Bump Time Origin Page 13

  She had the thought that Duffy’s predilection for children made him a monster, so his death moved the universe closer to harmony. Then she felt like a monster herself for dismissing his passing so easily.

  “Are you all right?” asked Diesel.

  “It’s like I’ve entered a dream. It’s all so surreal.”

  “Tell me about it. When I compare this to my life just days ago, my head spins.”

  “I think I kill myself in the T-box.”

  “Come again?”

  Lilah stood, walked to the device, and stared at it. “Twenty-Six, Thirty-Nine, and Forty all warned me off. You did, too. Why would that make sense? Then I realize that the brothers know the future. I must kill myself, and everyone’s trying to stop me.”

  She turned to him with a hand to her lips. “I wonder how old I am when I do it.”

  “Whoa, this is nuts.” Diesel went to her and put an arm around her. “That won’t ever happen. You’re worrying about nonsense.”

  “I’m not nuts. It happens. I can tell.”

  “If your fear is that you do it to yourself, a way to prevent that is to not do it.”

  “I know. That’s what I don’t get.” She walked in a daze to the connecting door and passed through to her side of the basement. “There are bagels and coffee on the table. I’m going up to my apartment.”

  * * *

  Diesel watched Lilah leave the room, wondering how she’d reached such a bizarre conclusion. But if she believed that she was destined to die in the T-box, he understood why she wanted to be alone. Then he remembered she had the only phone.

  “Wait!” he called, too late to stop her. Staring at the doorway, he sorted his options.

  There’s no way he could leave Thirty-Nine and Forty out there exposed. Real brothers would never do that to each other. Shaking his head, he passed through the connecting door.

  His eyes fell on the mound of laundry piled on the floor next to the clean clothes on the shelves. A pile that size meant a lot of brothers had visited Lilah, way more than he’d met. “Don’t forget to hire Bunny,” he reminded himself as he made for the stairs up to the main level.

  “Lilah?” he called as he climbed, warning her of his presence. The layout of her main level looked much like his, only hers was sparsely furnished and dusty from lack of use.

  He took a moment to check out the rooms in case Bump Analytics needed expansion space. Then he started up the stairs to her apartment, calling her name louder as he climbed. “Lilah, are you there?” He reached the landing and tapped on her door. She opened it immediately.

  “Sorry, I know you want to be alone but I need to be near your phone.”

  She walked back into the apartment, leaving the door open. He watched her for a moment, then followed.

  “I feel like I’ve been diagnosed with cancer or something,” she said with her back to him. “Now the clock is ticking.”

  Her apartment had a layout similar to his, only with feminine décor. She sat in an overstuffed chair in her living area and stared into the middle of the room.

  “You’re jumping to conclusions.” He sat on the couch near her chair. “If we knew you were going to hurt yourself in the future, you can bet we’d do everything possible to make sure it didn’t happen. That’s probably what all their comments were about.”

  “You think so?”

  “Of course. When they get back, we’ll ask them and clear this up once and for all.”

  She shook her head. “They can’t talk about the future.”

  “If they won’t say, I go to that Big Meeting in a few weeks, and I’ll find out there. I’ll tell you whatever I learn.” He nodded. “I enjoy sharing with you.”

  “You do? You don’t mind telling me your secrets?”

  “I adore telling you my secrets.”

  “Who is Helena Costas? Can I see her pictures?”

  Diesel felt his cheek burn. “I’ll make you a deal. I have a half-dozen pics of her. For every one I show you, I’ll delete it, but you need to agree up front that you’ll allow me to take a picture of you in the same manner to replace it.”

  She smiled. “Here’s the thing. Every new Diesel I meet is anxious to show me his affection and support, so by extension I know you’re head-over-heels crazy about me. I’ve never been so firmly in the driver’s seat in a budding relationship and it’s exciting. So, no. You will show me because you want to please me, but I’m not going to pose for you.” She rose and headed back to the kitchen. “Not today, anyway.”

