Word Puppets Read online

  The corridors had begun filling with the shift change crowd as Rava slipped through the door of the consignment shop. Behind the counter, Paĉjo sat on a stool reading, his bald head gleaming with a faint sheen of sweat as if he’d been running. Tidy ranks of shelves and racks filled the room, each covered with the castoffs of generations, arranged into categories. Long sleeve shirts, paper, pens, cables and a single silver tea service. Every family had brought only what they thought they would need but even with finite resources, fashions changed.

  “Hey, lady!” Paĉjo grinned, wrinkles remapping his face as tucked his reader into his coverall pocket. “What news?”

  “News is the same. And you?” Rava was always relieved he still had useful work and hadn’t hit the recycling point himself.

  He shrugged his shoulders with a laugh. “The same, the same. So you looking for anything specific or browsing?”

  She hefted the AI’s chassis. “I brought Cordelia to look at cables.”

  He hopped off the stool and waddled across the room, beckoning her to follow. “See this row? Every one of these goes to a different machine and every one of them has a proprietary plug. The ones in these four boxes have plugs that fit the ship, but your guess is as good as mine about what kind of plug your AI uses.”

  Rava swallowed. “Thanks, Paĉjo. I’ll browse then.”

  He wiped at his brow. “Ping me if you need anything.”

  Between the towering shelves, Rava set Cordelia’s chassis on the floor. She pulled out the box of cables and sat with it on the floor beside the AI’s silent frame. The cables were bound in bundles, each of which had a fat hexagon on one end. The other ends varied wildly. Some were tiny silver tubes, others were square. One seemed to be an adhesive electrode. She pulled them out and tried them one by one. The third one slotted neatly into the port on Cordelia’s back.

  Rising, she cradled Cordelia’s chassis to her like one of her nieces or nephews. The cable dangled like a tail. She trotted down the aisles to Paĉjo. “You got a hookup here?”

  He lifted his brows in surprise. “For hardwiring? I was wondering what you wanted a cable for.” Hopping off the stool he led her behind the counter of the consignment shop to a wall terminal. “Here you go.”

  Rava set Cordelia’s chassis on the floor, but the cable was a little too short to reach the terminal. Paĉjo solved it by bringing his stool to them. “Pesky things, those cables. Small wonder people stopped using them.”

  “Yeah.” Rava feigned a laugh. “Still, I’ll take this one. Charge it to my account?”

  “Sure.” Paĉjo looked from her to Cordelia and finally seemed to recognize that the AI was dormant. “Well, I’ll leave you to it.”

  When he had walked away, Rava pushed the wake up button. The cameras swiveled to face her as the AI’s eyelids fluttered in a programmed betrayal of her feelings. Her projected face was flushed and her breath seemed quicker. “Ah. Yes, yes, I’m connected now. Give me a moment while I manage the backlog.”

  Rava did not want to wait, not even a moment. She wanted this nightmare to be over and done with and for Cordelia to be connected again by wireless, as she should be. And then she wanted to know what to do about Uncle Georgo.

  Her handy pinged with five different messages. Before she could open them, Cordelia said, “There are four transmitters in storage. I’m sending the storage unit information to your handy.”

  “Thanks.” Rava flicked it open and scanned the message. The others were delayed messages from family members wanting to know what was happening with Cordelia. Wincing, Rava wrote a quick summary of the problem with the transmitter. “Will you broadcast this to the family?”

  Cordelia nodded and, so fast that it might have been an extension of Rava’s own thought, the message went out.

  Bracing herself, Rava checked behind her for Paĉjo. He was far enough away that she had little fear of being overheard and more privacy here than in her own quarters. “Tell me about Uncle Georgo.”

  “What about him?” Cordelia raised her eyebrows and cocked her head to the side with the question.

  Rava gaped. “The dementia? How long have you been covering for him?”

  Cordelia frowned and shook her head slowly. “I’m sorry. I am not sure what you are asking about.”

  Alarm bells went off in Rava’s head. “Did you perform a full sync?”

