At five o’clock in the morning, Stuart Ramey finally gave up on sleeping, crawled out of bed, and went into the bathroom to shower. He had spent most of the night reading through one article after another, trying to strategize on the best ways to deal with a reactivated Frigg. When he’d finally shut down his iPad and gone to bed, sleep had eluded him.
In researching the subject of robots and ethics, he had stumbled on an article about a Czech company called GoodAI that specialized in teaching artificial intelligences right from wrong. Instead of giving their AIs prescribed rules about how they should react in every given situation, they taught them to use their knowledge to infer how they should respond in unfamiliar situations.
When Stu read those words, the hair literally stood up on the back of his neck. That’s what Owen Hansen had done all on his own, with a playbook that could have been called BadAI rather than GoodAI. Owen had taught his AI all kinds of lessons, but instead of instructing her in how to be responsible or honorable, he had taught her to be devious and self-serving. And Frigg had been smart enough that, when faced with looming disaster, she had weighed the options and chosen to save herself.
That was what had kept Stuart Ramey tossing and turning for the rest of the night—the realization that Owen Hansen had been an inarguable genius as well as a profoundly troubled one. Yes, he’d been a serial killer, and yes, Stu had been the one who had sparked Owen’s suicidal leap off Mingus Mountain. That night, though, sitting alone in his Burbank hotel room, what Stu regretted more than anything was never having had a chance to sit down with Owen Hansen. He wished he could have talked to the man and gained some insights into the workings of what was clearly a magnificent mind, one whose crowning achievement was the creation of Frigg.
Rather than talking to the man and learning from him, what had Stu done instead? He had done everything in his power to destroy them both—creator and creation. He had succeeded with the former, and justifiably so, but not with the latter.
Stu knew that the hotel’s breakfast room opened at six. At five to, he tapped on Cami’s door on his way past. “See you at breakfast,” he told her when she cracked it open. “I want to get an early start.”
By a quarter to seven, they were in their rented truck and lumbering north toward Santa Barbara. “You look like hell,” Cami said. “Did you sleep at all?”
“No.”
“You can’t keep blaming yourself.”
“I’m sorry Owen Hansen is dead.”
“Of course you’re sorry he’s dead, but he was evil, Stu, really and truly evil.”
“And smart,” Stu said.
“Right, really smart and truly evil,” Cami agreed, “and being godlike to the end, he created Frigg in his own image.”
Stu fell silent then, huddling against the passenger door of the rumbling truck. Eventually, exhaustion took over and he slept. Much later he woke with a start and discovered they were off the freeway and moving through a residential area. The voice in the GPS was saying, “In five hundred feet turn right on Via Vistosa. Your destination will be ahead and on the right.”
As the truck turned in to the tree-lined entrance Stu caught his first glimpse of the house. It was a mansion, all right—a white stucco three-story edifice, complete with a red-tiled roof and surrounded by manicured lawns and lush gardens. They arrived at the front entrance too soon for Stuart to have worked himself into a cold sweat. As the U-Haul grumbled to a stop, an oversized door swung open and a tiny white-haired woman came out onto a colonnaded front porch and waved at them.
“I’ll do this,” Stu said to Cami.
He shoved open the passenger door and clambered stiffly down to the ground. When he turned around the woman had stepped off the porch and was making her way toward him, tripping daintily along a flagstone walkway in a pair of very high heels. It was a little past nine o’clock in the morning, but this elfin woman—so thin she resembled a sparrow—was decked out in a bright red knit suit topped by a single string of pearls. She looked as though she was fully prepared to dash off to church at any moment or else to some fancy country club luncheon.
“Are you Stuart?” she asked.
“Yes, I am,” he mumbled. Suddenly tongue-tied, Stu was unable to summon the words he had carefully schooled himself to say. Not so much as a single syllable of “sorry for your loss” escaped his lips.
“I’m Irene,” she said, seemingly unperturbed by his silence. “I’m so glad you’re here early. Tell your driver to go past the garage at the end of the house. There’s a drive off to the right that leads around to the back and down to the basement. That’s how Owen always took his deliveries—at the back. It’ll make it easier for loading. I’ve left the slider open so you can let yourselves in and out, and I’ve asked the cook to put together a little buffet. I wouldn’t want you people to starve to death.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Stu managed at last. “Thank you. We’ll go around back.”
With that, he retreated to the truck, climbed back inside, and pulled the door shut behind him.
Cami had been talking on the phone. Now she pulled the phone away from her ear and stared at him. “You’re white as a sheet!” she declared. “What happened? What did she say to you?”
