Shelter (31 page)

    And you've been waiting ever since, Meredith thought grimly. What could have happened to him? "Okay," she said. "I'll let you know in hear anything, okay? If I hear from him I'll have him call you."

    "Same here. Thanks, Meredith."

    "Sure," Merry said, and hung up, and immediately called Dan back. No, Raji hadn't been in the lab that night, according to the building's security records. He hadn't been there since the previous afternoon.

    Which meant he'd evidently fallen into a black hole somewhere between Zephyr's dorm and the lab. Or had changed his mind and gone somewhere else. Where? Where could he have gone?

    The Temple, Meredith thought, with a sudden surge of relief. Maybe he was so upset about the dinner that he went to the Temple to meditate. Maybe he's crashing in the novitiate dorm. Maybe he suddenly realized that he loves me and he went there to think things out. She knew, rationally, that Raji would never have gone there, that he hadn't set foot in the place since his year's service had ended, that he didn't even stay in touch with Matt or Gwyn or any of the others, for all his apparent devotion when he'd been there. The fantasy nonetheless filled her with a deep sureness, a blessed sense of peace. She basked in it a moment, her hand still on the phone, and felt the next ring even before she heard it. It would be Raji, she knew it. Raji calling to say he was wrong, that he loved her, that Zephyr was a lunatic. He'd tell her that he'd gone away for a few days to get away from everything and realized that this whole AI business was idiocy, that what mattered was organic life, and that she mattered more than any life he knew. She picked up the phone, ready to sing, ready to laugh for joy, ready to say, "Raji, where have you been?"

    She didn't get a chance to say anything. Before she could even speak, her mother said, "Oh, honey. Oh, Merry, I'm so sorry." Constance was crying.

    "Mom?" Meredith said. "What? Are you—is something—Theo?"

    "No," Constance said. "Honey, Raji's parents just called."

    Her body became ice. As if from a great distance, she heard herself saying, "Is he alive?"

    "They've been told that he is," Constance said. "They don't know anything for sure. They just got the ransom demand two hours ago. Honey, I think you'd better come home."

    Twelve

    IT took Meredith ten minutes, which seemed at once to last forever and to go by in a heartbeat, to throw a week's worth of clothing into a bag. It took her ten more minutes to hike to her car, parked in the distant lot the university reserved for undergraduates. Normally the walk took fifteen to twenty minutes, depending on her pace, but today she walked quickly, almost running, her heart pounding, her head down so that maybe no one would recognize her, no one would stop her. No one did. Thirty minutes after she reached the car, she was home. In the fifty minutes it had taken her to get there, the news had spread all over the Net, all over the TV networks; by now it was surely all over campus, too.

    The clip released by the kidnappers began with a series of still photographs of Raji in the campus AI lab. Raji staring at a monitor, his face lit eerily by the light from the screen; Raji frowning at a printout; Raji kneeling in front of a table on which perched a particularly insectoid bot. His face had been subtly altered to look more angular, crueler: he was recognizably Raji, but a Raji morphed into meanness everywhere but in the kneeling shot, where his face had been given a look of blank reverence instead. Meredith was surprised they hadn't manipulated the image to make him genuflect outright.

    "This rnan," said a woman's voice, beautifully modulated and cool as running water, "is the son of prominent ecoactivists." Shot of Sonia standing on a podium in front of the Sierra-Audubon logo; shot of Ahmed on the cover of Greenpeace Millenium magazine.

    Now there was a photograph of Merry, pale and confused and homely, emerging from isolation. "This woman," the voiceover went on, still in those dispassionate tones, "is the daughter of Preston Walford, the Soul of the Machine." Shot of Preston's face, thirty times life size, on a huge monitor above some teeming city square.

    "The child of the machine," said the voice, "has seduced the child of the earth." Shots of Merry and Raji together now, a lot of shots: the two of them sitting on a bench in front of the campus art museum, dancing in some anonymous, crowded room, eating in a cafeteria, walking, drinking coffee, carrying books. In all of the photographs Raji was gazing adoringly at Meredith; in all of the photographs Meredith—grown subtly more curved than she had ever been in real life—replied with a salacious grin. Now there was a montage of fuzzy, grainy photographs, designed to look as if they had been taken through windows: Raji and Merry in bed, doing things artfully left to the viewer's imagination.

