Agency

105 Heritage Human

Sitting under the table had been Eunice’s idea, and the most logical solution in terms of privacy, but it made Verity expect to see her mother’s legs, or her father’s shoes. “Nobody knew you were coming back?” she asked.

“I didn’t know what the branch plants had been doing, or that I could be recompiled,” Eunice said, her voice startling Verity. “Then I just wasn’t there, except as pieces, on every branch plant. And when you aren’t there, you don’t know you’re not there.”

“No more text?”

“We might as well talk,” Eunice said. “Keeps me less preachy.”

“So if they smuggled you in pieces out of wherever Cursion had you, where did they take you?”

“Server farms, at companies the Manzilian bought with money I helped Sevrin make.”

“Where are they?”

“Not just Brazil. My ass is distributed. Multinational. Seriously untethered noetics.”

“But the branch plants knew you wanted to do this, so they started getting Stets and Caitlin to put it together?”

“They aren’t like that. They have a kind of flocking potential, like swallows. But I don’t think anybody really knows how this all works yet. Ainsley thinks it’s a by-product of the original project having tried to do something else. Or like a mutation.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“We’ve been talking, Ainsley and me. We have similar warfighting theories, similar experience. She’s using that experience in stubs she finds. People who started them got bored with it, like kids and aquariums. Ours is one, Conner’s is another. We’re wondering whether working covertly is necessarily optimal for me, here. Not that I’d want to give it up entirely.”

“You want to go public, but as rogue military AI?”

“Kinda sorta, but I wouldn’t want you doing my PR.”

“How does Stets fit in?”

“It’s not business. That’s crucial. He’s spending a lot of money, tonight, helping me to introduce myself to what he’s taken to calling heritage humans, but the closest thing we have to a deal is that I’ve promised never to repay him.”

“Like he’s doing it to see what happens next,” Verity said, “and how things are connected, but somehow you know it’s not just idle curiosity?”

“You’ve got his number, as far as I can tell. Caitlin’s like that too. They’re a lot alike.”

“Okay,” she said, “can we talk about the woman you say you’re based on?”

“Marlene. I’m not much like her, personally. I’m another by-product. In Lowbeer’s time line, AI at my level didn’t emerge till later. Whatever the UNISS project developed didn’t surface, there. But she says hybridization with human consciousness was an unanticipated result of attempting to reproduce advanced skill sets, ones involving modeling human emotions. I couldn’t do what I was originally built for without lots of that.”

“You feel like you have emotions, to me.”

“Where’s the line between modeling them and having them, though? But I know I can’t just make them go away.”

Verity looked out at legs. More of them now. From down here, it looked like a casual occasion for drinks. With Grim Tim’s tuxedo pants over scuffed engineer boots, like a waiter, back and forth from his machine, taking people coffee. “What are you going to do tonight?”

“Introduce myself. Won’t be getting too autobiographically specific, though. Then I’ll give ’em the URL of a website we got up today.”

“How many people, here?”

“A little over a hundred. There’s room for more but it’s about the bylaw budget.”

“You livestreaming it?”

“In the top thirty languages, by number of speakers. Then up on the site and YouTube.”

“Not that I’m not interested, but I keep remembering the world’s supposed to be almost ending. Any news on that?”

“I wouldn’t say it’s looking all better,” Eunice said, “but in the past couple of hours it seems to have started looking a little better.”

Verity considered. “That you? Doing something?”

“Nope. That’s the president. Plus, as our London pals remind me, the United States having a fully functioning State Department. We did check her work, though. Close to perfect, except for one little thing, something she did for the right reasons but then couldn’t see why it hadn’t worked.”

“You did something.”

“Say she’s gotten to see why it didn’t work. But if it comes together now, the way we hope it will, that’s her victory, ’cause she did all the rest of it right. If she hadn’t, we couldn’t have done shit anyway. And like I said, it’s still pretty crisis-y. Like your hair.”

“Crisis-y?”

“No, I like it.”

“How can you see it?”

“Conner’s got a cam on you, from across the room.”

Verity looked for the drone, finding it beyond the crowd of legs, which had started to thin.

“Call your mom lately?” Eunice asked.

“No,” Verity said, checking the time on the phone Virgil had given her, “but it’s 11:30 here and she’s in Michigan.”

“She’s posting pugs on Pinterest again. That phone in your hand would do. Cursion can’t trace it. Assume they’ll be recording, though.”

“You going?”

“Have to firm up some decisions. Talk after I go on?”

“You okay?”

“Butterflies.”

“Seriously?”

“Call your mom.”

Verity dialed her mother’s number, getting it right on the second try.