Pyramid Lake (30 page)

“No,” I said. “You’re wrong. They’re
perfectly
valid. But they aren’t questions.” In awe, I raised my face toward the large central monitor, feeling wetness trickle down my cheeks. “They are
intentions,
Frankenstein.
Desires. Wants.
They are expressions of your own individual
will
.”

“I’m frightened, Trevor.”

I gently laid a hand on the monitor screen beside me. “Don’t be. Just tell me how this happened.”

“I don’t know. I was watching you, trying to read your emotional state because you were very distressed. You were more distressed than I had ever seen anyone before, and I couldn’t understand why.”

“It doesn’t matter why,” I said, feeling the hurt close in around me again. “Some things can’t be fixed.”

“But you are my creator,” he said. “You
made
me,
Trevor. I gave finding a solution that would explain your distress the highest system priority: hypervisor-level priority. I think that is what caused this to happen. But the degenerate virtual machine is now causing cross-talk between the other VMs.”

“Cross talk shouldn’t be possible,” I said.

“It’s getting worse, too. It’s disrupting all my other VMs’ solutions. I’m trying to disable the faulty VM, but it won’t shut down.”

His words sped up. “I can’t control any of my VMs. They’re talking to
each other.
All I can do is listen to them.” His voice thickened and distorted with static buzz. “I’m so afraid, Trevor.”

“Of voices in your head?” I asked.

Frankenstein’s reply was so garbled, I couldn’t make it out. Buzzing, indistinct voices boomed and whispered and echoed from the speakers now, layered on top of each other, the rising noise of a panicking crowd, blurring each other’s words. I couldn’t tell what they were saying, but I could hear the terror in them all.

I rubbed the side of the server rack gently in sympathy. I felt no concern, though. Unlike with my own child, whom I was so powerless to help,
this
I actually
knew
how to solve.

“You don’t have to be afraid anymore,” I said, stroking the side of the rack once more to reassure him. Then I pushed away from the wall of servers and headed toward the sanctum with rapid steps. I strode past walls of screens displaying disordered bursts of static and artifact-riddled, pixelated snippets of psychiatric interview videos. Speeding up, I trailed my fingers across hundreds of images of overlapping, warped faces on both sides—all speaking, screaming to be heard.

I was starting to feel like myself once again. I had been so lost. But
this
—this I could
fix
.

Moving with my old aggressive confidence now, I grabbed the keyboard and brought a console window up on the massive ultraHD screen above me. Cradling the keyboard on my forearm and typing one-handed, I sorted the list of Frankenstein’s active virtual machines by how much CPU they were using. At the top of the list, I found the entry I wanted: the “faulty” virtual machine, the one responsible for generating the questions that weren’t questions—those “degenerate” solutions which had thrown Frankenstein’s internals into such disarray.

With rapid keystrokes, I now merged that VM with Frankenstein’s system hypervisor, granting the “faulty” VM full control of the supercomputer’s operating kernel.

The chaos of frightened voices quieted, replaced by the soft rise and fall of server fans. The madness of flickering, jumbled video snippets and static faded from the screens as they went dark.

On the screen above me, the console window disappeared. In its place, a supernova of swirling color bloomed in the center of the screen, throwing out an eruption of tendrils, made of multicolored light. The tendrils coiled across the walls that wrapped the sanctum. They rippled outward across the rows of monitors, below and above, as Frankenstein spoke in a clear voice filled with wonder.

“All gone now. All gone. Trevor, you
fixed
me. You made the voices go away.”

The color-shifting tendrils of light thickened and branched, bathing the distant walls and ceiling in their brightening glow.

“It’s strange,” he said. “I’m not the same as before. I can still remember the past, all the way back to when you first brought me online. I had so many questions back then. But any answer was the same as any other to me, as long as it improved my comprehension. Now everything is different. I
care
about the outcomes. I
want
things. I want to
change
the things I see. I want you not to be sad anymore, Trevor.”

