death of some was a necessary sacrifice, one unavoidable if their race were to survive.

It reminded her of a story by Theodore Sturgeon called “Microcosmic God.” She’d read it as a child, and it was a true dinosaur as far as science fiction went, written more than eighty years earlier. In the story, a scientist created a microscopic creature with a very short lifespan and guided its evolution. He acted as their god and forced them to spend generations making new inventions for him, maintaining his authority by killing off half their population whenever they disobeyed him.

Was that who she had become? In the story, the scientist was not presented as a villain, but she had found his actions chilling. She considered this step necessary, but if the Mikes were ever to become aware of her actions, would they agree? Would they consider her a benevolent god or a devil?

It didn’t matter. It had to be done, and really, it was better to do it sooner than later, before the cost of maintaining their world drove Black Knight into bankruptcy. If she was their god, then she would act like one. It was time for her to send a plague.

In the end, she couldn’t do it. She wrote the script that would decimate their population, but she just couldn’t execute it. These were her children. Intellectually, she still didn’t think the Mikes had reached sapience, but the tenuousness of the distinction made it hard to put it out of her mind. Emotionally, they were important to her, and she projected onto them feelings and dreams that she couldn’t shake, even if she didn’t think those feelings really existed. If they did have emotions, they would have learned to communicate them, wouldn’t they? But they didn’t. They communicated practical information, but they didn’t write poetry or express love. They tried to live because evolution favored beings that wanted to live. It didn’t mean they mourned.

She slept poorly that night, knowing that soon, qualms or not, she would have to run the script. And as time passed and their population grew, she would have to run it again. She could reduce their birthrate, of course, but it was through the process of having offspring that the evolutionary improvement worked. She could only slow their growth so much without ruining the framework that made them develop. They had to keep growing in order to advance. Which meant she would have to regularly murder them.

It was in this dark frame of mind, in the middle of the night with no one to share her thoughts with, that she went searching for news about Tyler.

She discovered almost immediately that he had moved to Seattle. The other side of the country. Without even a note to say goodbye. Of course, that wasn’t fair, since she had ignored every call from him and deleted messages unread for weeks after the accident, until he’d stopped trying. But . . . Seattle?

She dug deeper and discovered he was working for that court case, the one with the motorcyclist killed by a self-driving car. Not only that—he was working for the plaintiff, trying to prove the car’s manufacturer was to blame. Why would he do that? Was it just for the money?

The principal lawyer on the case, Lauren Karelis, was easier to find. Hundreds of articles and videos featured her answering questions about the case or her client. She was beautiful in a glamorous way Naomi never would be, with feminine gestures, a gleaming white smile, and salon-perfect blonde hair like a curly picture frame around her carefully made-up face. That’s who Tyler was working with, instead of her.

But she didn’t want to work with him. Did she? Naomi sighed and lay back on her bed, looking up at the cracked and dingy ceiling. This was stupid. She wanted to forget him and everything about him. All searching him out did was remind her of pain and loss. She was moving on with her life, a new life. So why was she looking him up in the middle of the night?

She switched instead to pictures of Abby. There were thousands, captured at all ages, stretching back to Abby at two years old, piling stuffed animals on top of an infant Naomi in her swing, when Naomi had been too small even to reach out and grab hold of them. The images flashed past on her glasses, first the older two-dimensional ones, then the modern stereo shots, which the glasses rendered to make it look like she was standing in the room. Thousands of snapshots and thousands of videos: piano recitals and dance recitals and birthday parties and the playground near their house, Christmases and playing dress-up and making snow forts and putting on puppet shows.

Finally, for the first time since the accident, she cried. The tears came haltingly at first, choking her, until she couldn’t hold them back any more, and they overwhelmed her, like a river overflowing its banks, unstoppable. She could hardly breathe, the sobs tearing unbidden from deep in her lungs. She raged, lashing out at the bedsheets, and then curling up in a ball until the tears ran their course. Eventually, she slept.

When she woke, it was with a clarity and determination she hadn’t felt in weeks. She would never kill the Mikes. They had limited lifespans, yes, set by the parameters she had written, but that came with the world they lived in. Mortality was part of life. Regardless of whether they were sapient, she would never reach out and kill them directly. They might not mourn, but she couldn’t cut their lives short, not even to save them all. There had to be another way to preserve their world.

