She removed the glasses, put one earpiece into her mouth.
"You don't know who I am, do you?"
Oscar Vale looked embarrassed, but not flustered. "I got a lot of friends, me. You know the trouble." He waved one hand, as if rolling through names in his head, too many to mention. "At a party, right? Right! Can't always place everyone. The whole world looks different, you know? New visuals. Used to have Fabrique Double Reds, way down into the deep infras. Could tell if the suppliers were lying; bios anyway. Get that hot skin on their neck, or on the forearms. Not you, though. Cool as a cucumber."
Mira shook her head. With his SPCAI eyes, he couldn't even see full visible. He'd gone from talking about his old eyes to seeing with them in a seconds-long fugue of remembering, forgetting, remembering. She'd called him from the hotel before leaving. She'd called him from the limo. She'd introduced herself at the door.
And they'd been talking for half an hour. But again Vale's memory had undergone a little crash, a resetting of variables to zero.
"I'm the psychologist whom you spoke to earlier today."
"Doc! Sorry. I was expecting you sooner."
"I'd asked you if you had any unusual contacts or experience before the Blast Event."
He looked puzzled for a moment. A bad sign.
She'd tested a theory on her way over. Asked the question in passing to the hotel's human concierge, the limo's AI, a beggar on the street. The old saying was true: Malvirians knew exactly what they were doing at the moment of the Blast Event. But Vale's memories ended a few months before the Event. Of course, Vale couldn't just say exactly when his memories ended. She sighed, returning to the task of bracketting the date. Vale had sat through twenty minutes of the binary search without complaint. He just needed the occasional reminder of who she was and what was going on.
"September 1?"
"We haven't got a September here. Hey! You must be from off-world!"
She made a fist in frustration. "Convert to HC Standard, please. Remember?"
"A workday! That bastard Simmons tried to sneak in some - "
"December 1?"
"Don't seem to..." The puzzled, grasping look on his face, as if something were almost visible through a haze. She spoke before he drifted away again.
"October 15?"
"Friday. The birds were making a racket that morning. Went to - "
"November 7?"
He snapped his fingers a few times, smiled an empty smile, an affable shell of a person. He still tested well above 2.0 on the Turing scale, but there was something missing. Some vital connection had been lost. Apparently it wasn't enough to be real, a legal person, to have that solid base of curiosity, initiative, a capacity for setting goals: the Knack of Wisdom, as the SPCAI called it. One had to have memory, too. Vale's therapists had tried a simple minder implant, a device that he could query for details, appointments, names, faces. But he simply forgot to use it.
An artificial's memory was the business of processors and storage devices, independent from the AI core itself. Vale's pathway to that warehouse of past events wasn't blocked, his doctors were sure of that, but for some reason the AI core didn't reach out for those memories, didn't seem to care that they were there. And so he had ceased to develop as a result of his experiences. In a way, Vale was as lost as an AI cut off from sensory data; his Turing Quotient hadn't shifted in months.
What must be going on in his mind, in that analog, mystical realm of his core? What vital process had stopped in there? No one had ever been able to read, transcribe, exhaustively catalog the inner state of an AI. Even human brainwaves were easier to read.
Vale was a cypher, even to himself.
It was the deep unknowability of AI that was the source of the old rumor of artificial intuition, and which guaranteed that, unlike mere software, AI could not be copied.
Although it seemed that, somehow, someone had done so.
Mira remembered slipping the internal battery from the other Oscar Vale, long metal tweezers lifting out the little bauble like a precious pearl from a quiescent oyster. There had been no scream in her direct interface, just a sudden absence like a transmission gone from HOLD to disconnected, that rare technical glitch.
And that extra, redundant soul had disappeared forever.
"October 25..."
"Sure, I remember that..."
Soon the date was established at exactly November 2. His long-term memory before that day was perfect, as detailed as only an artificial's could be. For any date since, he was glad to make up stories if pressed, but if you let him, he would laughingly admit defeat.
"November 1. Took my spare audio package into get it looked at... or listened to. Hah! Traded for new CatsEar Ultras: seventy kilohertz response up to one twenty decibels. Seventy-cycle Nyquist filter. Got a Fletcher-Munson graph like a soccer field!"
"But the next day."
He nodded his head frantically, as if about to say something. But the motion was strangely repetitive, as if she could have let him sit there, head bobbing for an eternity. It was chilling, how quickly he could change from a person to a puppet guided by the springs, wires, and strings of social convention.
A thought struck her.
"Do you remember what you were planning to do on November 2? Not what you did. But what things you anticipated doing."
He looked momentarily confused, but his face remained somehow alive. The words came slowly.
"Needed to install a new... tactile processor. Fastfreighted from Betalux that Monday. Eighty-touch impact manifold, fifteen centimeter aura sizzle..."
"Did you have an appointment for the installation?"
"Yeah. Prometheus Body Works. You should check it out. They do biologicals, too. Fix those eyes of yours in ten seconds: radial monofilament implants with - "
"Thanks. I think I will pay them a visit." Mira put her glasses back on and stood. "You've been very helpful."
"Thanks. I'm happy to talk about visuals anytime. Nice to meet another sight jockey. Once I get my next paycheck I'm outta these SPCAI standards. Fuck. They make this place look like a shithole."
Mira looked around her.
The welfare dorm room was filled with the detritus of unfinished projects. A half-done watercolor with a dried and cracked palette arrayed beside it, a full watering can next to etiolated plants: the modest tasks of therapy that would never reach completion.