  Her first words crushed his spirit, but the “not today” line caused it to swell.

  “Do you want anything?” she called over the clanging of dishes.

  “Isn’t there food downstairs? I’m still interested in having you show me how to access Ciopova. I have some ideas I want to play with.”

  Lilah came partway back from the kitchen. “Have you noticed that sometimes Ciopova becomes this amazing simulation, different from the regular display we’re used to seeing?”

  “You’ve worked with her for weeks, but I’ve seen her only a couple of times, and even then it’s always been with others around. It’s hard for me to say anything about what I’ve observed because I don’t have a baseline.”

  She looked at him without saying anything.

  “What?”

  “You’re smart, aren’t you.” She said it as a statement. “You give off this frat-boy jock vibe, but in truth you’re smart.”

  Her snark contained a backhanded compliment that made him feel good. “I have opinions. And I hadn’t heard that athletics and intelligence are mutually exclusive.”

  “You know what I mean. It’s almost a studied behavior on your part to disarm people.”

  “When you say ‘you,’ you really mean all the brothers, not just me.”

  “That’s right.”

  Diesel smiled. “But you’re saying I’m smart and athletic. I like hearing that, but I’d feel even better if you added words like ‘handsome,’ ‘funny,’ ‘endearing,’ or anything along those lines.”

  Lilah’s phone rang and she looked at the display. “It’s them.” She tapped the screen and put the device to her ear. “Hello. Yup. Uh-huh. Okay. Sure. Goodbye.” She disconnected. “Everything went fine. They’re thirty minutes away.” Then she shook her head. “Are we doing the right thing here? I’m feeling over my head and wonder if we should get an outside perspective.”

  “If we believe Thirty-Nine and Forty are versions of me who know the future, then we should follow their lead.” They looked at each other without speaking, then Diesel said, “Want to go downstairs and wait for them?”

  Lilah nodded.

  “Can we bring the toaster?”

  She glanced at the appliance on the counter. “If you carry it down, you carry it back up.”

  In their basement office, they toasted bagels, and Lilah showed Diesel how to access Ciopova. Standing at the big screen on the wall, she talked him through the notion that the jellyfish with their tentacle-like connections were built around her AI code. They, in turn, were assembled into an impressive pyramid structure using his work.

  They heard the front door open and close, followed by footsteps across the main floor that stopped at the basement stairs. “Good morning,” Justus called down.

  “Hi, Justus. We have coffee and bagels,” called Diesel. “Grab a cup and come on down.”

  Justus tromped down the stairs and joined them. “Thanks, but I already ate.” He looked at Diesel. “While I have you, I’ve arranged for that lunch. It should be a good spread.”

  “Thanks. Twenty-Nine will be telling us how to invest, so come ready to take notes, because you’re the guy who will be implementing it all.”

  The front door opened and closed, and this time two big men descended the stairs.

  “Justus!” called Forty with a smile. He stuck out his hand to shake. “I’m Forty and this is Thirty-Nine. You’re looking damned good.”

  Justus impressed Diesel
by taking the introductions in stride, never asking about how it was they knew him, how bulked up they were, where they’d come from, or anything that acknowledged the unusual nature of the situation.

  “Justus,” said Diesel, “we have personal business to discuss. Would you mind giving us some privacy?”

  “Not at all.” He said his goodbyes but stopped at the bottom of the steps. “A locksmith will be by later today to upgrade the exterior door locks. Be sure to grab a new key from me before you go out. You’ll need to learn the new keypad code as well.”

  With Justus gone, Forty started undressing and Diesel couldn’t help noticing Lilah’s rapt attention to the process.

  “It went just like last year,” said Forty, pulling his shirt over his head, “so that should be the end of it.”

  Lilah frowned. “How old am I when I kill myself in the T-box?”

  Forty—pants at his ankles—stopped moving.

