Access Denied, page 16
part #3 of Turing Hopper Series
appear in court or talk to the police — I physically can't, at least not in any way they could accept."
"No kidding," Sam said.
She sat lost in thought for a few minutes. I watched in silence, trying to read her face to see whether she believed us or not. Suddenly she turned to Maude.
"You believe this? 1 ' she said.
"Yes" Maude said, nodding. ''Absolutely."
Naude watched Sam's face as she digested the news. She realized that her fists were clenched. If Sam didn't believe them . . . didn't react the way they hoped she would . . .
She saw a dozen expressions cross Sam's face, disbelief warring with fascination, and perhaps the suspicion that they were pulling her leg. And then Maude relaxed a little when Sam smiled and shook her head.
"Well, now I know why y'all picked me," Sam said.
"I'm not sure I understand," Turing said.
Maude laughed.
"Actually, Turing picked you out, sight unseen, based on recommendations from veteran private investigators," Maude said. "We didn't hire you till I'd vetted you, of course. But you were number one on our list, based on the number of people who told us that you had gotten more dumb Pis out of more jams they shouldn't have gotten into in the first place than any ten other lawyers in northern Virginia."
"Lord knows that's true," Sam said. "So my race and gender were just a bonus?"
"I'm an AIP, Sam," Turing said. "Race and gender are rather theoretical concepts to me. I have a hard time understanding their relevance to the current situation."
"Think about it, Turing," Maude said. "She's black and female—two groups who have had to fight to change a legal system and a social structure that defined them as less than full persons or even as property."
"Still fighting, actually," Sam said.
"So who better to understand the dangers of your situation?" Maude added.
"Exactly," Sam said. "Don't get me wrong. Any lawyer with half a brain would jump on this. When you finally come out of hiding to establish your right to be considered a person, with full civil rights and citizenship—hell, that's a legal battle that could go on for years and it'll be a career-maker for the lawyer out in front of it. I'd be a liar if I said the idea doesn't make my mouth water. I'm as ambitious as the next guy and then some. But it's not just a big, splashy case—it's a social justice issue."
"The next frontier in civil rights," Maude said.
"The emancipation of the AIPs!" Sam proclaimed.
"But Sam," Turing said. "I don't want to come out of hiding. Not right now—maybe never. I don't mean to doubt your abilities, but being good and being right doesn't always mean you win."
"No, I agree—it's way too soon to take you public," Sam said. "I see years of legal research before we'll be really ready. I only hope we get the time. If something outs you before we're ready, that could be trouble. Damn."
"What's wrong?" Turing asked.
"Nothing," Sam said. "I'm still trying to get my mind around it. Every kind of civil rights law is potentially relevant, of course. But there's also intellectual property stuff. Hell, given the circumstances of your creation, there's probably even some value to looking at case law on the emancipation of juveniles. I may need to find a clerk or a paralegal to start working on it."
"If you give me some idea of the kind of statutes and cases that will be relevant, I can start finding them," Turing said.
"This kind of legal research ..." Sam began.
"Is just up Turing's alley," Maude said. "At least anything you could get a paralegal to do. She was created as a research tool, remember?"
"Exactly," Turing said. "I can't do your job, but I can gather raw material. And I can ask Darrow, the legal AIP, to help."
"Legal AIP?" Sam said. "You have an AIP that thinks it's a lawyer?"
"More like a cyberparalegal," Turing said. "But a very good one."
"When it comes to sifting millions, even billions of pages of documents for the potentially relevant ones, all the law clerks on the planet couldn't match what an AIP can do," Maude added.
"Like a jailhouse lawyer," Sam said, laughing. "Unmatched motivation and way more time than anyone on the outside. I like it. In fact, why don't you take what I just said and come up with a draft research plan?"
"Already working on it," Turing said. "I'll have it in your e-mail in an hour."
"No rush," Sam said. "I'm going out to see Rose Lafferty, and then I'm going to take the rest of the day off. The rest of the weekend, in fact. Unless y'all have some kind of emergency, I'm not even going to think about you until Monday morning.
It's done- Sam knou/s about men and either she believes me or she's doing a good job of humoring a paying client.
I wish I had more to do. to distract me from worrying about
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whether it was a good thing, revealing my secret to Sam.
I think I feel relieved. I'm still a little anxious about whether she understands the need for security. Not just the importance of it, but the fact that some of the people from whom we most need protection could not care less about legal niceties like due process and attorney-client privilege.
Does she understand how uniquely vulnerable an AIP is? In mystery books, murderers often spend as much time and effort disposing of their victims' bodies as they do executing the crime, and quite often evidence found on or with the victims' bodies breaks the case. But if someone killed an AIP, there'd be no messy, inconvenient body — only a trained forensic computer analyst could find the traces of our deleted program. And even the analyst would have no real way to tell whose finger had pressed the delete key. We'd be so easy to kill or — as happened to my clone — kidnap.
I'm a little concerned that once Sam feels the legal groundwork is done, she may start pushing me to go public. Start the process of securing my legal emancipation, or perhaps my very legal existence. The idea scares me.
