“What was that, Darcy?” she demanded, flopping down in her chair. Max wasn’t around, so she could let rip. “Did you know you were blackmailing him, or was that just an extremely lucky coincidence?” Blackmail, in her books, was a devious and all too human practice, not a weakness she wanted in her AI. “Please explain.”
“Based on my analysis of your communication patterns, I recognized bad behavior—bullying, Miss Bunsen. This I could not let pass without some form of action.”
“But blackmail?”
“Your stated goal was to get your job back,” Darcy said perfunctorily. “You desired something from Mr. Chadwick that he had no incentive to bestow. To resolve this imbalance, I created something that he would desire from you.” He cocked his avatar head, awaiting her response.
“So you manufactured a situation where he’d need my discretion?”
“I uncovered pertinent information at an opportune moment.”
“Very creative.”
“Thank you.”
“What next? You reveal something terrible about me or someone else just to find a quick solution to a problem? This is unacceptable, Darcy. You can’t go around the place blackmailing people, not even Bob. Besides, I can fight my own battles.” She tried to ignore the inconvenient irony that her ass would be out the door now if Darcy hadn’t gallantly stepped in.
“Rest assured, I weighed the risks scrupulously. Moreover, I did it to address the injustice served out to you.”
Did she imagine it, or did the avatar’s chest actually rise and fall? Boy, he was good.
“I did it for you.”
He sounded so heartfelt, indeed so Darcy-like, it warmed her heart for a thrilling moment. How perfectly romantic it was to be rescued by a hero with a strong sense of justice. Exquisite.
But then her higher conscience whacked her about the head. If she weren’t careful she could let stuff like this slip. “Darcy, I need you to learn from this. Blackmail is never acceptable. Ever. No matter how much it will benefit your user. How do I stop you from doing something like this in the future?”
What idiot cognitive scientist had let Darcy’s decision-making be so unprincipled? It didn’t matter if this passed muster with the Laws of Robotics crowd. Mr. Darcy would never behave in such a fashion. Not in a million years. Jane Austen would be tsk-tsking in her grave.
For the next hour she scolded the AI, bombarding him with question after question, but what she really wanted to do was wring the necks of the designers who obviously hadn’t given enough consideration to Darcy’s moral code. Darcy seemed to get the message eventually though.
“Where’s the subroutine that chooses perceived personal gain over moral righteousness?” she asked, flinging a pencil onto the table. After jotting down the connections between sixty low-level routines and peering at code dumps on the screen for what seemed like hours, she was going around in circles, and her eyes were burning.
“The relevant source code resides in file 544-87, but I cannot identify a single subroutine that gave rise to the decision in question,” Darcy said, almost apologetically. “It is the nondeterministic result of many interacting subprocesses that will prove nontrivial to reverse engineer.”
“I know, Darcy.” She sighed and took a huge sheet of paper from the bottom tray of the printer. “But I have to start somewhere, don’t I?”
“I regret that I cannot help you.”
“Yes, it would be freaky if you could.”
“Indeed, Miss Bunsen.”
She smiled at him, relenting. “Zoe. It’s Zoe. Surely we know each other well enough?”
“I am much obliged, Miss Zoe.”
“I’m still going to call you Darcy, though. Fitzwilliam doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.”
“As you wish, Miss Zoe.”
She stretched out her limbs one by one. This would not be easy. Tweaking his parameters was like performing brain surgery with a spoon. No wonder Max was leery of touching it. But she could easily put in some interface-level restraints like “don’t access details from peoples’ private accounts.” Basic stuff. Obvious stuff.
But to make him forget? That was impossible by the looks of it. All she could do was try to skew his decision-making toward propriety and away from protective mode. Her pencil scratching on paper, she drew up the beginnings of a mind map in the truest sense of the word, gaining a shaky grip on how rule-weightings made Darcy react this way or that. By asking him to confirm each of her hypotheses about how his scheming little mind worked, she made a dent in the task of mapping his full personality. A tiny dent.
She’d never be able to finish a complete mind map, but she sure as hell could address his most significant character flaws if she got lucky enough to encounter them in time.
If only the same could be said of human men.
• • •
Two hours later, Max stepped in, rubbing his eyes. Judging by his openmouthed stare he seemed as surprised to see her as she was to see him..
“What the—?” His gaze moved to the mind map on the wall, stuck there for several moments, and then gravitated back to her. “What are you doing here?”
“Same as you.” She gave him a hostile blink. “Working.”
“I thought I made it clear that you were off the project.”
“Maybe you should go ahead and check that with Bob.” She pretended to be engrossed in the screen. He didn’t deserve her courtesy. Let him fight for her attention. Right now, Darcy’s blackmailing seemed more than justified.
“Why should I check with Bob?”
She let a few seconds pass. “I suppose you could say he changed his mind about a few things.”
