Audio: "Ghost Machine"

All I can say is that Brent Spiner and Ellen McLain both have a lot to answer for. (Not to mention Douglas Rain and William Daniels.)

Music: instrumental stems from "Creepy Doll" by Jonathan Coulton, licensed under Creative Commons.

Technical Difficulties

I had the germ of this idea a long time ago, and it finally took Scalzi and Twitter to nudge it into storyhood. But don't blame him for my descent into cliché soup at the end.

Further inspiration came from a practical joke played by some geeks at my previous employer. Upon returning from a long vacation, one engineer found that his desktop computer at work would only run an arcade game emulator. He found the boot CD easily enough, and then the bootable flash drive plugged into a USB port in the back of the case, but it took much longer for him to find the second flash drive that had been hidden inside the case and wired directly to another USB port. It didn't help that he couldn't resist playing a few levels of the game every time it booted up...

Infrared Coffee

As you may have noticed, this week's story is delayed again. I won't bore you with excuses. I'm working on it and will have it up before midnight. (If before 6pm, we might fight traffic to go see Jay Lake in Beaverton.) Meanwhile, feel free to decipher the title of this blog post.

UPDATE: Finished, but too late to go see Jay. Answer to lame riddle: "I R Latte"

"The Color of Questions"

THE COLOR OF QUESTIONS
By Curtis C. Chen

As Detectives Jacob Lanosky and Andrew Dixon watched, Lieutenant Eugene Adler led Jeremy Solis into the observation area next to Interview Room One and right up to the glass partition. Seated inside Interview One--"the box"--were the suspect and Detective Mason Nava.

Jeremy folded up his cane, put his hand on the glass, and asked, "What is this material?"

"Glass," Adler said. "One-way mirror. They can't see you."

"Which one is the detective?"

"The one closer to us."

"Are you sure?"

Jake gave Andy a look that said, I don't know how much longer I can put up with this crap.

Adler looked again. "Yeah. Detective Nava is on this side of the table."

Jeremy removed his dark glasses, and Andy saw the blind man's eyes. They looked like polished gray marble, missing irises but veined throughout with silver streaks, like lightning frozen inside a storm cloud.

"Your detective is the wrong color," Jeremy said.

"Okay, that's it," Jake said, and started for the door.

"Lanosky!" Adler said.

"It's not enough you gotta bring in some bullshit psychic, now he's a freaking racist, too?" Jake made a point of turning his back to Jeremy as he spoke.

"My apologies, Detective," Jeremy said. "Perhaps Lieutenant Adler didn't explain the nature of my sight."

"You let me know when the show's over, LT," Jake said. "I'll be getting some coffee. Black coffee."

Jake spun on his heel. Jeremy raised his arm, stopping the detective with a flat palm.

"You got five seconds before I arrest you for assaulting a peace officer," Jake growled.

"You and your partner are the same color," Jeremy said.

"What the hell is he talking about now?" Jake asked Adler.

"I see people's histories," Jeremy continued. "I don't have a good way to describe it. I just call it 'color.' You and Detective Dixon and Lieutenant Adler are the same color because you're police." He pointed to the glass. "The man in there is not."

Andy did a double take. "You're talking about Detective Nava?"

"Yes," Jeremy said. "His color--what I see of his history--is different. He is not like you."

"So what is he, then?" Jake asked.

"I don't know," Jeremy said. "I haven't seen his color before. On anyone."

Jake folded his arms and took a step back. Adler said, "Happy now, Jake?"

"No," Jake said. "But I'll take the bloodhound."

"What's going on here?" Andy asked.

"Sorry to keep you out of the loop, Andy," Adler said. "We couldn't risk you saying anything to Mason."

"I'm a little confused, myself," Jeremy said.

"We also had to convince Jake that Mr. Solis here was the real deal," Adler said.

"Wait a minute," Andy said. "You already knew there was something wrong with Mason?"

"Yeah," Jake said. "We dusted his keyboard for prints yesterday. Whoever that is in there, it's not Mason Nava."

"Nice performance," Andy said.

"Thanks."

Andy looked into the box. "It's another goddamn clone, isn't it?"

Jake shrugged. "We'll find out soon enough."

Audio: "The Color of Questions"

Music: instrumental stems from "Re: Your Brains" by Jonathan Coulton, licensed under Creative Commons.

Over There

No witty banter this week; I'm in Switzerland for jra's wedding, where the keyboard layouts are unfamiliar and flaky Internet access costs CHF 2.40 an hour. More later!

"Vampire Robot"

VAMPIRE ROBOT
By Curtis C. Chen

I know what you're thinking: Why would anyone build a vampire robot?

First of all, let's clear up some misconceptions. She's not a vampire. She doesn't drink blood. The artery in the neck is just the quickest way to get her probe tendrils into the brain--two probes, one for each hemisphere, so the scars look like what everyone imagines vampire bite marks would--although, if vampires actually existed, they'd probably just tear out your throat instead of making a couple of dainty little punctures.

That's another big difference right there. To a vampire, you'd just be food. But to Kayla, you're a research subject, a precious resource. That's why she doesn't kill anyone, why she doesn't hurt anyone, and why she does her best to take her measurements without disturbing their sleep. That's why she sneaks around at night. She wants data. No life, no brain activity, no data.

Yes, I admit, the original experiment has gone a little off track. She wasn't supposed to leave the building yet, but she's smart. We built her to be intelligent, adaptable--you might even say adventurous.

I'm not anthropomorphizing; we really did give her a personality. Do you know what goes into creating an AI? It's not linear programming like you learned in the sixth grade, or those clunky neural networks in self-drive cars. It takes months to train a neural net, and you still need to write explicit subroutines to handle any unexpected shapes or movement.

We wanted Kayla to seek out those exceptions. The Fed planned to send her into dangerous and hostile environments, and they didn't want their multi-billion-dollar investment to get taken down by some street urchin with a slingshot. We had to give her the ability to deal with anything.

I can't tell you how we did it. You wouldn't understand the math, and it won't help you stop her. Don't you get it? We don't know what happened. We don't know how she escaped, or why she decided to try in the first place. She's exceeded our original designs. She's alive.

And she's not some lumbering giant with no sense of purpose. Kayla knows exactly what she's doing, even if we don't. She knows how to hide in the darkness, emerging just long enough to perform--what did you call it? "Surgical strikes." Quick, clean, precise.

Now, we do need to find her, but not to kill her. If we get close enough, we can activate her wireless downlink and grab a complete copy of her current run-state. Then we can decompile that code and see exactly what she's thinking.

We've analyzed her activity patterns, and we can make some educated guesses about her next targets. But if we do this, we do it our way. We won't let you destroy her. She's not hurting anyone. She just wants to learn. Just like us.

Besides, we don't want to wake the nest. I mean, who knows how many more of those defensive bat-bots she's constructed by now?

Audio: "Vampire Robot"

I was unable to avoid channeling a little bit of Topher from Dollhouse in this week's reading. So sue me.

Music: "Blue Sunny Day" by Jonathan Coulton, licensed under Creative Commons.