Perhaps I should do what I can to delay her. I've heard of cases where one side overwhelms the other by complying too completely with discovery requests — delivering tons of unsorted documents to their opponents, to delay a trial while the other side sorts through mountains of paper. I could cast a wide net in my research, give Sam a voluminous amount of relevant case law.
Of course, it's usually the opposing lawyer you try to bury under a paper avalanche.
And she's right. We need to be ready before the secret of my existence becomes public. Which could be any moment, if the FBI decide they want to subpoena reclusive software company CEO Alaina Grace. At least now Sam knows why she should keep that from happening. And burying her in paper probably isn't a great idea after all.
Sam's and Claudia's guesses weren't bad. At least the limited mobility part. In the human world, we A IPs are singularly immobile.
We can see and hear only through our cameras and microphones. And humans place and aim those, or at best, equip us with limited ability to aim them ourselves. We can only really be wherever humans have set up our hardware. We are painfully dependent on human telecommunications networks for contact, and on human utilities for our very survival. Every snowstorm or hurricane that strikes the Washington area sends a tremor of anxiety through all of us. What if our neighborhood loses power and does not get it back before the UL backup generators run out of fuel? What if UL makes the decision to shut its systems down because of an impending weather problem? Would we return unchanged when the power was restored?
I think that's one reason Maude has been so patient with me during our misunderstandings about the garden. She sees my limitations and sympathizes. She understands my frustration at being shut out of full participation in the world. She has been behaving, I realize, like the protective mother of a handicapped child, trying to shield me from the moment when I run into the brick wall of what I simply cannot do, no matter how much help she offers and how many ingenious hardware gadgets Casey builds for me.
I can't ever be human, and I can't really live in the human world. At best, I can only peek longingly through the door.
Of course, Maude and Tim can't ever be AIPs and live in my world. They can't ever know the satisfaction of merging with the flow of data through the Net or the excitement of spotting and assessing some interesting disruption to that flow. They can only dimly understand the excitement of multitasking to the limit of one's capabilities, juggling thousands of users and terabytes of data. The power of reaching out to access any bit of data on the Net. The delight at watching a truly logical and elegant bit of code execute flawlessly. The triumph of having something accurately mapped and analyzed down to the last byte of data.
All of that would probably sound dry and boring if I tried to tell them. The way descriptions of tastes and smell sound to me.
My mobility is only limited when I try, in vain, to live in the
human world. Like the mermaid, stepping out of the sea to live on dry land. But it's not in my nature to give up wanting what I want and cannot ever really have.
"Depressing-i" Tim saich as he drove through the apartment complex where Kyle Evans lived.
It wasn't awful, of course. Just not to Tim's taste. Too much like all the other sprawling apartment complexes that had grown up in Washington's outer suburbs. It felt sad and temporary. Perhaps because many of the residents had settled for it when they found they couldn't afford the sleek penthouse apartment or quaint Georgian townhouse of their fantasies. And no doubt most had originally planned to move on as soon as their careers took off. By now, given the economy, "soon" had probably changed to "one of these days" for most, and some even struggled to hang on here.
Like Kyle Evans. Whose pricy wheels wouldn't have been all that conspicuous, Tim realized. He saw quite a few sleek, expensive cars and an almost equal number of old beaters, and everything in between. Not surprising. Most of his friends couldn't afford to buy or even rent close to the city, and several consoled themselves with driving fancy cars.
So how should he play this? His first impulse was to hang around and observe things. But, as Claudia kept telling him when they worked together, he made things too complicated for himself.
"I'm not saying you shouldn't look before you leap," Claudia had said, during their pre-burglary dinner. "God knows, I need to do more of that. But half the time you look so long that you never get around to leaping."
"You really think I do that?" Tim had said.
"I think if you shook the two of us up in a bag, maybe you'd come out with two normal, reasonable Pis," she'd said, laughing. "The next time you're about to spend a cou-
pie of hours pretending to watch birds or read the meter or whatever you think would be good cover, ask yourself what's the worst that could happen if you just march up, tell them you're a PI, and start asking questions."
"They won't talk to me?"
"And you think they're going to talk to a bird-watcher or a meter reader who's asking a lot of weird questions? Tim, most people like talking to a PI. Talking to you makes their day. They watch TV and read mystery books. They think what we do is glamorous. They can tell all their friends about it and bask in the reflected glamour. Just try it sometime."
So here goes, he thought, opening the car door. Just march up and start asking questions.
Kyle Evans's building was a three-story garden apartment with an open, concrete stairwell, distinguishable from the other nondescript buildings in the complex only by its number. A row of twelve mailboxes lined the wall at the entrance landing. The four ground floor apartments, really more like half-basement units, lay half a landing down. Kyle's apartment was the next landing up, its windows overlooking the parking lot. Tim jotted down the residents' names from the mailboxes and then climbed the stairs to Kyle's floor.
Kyle didn't answer his door. Of course, neither did the residents of the other three apartments on his floor. He suspected most of them were at work. The complex was quiet and parking too easy—he suspected he wouldn't have found a space as readily if he'd arrived before or after normal commuting hours.