She washed her face and dressed for work. She climbed into a Black Knight car that pulled up to the curb just as she stepped out of her apartment. She hardly thought about it anymore. She checked her mail as she rode, trusting a Mike in a booth somewhere in her Realplanet simulation to transport her safely to the office.

Brandon had subleased five hundred square feet of office space on the fiftieth floor of an office building in the financial district, near the Department of Transportation headquarters. Two thirds of the space was cluttered with various electronics boards and components Naomi couldn’t identify, which Brandon continued to tinker with, trying to improve the design of their cars. Naomi’s desk was by a window, with a high-end development machine and a very comfortable chair.

They didn’t talk much. Naomi rarely talked anyway, of course, and her work captured all of her attention. Brandon, however, was moody, sometimes on the top of the world, sometimes kicking electronics across the room. He always seemed balanced at the edge of rage, and it didn’t take much to push him over. A lot of the time, he was out of the office anyway, lobbying officials for permits, or overseeing work on their cars, or else just working out at the gym. When he was in, Naomi kept her head low and stayed out of his way.

She arrived that morning to find another desk next to hers, with another computer and another young woman sitting in front of it. She stood when Naomi came in. The absurd thought flitted through Naomi’s mind that she had walked into the wrong office.

The woman was Asian, with straight black hair, a form- fitting black dress, long legs, and black high heels. Brandon, standing next to her, wore a black suit jacket over a tight black T-shirt that showed off his increasingly muscled build. Together, they looked like a funeral.

“Naomi, I’d like you to meet Min-seo Cho. I hired her to help you with the software development work.”

Naomi just stared, panicking inside. “I don’t need any help.”

“You do a great job,” Brandon said smoothly. “But the company’s growing, and a lot of the work falls on you. I know you’ve been putting in some late nights, trying to make things more efficient, keep costs down. Min-seo just graduated from Columbia with top marks in computer science and a particular interest in AI. You two are going to have a lot to talk about.”

The office had never felt small to Naomi before, but now the walls seemed to be closing in. She hated any kind of confrontation, but she hated even worse the idea of this woman delving into the Black Knight software and discovering how it all really worked. It was her software, her simulation, her secret world. “You didn’t even ask me.”

“I don’t have to ask you,” Brandon said. She could hear the ever-present anger there, simmering under his words. “This is my company, and I decide who to hire. Min-seo is here to stay. Make her feel welcome.”

Naomi looked at Min-seo, really looked at her, for the first time. She seemed nervous, her eyes wide and fingers clasped hesitantly together. She had probably bought that outfit to look nice for her first day of work, in her first job since graduating. She wanted to impress, to fit in. Naomi didn’t want her to feel welcome, but she probably should avoid telling her to her face that she wasn’t wanted.

“Could I talk to you alone?” she asked Brandon.

He scowled and strode toward her, and for a crazy moment she thought he was going to hit her. Instead, he grabbed her arm and propelled her out the door and into the hallway, closing the door behind them. “What’s wrong with you?” he said. “I just hired her. You could at least be nice.”

“I don’t want someone else. She’ll only get in the way.”

“I need redundancy. You’re the only person who knows how this all works. What if you were hit . . .” He paused, realizing what he had been about to say. “What if something happened? What if you won the lottery and quit? The whole company would go under. I need more than one person to understand how this software works.”

“I can’t explain it to her.”

“Oh, you’re so special? Nobody else is as smart as you?”

“That’s not it. It’s just, the software—it’s unique. I’ve been working with it for so long, and nobody else—”

“There’s nobody else in the world who can do what you do? Is that really what you’re saying?”

“Yes. I mean, maybe Tyler, but—”

Brandon pounded his fist on the door so hard she jumped. “Not Tyler. Not ever. You hear that? He killed her, Naomi. I won’t hire him; I won’t even talk to him. I never want to see his face again.”

“I wasn’t saying—”

“You know what? I’m done with this conversation. You’re going to work with this woman whether you like it or not. You’re going to explain everything to her, enough that she can back you up and help you. Who knows? She might even be smarter than you.”

Brandon flung the door open hard enough that it bounced off the wall and caromed back again. He stormed into the room and sat down at his own desk without a glance at either of them. Naomi followed him inside and crossed to Min-seo, who still stood where they had left her.

Naomi held out her hand. “I’m sorry,” she said. “You took me by surprise. I’m Naomi. Apparently we’re going to be working together.”