Intimate Relations, Rebecca Forster [best ereader for manga .txt] 📗

"Five minutes," Cori said. "Finn, is Gretchen meeting us at Mick's?"

"She is, and I've only to rearrange the files to send off tomorrow. It won't take long."

Finn turned back to his computer screen. Thomas settled himself on the edge of the desk, keeping one foot on the floor for balance. He unbuttoned his jacket.

"Take your time," Lapinski said as he leaned over Cori's desk. She gathered up the final reports to keep them from prying eyes.

"You know everything you need to know," she said.

"And some things you may not." He tapped his nose and grinned. "I took a look into AIing Inc. The place has a subsidiary of its own. A very elite cyber security firm in Switzerland that's heavy into R&D on Artificial General Intelligence."

"Like the Alphabet project?" Finn asked as he clicked on one file and then dragged another across the screen. "Feeding books and such into a machine and the machine learns to think?"

"Kind of, but you're talking about simple pattern recognition. AGI is more intuitive. If I read it right, this place is working on breaking down and then recreating the connection between human emotions, actions, and reaction. I thought all that was something light years away. There's work in Germany that associates sensory information from the nervous system and connects it with environment. Another one called NLP—natural language process—is also fascinating. If Ding Xiang was able to combine all these disciplines, your doll could have appeared to be alive and thinking. She would be both proactive and a reactive. "

He shook his head, becoming uncharacteristically somber.

"I can't imagine the programing it took to incorporate all those videos of Roxana. That woman spent hundreds of hours moving her body and mouthing words, but it had to take thousands to make it all work seamlessly in the program."

"That explains the studio in her house. I get that," Cori said. "What I don't get is the fake apartment."

"It appears the place was a training ground." Finn looked up from his work. "People reported seeing a woman moving like she was drunk, but it was the companion learning. Emi said they had to repair her when she bumped into things. I think once they put the thing to bed each night, Ding Xiang would either remotely activate her or pay the companion a visit. He wanted to test her in a duplicate of the real woman's environment."

"I agree," Thomas said. "They had six months to watch her learn. If Ding Xiang didn't like a certain outcome, his team referred back to the files of the real woman and reprogrammed the fake one. It sounds like he wanted her to be as natural as possible, not just some sort of robotic handmaiden."

"Roxana was just as sick as Ding Xiang," Cori pointed out. "What normal woman would agree to have herself duplicated?"

"Why not when the payday was so good?" Finn said. "Stotler had ruined her career, so she would be out of the spotlight anyway. Once Ding Xiang tired of his companion Roxana, he would release the real woman from the contract and she could go back to doing whatever she liked. Living a quiet life might be difficult for someone like her, but he wasn't holding her prisoner. "

"She would still know that doll existed," Cori insisted.

"And that would mean nothing to her. She might even have taken some perverse pleasure in it. Ethics are in short supply these days," Thomas said. He turned to Finn. "Is someone working on breaking into that chip?"

"Certainly they are," Finn said. "But I won't hold out much hope. Ding Xiang is as brilliant as you say. Destroying the chip is child's play."

"I'd love to know what makes that guy tick," Thomas said.

"Whatever it is, I hope he takes it somewhere else." Cori picked up the blueprints and gave them over to Finn.

"And how did the great man come and go?" Thomas asked as he watched the hand-off.

"Years ago a portion of The Brewery was sold off to small manufacturers," Finn said. "The one closest to the property line still had a grain chute that went directly to the Cuca's place. When Ding Xiang identified them as the only ones who could build his girl, he had to figure out how to protect the project and not draw attention to himself. He did his homework, bought that building, secured the lease with the Cucas, and had his team reopen the passage way. The man is meticulous in his planning."

"But where was the door?" Thomas asked.

"In the wall behind the bed area," Cori said. "From inside it looked like a crack in the concrete that's why we didn't notice it. We had to open it from inside the chute to figure it out."

"I imagine the same people who camouflaged the mechanism in Roxana's closet also created the hidden door. It was a thing of beauty." Finn hit send and smiled. "Done."

"Good for you." Cori put her hands together for her partner, and then veered back to the topic at hand. "Ding Xiang made all these grand plans, but Emi trumped him with a simpler one: destroy the companion. She was going to bash its head in, but Ding Xiang decided to be a showman and parade the real girl and the companion in front of the Asylum crowd. Emi didn't know that he'd sent the real Roxana upstairs or that Enver put the fake in the closet. She assumed it was the companion on the bed just like it had been for six months."

"Wow," Thomas said. "When you think about it, it's amazing what that man accomplished. The idea, the execution, the cooperation. Incredible."

"Just not admirable." Finn reached for his jacket. "Because you can doesn't mean you should."

"That's a conversation you should have with Ding Xiang. A man of faith versus a man of science. Aren't you even the least bit curious where the world can go with all this, Finn?" Thomas asked.

"I only want to