ANA Reborn by Carl Facciponte - HTML preview
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Chapter 5
artha walked up behind Ana two days later M and lightly touched her back while doing computations on skin formulas for their next project, the Generation-3 AI’s.
“Hi, Martha,” Ana said, then paused for a moment, “Oh no…are we going to do more of those socialization exercises again? You know, the ones that look like someone created them in the mid-1970s. Do you think anyone can update those silly facial drawings that are supposed to show emotions?”
“No, corporate weenies don’t care about drawings,” Martha said with a laugh as she shook her head. “I feel the same way about those stupid things. What would you think if just you and I went down into the street, observed people, and tried to determine what their emotional state is?”
Ana smiled and nodded her head vigorously, raising her hands in agreement. “Yes, I would 31
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absolutely love to do that. Working all day in the lab is great, but it only takes a short while before I get bored. New stimulation would be a wonderful thing.”
Martha turned to Rhett, who was working at a nearby lab station. “Rhett, will you be okay here in the lab if Ana and I go out for a coffee and some private girl talk?” Martha asked as she hooked her arm around Ana to lead her to the door.
“Sure, no problem, ladies. I wanted to hang out with T’Quan to get more information on hydraulics and servos. General Coopers has me wondering what our real assignment may be, and it doesn’t hurt to know as much as we can about ourselves. Have a good time. I’ll be good while you’re gone.” Rhett added with a smile.
They hung their lab coats on the pegs near the exit. “Stairs or elevator, Martha?” questioned Ana. “I know most women would prefer the elevator, and I’m going to guess that you do not like to use the stairs any more than you have to.”
Martha was quiet for a few moments before pushing the down elevator button for the ten-story ride to bring them to the Manhattan street 32
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level. “That’s a curious way to say that, Ana,”
said Martha as they waited for the half-minute for the elevator to get to their floor. “From your voice inflection, it almost sounds like there is more to the statement than that. Why would you guess that I don’t like to use the stairs? I’m trim and toned, so most people would not make that assumption, although you are correct. This lab is ten stories up. I’m not walking down no ten flights!”
The elevator arrived at the floor with a cheery
‘ding,’ and the door slid open with a pleasant whooshing sound, revealing a clean and brightly lit interior. Ana smiled and changed the subject,
“The only thing missing from that elevator is a voice annunciator to tell people how delighted the elevator was to be serving them today and to have a good trip.” Ana smiled again as she quipped at Martha. “Do you think we can have the guys in the lab put just a touch of AI into the elevator so we could talk to it?”
“Girl, let’s not even start to go down that path today. But actually, the lab electronics people could whip something together in no time. That would be a lot of fun, wouldn’t it?” Martha thought a few moments quietly before adding, 33
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“Ana, you used a bit of humor there. I wasn’t expecting you to understand humor this early.
No offense. It’s just that it took Gabriella quite a bit longer to understand the quirks of humor.
Where have you been learning about it?”
It was Ana’s turn to be quiet for a moment while thinking. “From the Internet, of course.
Where else would I possibly be able to understand humor?” she lied. “The gang in the lab are wonderful and brilliant people, but humor is something that alludes so many of them.”
The elevator stopped smoothly on the first floor without the expected jolt. They exited into the modern marble and glass security foyer.
Martha waved and smiled at the handsome young desk guard as she swiped her security badge to leave the building.
“You have to hold the badge up to the proximity reader just as I did, Ana. No one gets in or out of this building without their employee badge scanned.”
“No problem Martha, but what if I just tailgate you through the door without swiping my badge.
What if we made it seem as if an extraordinarily heavy person just swiped through?
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“That’s a fun concept, but it wouldn’t work at all. The elevator is about the only thing without a piece of AI to operate it. They connected all of the many cameras in the building to recognition software systems. When I joined the company, Security took still photos and videos of me walking at different speeds from every conceivable angle and loaded that information into the mainframe. They can identify every person who should be in the building from any angle.”
Ana thought about Jim and their love-making for a second as she lifted her badge to the reader, saw the green LED turn on, and joined Martha on the other side of the door.
Crowds filled the New York street with people hurrying from one place to another. Many talked on their phones or read text messages without looking up as they somehow avoided disastrous collisions with others doing the same thing. Taxis honked their horns, demanding other drivers move out of their way to allow them to drop off their riders and move on to their next paying customers.
The two women walked arm in arm down the 35
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street. “Has security always been that tight, Martha?”
“No, it wasn’t always like that. The security measures are pretty new. We had a tragic incident in the lab. They immediately beefed up Security to prevent anything like that from happening again in the future.”
“Can you share what happened?”
