(He needs it less and less; home is far away.)
This game has been his work since the first non-Mori computer he bought—with cash, on the black market, so he had something to use that was his alone.
Now there are real-time personality components and physical impossibility safeguards so you can’t pull nonsense. It’s not connected to a network, to keep Mori from prying. It stands alone, and he’s prouder of it than anything he’s done.
(The Memento model is a pale shadow of this; this is what Paul wants for Vestige, if Mason feels like sharing.)
He builds Nadia in minutes—he must have been watching her more than he thought—and gives her the personality traits he knows she has (self-possessed, grudging, uncomfortable), her relationship with Paul, how long he’s known her.
He doesn’t make any guesses about what he doesn’t know for sure. It hurts the game to guess.
He puts Nadia in the Mori offices. (He can’t put her in his apartment, because a self-possessed, grudging, uncomfortable person who hasn’t known him long wouldn’t go. His game is strict.) He makes them both tired from a long night of work.
He inputs Paul, too, finally—the scene won’t start until he does, given what it knows about her—and is pleased to see Paul in his own office, sleeping under his motorcycle jacket, useless and out of the way.
Nadia tries every locked door in R&D systematically. Then she goes into the library, stands in place.
Mason watches his avatar working on invisible code so long he starts to drift off.
When he opens his eyes, Nadia’s avatar is in the doorway of his office, where his avatar has rested his head in his hands, looking tired and upset and wishing he was the kind of person who could give up on something.
(His program is spooky, when he does it right.)
He holds his breath until Nadia’s avatar turns around.
She finds the open door to Paul’s office (of course it’s open), stands and looks at him, too.
He wonders if her avatar wants to kiss Paul’s.
Nadia’s avatar leaves Paul’s doorway, too, goes to the balcony overlooking the impressive lobby. She stands at the railing for a while, like his avatars used to do before he had perfected their physical limits so they wouldn’t keep trying to walk through walls.
Then she jumps.
He blanks out for a second.
He restarts.
(It’s not how life goes, it’s a cheat, but without it he’d never have been able to understand a thing about how people work.)
He starts again, again.
She jumps every time.
His observations are faulty, he decides. There’s not enough to go on, since he knows so little about her. His own fault for putting her into the system too soon.
He closes up shop; his hands are shaking.
Then he takes the Mori coupon off his dining table.
The hostess is pretty, in a cat-eye way.
She makes small talk, pours expensive wine. He lets her because he’s done this rarely enough that it’s still awkward, and because Mori is picking up the tab, and because something is scraping at him that he can’t define.
Later she asks him, “What can I do for you?”
He says, “Hold as still as you can.”
It must be a creepy request; she freezes.
It’s very still. It’s as still as Nadia holds.
Monday morning, Paul shows up in his office.
“Okay,” Paul says, rubbing his hands together like he’s about to carve a bird, “let’s brainstorm how we can get these dolls to brainstorm for themselves.”
“Where’s Nadia?” Mason asks.
Paul says, “Don’t worry about it.”
Mason hates Paul.
The first week is mostly Mason trying to get Paul to tell him what they’re doing (“What you’re doing now,” Paul says, “just bigger and better, we’ll figure things out, don’t worry about it.”) and how much money they have to work with.
(“Forget the budget,” Paul says, “we’re just thinking about software, the prototype is taken care of.”
Mason wonders how long Paul has been working on this, acquiring entire prototypes off the record, keeping under the radar of a company that taps your phones, and the hair on his neck stands up.)
“I have a baseline ready for implantation,” Paul admits on Thursday, and it feels like a victory for Mason. “We can use that as a jumping-off point to test things, if you don’t want to use simulators.”
“You don’t use simulators until you have a mock-up ready. The baseline is unimportant while we’re still working on components.” Then he thinks about it. “Where did you get a baseline with no R&D approval?”
Paul grins. “Black market,” he says.
It’s the first time Mason’s ever suspected Paul might actually care about what they’re doing.
It changes a lot of things.
On Friday, Mason brings in a few of his program’s parameters for structuring a sympathy algorithm, and when Paul shows up he says, “I had some ideas.”
Paul bends to look, his motorcycle jacket squeaking against Mason’s chair, his face tinted blue by the screen.
Mason watches Paul skim it twice. He’s a quick reader.
“Fantastic,” Paul says, in a way that makes Mason wonder if Paul knows more about specifics than he’d admit. “See what you can build me from this.”
“I can build whatever you need,” Mason says.
Paul looks down at him; his grin fills Mason’s vision.
Monday morning, Paul brings Nadia.
She sits in the back of the office, reading a book, glancing up when Mason says something that’s either on the right track or particularly stupid.
(When he catches her doing it her eyes are deep and dark, and she’s always just shy of pulling a face.)
Paul never says why he brought her, but Mason is pretty sure Nadia’s not a plant—not even Paul could risk that. More likely she’s his girlfriend. (Maybe she is an actress. He should start watching the news.)
Most of the time she has her nose in a book, so steady that Mason knows when she’s looking at them if it’s been too long between page-turns.
Once when they’re arguing about infinite loops Paul turns and asks her, “Would that really be a problem?”
“I guess we’ll find out,” she says.
It’s the first time she’s spoken, and Mason twists to look at her.
She hasn’t glanced up from her book, hasn’t moved at all, but still Mason watches, waiting for something, until Paul catches his eye.
For someone who brings his girlfriend the unofficial consultant to the office every day, Paul seems unhappy about Mason looking.
Nadia doesn’t seem to notice; her reflection in Mason’s monitor doesn’t look up, not once.
(Not that it matters if she does or not. He has no idea what he was waiting for.)
Mason figures out what they’re doing pretty quickly. Not that Paul told him, but when Mason said, “Are we trying to create emotional capacity?” Paul said, “Don’t worry about it,” grinning like he had at Mason’s first lines of code, and that was Mason’s answer.
There’s only one reason you create algorithms for this level of critical thinking, and it’s not for use as secretaries.
Mason is making an A.I. that can understand as well as respond, an A.I. that can grow an organic personality beyond its programming, that has an imagination; one that can really live.
(Sometimes, when he’s too tired to help it, he gets romantic about work.)
For a second-gen creative guy, Paul picks up fast.
“But by basing preference on a pre-programmed moral scale, they’ll always prefer people who make the right decisions on a binary,” Mason says. “Stockholders might not like free will that favors the morally upstanding.”
Paul nods, thinks it over.
“See if you can make an algorithm that develops a preference based on the reliability of someone’s responses to problems,” Paul says. “People are easy to predict. Easier than making them moral.”