  “Of course. After being offline all afternoon, it was the first thing I did.” Cordelia’s brows bent together in concern. “Rava, are you all right?”

  Rava could hardly breathe. “Fine. Hey, can you set my handy so it shows the names to go with the numbers?”

  “Done.”

  “Thank you.” Rava snatched the cable from the wall.

  Cordelia gasped as if struck.”What are you doing?”

  “Something has overwritten your memories.”

  “That isn’t possible, dear.”

  “No? Then tell me about the conversation that you and I and Ludoviko had in Uncle Georgo’s apartment.”

  “Well . . . if you plug me in to the system, so I can access long-term memory, I could do that.”

  “This happened less than half an hour ago.”

  Cordelia blinked. “No, it didn’t.”

  “I was there.” Rava lifted Cordelia, hugging the chassis to her chest. “I remember, even if you don’t.”

  Rava trembled as she sat in the family council chambers. Ludoviko lounged in his chair, with apparent comfort, but she could smell the sweat dampening his shirt. The eight aunts and uncles who sat on the council had been quiet through her entire recitation. Only Uncle Georgo’s seat sat empty. Her words dried when she had finished and she waited to hear their reaction.

  Aunt Fajra removed her steepled fingers from her lips. “Two years, you say?”

  “Yes ma’am.” Two years ago, buried in an update, Uncle Georgo had slipped in a program than added a law to Cordelia’s copy of the official shipwide laws. He’d seen the dementia coming and acted to save himself.

  “Cordelia? What do you have to say about this?”

  The AI’s cameras swiveled to face the council. “I do not wish to discredit my wrangler, but I have no records of anything she has told you except the problem with my transmitter. The rest of her statements seem so fanciful I hardly know where to begin.”

  Ludoviko sat forward in his chair, eyes hard. “Would you like Uncle Georgo to respond?”

  The AI’s hesitation was so slight that if Rava hadn’t been watching for it, she would not have seen it. “No, I don’t think that is necessary.”

  “Can you tell us why?” Rava glanced at her aunts and uncles to see if they were noticing the same slow reaction times she was, apparent now as Cordelia adjusted her responses in accordance with the private law to keep Georgo safe.

  “Because until you dropped me, Georgo was a respected member of this council. Everyone here has spoken with him. The evidence is clear enough.”

  Aunt Fajra cleared her throat and pressed a toggle on her handy. The doors to the council room opened and an attendant brought Uncle Georgo in. His stride was erect and only the furtive glances gave him away at first. Then he saw Cordelia and his face turned petulant. “There you are! I couldn’t find you and I looked and looked.”

  Cordelia stilled, became a static image hovering over the writing desk. Rava could almost see the lines of code meeting and conflicting with each other. Keep his secret safe, yes, but how when it was so clearly exposed. Her face turned to Rava, but the cameras stayed fixed on Uncle Georgo. “Well. It seems I am compromised. I have to ask what my wrangler plans to do about it.”

  Rava winced at the title, at the way it stripped their relationship to human and machine. “I have to do a rollback.”

  The cameras now swiveled to face her. “You said you found the code.”

  “I found the code that adds the law that you must protect Uncle Georgo. Not the one that overwrites your memories.” She nodded to her brother. “I had Ludoviko search as well
and he also didn’t find anything definitive. We think it’s modified in multiple places and the only way to be sure we’ve got it out is to rollback to a previous version.”

  “Two years.” Cordelia tossed her head. “Your family will lose two years of memories and records if you do that.”

  “Not if you help us reconcile your versions.” Rava picked at the cuticle of her thumb rather than meet the AI’s gaze.

  Cordelia wavered and again those lines of code, those damnable lines of code fought within her. “What happens to Georgo?”

  “It’s not a family decision.” Aunt Fajra straightened in her chair and looked at where Uncle Georgo stood, crooning by Cordelia. “You know what the laws are.”

  Cordelia’s mouth turned down. “Then I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

  “I think we’ve seen all we need.” Aunt Fajra waved her hand and with unceremonious dispatch, Cordelia and Uncle Georgo were both bundled out of the council chambers. As the door slid shut, Ludoviko cleared his throat and looked at Rava. She nodded to let him go ahead.