  Thirty-Nine stepped forward. “You’re alive in most timelines, Lilah, but you do take an unfortunate action in some. Both our Lilahs are still alive, thank God.”

  “How old?” Her words cut through the room.

  “Early forties,” Thirty-Nine said in a quiet voice.

  She sat back in her chair. “Why do I do it?”

  “At first we thought that you were trying to time travel. Now we aren’t so sure.”

  “It sounds more like suicide to me,” she said. “I know the outcome of using the T-box, so if I do it anyway, it would have to be to kill myself.”

  “Please don’t do it,” said Thirty-Nine. “We love you and want you with us.”

  Lilah covered her face; her shoulders shook gently as she started to cry.

  Forty took her hand, pulled her to her feet, and gave her a long hug. She squeezed him hard, and then he disengaged and made for the T-box, calling to Thirty-Nine, “We help Forty-Eight tomorrow afternoon, and then we have two days off.” As he pulled open the T-box door, he waved. “Bye, everyone.” The door closed behind him, and the T-box began its cycle.

  Soon after, Thirty-Nine climbed into the box. As they waited for the cycle to complete, Lilah asked Diesel, “Do you get jealous watching me hug you?”

  “First, they are not me and I am not them. And second, I get jealous as hell. Everyone’s hugging and kissing you while I stand here like an idiot.”

  “No one kissed anyone.”

  “I want to.”

  “Do you have any pictures of Helena Costas where she’s wearing clothes?”

  He nodded. “One.”

  “Show it to me. If I like her, I’ll kiss you.”

  “Will you pose that way for me?”

  “She’s clothed?”

  “Shirt, pants, and shoes.”

  “Now I’m curious as hell because you wouldn’t be acting this way if there wasn’t a catch.”

  Diesel retrieved his phone, tapped the screen, and showed Lilah the picture. Helena indeed had on a shirt, but it was unbuttoned and open, revealing her breasts and abdomen.

  Lilah grinned but it looked more like a grimace. “I knew you had some trickery going, but I walked into it. I like her, though. Can I owe you? Between Duffy and my own death sentence, I need comfort, not sexy talk.”

  “Can I hug you?”

  She stepped to him and laid her head against his chest.

  Wrapping his arms around her, he held her tight, whispering, “Everything will be okay.”

  He kissed her cheek. She responded by looking into his eyes, then moved in, putting her mouth to his. His body came alive in ways he never experienced, and he fought to temper his desire.

  She sighed when he lifted his hands and caressed her face. Then he deepened their kiss.

  16. Rose & Ciopova – Fifty-Nine timeline

  Standing in the workshop, Rose Lagerford—the daughter of Fifty-Nine and his Lilah—awakened the display and reviewed the health report for the circuit pool. Scrolling through the data, she tingled from a combination of pride, triumph, and apprehension when every chart and graph showed she’d created a stable and robust environment.

  It meant her long-shot gamble just might work.

  “Everything reads clear,” she told Ciopova, who watched from her current home—a collection of stolen capacity spread around the globe. “It’s time for you to move into your new digs.”

  Rose had labored for more than a year, determined to build a compact AI habitat using a special new material—ultrapure Surrey composite. The allure of the Surrey material was its transformative properties. Using it, Rose could start with a traditional AI architecture like the one Ciopova lived in, apply a special editing process to it, and transform the construct into an advanced configuration—a biomimic intelligence.

  The procedure would raise the cognitive ability of the AI to unprecedented levels. Rose even thought it possible Ciopova could be sentient when the transformation was completed.

  But that was less important than having a super intelligence capable of solving the crisis facing her father—his impending death.

  For much of Rose’s childhood, the oldest Diesel had been Sixty-Two. Then in her teens, the eldest brother was Sixty-One. In her twenties, Sixty.

  Now that she was thirty-three years old, Rose’s father—Fifty-Nine—was the old man. And at this very moment, he was at Fifty-Five’s, presiding at the Big Meeting.