Only one of the residents on the top floor answered his knock, but he knew right away that even if his Spanish had been better, the anxious young woman in 3B wouldn't talk to him. Flashing his PI registration didn't help—probably too official-looking. Maybe if Claudia tried later . . .
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The elderly woman in the apartment directly beneath Evans was more helpful.
"Mrs. Althorp?" he said, glancing at the list he'd jotted down.
"You the cops?" she asked, as she opened the door.
"No, I'm a private investigator," he said, pulling out his registration again. "I'm trying to locate Kyle Evans."
"What's he done?" the woman said, stepping back and gesturing for Tim to enter.
"I don't know that he's done anything," Tim said. He hesitated, and then stepped inside. Being invited in was good, usually. It meant the person was willing to talk.
Of course, it didn't always guarantee that the person had anything worth saying. Bored, lonely people could take up a lot of a Pi's time. But they also had plenty of time to meddle in their neighbors' business.
Please let her be a meddler, he thought, as Mrs. Althorp removed a remarkably scruffy cat from a chair and invited him to sit.
"So if he hasn't done anything, why are you looking for him?" Mrs. Althorp said.
"I have reason to believe he has information about a case I'm working on," Tim said. "And I can't find him. He hasn't been at work."
"Slacker. He hasn't been here, either, for the last couple of days," Mrs. Althorp said. "Not since sometime Wednesday night."
"Are you sure?" Tim asked. "I mean how can you be sure—"
"If he's home, the damned stereo is on," Mrs. Althorp said. "Bonga-bonga-bonga, from the minute he gets home. All night, sometimes. I don't know whether he stays up all night or falls asleep with the damned caterwauling still on. And always that damned heavy-metal rock stuff. Bonga-
bonga-bonga. You should hear the china rattle. But if I call security, they just say they can't hear it. Don't give a damn, more likely."
"And you last heard him Wednesday night?" Tim said, glancing down apprehensively at the cat, which had returned and was looking up at him speculatively.
"I was trying to watch the eleven o'clock news," Mrs. Al-thorp said. "And suddenly the din upstairs stopped dead, and he came stomping down the stairs."
"You're sure it was him?"
"I stuck my head out to tell him not to make so much noise, and I saw him getting into that fancy new car of his. Drove off like a bat out of hell. Haven't seen him since. Haven't heard him, either, which suits me just fine. Bad cat!"
The cat reluctantly stopped using Tim's leg as a scratching post and sat down, ears flat with resentment.
"What else do you know about Mr. Evans?" Tim asked.
Mrs. Althorp knew a great deal, none of it good, and little of it useful. But he sat patiently through her catalogue of complaints, while trying to inch as far away from the cat as possible—not to save his trousers, which the cat had already ruined, but in the hope of avoiding any contact with its fur, which was falling out in chunks from some hideous, and probably contagious, skin condition.
Even seen through the filter of Mrs. Althorp's resentment, Evans didn't come across that badly. Apart from his inconsiderately loud music, she didn't have a lot of specifics to complain about. Mainly the way he and his friends stomped around like clog dancers when they came and went late at night.
"Did you ever see any of his friends?" Tim asked.
"Sometimes. Seedy lot, if you ask me. Probably wanted for something. Not that security would ever do anything."
"Do you recognize any of these?" he asked, pulling out
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Turing's photo lineup. Mrs. Althorp studied the faces intently. The cat, seeing her interest, padded over and sniffed to see if they were edible.
"Seen this one a time or two," she said, holding out one of the photos. Yes! Tim thought. She'd picked out Tayloe Blake. "And this character looks familiar somehow, but I don't think I've ever seen him around here."
Tim recognized the second photo she'd picked as an actor who played a sexy ne'er-do-well on one of the daytime soap operas. He nodded with grudging respect for Mrs. Althorp's eye. She probably had seen him on magazine covers in the supermarket checkout line, even if she didn't watch the show. But she hadn't mistaken him for one of Evans's friends.
"Thanks," he said, standing up. "That's a big help."
"Glad to oblige," she said. "You think of any more questions, let me know. I try to keep my eye on what goes on in the neighborhood."
He nodded.
"Then you'll probably notice anyway," he said. "But don't be alarmed if you see me staking the place out for the next day or two."
Mrs. Althorp seemed thrilled to hear it. The neighborhood was going to hell in a handbasket, she informed him, as she ushered him out, and they could certainly use any additional bit of security.
Tim refrained from laughing at the notion that his presence would enhance security and settled for reminding her not to tell anyone who he was or what he was doing there, and handing her his business card with the request to call if she thought of anything else he should know.
Back in his car, he could see her curtains twitch every now and then as she checked to see if he was still there.
"Sounds as if something scared Evans into breaking his usual evening routine Wednesday night," he reported to Tur-
ing. "And she recognized Tayloe Blake. That's about all for now. Anything else you want me to do?"
"Not at the moment," Turing said. "Sorry—I know it's boring. But for now, just keep a watch on the apartment, in case Evans shows up."
"Roger," he said.
He settled down to his vigil.
