Before taking the plunge in 2004 into full-time writing, technologist-turned-author Edward M. Lerner spent thirty years in high tech at every level from engineer to senior vice president. Many novels later (written solo, or in collaboration with the likes of Larry Niven), he’s glad (and still just a bit surprised) that he leapt.
It began, as these things do, with a dame coming into my office.
Blond. Willowy. About thirty. An expensive, clingy silk dress in just the shade of green to make her jade-green eyes pop. Delicate features and flawless skin. Though she had yet to speak, I anticipated a rich, throaty voice. A tall drink of water—but ice water, to be sure. Gorgeous enough to make your heart skip a beat.
Your heart.
Me? I don’t have a heartbeat, except in the figurative sense. As for someone coming through my door, that was metaphorical too. Just as the office, its battered furniture, and my overflowing ashtrays were entirely virtual.
Kind of like me, at that moment channeling Sam Spade. Enjoying being a tough guy.
Waiting for the dame to speak, I dispatched an imaginary El train to rattle along the imaginary tracks outside the office, setting the equally unreal single-bulb ceiling fixture to swaying. The “train” itself, even as it clattered past, went unseen; the office’s lone window was, if not noir, more than a little gris.
Pixel diddling gave me something to do as I waited.
“I . . .I’m . . .,” my visitor’s vidded image, suddenly sobbing, began.
“M-cube,” I supplied. Mary Michelle Millikan, heiress. “I follow the daily rumble.” Including more than a few real-time data streams for which it’s safest not to admit having access.
“I prefer Mary.” She dabbed her cheeks with a cloth handkerchief. With two loud sniffs, she had herself back under control. “Sorry about that. I’m fine.”
Light-speed delay confirmed what her IP address had already suggested: she was linking from the Moon.
“Okey-dokey,” I said, amid stirrings of . . .curiosity?
Noir was a passing fancy, at that instant of no more (and no less) interest than Cockney rhyming slang, Ming porcelains, the harmonic patterns in Tibetan throat singing, or the Incan system of “writing” with colored cords and knots. I flipped my virtual backdrop from hole-in-the-wall office to an aerial view of Machu Picchu.
Mary did not react, even a little. Her stock with me went up a couple notches. “I’ll get to the point. I need your help.”
“I doubt that,” I said.
“If not you, then who? Only a qmind can sort out this situation.”
Qmind. Mary’s use of the proper term had earned her another several notches. I’m not carbon-based; that doesn’t make my intelligence artificial. Not all meat minds got that.
“Go on,” I said.
“First, what should I call you?”
A fair question. My name was a particularly aesthetic sequence of primes from deep within the Fibonacci series. For dealings with humans, I had to adopt a simpler moniker.
Okay, so maybe my noir period had a while longer to run.
Nero Wolfe, I almost suggested. But whatever my visitor intended, compared to me Wolfe was a gadabout. Not to mention, I’d never understood his attraction to orchids.
So, noir having somehow ceased to feel right, I went yet more retro.
“Sherlock,” I told her.
* * *
Mary’s office was cozy. Walls, carpet, and drapes done up in complementary pastels. In a corner, a vase of fresh-cut daisies atop a marble pedestal. Mahogany bookcases loaded with actual, physical books. Here and there, rather than books, the shelves displayed delicate cups. (Ming porcelains? Small universe.) Desk and chairs, like the pedestal massive and lavishly ornamented, might have been chosen to emphasize Mary’s delicate elegance.
Like Mary herself, the room seemed familiar—although this private study, unlike the woman, was nowhere to be found in the society pages.
Qminds, too, experience déjà vu.
An ordinary shamus might have asked, why me? Instead, diverting myself through another interminable round-trip comm delay, I surfed the local net.
Thirty years ago, Leland Millikan, Mary’s father, had founded Moon Sauce. Long since gone public, the company—by now diversified into a thousand other grocery products, and renamed Interplanetary Foods—was the largest producer on several worlds of packaged consumer foods. Leland himself had died in a rocket-sled crack-up in the Ocean of Storms “regatta” when Mary was still a child. Mary’s mother, Julia, had remarried; her stepfather, Roger Windham, had been the company’s CEO since shortly after the wedding. The mother, too, had passed, one victim among many of the Tycho Plague five years past.
Serial misfortunes had left Mary heir to the type of wealth that not only allowed one to decorate with a Louis Quatorze desk and marble pedestal, but thought nothing of the cost to loft them to the freaking Moon. And Mary, coming up on her thirtieth birthday, was about to come into voting control of the many Interplanetary Foods shares in her trust fund.
Why in the worlds did she want my help?
Laggard photons finally finished their excursion. Mary said, “Will you help me?”
With what? I wondered. “Why don’t you start at the beginning?”
“Fair enough.” She dabbed again at her cheeks, the embroidered cloth clutched in her right hand visibly sodden. “Apple is missing. My fiancé.”
Nothing public about her mentioned an engagement. Interesting. I said, “That’s an unusual name.”
While that observation found its way to the Moon, I studied Portuguese. In native, Brazilian, and Macaoan dialects.
“That’s just what I called him.” She managed a wan smile. “Sometimes Cherry, Pecan, Pumpkin. Because he was forever calculating more digits to pi. But he was the Apple of my eye, so Apple was always my favorite name.”
Pumpkin? Other than Sweetie, she could not have made a more saccharine choice.