  “Okay. Here’s the thing. That Cordelia is a reinstall after we pulled out the code we found. Every time we try to clear her we get pretty much the same answer. We tried lying to her and saying Uncle Georgo was already gone, but she knows us too well, so we don’t know how she’d behave in that scenario. At the moment, she’s insisting she’ll only help if we don’t send Uncle Georgo to the recycler.”

  Shaking his head, Uncle Johano harrumphed. “It’s not a family decision. He should have been sent there the moment we sorted out what had happened. Keeping him like this is a travesty.”

  “And will get worse.” Rava shifted in her chair. “As his dementia progresses, Cordelia will have less and less control over him. We’re concerned about how far her injunction to ‘keep him alive’ will go. That’s why we’ve kept her from reconnecting to her long-term storage or to the ship.”

  “And your solution is to reboot her from a backup, wiping those two years of memory? Including all the birth records during those two years . . . ” Aunt Fajra gathered the other family council members with her gaze. “That will require a consensus from the entire family.”

  “Yes ma’am. We understand that.”

  “Actually. There’s one other option.” Ludoviko stretched out his legs, almost reclining in his chair. “The Grands packed backups of everything. There’s another AI in storage. If we boot it from scratch, it would be able to access the database of memories without the emotional content Cordelia would carry.”

  “What?” Rava’s voice cracked as she spun in her chair to face him. “Why didn’t you say that earlier?”

  “Because it means killing Cordelia.” Ludoviko lifted his head and Rava was surprised to see his eyes glisten with tears. “As her wrangler, you can’t be party to it and I couldn’t chance you letting her know.”

  “But wouldn’t she—No. Of course not.” Since Cordelia didn’t have access to her long-term memory, she would have forgotten the existence of another AI. Rava’s stomach turned. “Did it occur to you that she might change her response if she knew we had that option?”

  “You mean, she might lie to us?” Ludoviko’s voice was surprisingly gentle.

  “But Cordelia isn’t a machine, she’s a person.”

  Ludoviko cocked his head to the side and left Rava feeling like a fool. Of course this reaction was exactly why he thought he was justified in not telling her about the backup AI.

  “You are correct. Cordelia is a person.” Aunt Fajra tapped the handy in front of her. “A dangerous, unbalanced person who can no longer do productive work.”

  “But it’s not her fault.”

  Aunt Fajra looked up from her handy, eyes glistening. “Is Georgo’s dementia his fault?”

  Rava slumped in her seat and shook her head. “What if . . . what if we kept her disconnected from the ship?”

  Ludoviko shook his head. “And what, overwrite the same block of memory? Only remember a week at a time? Nice life you are offering her.”

  “At least she’d get to choose.”

  Cordelia’s cameras swiveled to face Rava as the door slid open. “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  Rava nodded. “I’m sorry.”

  The AI appeared to sigh, coded mannerisms to express grief expressing themselves in her projection. Her face and cameras turned away from Rava. “And me? When do you roll me back to the earlier version?”

  Rava sank into the seat by Cordelia’s chassis. The words she needed to say filled her throat, almost choking her. “They . . . I can offer you two choices. There’s another AI in the hold, the family voted to replace you.” She dug her fingernails into the raw skin around the cuticle of her thumb. “I can either shut you down or let you remain active, but unconnected.”

  “You mean without backup memory.”

  Rava nodded.

  Under the whirring of fans, she imagined she could hear code ticking forward as Cordelia processed thoughts faster than any human could. “For want of a nail . . . ”

  “Sorry?”

  “It’s a proverb. ‘For want of a nail—’ ” Cordelia broke off. Her eyes shifted up and to the left, as she searched for information that was not there. “I don’t remember the rest of it, but I suspect that’s ironic.” Hiccuping sobs of laughter broke out of her.

  Rava stood, hand outstretched as if she could comfort the AI in some way but the image that showed such torment was only a hologram. She could only bear witness.