Stu shrugged. “That she’s glad we’re early; that she’s had her cook put together a little buffet for us; and that we’re supposed to drive around the end of the house and take the drive to the right that leads to the basement entrance around back.”
“Did she say anything to you about Owen?”
Stuart shook his head. “Not a word,” he muttered. “Not a single word.”
Cami returned to her call. “Did you hear that, Lance? When you get here, drive around the end of the house. We’ll be doing the load-out through a slider at the back.”
“Are you all right?” Cami asked Stu once she ended the call.
“I think so,” he said. “Irene Hansen just wasn’t anything like what I expected.”
At the back of the house, the drive led to what amounted to a mini loading dock. Before Cami set about positioning the back of the truck in front of the dock, Stu let himself out of the truck and walked into the house through the unlocked slider, aware as he did so that he was entering Owen Hansen’s private domain.
Stu had expected palatial digs. As a consequence, the stark simplicity of what he found there surprised him. The space was designed into an open-concept arrangement with a master bedroom–style sleeping area—bed, closet, and bath—on one side and a combination kitchenette/bar on the other. The flooring was high-gloss hardwood; the walls were painted a muted dove gray. In the center of the room stood two pieces of furniture—a highly polished antique library table and a decidedly modern ergonomic rolling desk chair. On top of the table sat a computer, one Stu instantly recognized as an early-model Apple Macintosh. On the far side of the table a long black leather sofa faced a wall covered with six forty-two-inch monitors. That way, someone seated either at the computer or on the sofa would have an unobstructed view of whatever was displayed on the screens.
Stu was somewhat confused. Wasn’t this basement supposed to be full of computers? Where were they? And then, in the wall at the far end of the monitors, he spotted a nearly invisible swinging door. He walked over to it, pushed it open, and found himself in almost total darkness. After groping blindly along the wall, he finally located a light switch.
Stu was well aware of the working conditions for Bitcoin miners toiling away in what had once been abandoned industrial parks in China’s Sichuan province, where the presence of cheap electricity and cheap labor had made blockchain technology the only growth industry around. People there worked under terrible conditions in tumbledown buildings that looked like little more than grimy, metal-sided chicken coops. Cooling was provided by walls of exhaust fans and lighting came from bare bulbs on wires that dangled from the ceiling. As for the blades? They were usually perched on metal shelving that looked as though it was strung together with baling wire.
But that was there—in China. In Santa Barbara, California, Stu could only stand and stare at what he was seeing. He had felt the same way two years earlier when he had first set foot inside Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral. That incredible achievement had been due to the efforts of countless laborers, toiling over hundreds of years. What he saw now, in all its simple elegance, was the product of a single brilliant mind. The racks were open to the air, but not a speck of dust was visible anywhere. Everything was pristinely clean, but then, almost as an afterthought, Stu realized something else—the room was eerily silent. There may have been eight hundred high-end GPUs in the room, but not a single one of them was running.
“I turned them all off,” Irene Hansen said, noiselessly materializing in the open doorway behind Stu and answering a question he had not yet asked. “My son always paid his own electric bill,” she continued. “After he died, when that first power bill showed up, it was so high that I almost had a heart attack. I had my yard man come down and unplug everything.”
Stu winced at that. He would have preferred to have each blade powered down individually to keep from corrupting the data. Then again, if Frigg had already disbursed all the files, maybe powering down properly wasn’t that big a deal.
“Owen never liked me much,” Irene added as an afterthought, entering the soundless room and running her finger along the dust-free surface of one the racks. “He liked his machines better.”
Still unable to speak, Stuart Ramey nodded in reply.
“He always blamed me for his father’s death,” Irene continued. “Owen was convinced that it was my fault that his father committed suicide.”
And then, without any warning, she flung herself at Stuart and fell weeping against his chest. Irene Hansen needed someone to lean on right then. It didn’t matter to her that the person she chose for her leaning happened to be the one who had contributed the most to bringing her son’s murderous crime spree to an end. No, that didn’t bother her in the least.
All his life, Stuart Ramey had recoiled from any kind of human contact. For a long time, he stood frozen with both hands raised in the air, as if they were strange appendages belonging to someone else, and he was uncertain about how to use them. At last he lowered his arms. He wrapped them around Irene’s tiny heaving shoulders and held her close.
That was the first thing an astonished Cami Lee saw when she entered the computer lab through the open slider—Stuart standing there holding a grieving Irene Hansen against his massive chest and gently rocking her back and forth.
“It was the most amazing thing,” Cami would tell Ali much later. “You just had to be there.”