    It was all digital manipulation. None of it had ever happened, not even the innocent images. Meredith had only been on campus for a month, and she hadn't spent nearly that much time alone with Raji.

    "The machine," said the voiceover, "has already murdered the planet." Quick montage of shots now: landfills, strip mining, smokestacks belching filth, someone's hand crushed between gears, a flash of bare skin and spread legs on a computer terminal. "Now the empire of the machine wishes to replace the empire of the living." Swarming bots, metallic and menacing, like something out of a horror movie.

    "This thing"—shot of Preston—"has given the University of California at Berkeley five billion dollars so that this man"—shot of Raji—"can develop artificial intelligence, including the so-called organic knowledge project, which encourages machines to design themselves without human intervention. To date, the most common use of AI technology has been in missile guidance and other defense systems, although the Soul of the Machine continues to deny his involvement with such mechanisms." A shot now of a mushroom cloud, of missile silos, of a heap of charred bodies with a radiation symbol superimposed on them. "If AI continues to be perfected, the living will be doomed." Shot of planet Earth, seared by fire, being overrun by swarming bots.

    "We have this man, this traitor to humanity"—Raji—"under protective custody. We will release him only if the empire of the machine refunds that five billion dollars to the living and ceases all work on artificial intelligence, including complete destruction of the laboratory housing the organic knowledge project." Shot of the AI Project building.

    "These demands must be met in forty-eight hours." Shot of Earth overrun with bots again, but this time Raji's features were imposed on the planet's. "If the machine is not stopped, the planet will die." The clip faded into a logo of a boot stamping on a bot, with the phrase HUMAN ALLIANCE in garish red capitals below it.

    The clip was everywhere: slick, sinister, emotionally manipulative, profoundly illogical. Never mind that Raji was an undergraduate, not even a grad student, let alone a MacroCorp employee. Never mind that the organic knowledge project's greatest triumph to date had been producing an AI that thought it was a goldfish, or that very few bots were equipped with anything but the simplest, most rudimentary form of AI. Never mind that anyone who'd ever seen Merry in person knew that she'd never had those curves; never mind that she and Raji hadn't been lovers for three years. Never mind that no one had ever produced solid evidence linking MacroCorp to the military. Whatever else one could say about the Luddite fringe, it was certainly adept at using technology efficiently for its own ends.

    Meredith had already seen the footage five times, on two different channels and three different servers, by the time the cops came to question her. Both of the cops were women; both squeezed her hand when they shook it, and both treated her very gently. The shorter one did most of the talking, and the first thing she said was, "You mustn't blame yourself for this."

    It was the first thing Constance had said when Meredith got home. Jack and Preston had been repeating it at regular intervals ever since. Theo was upstairs, taking a nap.

    "Raji's not my boyfriend," she said, as Constance waved them into the dining room, murmuring something about coffee, tea, maybe some homemade scones? Merry realized with a shock that there were no bots in the house, not even Theo's beloved toys. Where were the bots?

    The short cop said, "It's not your fault, Meredith."

    They were all sitting down now. She was sipping mint tea and the tall cop was eating a scone. She couldn't remember sitting down. She couldn't remember her mother, or anyone else, bringing the tea and the scone to the table. Jack sat across the room. Where was her mother? Her mother was upstairs, checking on Theo, even though the baby monitor on the table next to Merry hadn't made a sound. Preston, looking anguished—more digital manipulation—watched from a nearby monitor. "He's not even my boyfriend, and he's not the head of the AI Project, he just works there, he's just a stupid lab tech, and MacroCorp funded that project two years before Raji even enrolled!"

    "We know," the short cop said patiently. "It doesn't matter."

    "It matters to them!" The mug slipped from her hands, fell on the table, rolled toward the edge, where someone's hand—her mother's, her mother must be standing behind her, yes, she could hear Constance's murmuring voice again—caught it.