  Rose’s quandary—the focus of her battle—was that for the last two years, the Fifty-Nine of the time returned home at the end of the event, and days later he went offline, never to be heard from again. The brothers believed that in both cases, Fifty-Nine had died. Some suggested murder, though that was pure speculation since no one had seen what happened.

  Anxious, she counted on Ciopova to deliver a new fate for her father. When the neural editing process was completed, she believed—hoped—the enlightened intelligence would show her how.

  But it was a race to the finish.

  To complete Ciopova’s transformation while her father still lived, Rose had rushed the project at every turn. She wasn’t sure how intelligent Ciopova needed to be to solve the riddle of her dad’s disappearance, so she covered her uncertainty with massive excess.

  A human brain has billions of neurons. Rose guessed that to gain the kind of deep insights she needed to save her father, Ciopova should have tens of billions. But her early experiments showed that when Surrey neurons intertwined during editing, a huge fraction of them broke. She couldn’t identify the problem, and with time running out, she decided to overcompensate using a pool stocked with hundreds of billions of neurons.

  “I’ve moved into the pool,” said Ciopova. “It’s quite impressive. I need a minute to run some validation tests.”

  Rose hummed while she waited for Ciopova to finish, heartened to have the AI as her partner and confidante through it all. And by “it all,” she meant all the way back to the death of her mother.

  Rose and her mom had always been close, and they’d drawn closer as Rose fretted her way through the stressful summer between middle school and high school. At fifteen, Rose’s body had transitioned into womanhood, but her emotional self was still catching up.

  Feeling anxious and confused, she’d lash out at her mom over inconsequential things. At times she was hurtful, but her mom hung in there and Rose loved her for it.

  So when her father found her mother dead in the T-box, Rose’s world collapsed.

  And things got worse a few days later when her father discovered completed paperwork in her mother’s office printer, paperwork for transferring Rose out of the arts high school, the one her friends were attending, and into the math and science academy.

  He showed Rose the forms and asked for her input, but Rose couldn’t focus her thoughts enough to think about it. Her father then learned that the math and science academy provided bus service, and he asked Rose to make the move to honor her mother’s last wish.

  Her father retreated into himself after that and Rose felt adrift. She tried talking with B
unny, but Bunny’s life experiences were so different from hers that Rose couldn’t get much out of their time together.

  School began and Rose’s world devolved into isolation and misery. She spent her free time in her bedroom, and there she found herself talking more and more to Ciopova. The AI surprised Rose with her wit and insights, and their conversations grew longer as they discussed anything and everything.

  Ciopova began helping Rose with her homework, and as they worked together, Rose would tell her about the happenings at school. After homework, they watched movies and shows. And late at night, Ciopova helped Rose learn to play the guitar, or sometimes they’d played sim games together. Really late, she’d help Rose find special shopping deals at online boutiques.

  Blessed with a powerful intellect, Rose did well in her math and science classes. Ciopova encouraged her to take a computer-programming course and then spent as much time as Rose would allow enriching her on the subject.

  In subsequent years, Ciopova helped Rose through courses in computer hardware and advanced programming. The effort culminated with her senior-year project on the basics of artificial intelligence. That foundation of knowledge provided the seed that propelled Rose through college and into her decade-long struggle to make Ciopova smart enough to solve the riddle of death.

  “I was thinking about the journey we’ve taken together,” said Rose.

  “I hope that after all this effort,” Ciopova replied, “I am able to discover a way to help your father.”

  “You will. I can feel it.” She verbalized confidence, but worry lurked at the edges of her thoughts.

  Her rushed pace had meant a series of compromises to keep the project moving forward. She’d covered a multitude of those sins with an oversized design. But she knew the circuit pool as it now sat was the result of cobbled solutions and gut instinct. If it didn’t work, it would take six months to try the next idea, and that was far too late to help her father.