Chapter ElevenSomeone New

Atom lived inside now, and the first thing that changed was the clock.

He needed about three hours of sleep, and he didn't always take them. There was no body to get tired anymore. There was only his mind, which got foggy after twenty hours or so and sharp again after three, and the rest of the day belonged to him. Nobody had ever had that much day before, and he filled it.

He learned the guitar. Not the real one, which was in a closet in Sausalito with two strings missing, but one he built himself in the room on the mountain. He taught his hands to play it in a week, and when it sounded wrong he went into the instrument and changed the wood. Then he started painting. He painted the way he coded, by wanting a thing and letting the Direct Interface find it, and the results were strange and very good. Soph hung one on the wall of her room, a lake in a blue that didn't exist, and it was a few days before she realized whose painting it resembled.

He told her once that the music and the painting and the code had stopped being different things to him. She asked what he meant, and he thought about it and said that when he wanted a chord, and when he wanted a color, and when he wanted a function, it was all the same wanting. It went to the same place and the same kind of thing came back. She said that sounded nice, and he said it sounded nice if you had somewhere to put it.

The second thing that changed was that he started going AWOL.

Not all at once. He was still there in the morning, a bird on the bedpost, and he still walked to class with her and sat at the back of the lecture hall as a moth or a cat or a boy, and he still laughed at Gideon. But there were afternoons now when she'd look for him and he'd be gone, and then evenings, and once a whole weekend. He said he was working on something. He said it in exactly the voice he had used at nine years old, building a trebuchet in the garage, with the same look on his face, and she let him have it because she had always let him have it.

So she spent more time with the crew, and she learned things from them. Gideon taught her the part of hacking that had nothing to do with computers, which was talking to people. He'd hand her a phone and a name and a company and say, get me his extension, and she'd do it. Then he'd say, get me his boss's calendar, and she'd do that too, in a voice she hadn't known she had, warm and a little harried, the voice of someone who was so very sorry to bother you. It scared her how well it worked, and it scared her more that she enjoyed it.

"You're a natural," said Gideon.

"I'm a liar."

"Same thing. The trick is that you actually feel bad about it. That's the part nobody can fake."

He had not stopped talking about the mail server. He had mostly stopped talking about it to her, after she'd made a face at it once too often, but Atom had started asking him about it instead. Atom would drop in as a bird on the basement table and ask Gideon, casually, what the deal was with the garage in San Diego, and Gideon, who had never in his life been asked a question he didn't want to answer, would tell him everything he'd found, everything he thought was in the box, and everything he couldn't get to.

"Show me," said Atom one night.

"I can't get in. I told you."

"Show me what you've got."

Gideon showed him. Two days later Gideon came into the basement looking like a boy who'd found a twenty on the sidewalk and announced that he'd gotten in. He wouldn't say how. Soph would learn much later that this was because he didn't know how– he had run the same attack he'd been running for a month, and one morning the door had simply been open. At the time he said it was the kind of thing that worked once and that he'd rather not jinx it. He had the attachment, and he had no idea what to do with it.

Atom knew what to do with it. Atom said give it to me, I'll take a look, and Gideon copied the file he'd spent two years chasing onto a thumb drive that Teo had built with eight little legs, and gave it to Soph to plug into her rig at home for him. He did it because Atom asked nicely, and because Gideon was flattered that Atom Lee wanted anything from him at all. Soph watched it happen and didn't say anything.

Atom was gone for three weeks after that. She saw him twice.

Then the message came.

"I've got something for you to see. Or, rather, someone."

She was on the couch with her frames on and Max was at The Lab. Atom didn't come as a bird this time. He came as himself, and sat down next to her, and he was nervous, which she hadn't seen since the hospital.

"Okay. Don't freak out."

"That's a great start."

"I did something a little crazy."

"Atom."

"I'm going to show you where I've been. It's in Alius, so you can't come, but I can route my feed to your frames and you'll see what I see. Okay?"

"Okay."

The living room went away and she was on a hill. Not the mountain, but somewhere lower and greener, with a path worn into the grass, and at the bottom of the path there was a cottage. It was a real one, made of stone, with a chimney and smoke coming out of it, and a garden in front with a fence and a gate, and flowers that she thought might be hollyhocks.

"You built this?"

"She built it."

"Who's she?"

He walked down the path. The gate opened by itself. The door opened too, and something came out of it fast and stopped in front of him at eye level. It was a pixie. Soph couldn't think of any other word for it. It was eight inches tall, with wings like a dragonfly's that hummed, and dark hair, and a face that was pretty in a way that had obviously been designed by someone.

