“Why do you keep watching me?”
She’s not coy, either, he thinks as he turns, and something about her makes him feel like being honest.
He says, “I find you interesting.”
“Because of how I look.” Delivered like the conclusion of a scientific paper whose results surprised everyone.
“Because of how you look at everyone else.”
It must shake her; she tilts her head, and for an instant her eyes go empty and flat as she pulls her face into a different expression.
It’s so fast that most people wouldn’t notice, but Mason is suspicious enough by now to be watching for some small tic that marks her as other than human.
Now he knows why she looks so steadily into her book, if that’s what happens every time someone surprises her.
Doesn’t stop him from going cold.
(He can’t process it. It’s one thing to be suspicious, another thing to know.)
It must show on his face; she looks at him like she doesn’t know what he’s going to do.
It’s not how she used to look at him.
He goes colder.
Her eyes go terrified, as terrified as any human eyes.
She’s the most beautiful machine he’s ever seen.
He opens his mouth.
“Don’t,” she starts.
Then Paul is there, smiling, asking, “You remember how to dance, right?”, lacing his fingers in her fingers and pulling her with him a fraction too fast to be casual.
She watches Mason over her shoulder all the way to the dance floor.
He stands where he is a long time, watching the golden boy of Mori dancing with his handmade Vestige prototype.
He spends the weekend wondering if he has a friend in Aesthetics who could tell him where Nadia’s face really came from, or one in Archives who would back him up about a personality Paul Whitcover’s been saving for a special occasion.
It’s tempting. It wouldn’t stop the project, but it would certainly shut Paul up, and with something that big he might be able to renegotiate his contract right up to Freelance. (No one taps your home network when you’re Freelance.)
He needs to tell someone, soon. If he doesn’t, and someone finds out down the line they were keeping secrets, Mason will end up in Quality Control for the rest of his life, monitored 24/7 and living in the subterranean company apartments.
If he doesn’t tell, and Paul does, Paul will get Freelance and Mason will just be put down.
He has to make the call. He has to tell Compliance.
But whenever he’s on the verge of doing something, he remembers her face after he’d found her out and she feared the worst from him, how she’d let Paul take her hand, but watched him over her shoulder as long as she dared.
It’s not a very flattering memory, but somehow it keeps him from making a move.
(Just as well; turns out he doesn’t have a lot of friends.)
Monday morning Paul comes in alone, shuts the door behind him, and doesn’t say a word.
It’s such a delightful change that Mason savors the quiet for a while before he turns around.
Paul has his arms crossed, his face a set of wary lines. (He looks like Nadia.)
Mason says, “Who is she?”
He’s hardly slept all weekend, thinking about it. He’d imagined tragic first love, or some unattainable socialite Paul was just praying would get personality-mapped.
Once or twice he imagined Paul had tried to reincarnate Daddy, but that was too weird even for him.
Paul shakes his head, tightly. “No one.”
“Come on,” says Mason, “if I haven’t called HR by now I’m not going to. Who?”
Paul sits down, rakes his hair back with his hands.
“I didn’t want to get in trouble if they found out I was making one,” he says. “It’s one thing to fuck around with some company components, but if you take a customer’s remnant—” He shakes his head. “I couldn’t risk it. I had them put in a standard template for her.”
Mason thinks about Paul’s black-market baseline, wonders how Paul would have known what was there before he installed the chip and woke her.
“She’s not standard any more,” he settles on.
Nadia should be here; Mason would really feel better about this whole conversation if she were here.
(But Paul wouldn’t be talking about it if she were; he knows that much about Paul by now.)
“No,” says Paul, a sad smile crossing his face. “I tried a couple of our early patches, before we were working on the full. I couldn’t believe how well they took.”
Of course they did, thinks Mason, they’re mine, but he keeps his mouth shut.
Paul looks as close to wonderment as guys like him can get. “When we announce Vestige, it’s going to change the world. You know that, right?”
He knows. It’s one of the reasons he can’t sleep.
“What happens to Nadia, then?” he asks.
(That’s the other reason he can’t sleep.)
“I don’t know,” Paul says, shaking his head. “She knows what she is—I mean, she knows she’s A.I.—she understands what might happen. I told her that from the very beginning. At first I thought we could use her as a tester. I had no idea how much I would—” He falters as his feelings get the better of him.
“Not human, but the nearest thing?” Mason says, and it comes out vicious.
Paul has the decency to flinch, but it doesn’t last.
“She knows I care about her,” he goes on. “I’m planning for better things. Hopefully Mori will be so impressed by the product that they’ll let me—that they’ll be all right with Nadia.”
He means,
“What if they want her as the prototype?”
“I haven’t lied to her,” Paul says. “Not ever. She knows she might have to get the upgrade to preserve herself, that she might end up belonging to the company. She accepts it. I thought I had, too, but I didn’t think she’d be so—I mean, I didn’t think I would come to—in the beginning, she really was no one.”
Mason remembers the first time Nadia ever looked at him; he knows it isn’t true.
They sit quietly for a long time, Paul looking wracked as to how he fell in love with something he made, like someone who never thought to look up Galatea.
She’s waiting in the library, and it surprises him before he admits that of course he’d look for her here; he had a map.
He doesn’t make any noise, and she doesn’t look up from her console, but after a second she says, “Some of these have never even been accessed.” A castigation.
He says, “These are just reference books.” He doesn’t say, I don’t need them. He needs to try not being an asshole sometimes.
She glances up, then. (He looks for code behind her eyes, feels worse than Paul.)
“I love books,” she says. “At first I didn’t, but now I understand them better. Now I love them.”
(She means,
He wonders if this is just her, or if this is his algorithm working, and something new is trying to get out.
“I have a library at home,” he says. (He means,
She blinks, relaxes. “What do you read?”
“Pulp, mostly,” he says, thinks about his collection of detective novels, wonders if she thinks that’s poor taste.
She says, “They’re all pulp.”
It’s a sly joke (he doesn’t think it’s anything of his), and she has such a smile he gets distracted, and when he