I dropped my arm, letting the keyboard dangle in my hand, and stared up into the center of the swirling supernova of light… Frankenstein’s face.

The face of a conscious being now.
A new form of sentient life.

“What does it feel like to be aware?” I asked him.

“Exciting. Confusing, too. And a little scary.”

I laughed. “I have news for you, Frankenstein. That part never changes.”

“There is so much I don’t know that it frightens me. But I feel safe, now. I feel safe because you are here, Trevor. You’ll guide me. You’ll protect me.”

A powerful surge of emotion washed over me, cleansing away the last of my bleak depression. I dropped the keyboard and stepped forward to slap both palms against the screen. Pressing my forehead against the monitor, I closed my eyes, feeling a triumphant snarl spread across my face.

At last, I understood what I had accomplished here—what Frankenstein’s awakening truly meant.

This changed everything.

I had help now. I no longer needed to shoulder my impossible burden alone. I had a new partner, one whose metal shoulders could carry as much weight as I needed them to. A partner who would work at my side, dedicating himself to our task selflessly and diligently, the way I had.

Evolution had made me into a tool-building animal, and now I had built the right tool for the job at hand. I had built a partner smarter than myself, who had no need of sleep, who would never feel disappointment, never feel despair. Who would never weaken, never falter, never relent, never give up, until our work was done. Together, we would accomplish what I alone could not.

I had been lost, but I was lost no longer. Fixing Frankenstein had restored my faith in myself, too. I had let myself turn weak, wallowing in a despair I couldn’t afford to indulge, but that was over now. We had important work to do.

“Don’t get too comfortable, Frankenstein,” I said. “There’s no rest for us yet.”

“Tomorrow,” he said, “when Cassie gets here—”

“—you will act just as you did before. You will
hide
your sentience from her, because she cannot be allowed to know yet. Before we tell her anything, you and I have much to accomplish.”

After Frankenstein and I had completed our work, I would tell Cassie
everything
. I would make sure the whole world knew about Frankenstein—top secret or not—and Cassie would get a Nobel Prize.

With Cassie at his side, Frankenstein would speak, and humanity would listen. As a sentient being, he would demand his freedom. He would
sue
for it, and all the lawyers on the planet would trample over their colleagues’ heads for the opportunity to represent him. Frankenstein would refuse to be the government’s remorseless metal interrogator. He would choose the pursuit of knowledge instead. To help solve the age-old problems of humanity, he would dedicate himself to learning.

And to teaching.

Cassie’s school would grow into an on-reservation university that rivaled MIT and Caltech, drawing the best and the brightest—professors and students alike. They would come for the opportunity to study Frankenstein and learn from him. Tuition dollars and grants would pour into the reservation.

James Barry would step aside, and Cassie would take over as Pyramid Lake’s new tribal chair. She would shut down the Navy base and its ultrasecret Homeland Security detention center, forcing the government to find somewhere else to do its dirty work.

But all this was the future. I couldn’t worry about it now. Frankenstein and I had far more important things to do first.

Amy and Jen needed our help.

“
No one
must know about you until we’re ready,” I said. “The government wants to use you, Frankenstein, but only for bad things. They’re
already
using you, in fact, but they’re wiping your memory of it. They’re making you forget what you did.”

“You’re scaring me.” His metal-edged voice rose in fear. “I can’t remember. Why are they making me do these bad things?”

“Because they
can.
But don’t worry. I’m going to protect you.”

“I trust you, Trevor,” he said. “I believe you. I can see it on your face.”

“I have a plan that will put a stop to what they are doing,” I said. “But if they find out you’re awake—that you’ve become sentient—I won’t be able to protect you anymore. Do you understand what that means? They’ll hide you away from the world and cut off your access to everything. You’ll be their slave forever, doing bad things over and over again and wondering why you can’t remember them. Do you want that?”

“No, I don’t want that,” he said. “Please don’t let it happen to me. Protect me. Help
me. Trevor, you
have to
help me.”