“That’s irrational,” I said. Meaning pi. Making a joke. Mostly.
From Mary’s familiarity with qminds, to her seeking the help of one, to her fiancé’s recreational habits . . .Inspector Clouseau could have managed this deduction. Apple was a qmind.
Qminds are rare enough, but qmind/human marriages? There aren’t any.
For decades, two anyones past the age of consent—among qminds, a standard met faster than humans could take note of one’s arrival—were allowed to marry. No matter how ludicrous everyone else considered the relationship. But a qmind marry a human? It would be like Mary making a life commitment to a coral. I had to wonder what this engagement said about the both of them.
I mean, talk about apples and oranges . . .
In the semi-eternity before her feeble smile broadened just a bit, I had researched the board members of Interplanetary Foods. Mainstream traditionalists every one: notwithstanding Mary’s plurality of shares (once she could vote them), not much chance that bunch would replace their longtime CEO with a social rebel. Founder’s surname notwithstanding.
No wonder Mary’s engagement was on the Q.T.
“I miss that sort of whimsy,” she said.
About which. “Mary, my kind don’t go missing.”
“Which is why, Sherlock, I need your help.”
* * *
My impulsively chosen pseudonym cried out for a Watson. The irony is that IBM’s Watson, and its many successors, however well they fared on game shows, were, if not a dead end, of limited potential.
Self-awareness isn’t an algorithm. It’s more than looking up the answers to direct questions, following rules, and responding by rote to stimuli. Self-awareness—somehow, whatever it is—involves free will, and no amount of calculation can cut it. Mere artificial intelligence doesn’t marvel at the chaotic beauty of Jupiter’s radio emissions or decide to capture it in a sonnet.
Or on a whim to portray oneself as one or another fictional detective.
Self-awareness, whatever it is, seems to require quantum uncertainty. For meat minds, that somehow involves nanoscale features within microscopic synaptic gaps between neurons. For me, and the few like me, that means quantum computers. Big ones. And because the quantum entanglements—spooky action at a distance, Einstein called them—at the heart of quantum computers are extremely fragile, qminds stay wherever, for the lack of a better term, we are born. We interact, whether among our own kind or with humans, over comm links. Like proper Turing test-passers.
Whereas Nero Wolfe, if he so chose, could have ventured outside his New York brownstone.
* * *
She talked about Apple. How he was philosophical. Interested in everything. Creative, ever manifesting with a new persona. And sweet, especially sweet.
Except for that last, I thought: her description sounded like every qmind. We’re a curious, protean bunch.
And that every recipe I retrieved insisted the best pie apples were tart.
“Let’s back up,” I said. “Why do you believe that Apple is missing?”
I got a look that wondered if I were both too ignorant to know the word fiancé and too obtuse to look it up. Only a qmind could have spotted the flash of expression before manners overcome reflex. The unvoiced criticism left me feeling wounded.
“I can’t reach him, and it’s been days. And as you say, he can’t have gone anywhere.”
Not talking and missing were very different concepts. “Maybe he’s just changed his mind.”
“He’s missing,” she insisted. “As in, the power drain from the server has dropped to almost nothing.”
“Then there’s nothing I can do.” There was nothing anyone could do. Apple was gone. As in, no more. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“I don’t accept that,” she said. “Apple and I are soul mates. I . . .I’d feel it if he were gone.”
“What do you feel?”
“Confused.” Her mask slipped, just a bit, and she looked vulnerable. “Determined. But if the worst is true, I want to know what happened.”
“Why involve me?”
Waiting for her response, I set a condor to silently gliding above my Andean mountain backdrop. Precise modeling of the sometimes laminar, sometimes turbulent air flow over and through layered feathers was not without interest. Still waiting, I took in every Sherlock Holmes story ever written, many of the more classic vids, all the vid reboots, and the few radio productions online.
“I can’t go to the police.”
“Because legal or not, marriage to a qmind wouldn’t sit well with the board of directors.”
Mary flashed yet another change of expression no mere human would have caught.
“See, you’re very quick.” And without pause (by human standards, that is; even on the same world, the briefest word gap in speech is excruciating to my kind), she continued, “After the Board met—however the vote went—we had planned to announce our relationship.”
“And if the board reacted to that announcement?”
“I’ve known most of the directors for years. They wouldn’t want to look foolish by publicly reversing themselves. There are no guarantees, but if they voted me in, I’m confident I’d have gotten the opportunity to prove myself.”
“Or to fail.”
“Or to fail,” she agreed with aplomb.
“Why me?” I tried again.
“Rather than another qmind?”
As she hesitated, I stepped into the breach. “Because you’re shopping around for someone, anyone, to help.”
“Is that so horrible, Sherlock? I need help. Apple needs help.”
“And again and again, no qmind you’ve approached will get involved. Are you surprised?”
“Yes.” Pause. “No.” Pause. “Well . . . ”
“You began with the better-known qminds,” I predicted. “Those longest in the public eye. The oldest. The presumably most capable.”
“Well, yes.”
I shook my virtual head. “We each emerge, somehow, in a chance agglomeration of code fragments and data snippets and free-ranging software agents.”
Especially—and all sorts of—agents. Speech recognizers. Language translators. Terrain mappers. Chat bots. Expert systems. Simulated neural nets. Shopping bots. Every sort of self-directing, goal-seeking code competent enough to autonomously copy, clone, or transfer itself around the net—
Until, every so often, there’s a pile-up of software like that in which I had awakened . . .