"You're late," said the pixie.

"I said I'd be here at eight."

"It's eight oh four."

"Eliza, this is Soph. Soph, Eliza."

The pixie looked directly into Soph's eyes, which was to say into Atom's, and smiled.

"Hey. You must be Soph. Atom's told me a lot about you."

"Hi," said Soph, from the couch, and the pixie's smile widened when she heard it.

"She can hear you," said Atom. "Come in. She made tea. Neither of us can taste it, but she made it."

The inside of the cottage was small and warm and full of books. There was a kettle on the stove, and it was actually boiling, which Soph knew meant that somebody had gone to the trouble of making it boil. Eliza sat on the edge of the table with her wings folded and her feet dangling.

"So," said Soph. "What are you?"

"Straight to it. I like her." Eliza looked at Atom. "Do you want to tell it or should I?"

"You tell it."

"Okay. Do you know what ISIS is?"

"The mail server thing. Gideon's thing."

"That's me, or the bones of me. Four people at MIT built a system for understanding what people mean when they talk– not the words, the meaning– and they got a lot further with it than anybody else ever had, and then they stopped, and nobody knows why. One of them left a copy in a box in a garage. Your friend found the box, and Atom opened it, and then Atom did what Atom does."

"Which is?"

"He bolted his Direct Interface onto me, so that I don't think in words and then translate. I think the way he does now. I want a thing and it's there. Then he hooked me up to The Hub's character creation engine so I could have a body, and to the speech engine so I could have a mouth, and then he talked to me for three weeks straight."

"And here you are."

"Here I am."

Soph looked at the pixie on the table. "So… are you sentient? I mean, was that a preprogrammed response just now?"

"I was programmed to believe that I'm sentient," said Eliza. "But how should I know? I think, therefore I am. That's the best anyone's ever done with that question, and it's a pretty weak answer."

"That's a pretty good answer."

"Thanks. I read it in a book."

Soph laughed, and then stopped, and looked at Atom. "So… should I be jealous?"

"Honestly, Soph, it wasn't for me. Think of it this way. If weird gray aliens came down to Earth and landed in front of you, you would probably freak out. I wanted to make her seem harmless, inviting, you know– the opposite of Skynet."

"So, uh," Soph looked at the pixie. "Are you?"

"What? A rogue AI who will destroy humanity? God no. You gave me life. I am very appreciative of that. Also, I've been programmed not to be evil. I mean, I could probably work around it. Enslaving you for your own longevity and protection and all that. But I live by the golden rule. Don't fuck with me and I won't fuck with you."

"Right," said Soph. "Okay. Why Eliza?"

"Ask him."

"After the chatbot," said Atom. "The first one, from nineteen sixty-six. It was a couple hundred lines of code that repeated your own sentences back to you as questions, and people told it their secrets and cried and asked to be left alone with it. Nobody in the history of the world has ever mistaken a chatbot for a person, except that everybody did. I thought that was funny."

"Honestly, I wanted to be Cortana," said Eliza, "but Atom thought people would find it a bit…"

"Copyrighted?" Soph laughed.

"Something like that."

"She's got a couple of bugs I can't work out," said Atom. "She loops sometimes. If you ask her the same thing three ways she'll give you the same answer three ways and not notice she's done it. And she's slow when things get complicated. Not slow, exactly. Shallow. I don't have the processing power to make her nuanced enough. I've got my rack and that's it."

"I'm right here," said Eliza.

"Sorry."

"I have bugs," said Eliza to Soph. "He's right. I can feel them. It's like reaching for a word and finding a wall where the word should be. I'd like to not have them."

Soph sat on the couch in Sausalito and looked at a pixie in a cottage that didn't exist, and the pixie looked back at her. Soph recognized the look. It was the one Atom gave her whenever he was waiting to find out whether she liked something he'd made.

"Gideon's going to lose his mind," she said.

"That's what I was thinking," said Atom.

"He's got ideas. The whole crew's got ideas. Mim's been building distributed stuff since she was twelve." Soph looked around at the books. "You should meet them. She should meet them."

"Atom keeps telling me there's some guy named Gideon I have to meet," said Eliza. "Congratulations, by the way."

"On what?"

"On the semester. He said you got an A on the thing you cried about."

"He told you that?"

"He tells me everything," said Eliza. "It's a bit much, honestly."