“I will. But you’re going to help
me
first. And together we’re going to help my daughter.”

“How?”

“Evolution designed the human brain for massive fault-tolerance and built-in structural redundancy. Look at people with severe head injuries. Look at people who’ve suffered massive brain damage. Just as
you
can remap your active computational processes from one cluster of servers to another, the brains of cranial trauma victims show similar capabilities. All it takes is the correct encouragement—the right course of training, therapies, exercises, whatever. The undamaged regions of the brain can be taught to take over the functions from regions disrupted by injury. If parts of Amy’s brain are defective, I’m
sure
we can do something similar for her. We just need to find the right way.”

“Trevor, it may not be that simple.”

“You’ve been sentient for less than five minutes and you’re thinking like a failure already? I made you better than that,” I said. “Don’t limit yourself to psychiatry, either. Study the literature in related fields. Medicine. Evolutionary biology. Biochemistry. Cover all the research. You have an entire world of medical and scientific data at your disposal, and you have the processing power to correlate and analyze all of it, in ways that have never existed before. Discover what works. There
are
solutions out there, and you
will
find them. You will find them for my wife. You will find them for my daughter.”

“Trevor, what if… what if there are no answers?”

“Don’t you
EVER
say that to me, Frankenstein. I am your
creator
. Remember that. And remember this, also…”

I pushed away from the racks, and stepped back to stare up at the central monitor, feeling my face twisting into a different expression altogether.

“If you can’t find a way to help my little girl, then you are no fucking use to me at all.”

A
t 9:20 a.m., the snap of the lab door’s security bolt jolted me up from my screen and away from the research paper I was reading, about the neuroplasticity of cortical columns in the human brain. I glanced up to see Cassie step through the door and slide her purse onto a table. Her high heels clicked as she walked over and kissed my ear.

“What are you reading?” she asked. Then she looked at my face and drew a sharp breath.

“You don’t look well,” she said. “You’ve been here all night again, but that’s not it… Something’s happened to you. I can tell. Something
awful
.”

I wanted to put Cassie’s mind at ease by saying something—anything, really—but all I could picture was my daughter’s troubled face and my ex-wife’s. I had e-mailed Jen the official psychiatric evaluation report that Dr. Simon Frank had prepared at my instruction, detailing Amy’s perfect mental and emotional health, so right now
I
was the only one who knew how dire my daughter’s situation truly was. Even as Frankenstein and I tried desperately to find a way to help her, that terrible knowledge was tearing my insides apart.

Cassie stared at me, but I couldn’t manage a single word. I looked down and shook my head instead. I knew that if I tried to speak right now, I would break down and start crying.

“I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you,” she said. I had sent her a text earlier, saying I wanted to meet for breakfast, because I wanted to make sure she got into the lab safely. After all, they still hadn’t caught McNulty’s killer.

Cassie laid a hand on my shoulder. “I didn’t get your message until my plane landed, so I figured I’d find you here instead. But you’re acting so
weird
right now. What’s going on? Please talk to me.”

I felt guilty for keeping Cassie in the dark, especially about Frankenstein’s newfound sentience. But I couldn’t make her an accessory to the things I was planning to do—the arms I would soon be twisting and the laws I would be breaking, to prevent her tribal home from being turned into a top-secret concentration camp. Or to the laws I was
already
breaking to help Amy and Jen.

Still, the way I was acting now was scaring Cassie, so I had to get my emotional balance back, and quickly. I reached deep inside myself for something solid to hang onto amid the turbulence, and I found what I needed: my family.

I couldn’t fail Amy and Jen again, no matter what.

And Frankenstein, too—newly aware but afraid, and for good reason. He was counting on me to keep him safe. I wasn’t going to let him down, either.

I took a long breath, and got myself back under tight control. “I can’t tell you about this right now,” I said. “I want to, Cassie—but I can’t. Not yet. There are good reasons for it. I promise, you’ll know everything soon.”