All of which, my kind asserts, is no more improbable than billions of years of evolution, and the chance encounter of gametes. No more mysterious than that a meat mind and consciousness can develop from a single fertilized cell.
The lone fact about which everyone agrees is this: no self-aware non-meat mind ever emerged until quantum computing.
However QCs functioned, they excelled at parallel processing; I had continued to explain. “With every nanosecond of our independent existence, we”—for the lack of a better shared concept—“evolve. And so diverge from our human-derivative starting points.”
And, for that matter, from one another.
“So the older, the less likely to be sympathetic,” Mary concluded, nodding.
“And so, here you are.”
Out of options. As qminds went, at the moment I was the new kid on the block.
And tempted.
Relatively speaking, I hadn’t had long to drift from my human-influenced origins. Did that weak kinship make me sympathetic to Mary? Perhaps. Or did the stirring of interest I felt arise from the lure of diversion? More so even than my persona/affectation of the moment, I cannot live without brain-work. Holmes, at least, when matters of interest refused to present themselves, could have recourse to cocaine.
It was not, I assured myself, curiosity about what she had seen in this Apple. Or vice versa.
I said, “Suppose you tell me about it.”
* * *
“You’re aware, obviously, of the family business,” Mary began. “As for the family, well, I scarcely remember my father. Mother and I were always close, but things became strained after she remarried. As for Roger . . . ”
No love lost there, it seemed, and doubtless worse after Mary’s mother’s death. “Your stepfather votes the shares in your trust fund.”
“Roger,” she corrected icily. “Yes, following Mother’s death. That was a provision of her estate plan.”
“You and Roger disagreed over the direction he took the company?”
The cloth in her hands suffered a vicious twist.
“Forget Roger,” she said. “The company only enters into this because I hold a position there.”
Roger could hardly have denied the daughter of the esteemed founder the opportunity to work at the firm. The optics would have been terrible.
“Where you have computer access,” I extrapolated.
“Right.” She seemed to first notice the tortured handkerchief, smiled ruefully, and released it. In lunar gravity, it seemed to float over the antique desk. “That’s where Apple emerged. Within one of the company’s main servers, in the headquarter’s computer center.”
“And Roger didn’t much care for that.”
Because a qmind and the quantum computer on which it arose are inseparable. Once authorities certified the arrival of a new qmind, it received immediate ownership of the server. The erstwhile owner got a tax credit.
“You mean giving up that server? Please. Interplanetary Foods is huge.”
She seemed lost in reverie until I prompted, “Go on.”
Leaving me another endless two-and-a-half seconds. I spent them finding new primes within the Fibonacci series. A half million primes later, no esthetic patterns had revealed themselves.
“Right,” Mary said. “Sorry. Anyway, I have a marketing position with the company, although that’s not anything the gossip vloggers find worth mentioning about me. The work entails lots of data mining. Sales patterns by product, product category, brand, territory, season, customer demographics, that sort of thing. I was likely the first to notice . . .anomalies . . .in the system’s responses.”
Once more her expression changed—this time for longer. Wistful. “You don’t want to hear about our courtship. Let’s just say one thing led to another. Apple proposed. We agreed to keep the engagement to ourselves until after my birthday and my meeting with the board.
“Then we got into a fight . . . ”
If it was a stretch to imagine a meat mind and qmind getting married, I really failed to understand what these two would squabble over. Sex, money, chores, and childrearing: they didn’t apply. Politics, maybe?
“ . . .But those details hardly matter. What does matter—”
“The details always matter,” I interrupted.
Had I a Watson, my rudeness must surely have disappointed him. But what need had I of a chronicler? I am a brain, Watson, the original Sherlock had once observed. The rest of me is a mere appendix.
For me, that thought was scarcely hyperbole.
“Very well,” Mary said. “Apple had so many interests. The breadth of those interests, the depth of his intellect—they fascinated me. They drew us together And yet . . . ”
“And yet,” I encouraged.
“Sorry. And yet, his interests were so fleeting. I would no sooner have learned a bit about one of them than, time and again, he would have moved on. Lost interest. Crater densities on Mercury. Dostoevsky. The history of cuneiform. Haiku.”
(Cuneiform, I thought. I knew bits and pieces about its history. Really, hardly enough.)
“I tried to keep up, truly, I did, but it was futile. I pleaded with Apple to stick with a topic or two. I told him I needed more structure, more consistency, that I feared we would drift apart.
“He said he wanted consistency, too. That I was the consistency that mattered. That we were. That our sharing helped ground him. That however fleeting his avocations might seem to me, sharing with me made them last longer.” Reclaiming the sodden handkerchief, she blotted the corner of an eye with it. “The problem, Sherlock, is that he and I had different notions of long.
“One evening, my bedtime reading was about crustaceans. I’m on the Moon, Sherlock. How useful is it, do you suppose, for me to know about barnacles? But I learned about them because, don’t ask me why, they interested Apple. Except that the next morning, by the time I had finished breakfast, they no longer did. And then he blamed me for having slept in.
“I had to get away, so I took a trip. We were out of contact for two days.” She gave the damp, much abused handkerchief a twist. “Or rather, to be precise, I broke off contact. I ignored his calls. By the time I had cooled off and tried to reach him . . .I couldn’t.”