  The laughter stopped as suddenly as it had began. “Shut me off.” Cordelia’s image vanished and the cameras went limp.

  Breathing shallowly to keep her own sobs at bay, Rava pulled the key from her pocket. The flat plastic card had holes punched in it and metallic lines tracing across the surface in a combination of physical and electronic codes.

  Counting through the steps of the procedure, Rava systematically shut down the systems that made Cordelia live.

  One. Insert the key.

  She had known what Cordelia would choose. What else could she have chosen? Really. The slow etching away of self, with pieces written and over-written.

  Two. Fingerprint verification.

  Uncle Georgo had chosen to stay, though, and Cordelia might have followed his lead.

  Three. Confirm shut down.

  If only Rava hadn’t dropped the chassis—but then it would have come out eventually.

  Four. Reconfirm shut down.

  She stared at the last screen. For want of a nail . . . Tomorrow she would visit the consignment shop and get some paper and a pen.

  Confirm shutdown.

  And then, with those, she would write her own memories of Cordelia.

  The Shocking Affair of the Dutch Steamship Friesland

  I was born Rosa Carlotta Silvana Grisanti, but in the mid-eighties, I legally changed my name to Eve. As you have guessed in your letter, after the shocking affair of the Dutch steamship Friesland, my dear friends Dr. Watson and Mr. Sherlock Holmes suggested that my safest course of action would be to distance myself from my family.

  But I get ahead of my story; I have not Dr. Watson’s gift for explaining Mr. Holmes’s methods, and I fear your wish that I relay the particulars of this strange case may be met with inadequate measures.

  On the twelfth of October, 1887, I was being taken by the steamship Friesland from our home on the Venetian isle of Murano to Africa; there to meet my betrothed, Hans Boerwinkle, a man several years my senior with whom my father had very recently made arrangements. Living as we do now, in the nineteen-twenties, it is difficult to remember what a sheltered life we girls led forty years ago, but at the time it seemed natural that my brother, Orazio Rinaldo Paride Grisanti, escorted me as chaperone. With us also was my lady’s maid, Anita.

  In addition to my trousseau, we had several boxes packed with the finest Murano crystal as part of my dowry. My father had blown glass without cessation after my betrothal was announced. I remember Zia Giulia asking, “What is the hu
rry?” At the time, I was only anxious to be an adult, which was all that marriage meant to me.

  I can still recall my excitement at dinner the first evening as glittering ladies and gentlemen, in full evening dress, caught me in a dazzle of delight. Orazio and I were seated at a table with two British gentlemen and a couple from Hungary; at the captain’s table sat Signore Agostino Depretis, the prime minister of Italy, with his new bride, Signora Michela Depretis. As I anticipated my own wedding and honeymoon, I envied the young woman and the way all eyes sought her.

  But I should not dwell on my youthful fancies. The two British gentlemen, as you might have surmised, introduced themselves as Mr. Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

  Mr. Holmes delighted me by having an excellent command of Italian, and asked us endless questions about glassblowing. While we bantered, Signore and Signora Comazzolo, the Comazzoli were a rival glassblowing family who also sailed on the Friesland, sent a bottle of expensive champagne to the bridal couple.

  My brother’s eyes narrowed, then laying his hand upon my arm, he said in Italian, “Would you send them a gift as well, though it means parting with a small item from your dowry?”

  “Papa will send me more.” I smiled at him. “I shall write a note myself.

  Orazio gestured to Anita and gave her hurried instructions. In moments she returned with a small box containing a matched pair of opalescent champagne flutes ornamented by delicate tracings of crystal. I quickly penned the note that you have in your possession.

  A foolish note, from a foolish girl, but—how was I to know what was to follow? Before the ink was dry, my brother snatched the note and fairly sprinted across the dining room. Bowing at the captain’s table, he presented the box of flutes to Primo Ministro Depretis and his bride. She laughed prettily, and kissed him on both cheeks to thank him.

  I do not boast when I say the artistry of these flutes was without peer. My father was a brilliant glassblower; no other studio knew the secret of his opalescent glass, and of its shifting colours that bent light into translucent rainbows.