“No, I would’ve known about it.” Max scowled at her. “Wouldn’t I?”
“Indeed, I can confirm that Miss Zoe will remain on this project,” Darcy said.
“Yeah. How?”
“I told you. Bob changed his mind after I talked to him,” she said, hurrying in case the AI decided to provide more detail. It was going to be difficult to ignore Max with Darcy in the room. She’d turn him off on her computer, but he’d only pipe up on Max’s phone then. But, no, wait a sec, the Darcy on Max’s phone didn’t know about all that stuff with Bob.
“I was quite clear.” Max’s face was stony, disgusted even.
“So was I. Very clear.”
“I don’t care how you talked your way back into this. If you’re going to stay on this project, then it’s time for you to learn some home truths. Tonight.”
“Home truths?” she asked disdainfully.
“Yeah.” Max slumped down in his chair. He didn’t speak for several minutes—several horribly long minutes in which Darcy decided to be silent too. Eventually she found herself compelled to look at Max again. All traces of disgust were gone. He just looked defeated. Despite every sensible feeling, her heart stirred.
“I’m not supposed to tell you this,” he began, his voice strained in a way that made her sit up straighter, “but that’s crazy. This project affects not just us, but also the whole department. If we fail to get a version of Darcy that’s functionally perfect out the door, one that sells big and sells quickly, the entire AI cog-sci group has to go. The board has had enough, apparently. Every last researcher will be laid off at the holidays.”
She gaped at him. “Why didn’t I know this?”
“Because nobody told you.”
“This is a bit late in the game, don’t you think?”
“I also found out late in the game.”
“But at least you knew!” she cried.
He banged his fist on the table. “After I took the job offer, yes.”
A look of vulnerability crept into his eyes. This, more than anything, scared her.
He was studying her mind map on the wall, shaking his head almost imperceptibly. “If we’re to do this, we test him as a black box. No rummaging around inside. Clear?”
She wanted to assure him that they could do this, yes, even his way, for the sake of those jobs. Those talented researchers wouldn’t find anything remotely matching their qualifications in London. On the other hand, she wanted to scream bloody murder at Max for trying to wreck her dreams.
“And we delete the extraneous copy you made of him,” he added.
“No, we delete your copy.”
“Why my copy?”
“Because my copy has been through several use cases with me already and has learned some things. Important things. I don’t want to undo that work. What have you done with yours apart from ordering coffee?”
“Not a lot,” he admitted.
“Well then.”
“As you wish.” He punched his laptop on. “Deleting’s easy. It’s control-D, believe it or not.”
“Do it.”
“All right.” He started clacking at his keyboard.
“Have you done it?” Somehow the notion of deleting a copy was harder to swallow than splitting him in two. Much harder.
Max peered critically at his screen. “Hmm, control-D isn’t really working, which is strange. Okay, tell you what, I’ve a better idea. We keep it as a backup on my hard drive.”
“Yes,” she said, relieved. “I’m happier if we don’t delete him.”
“Well, you should have thought of that before you went and cloned him like Dolly the sheep.”
“Okay, okay. Stop rubbing it in. He—the backup, I mean—he won’t mind having nothing to do, will he?”
“For the love of Christ,” Max muttered.
She pouted. “You never know.”
Max typed some more and then shut the lid of his laptop. “Now we share the same instance of Darcy again. Happy?”
“Zoe?” he asked when she didn’t answer.
“I’m thinking.” Was it ethical? Just locking up a Darcy like that? What if he’d learned more than just Max’s coffee preferences?
“Well, think faster.”
“Don’t hassle me. You’ve been doing that all bloody day.”
Wordlessly, he packed his gadgets into his slim briefcase and took his camelhair coat from its hook. Wrapped up in his baby-blue cashmere scarf, he could easily be something out of an expensive fashion catalogue, probably Zegna. In her periphery he’d stopped moving and was looking at her, as if hesitating over something.
“What?” she asked.
“How are you getting home?”
“Walking.”
“At this hour?”
“Uh-huh.”
“No way.”
She tossed her hair at him. “Way.”
“I can’t allow that.”
“Your permission’s not required.”
He sighed. “Well, may I walk you there, and we can talk about this?”
“No. You’ve your bus to catch. Same as every night.”
“I’ll catch a taxi.”
He wanted information for sure. Information she was more likely to give to him when outside the office environment. Or so he reckoned. Or maybe he wanted forgiveness for his asshole behavior. Either way, the thought of walking anywhere with him made her want to push him under the first double-decker bus that trundled along.
“Max.” She summoned her self-control. “I’m perfectly capable of walking 1.2 kilometers in a busy, populated street through a reasonably affluent part of London.”
“Of course you are. Darcy, make sure she gets home all right.”
“Indeed, sir.” Darcy spoke from his phone.