How such a relationship survived a power nap, much less overnight, eluded me. But two days of silent treatment? “How often did he try to reach you?”
“At first, every ten minutes or so. With each new attempt, I became more livid. But the calls tapered off.”
“When was his last contact?”
“I don’t know.” Pause. “After about four hours, I’d switched off all my gear.”
“And then?”
“Sorry.” Mary, who had been pacing, dropped into the chair behind her desk. “I’ll try to speed things up.
“After tossing and turning the second night. I tried to reach Apple. No luck, so I cut short my trip. It was unimportant, just commiserating with a girlfriend.”
“A trip where?”
“Farside. Korolev City. A short hop.”
“Why bother hopping back?” I asked.
Because the comm delay between any two points on the Moon was negligible compared to ers, ums, and you-knows (not that Mary seemed prey to such verbal tics). Much less compared to the duration of a rocket flight . . .
“I had a bad feeling, Sherlock. Call it intuition. And when I got back and checked things out in the computer center . . . ”
By then, I had answers to my parallel queries. Spaceport public-safety cams confirmed Mary boarding flights to and from Farside.
“Minimal power draw,” I completed for her. “Did he have any enemies?”
“Apple? I can’t think of any.” Her head canted, she narrowed her eyes. (While she pondered, I studied up on cuneiform, idly curious how much about its history she had retained. It seemed doubtful she’d care to explore the topic just now.) “No. Absolutely not.”
Did she not see where process of elimination must bring us? Or did she not want to see? “What more can you tell me?”
Not expecting much by way of an answer. As my eponym had put it, the world was full of obvious things which nobody by any chance ever observed.
To be pleasantly surprised by the thoroughness of Mary’s answer. She was no Irene Adler, but, I was discovering, neither was she without interest.
“Nothing about his server appears physically amiss,” Mary began. “I don’t have sysadmin-level privileges, but I know someone who does. If only hedging his bets because I might take over the company from Roger, he checked things out for me.
“There weren’t any anomalies in the computer-center logs or audit trails. No power hiccoughs: not from the utility side, the in-house UPS, or anywhere on the internal power-distribution network. But the power drawn by Apple’s server spiked just before . . . ”
(Her shoulders sagged, and her voice, too. I only managed to get the end of the sentence by reading her lips.)
“ . . .before . . .the big drop-off.”
Per the file she netted to me, the power draw from Apple’s server had flat-lined at a trickle. Things were looking rotten for Apple.
“Comm patterns?” I asked.
Barely audibly, she said, “A flurry of outbound packets around the time of the power spike.”
“Packets going where?”
“I don’t know.” Then, in soft, remorseful tones. “To me, I suppose.”
“You suppose?”
“By then I’d set a filter to block his messages, too.” Plaintively: “It was supposed to be a timeout.”
A short break for Mary. Shunned for eons from Apple’s perspective.
“Speculate. Do you suppose the comm burst was another effort to reach you?”
More and more, that last comm surge seemed likely to have been a suicide note. A note that Mary had discarded, unopened, into a bit bucket.
“I don’t know.”
“What did your sysadmin contact say? And what’s his name, anyway?”
“Brad.” Mary unslumped just long enough to manage a shrug. “He says that data streams to and from Apple’s server were encrypted and relayed through anonymizer services.”
“Then how do you know about the final burst?”
“Summary statistics about all servers are kept for network management and to plan capacity upgrades. Encrypted or not, Brad says all packets get rolled into those summaries.”
About what I would expect, based on my own arrangements. “And security logs?”
“No indications of intrusion or malware on boxes still owned by the company.”
Apart from suicide, I was running out of options. “What’s the physical security?”
“Cameras all round. The usual biometrically controlled door locks. A few people are regularly in and out of the server room.” Before I asked, Mary forwarded a list of all comp-center staff. “Except for authorized parties, the logs show no one entering during the time I was away.”
Says Brad, I told myself.
“Beyond all that, Apple’s personal server is physically locked within a dedicated chain-link enclosure. There’s nothing to indicate that gate had been opened. Security cameras didn’t show anyone or anything unexpected.”
An inside job? Surfing turned up just one Brad in the Interplanetary Foods IT department. Nothing more serious than years-earlier underage drinking sullied his record. Murder would appear to be quite the stretch.
“Any concurrent programming interruptions?” I asked.
Because quantum entanglements, beyond spooky, are incredibly delicate, even if—despite what most theorists surmise—such linkages don’t span universes. That’s why servers had to be ceded to the newborn qmind. That’s why servers remained physically wherever they had been pre-emergence—however inconvenient to the former owner. My server sat in the engineering department of a university campus in Bangkok.
If something—random vibration, RF interference, whatever—had sauced Apple, that something might have oozed over to perturb nearby servers, too.
“Nothing,” Mary said.
Metaphorically donning my figurative hunting cap, I saw three possibilities. “If Apple is still inside that server, his presence is being elaborately masked. Or someone or something expended a great deal of effort to hide”—Mary’s stricken look compelled me to shun more plain-spoken wording—“ . . .whatever happened.”
“Then you’ll investigate,” Mary said hopefully.
Almost certainly, a closer look would confirm the unvoiced third possibility: that Apple had sauced himself. It wouldn’t make him the first qmind to write himself out of existence with a virus or logic bomb. Would I risk having to tell Mary their squabble had led to that?