“Well, Jim Arnold, our former lab director before Francine, was working late one night. He had a reputation for womanizing. He didn’t stop cheating on his wife, even after she burned all of his clothes in their backyard as a warning. I guess she finally had enough of it, snapped, and used one of Jim’s spare badges to swipe into the building under the old system. She killed him in the lab.”
Ana’s brow furrowed as she pursed her lips.
“Oh, I’m so sorry, Martha. That must have been terrible. Can I ask how she killed him? Did they arrest her?”
“They didn’t know it was his wife, Alice, that had killed him. She put a long-bladed screwdriver through his heart in a rage. Then, after she stabbed him, she stepped off a subway 36
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platform in front of a speeding train.”
“That’s awful! How incredibly brutal! So then, was that the end of it?”
“No, it wasn’t. Someone doctored the security footage, making it look as if Gabriella was the last person to enter and leave the lab after Jim swiped in,” Martha said as they turned down a small east-west street to avoid some of the congestion.
Ana looked slightly pained. “So did they arrest Gabriella? Did everyone in the lab think she killed Jim?”
“No, no one in the lab would believe that Gabriella did it. They were, let’s just say, very, very close. And yes, the police came and arrested her in her apartment and hauled her off to jail on Rikers Island. She was there for several weeks before the tapes were mysteriously replaced and showed Alice entering and leaving instead of Gabriella.”
“Wait a second. By ‘very, very close,’ do you mean they…”
“Yes, Ana, they were having sex in the lab. Jim was also having sexual encounters with Francine.
As a heads up, if Francine is rather cool and 37
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impersonal toward you, it’s because her competitor for Jim was also an AI. Scientists and engineers designed and built both you and Gabriella to exactly simulate a human woman in every detail, including feeling pleasure, pain, and emotions. Understand?”
Ana nodded.
They were approaching a street vendor’s cart.
The smell of hot dogs and sausage swirled in the spring breeze. The line at the cart was relatively short since it was not yet lunchtime.
“Martha, let’s stop and grab a sausage. They smell delightful. I can taste them already.”
Martha stopped, turned suddenly, and stared at Ana.
“Why are you staring at me like that? Did I say something wrong?”
“Ana, this is the first time you and I have been out of the lab together alone. When I walked with Gabriella, she used almost the exact phrase you did when you smelled the sausage. I find that to be an extraordinary coincidence.”
“It could be just coincidence,” Ana said with a grin and sparkle in her eyes. “Or it could be 38
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more. Who knows?” She playfully threw her hands in the air.
“Ana, if you’re screwing with me, please stop!
Gabriella was my best friend, and I loved her dearly. I miss her more than you could know.”
“Martha, how was Gabriella killed?”
“A lone terrorist in Times Square shot her.”
“But her nano-gel brain synapses were backed up daily on the Cray mainframe, right?”
“Yes, that was the routine. So?”
“Is it also true they downloaded her base programming and nano synapses into me?”
“What are you getting at, Ana?”
“And wasn’t she a genius at programming?”
“Well, yes.” Martha’s widened eyes stared at Ana without blinking.
“And do you remember when you and Gabriella would go out to dance clubs together?
Remember that night when we went to dinner and dancing with Ralph and Colonel Lance?”
Martha gasped as her knees threatened to buckle. Her body shook. Ana gently grabbed her 39
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elbows to keep her from falling. Martha threw her arms around Ana’s neck and gave her a tight, full-bodied hug. Sobs convulsed her body as tears streamed down her face.
“Oh my gosh, it’s you! It’s you! I just knew it all the time. Oh my gosh! I don’t know what to say!” Martha cried as she crushed Ana to herself.
“You’re back! You’re back! Oh, how I’ve missed you!”
The two women embraced for several minutes, ignoring the people walking by. Some pedestrians smiled at them as they passed, but most simply ignored them. Not much attracted attention on a New York street.
“But Ana, Gabriella, I don’t know what to call you… why didn’t you say something to me earlier? I felt it from the beginning but thought I was just missing my best friend.” The two women separated into close-talking distance but clung to each other’s hands.
“Martha, I have to be very cautious. Things just don’t add up properly. I’m not sure who to trust, except for you. No one can know that I have Gabriella’s memories. I’m not sure who I am right now, but I need to present myself as Ana.
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Besides, it’s only a name.”
“What doesn’t add up for you? Why can’t you trust people?”