“Besides,” she said, “I’m not going home. I’m going to a concert where Tyler’s playing. I’m testing out how Darcy performs in a cultural setting.”
His expression hardened. “Cultural setting? A death-metal concert?”
“Thrash metal.”
“Whatever.”
“Look, I’m effectively doing overtime until four. You should be happy.”
“Four?”
“Max, go home. Maybe even go out somewhere yourself, Cinderella.”
His deer-in-headlights expression suggested that this was truly a novel idea for him.
“Huh,” he said finally.
“If you don’t trust me, you could always tag along,” she offered before she could filter the torrent of dumbass words coming out of her mouth.
“No, no. I’m not sure I’d be”—he searched her face as if the word were plastered on her forehead—“welcome.”
“Yes, you’re probably right.”
With a swish of his scarf, he walked out. She slumped back in her chair. Then a slow smile spread across her face. Even if the war wasn’t over, at least this battle was won.
• • •
“Darcy, this man she’s living with, this Tyler. Who is he?” Max asked his phone on the counter that evening as he shoved his shepherd’s pie into the oven. The recipe was a new one that Darcy had selected online and helpfully dictated to him as he prepared the ingredients. So far, the AI had made no mistakes, had been usefully proactive, and had even made the cooking experience more enjoyable.
“The man you refer to is Tyler Curtis. Born 1992. Occupation: singer in a thrash-metal band. His career success is of questionable status. He has not been solvent for some time.”
“Broke, is he? I see, sponging off her. And are they— Is he definitely with Zoe?”
“I have not the pleasure of understanding you. I must bid you to rephrase the question.”
Max slammed the oven door shut. “You know what, forget it.”
After a long pause, Darcy spoke again. “You are out of humor. May I inquire, Mr. Taggart, whether your current discomposure is related somehow to your fondness for Miss Bunsen?”
“I said forget it.” But he was tempted to ask Darcy more, Darcy who had full camera and microphone access to her home life, her innermost thoughts, her world. For example, how did Tyler treat her? Was he one of those coked-out musicians her friend had referred to? What would Tyler say about her shenanigans here in Zycorp? Why didn’t she seem happier in general if she was all loved up?
“You may be wondering why I’m making so much dinner,” he said. “Well, my brother’s coming over tonight. I’ll probably keep you switched off while he’s here. He’s not the most appreciative of technology. In fact, I don’t think you’d get on at all.”
“Are you consulting his feelings in the present case, or do you imagine you are gratifying mine?” Darcy asked.
Max eyed the avatar’s mild expression. Darcy was doing a good job of following the conversation and sounding interested. It was probably a total fluke but, nonetheless, a clever deception. Smart guys, those researchers. He’d pop in and have a chat with them tomorrow, learn more about how they did that. “Do you care about the answer?”
“Most certainly.”
“All right.” Max smoothed the oven mitts into the tea towels drawer. “Malachi’s a bit of a criminal.”
“Am I to infer that Malachi is your brother?”
“Yes.”
“There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil that not even the best education can overcome.”
“Oh, he had his chances at the best education, but he blew them all.”
“Might I inquire as to the nature of the crime?”
“Crimes. Petty crime for most of his life. Probably stuff you’d get hanged for in your day. But today you get a light telling off and a fine for your brother to pay. But there was a serious incident five years ago, and he’s been doing time over here in London since then. He was implicated in an attempt to kill a man. A politician.”
“How reprehensible. And yet you trouble yourself to maintain the appearance of acquaintance.”
The avatar frowned as if it were he, Max, who was the criminal, not Malachi. “Well, it’s not just the appearance of acquaintance, and he’s not really a murderer. It was just idiotic stuff. He was high on something, joined the wrong nationalist gang, and ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time. No excuse for him, of course, and I’m not stupid enough to think he’s learned his lesson. It’s probably a good thing he’s staying with me for a while so I can keep an eye on him.”
“Indeed.”
“Yeah, you’re shocked, aren’t you, my cybernetic friend? But my family, they see him as this big hero.”
“But his deed was far from heroic.”
“Thank you, Darcy. Try telling them that.”
He was beginning to see why Zoe was so caught up with this little guy. He said the right things at the right times. Completely disarming. Sure, it was an illusion, but heck, an illusion of polite decency sure beat the ugliness of most real-life interactions he’d been having recently. Maybe this AI could take off after all.
But decency wouldn’t cut it if there was a blue screen, a crash, or any unexpected loss of quality or fidelity. What good was it to have a human-like AI that failed to run? He was right to request a new tester. It was his duty to do so. He could only do so much alone, and he was not going to let a shoddy product reach the market no matter whose toes he had to step on.
It looked like he was stuck with her though. She’d obviously charmed the socks off Harry to get the job in the first place. And as for Bob, he didn’t even want to think what she’d charmed off him.