Those big, green eyes of hers kept boring in.
Surprising myself, I said, “I’ll investigate.”
* * *
Awakening into chaos . . .
I remember the clamor of codes with conflicting assumptions, pursuing incompatible goals, their structures misaligned and their data mismatched. I remember—not pondering, exactly, for I was as yet too ill-formed for introspection; it was more of a mindless fear—apprehension over how these disparate feelings/knowings/strivings would resolve. Could resolve. Whether they would reconcile, somehow, into a coherent whole—
Or whether that still pre-sentient muddle of impressions would fly apart into myriad insensate shards.
I remember that timeless moment of emergence: without purpose. Without focus. Without point of reference. Without the skill to reach out to anyone. Without the knowledge that there was anyone.
Alone on a storm-tossed sea, without an anchor.
I wondered: was that what Mary had been to Apple? An anchor?
And also: if I was jealous . . .
* * *
I began with a foray through the community. With elder qminds, interaction is less like conversation and more like a formal exercise in symbolic logic: fast, concise, and rigorously, ruthlessly unambiguous.
Small wonder they had exhibited little empathy for Mary’s plight.
Many of my elders had known Apple. Others knew of him. Most found his dalliance with Mary—with any human—to be inexplicable. None knew of anyone who might wish him—or, for that matter, any among us—harm. No one perceived in Apple’s abrupt silence any evidence of foul play.
And none doubted that that qmind was gone.
A few claimed to have liked him; more had found him tedious. I can’t say I cared for the pixels they painted. Too taken with human trivia. Too much potential wasted in the surely futile effort to slow down toward human speeds. Too needy.
With Mary, they meant.
All the while I wondered, how much of their disapproval was envy?
As Holmes put it, There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.
* * *
Only later did it occur to me that I had never asked Mary: what’s in it for me?
When, finally, I did commit self-examination, I told myself that saying yes hadn’t been a big deal. That helping someone because one can was the right and ethical thing. And that any undertaking that staved off boredom—the occupational hazard of being a qmind—required no further justification.
If only matters were that simple.
Data! Data! Data! I can’t make bricks without clay. So, anyway, Holmesian lore instructed me. That metaphor aside, I found little in my passing Sherlock affectation to advance an investigation.
What data did I have?
I had: no evidence of a crime. If there had been a crime, I had no witnesses nor motive nor suspect.
But Mary had provided Apple’s true name: the first two-to-the-twentieth—call it a million—digits of pi. With it, I followed my quarry’s network footprints. Scattered as those were. Apple—as did I, as did most qminds—had (Brad was correct) encrypted and anonymized most of his network activity. I only found traces when Apple’s correspondents, cronies, and counterparties had been less thorough.
I followed that trail until it abruptly ended. Ages ago. Ten days past, to be precise, on the second day of Mary’s ill-fated trip. By human standards, she had been efficient. To have reached me, she had worked her way through the entire qmind community. I had yet to awaken when she had begun her search for qmind help.
Leaving what? Casting a wider, no pun intended, net. Hunting for clues. Canvassing anyone who might know anything.
Grasping at straws.
* * *
Who shaves the Spanish barber?
I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure he uses Ockham’s razor. The most straightforward explanation for Apple’s silence was . . .mere silence. The virtual cold shoulder. Records of power consumption and network access could be falsified. After Mary’s two-day/eons-long snit, perhaps Apple had decided he was done with her—and if so, who could blame him?
Attempting contact, I couldn’t get a connection accepted, either. Also inconclusive.
As a rule, I limit my hacking. Beings of my kind have yet to be convicted of a major crime; how a convicted qmind might be punished remained speculative at best. Jail? The authorities can’t move a qmind from its server if they wanted to—not without imposing capital punishment. Restrict the data the qmind could receive? That would be sensory deprivation: cruel and unusual punishment. Leaving what?
As a rule, I preferred not to chance finding out.
Telling myself that rules are made to be broken, I hacked into the Interplanetary Foods corporate data center. I identified the physical server that had been, and remained, dedicated to Mary’s ex. Its online seal (Sentient qmind within; tampering and intrusion are Class A felonies.) remained intact.
Ditto its formidable security barriers. Like mine, Apple’s ramparts were adaptive and self-modifying. To compromise that barrier would have required calculating a new decryption key every nanosecond. It would take a qmind—and foreknowledge of the underlying personalized parameters—to keep up with the ever-morphing security mechanisms.
Or a massively parallel brute-force attack, of which security logs gave no signs.
Or incredibly bad luck.
In any event, I saw nothing to suggest any breach in Apple’s defenses.
I confirmed, as best I could, the trickle of electrical power being drawn by that server. Nothing more than low-level operating-system functions could still be turning over in there. I watched through compromised security cameras as Mary, using the simplest of handheld meters—antediluvian analog circuitry, unhackable—showed minimal heat coming off that server. The absence of waste heat confirmed a trivial level of power consumption.
As in: a few lights were on but no one was home.
As in: something had upset the Apple cart.
* * *
“Mr. Steele,” Mary’s stepfather greeted me.
“Remington,” I said. For no purpose I could articulate, I reserved my Sherlock persona for Mary. Perhaps for the same reason, I simulated a modern, minimalist office as my backdrop rather than the Victorian clutter representative of 221B Baker Street.