“I’ve come to believe the terrorist attack in Times Square was not at all a random event. Do you remember telling me that Lance insisted I pick up some theater tickets from a kiosk in Times Square? As a Colonel, he had direct reports he could simply order to pick up his tickets. So why did he ask you to have me do it? I’ve searched the papers and news reports online and found that although there were injuries from panic and people running out into traffic to get away from the shooter, the shooter killed only one person. That one person was me. That is way too coincidental. I believe it was a planned hit.”
“But why, Gabby...er... Ana? What would be his motivation?”
“That gets a little complicated. Frank Wright, the President of the AI concepts R&D branch at the time, said the CIA contacted him. They wanted me to work undercover to expose a terrorist cell in New York City because I’m an AI.
It turned out to be a setup, but neither Frank nor I knew that. The CIA contact explained that I was 41
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to infiltrate the terrorist cell and do whatever it took to get information from the group, including sleeping with their leader if I could. He identified the terrorist leader as Colonel Lance Coopers.
You can imagine how shocked I was. But it was all fake.”
“Was this some sort of test, Ana?”
“Yes, it was, but not like what you would think. Lance had been pushing Gabriella to sleep with him, but she, I, wouldn’t do it because he was a jerk. The agent said people would hurt my friends if I did not carry through on this assignment. Lance and I subsequently had dinner at a restaurant. I was going to go through with it for the sake of our country. A cab pulled up to bring us to his apartment as Lance put his hand on my bottom. At that moment, I knew I couldn’t sleep with him. I jumped into the cab, slammed the door, and drove away. You know Coopers doesn’t take a woman turning him down easily.”
“That’s awful! But would he actually kill you for turning him down?”
“Well, the outcome seems to answer that question, doesn’t it? I’m a piece of military equipment that did not fulfill its function from his 42
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perspective. And what does the military do with equipment that doesn’t function properly?”
Martha shook her head.
“Yup, you got it,” Ana said. “They get rid of it.
I don’t have any hard proof, though. But if it was him...” she let her voice trail off. “I need more to go on. Look,” she added, “here’s Sal’s.”
‘Sal’s Dogs n Sausages’ sold its wears from a small vendor cart next to the curb. People would come primarily for a Styrofoam cup of their genuine Hawaiian Kona Coffee but almost always buy a hotdog or sausage along with it.
Ana continued, “Why don’t we grab a couple of sausages, too, while we’re here and continue talking on the way back to the lab?”
Martha ordered sausage on a roll with mustard and a can of diet soft drink. Ana ordered her’s with onions and peppers. She asked for extra mustard, raw onions on top, and a heaping of sauerkraut.
“Are you really going to eat that mess, Ana?
Some things just don’t change, huh? No drink?”
“Hey, it’s just good food. Besides, I don’t need to drink. I don’t need to eat either, but this just 43
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tastes so darn good! Now getting back to the story, I don’t know if you knew about the circuitry the military had designed into my head so that they could just push a button and completely erase all the connections in my nano-gel brain. Essentially, they embedded a kill switch in me.”
Martha gasped and stopped chewing.
Ana went on, “I found a way to program around that while I was in Rikers Prison without them knowing it by coming up with a new computer language readable only by me. If someone looked at the code, they would think they only saw explanatory comments from one of the other programmers or scriptwriter teams.
They would ignore it.”
Martha swallowed and said, “No, I never knew anything about that. That’s a diabolical plot and something out of a sci-fi movie!”
“At any rate, because I made friends with so many people, they couldn’t just make me disappear. Someone would notice and start asking questions. So they had to come up with something believable. I have no proof, but I suspect that Lance coordinated the fake terrorist 44
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attack with Governor Vomitarie, who was looking for an incident to help promote his anti-gun platform. How else would he dare to stage a shooting in Times Square in broad daylight?”
“You’re scaring me now, Ana.”
“I can’t blame you. Corruption runs deep and has many tentacles in politics. At any rate, I believe Lance made it look like a random shot hit me in the head, but as I said, it is way too coincidental. If the facts don’t fit your theory, you pretty much have to change your theory to fit the facts. I know the General still wants his battle-bots, but he can never find out that I am Gabriella. Will you promise me that you keep that secret?”
“Honey, I promise you that I will keep it on my life.”
“Thank you. And you know I totally trust you with my life. You’re a good and precious friend. I don’t know what Lance’s ultimate plan is, but I can assure you that he is up to no good. Worse, he is a general and can make almost anything happen behind the scenes. That’s frightening.
Let’s get back to the lab see what kind of mischief Rhett is up to.”
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“Yeah, and how about Rhett? Is he Gabriella, too? I don’t think I could handle two of you!”
Ana laughed. “No, his base programming did not come from Gabriella’s. It’s all new. No part of her, err… me, is in any part of him. He’s just a regular boy.”
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