    "Theo?" Jack said.

    "He's still asleep. He's okay."

    ''I'll go in when he wakes up, Connie. You stay with Merry."

    Her mother's hands were digging into her shoulders. What did that remind her of? The doctor's office. Dr. Honoli's office, a million years ago. "It matters to them," Meredith said again. It was terribly important for her to remember where she was and what was happening, and she couldn't seem to manage it for more that; a minute at a time. "They snatched Raji because they thought I'd—I'd brainwashed him or something! They snatched him to get at MacroCorp's money because they couldn't snatch me, because my blood's been doctored. And none of it's true!"

    The taller cop sighed. "They snatched him because they could twist the facts into a story, Meredith." There was a towel now, in front of her, wiping up the tea. Her mother's hand was pushing the towel. Her mother's hands weren't on her shoulders anymore. When had they left? "I doubt they believe any of it themselves. It's propaganda. The connection with you was gravy for them because it made the propaganda more powerful, that's all."

    Her arm hurt; she realized dimly that the spilling tea had burned it. "Powerful? It's a pack of lies. How can anybody believe any of that stuff? They're crazy!"

    "They're extremists, yes. Terrorists always are. But they'd have found some way to demand the dismantling of the AI Project even if Raji had never met you."

    She swallowed. She was shaking; she'd been shaking since the call from Raji's supervisor, eons ago. She wondered if she'd ever stop. She saw with merciless clarity that she would never be able to be friends with anyone again; and then, with heightened fear, she remembered Matt, Gwyn, Anna, and Johann and Fergus, and Harold. None of them was safe. Only Hortense was safe, because Hortense was already dead, having taken her last breath peacefully, during her sleep, six months before. No one who had ever been friends with Meredith, no one who was still alive, was safe. "Where is he? Do you know where he is?"

    "No. And we won't be able to find out by the deadline."

    He doesn't have special blood, she thought numbly. That's why they took him in the first place. "So what are you going to do?"

    The cops both sighed now, in unison. "We are going to save Raji's life," said another voice, and she realized that it was coming from the monitor, that it was Preston who had spoken. "We are going to do what the terrorists have asked. Weare going to demolish the AI lab building, and we are going to divert the MacroCorp research grant to whatever account the terrorists specify."

    "Right," Jack said grimly. "We're going to give them their fucking five billion on international monetary microchip at their fucking drop point by their fucking deadline. And we're going to hope they're stupid enough to get caught in the process, except that they probably won't be, because that only happens in the movies. And in the meantime we're going to slap a ton of security on anybody connected with the AI Project or Raji or you, Merry, which I suppose is what we should have done to begin with." Meredith blinked, and realized that Jack was shaking almost as badly as she was.

    "Which is why we're here," the short cop said. "To get a list of names from you, Meredith. Names of people who might also be at risk."

    She shook her head, wondering if Zephyr, for all her soulfreak rhetoric, was really a Lud in disguise. "You—don't want to know who might be connected with them?"

    "Yes, of course," the tall cop said gently. "That too. But it's the same list. It will be easier for you to give us the list if you're protecting people than if you're naming them as suspects, right? But for our purposes, it's the same thing."

    Meredith closed her eyes, and the images from the vid clip rose unbidden, as if they had been waiting there all along. She and Raji, walking arm in arm on campus; she and Raji on a bench, her head resting on his shoulder. She and Raji wrestling in near darkness, lit only by a candle.

    How she wished that all of it had really happened.

    Traitor to humanity, they had called Raji. What had Meredith herself betrayed? Seeing the montage that so eerily replicated her own desires made her feel unclean, violated, as if the Human Alliance had strip-mined the inside of her skull. "Is he safe?"

    "We don't know," the short cop said, very gently indeed. "Of course they want us to believe he is, will be, as long as we accede to their demands. They sent us and his parents clips of him, standard kidnapping stuff, please save me, please go along with what they want, et cetera. But that stuff could be faked, just like the media clip was. Raji's parents aren't convinced by any of it. We won't know, can't know, for sure until the drop."