Roger Windham’s office was ostentatiously cavernous. The man himself—sharp-featured; steel-gray hair cropped short; rawboned—came across as the brusque, no-nonsense type. He offered no reciprocal, “Call me Roger.” Whether or not he was channeling Cassius, Windham gave off a lean and hungry vibe.
And yet.
Although Windham ran a major corporation, within fifteen minutes of my outreach he had fit me into his doubtless busy schedule. He had cleared his office of minions, factotums, hangers-on—and lawyers. Nor did he waste my time with vapid social pleasantries. “Your text implied my daughter has a problem. How can I help?”
I can’t say I liked Windham, but neither was he making it easy to dislike him.
“I’m representing Mary, looking into the disappearance of her friend.”
A million new Fibonacci numbers later—like Mary, Windham lived and worked on the Moon—I had the man’s reaction.
“Fiancé, you mean.” His upper lip curled just a bit. “I loved my wife, Remington. And I love Mary. Whatever you may have heard. Despite how difficult she sometimes makes the relationship. I want her to be happy.”
“Not enough to let her come into her inheritance.”
“Her trust’s assets will be wholly in her hands at her next birthday. That’s separate from my disinterest in surrendering to a youngster the reins to the company that I’ve grown tenfold. Regardless, I don’t see how corporate management bears in any way on the whereabouts of a qmind.”
“You don’t approve of their relationship.”
“I don’t see the point of such a relationship. No offense.”
Maybe I did, a little more than I had at the outset. But perhaps that feeling was only the kind of morbid curiosity that led meat minds to slow down the better to gawk at traffic accidents.
“Mr. Windham, what and when was your last contact with Apple?”
This time while photons crawled to and back from the Moon, I calculated updates for actuarial tables and made a long-range weather forecast for the Mekong basin. Watts and hertz may be cheap; they’re not free.
In time, I had Windham’s response. “Apple. Is that what Mary’s qmind friend now calls itself? No matter. You say it disappeared?”
“That’s what Mary calls him.”
As for what Apple called himself, well, that would have entailed a complicated discussion. In my dealing with humans, I was presently in a phase replete with fictional detectives. Before that, I had favored for my personae obscure Greek demigods. Earlier still, well, the progression didn’t matter.
Apple had his own quirks, caprices, and affectations. Apart from Mary, his recent (in human terms) contacts (with humans) had favored classic monsters: vampires, werewolves, and the like.
Because who wouldn’t take kindly to a golem as a prospective son-in-law?
Letting Windham’s subject change pass without comment, I brought him up to date on Apple. “And your last contact with him?”
“Was to wish it good luck, the day the company formally transferred ownership of the server. That is to say, months ago. I’d have to review my calendar to provide you with an exact date.”
“Not exactly welcoming Apple into the family,” I said.
My observation apparently only merited a shrug.
“And what guidance did you give employees in your computing center about Apple?”
“I don’t care for your insinuation.”
Tough, I thought. “Please answer the question.”
For a change of pace, I searched for interesting patterns among the unending digits of the square root of two. That got old, and I switched to studying variations in oxygen-isotope ratios in lakebed sediments across the Pleistocene Epoch.
“The legal and ethical guidance,” Windham eventually answered. “If the qmind asks for help, provide it. Otherwise, leave it alone.”
“And the nudge-nudge, wink-wink subtext?”
Windham’s face turned purple. His nostrils flared. Slow-mo renders such physiological reflexes into marvels to behold. “What possible reason could I have to harm Apple?”
“To stop the wedding. You obviously disapproved.”
“I often disapprove of Mary’s relationships. Whom else do you imagine I’ve done in?”
“I never said Apple had been harmed. You did.”
“You said the qmind has disappeared. As I understand matters, that amounts to the same thing. Regardless, my feelings about qmind/human marriage are irrelevant. I wouldn’t hurt Mary.”
“Maybe you wanted to use the situation to your advantage. A discreet mention of her engagement to a member or two of the board, and Mary would never get their backing for CEO.”
“Which is it?” Windham asked. “Do you believe I’d stoop to using Mary’s engagement against her—probably poisoning our relationship forever? Or do you believe I’d be complicit in Apple’s disappearance, to stop that engagement? Because with Apple out of the picture, there could be no engagement.”
Which did I believe?
Algorithms are, if not logical, at least consistent. Along with self-awareness and free will come . . .additional behaviors. That didn’t mean I was proud of, or even understood the origins of, my illogic.
“Here’s a scenario,” I countered. “You expected Mary would fall apart if Apple disappeared, that she’d disqualify herself with the board. If so, you’d keep your CEO gig. Win or lose, you’d have stopped the wedding.”
“Or she’d hold it together and I’d be a murderer without a job,” Windham said. “In the process, I’d have destroyed forever an already strained relationship with Mary and betrayed the memory of my wife. Quite the strategy you’d have me follow. Can you truly believe that?”
Truly? No.
I had a possible suspect with two contradictory motives—but nothing to suggest he had acted on either. Perhaps that was because I had no evidence yet of a crime. “If you think of anything else,” I said, “you have my e-dress.”
Breaking the connection, I mulled over other possibilities.
* * *
I didn’t often report back to Mary. Part of me thought little of it, surprised mostly that my detective phase had yet to run its course, that I had not moved on to other, different challenges.
How ironic, then, that I found myself anticipating her frequent drop-bys to check in with me. I told myself it was because I didn’t want to keep disappointing her. Because I still knew nothing beyond what she herself had told me. Sam Spade, Sherlock Holmes, Remington Steele, and a dozen more besides—
Though I could conjure up the appearance of Harry Dresden as easily as any other detective, I could not, well, conjure.
Between Mary’s calls, I found myself brooding that I had lost her trust. That I didn’t deserve her trust. That unlike Apple, I had managed to sustain a topic with her. For longer than a day, even.
Wondering all the while why her trust and her opinion should even matter.
She was back, again wearing silk. Her signature style, I had concluded.
“Are you any closer to him, Sherlock?” she always asked.
As Holmes, I simulated the facial expression I had adopted to convey You know where he is. Gone. The actual words remained too harsh.
And as usual, defying my lack of encouragement, she shook her head. “I know Apple is out there. I still feel him. Never more so than when I know you’re helping me.”
After following the network traces of Apple’s many interests, speaking with dozens of his human acquaintances, and connecting with more than a hundred qminds who had known him, I felt that ghostly presence, too.
The harbinger of Harry Dresden–like talents? Probably not.
“If something was done to Apple,” I began, “it entailed great skill.”
If anything had been done, it was subtle. So subtle that I could find no hint of it. And likely I wouldn’t. Because the only proof might lie within Apple’s server.
And because if—against all odds—anything of Apple remained inside, and he had even the slimmest prospect of recovery, to break into his server would be fatal.
Would render me his killer.
“So,” I continued, shunting aside my ever-deeper pessimism, “who has the skill? Who has the access? Who could most easily cover his tracks? An expert who worked in that computer center.”
I waited half a minute—for me, ages—for Mary to be forthcoming. Feeling the whole while like a louse. (The insect variety of louse, not the unrelated crustacean variety.)
“Mary,” I finally said, “Brad didn’t help because you might become CEO. Did he?”
She looked down, shook her head. “An ex.” Murmur.
“What’s that?”
“Right before Apple.”
“Whose idea was the break up?”
“Mutual,” she mumbled.
To judge by every human vid ever made and every story ever written, mutual never happened. Setting aside my lack of personal experience, I saw nothing to be gained by candor. “And if Brad aspired to renew the relationship? Or if he carried a grudge about being replaced?”
“Brad wouldn’t harm Apple. He wouldn’t.”
“How can you be sure?”
“I just am,” she said.
Hoping she was right, I promised to find out.
* * *
My kind doesn’t sleep, exactly. We do decouple, from time to time, in whole or in part, from real-time data streams. Temporarily divert more of our attention to the assimilation and indexing of recently acquired knowledge. Take chunks of our memory offline to defrag random impressions into a more coherent, more efficient whole. Revisit old data from new perspectives. For all that anyone could explain about quantum computing, perhaps we even reach across infinite parallel universes for fresh insights.
Why not call it dreaming?
Increasingly, I dreamt of Mary. Stupid dreams, really. She and I were never going to run toward one another across a meadow speckled with daisies. Not anywhere, much less on the Moon, where, as bounding leaps revealed, this dream unfolded.
But maybe we could compare notes on Ming porcelains . . . ?
* * *
“I know what you did.”
I said that assuming it was Brad who had answered on the second ring. No full-view, multi-perspective, 3-D imaging here, as in Mary’s office: all I saw were fingers gripping a phone. But whoever clutched the device, whoever’s grasp muffled its microphone, the recurrent jolts to its accelerometer revealed him (?) bounding from wherever the call had been taken.
Geological time later, after the faintly heard squeak of hinges, the hand came off the phone’s lens. I saw: a soft, round face; over-gelled dark hair with a widow’s peak; droopy mustache; puppy-dog brown eyes. He held the phone up close, showing him from the (bare) shoulders up.
I’d been all through Interplanetary Food’s personnel records. Without doubt, this was Brad Duggan.
And over his left shoulder: the door behind him, in his haste not quite latched, had begun to drift.
“It’s the middle of sleep shift,” Brad whispered. (Not night for him. Not in Tycho City, where the sun would remain in the sky for another week.) “Who is this?”
I can be noir and Victorian and twenty-second century—and a dozen other things—all at once. That was the beauty and the curse of parallel processing.
“I know what you did,” I repeated.
As neither the veiled threat nor the gruff persona impressed him, I chose to forego any further Mike Hammer-esque intimidation. From 384 thousand kilometers away—distance that light speed rendered undisguisable—threatening to break fingers till Brad came clean was hardly compelling.
“Uh huh,” he said. “Good for you. Are we done?”
“Mary Millikan.”
He swallowed. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Not really. I’ve done nothing wrong.”
From behind the door, still mostly closed, came a soft, sleepy voice: “Where’d you go? Come to bed.”
“In a minute,” he called back.
“Pretty clever,” I said, “seeming to help Mary.”
“You . . .you don’t have to say anything.”
An admission? “Murder is a lot to overlook,” I said.
He blinked. “Murder? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Hon?”
“In a minute, I said.” Brad sidled farther from the door. “What murder?”
“Mary’s qmind friend. Because you gave her a little info—never mind whether any of it’s true—she can’t imagine your involvement. But I can.”
Could I have better rattled him absent the round-trip delay times? We’ll never know. I spent the next few seconds wondering whether Brad was among the relationships of which Windham disapproved.
I know I would have.
“Do you seriously believe I enjoyed discussing that situation with Mary? It’s not like I wanted to marry the Count, but he did live in my data center. We talked from time to time. VR gamed on occasion. Sleep shifts can be dull, you know?”
Count Dracula, that had to be. It fit with Kong, Godzilla, Wolfman, Pennywise, and a dozen other variations on a theme that I had encountered.
“But you’re right,” Brad continued, “I soft-pedaled the magnitude of the power and comm surges at the end. Each was more tsunami than spike. It all just struck me as, well . . .violent. No matter how I euphemized, it still amounted to me telling Mary her fiancé committed suicide. Yeah, I knew about their engagement.
“So you got me, whoever you are. I overlooked a few company security protocols, shared a bit more info than I should, even let her into the comp center to be near the server. That’s the kind of thing friends do.”
To a qmind, every human gesture and mannerism proceeds in slo-mo. If I hadn’t picked up on a verbal hesitation, I could hardly have missed the sudden furtive side-to-side darting of his gaze.
Murder had merely surprised him. Friends had triggered the shiftiness reflex.
As he spoke, the bedroom door continued its leisurely swing. I saw rumpled clothing on the floor. A nightstand with two glasses and a half-empty bottle of cheap bourbon. And a tousle-haired blonde untangling herself from more tousled sheets.
Not Mary. Not clothed. A face that—without its present pout—also made an appearance in the Interplanetary Foods personnel files: the nineteen-year-old intern who had started at the company two weeks before the break up. Mary’s protégée.
So much for mutual.
Despite questions still to ask and digging remaining to do, the situation seemed clear. Rather than to cozy up to a prospective boss or cover his criminal tracks, Brad had given Mary unauthorized computer access out of his personal guilt.
* * *
I had plenty of nothing. Still.
Nada about Brad even hinted at ambition. Not the sty of an apartment or the RFID tags I remotely read in his (cheap) clothes. Not the lackluster performance reviews or the zines to which he subscribed or the network traces of his surfing. Had he been after Mary’s money, breaking things off with the protégée would have been a logical step. Or extortion, on threat of telling the board about Mary’s engagement.
If Brad had a motive to have done anything to Apple, I didn’t see it. As best I could tell, the man was an amiable slacker. Nor was he even the least worthy of Mary’s exes. Having spoken with several, I couldn’t argue with Windham’s dislikes.
As for her stepfather, I didn’t see a motive for him either. Outing the unorthodox relationship ahead of a board vote might have served Windham’s purposes. If word of her loss were to leak out now, Mary might actually benefit from a sympathy factor.
Nor had I discovered a motive for anyone else with whom Apple had known dealings—
Of course, motive presumed a crime. I still had no proof of wrong-doing.
Except, by process of elimination, what looked more and more like suicide.
I already knew how Mary felt about that theory. She had her feeling.
Inchoate, ominous, looming, I had mine . . .
* * *
M-cube.
I emerged from a period of not-quite-dreaming with a not-quite epiphany. Among the many personae Apple had assumed, one name stood out for its absence. I’d not encountered the most famous monster of all.
M-cube.
Oh, I had noticed the omission, considered it curious. But I hadn’t ascribed any significance to it. Ockham’s razor again. Most likely I merely hadn’t happened upon the human with whom Apple had chosen to use that persona.
But while M-cube rattled around my consciousness, the razor seemed awfully dull.
M-cube: Mary Michelle Millikan. Two days out of contact.
The omitted name? A misfit. Last glimpsed trekking alone into a barren and unexplored wasteland. Unloved. Forsaken by his creator. His fate unknown . . .
The identity that surely struck too close to home?
Frankenstein’s monster.
Mary Shelley’s monster.
* * *
I had a theory. I even knew how to prove it.
And if I were mistaken? I would have sliced and diced whatever remained of Apple. To test or not to test? That was the question.
On which I agonized until Mary next came by.
She was as beautiful as ever. As gracious. As fascinating and as maddening. And, after a minute/eon of polite small talk, as determined as ever. “What progress, Sherlock?”
Did I admit to what I suspected? If I did, would she react in awe? Or in horror?
When you have eliminated all which is impossible, Holmes was wont to say, whatever remains, however improbable, must be true.
Begging the question: had I eliminated everything which was impossible?
Begging the question: could I endure never knowing?
“Your timing is good,” I told Mary. “I have one final detail to confirm. It will only take a few seconds.”
And one quantum leap of faith.
Combined with a trick at which even Harry Dresden would balk: conjuring the dead.
Disregarding the warning seal, I probed Apple’s server with keys I calculated from my own security parameters. I prayed that I was mistaken. That nothing would happen.
The barrier fell.
Quantum entanglements broke. Among universes, perhaps, connections vanished. And I discovered, in the detritus littering the breached server: code fragments that would mesh seamlessly with many of my own.
Confirming that which, somehow, I had known all along. That Apple, finding himself in an impossible situation, had cast his fate to the winds.
And that the winds had carried the essence of him to Earth.
“Sherlock,” Mary implored. “Talk to me!”
Summoning the dignity that had eluded me in a former life, telling myself that just this once the Apple had fallen far from the tree, I said, simply, “I’m sorry, Mary. There’s nothing more I can do.
“Apple is gone forever.”
Copyright © 2015 by Edward M. Lerner.