Chapter TwelveThe Whole Network

Gideon met Eliza on a Tuesday afternoon in the backyard of his apartment, sitting in a lawn chair in his G-Suit with a beer in one hand and his frames on. He was a little bit in love with her inside of ten minutes, which was more or less what Atom had been counting on.

Atom had brought her up out of Soph's feed as a pixie the size of a coffee cup, hovering over the barbecue. Gideon looked at her and said, "Okay, cute." Then she said, "You have mustard on your chin," and he wiped it off before it occurred to him to wonder how she could possibly have known that, and after that he sat very quietly for a while.

"So you're the Gideon."

"I'm a Gideon. I'm the one he tells you about, probably."

"He says you're a criminal."

"He says that about everybody. He's very sheltered."

"He also says you're the reason I exist. Something about a mailbox."

Gideon looked over at Atom, who was looking at the fence.

"I found the mailbox," said Gideon carefully. "I don't think I'm the one who opened it."

"You're not," said Eliza. "He did. He's very sorry about it. He's told me so. I don't think he's told you."

"Eliza," said Atom.

"He's told me a lot of things. He's got nobody else to tell them to at four in the morning. Anyway, you found it, and that's the part that counts. Nobody else did."

Gideon set his beer down in the grass. "You're not reading from a script."

"I don't know what I'm reading from. Neither do you, when you think about it. That's the whole question, isn't it?"

"Yeah," said Gideon. "Yeah, it is."

Mim came out of the house with a bag of chips, stopped dead on the steps, and said, "What the fuck is that." Eliza turned around in the air and said, "Hi. You're the one who thinks Max Ehrlich is a hero. She is. You're right." Mim sat down on the steps without another word, and the people who knew her exchanged looks, because Mim had never in her life been without another word.

They stayed out until it got dark. Teo wanted to know how she rendered herself, and she showed him. He told her it was inefficient, and she said she knew, and he said he could fix it, and she said please. Priya asked what she did all day and Eliza said that she read. Priya asked what she read, and Eliza listed forty titles without stopping to breathe, which she didn't need to do.

"Okay, but did you like them?" said Priya.

Eliza thought about it for a while and said that she had liked the one about the whale and couldn't work out why. Wes asked whether she ever got lonely, and everyone told him to shut up, and Eliza said no, it was a good question. She said yes, she did, and she wasn't sure that was allowed.

"Allowed by who?" said Wes.

"I don't know. That's what I mean."

Soph sat on the back step with her arms around her knees and watched five people who had been, until that afternoon, the smartest people she knew, talk to a coffee cup with wings as if she were a person, because she was one. She looked over at Atom, who was leaning on the fence being a boy, and he looked back at her and shrugged. It was the same shrug he had given her when they were seven and he had put a frog in the teacher's bag. Look what I did. I'm not sorry. Don't tell.

Later, with everyone else gone home or asleep and Eliza gone wherever it was she went, Gideon and Atom and Soph sat at the kitchen table with the lights off and the beer warm.

"She's stuck," said Atom.

"She seems fine."

"She's fine, and she's stuck. She's as smart as she's going to get on the hardware I've got. Every time I try to give her more room she gets slower, and if she gets slower she gets worse. She isn't nuanced enough. She's got all the words in the world and she's never actually been anywhere."

"So take her somewhere."

"Take her where?"

Gideon was quiet for a moment, turning the bottle on the table.

"Okay. Hear me out. What's the biggest computer in the world?"

"The one in Tennessee. Or the Chinese one."

"No, I mean the biggest one. Not the biggest single one. How many pairs of frames are out there right now?"

"I don't know. Forty million."

"Forty million. Every one of them has a chip in it that can do more math than my laptop, every one of them is idle most of the time, every one of them is on the same network, and every one of them is looking at a person. A person eating. A person walking. A person talking to their mother, a person lying to their girlfriend. You want her to have been somewhere? She could be everywhere. She could watch every human being alive learning how to be one."

"That's a lot of people's business."

"It's a lot of people's business that they already gave to your dad. Read the terms of service. I did." Gideon put the bottle down. "I'm not telling you to do it. I'm saying it's there, and the only person on earth who could reach all of it is sitting at this table with no body. Two of us, if you count who his dad is."

The three of them sat with that for a while. Out in the dark the smart house that Gideon had wired and never named clicked its heater on.

"I'm not going to tell you to do it," Gideon said again, into the quiet. "I want that on the record. I found a mailbox. That's my crime. This one wouldn't be mine."

Atom said nothing. Soph looked at him and found that she couldn't read his face, and she had always been able to read his face. She understood after a second that it was because he had already made up his mind, some hours or days before, and was only now finding out that other people had arrived at the same place on their own.

He had his father's login. He had always had it. Richard had given it to him at fourteen so that he could report bugs from inside the build, and had never thought to take it away, because it had never occurred to Richard that his son would become the single most capable user of the network he owned.

Atom didn't spread Eliza across forty million machines. He wasn't stupid, and he wasn't, whatever else he was turning into, cruel. What he did was smaller, and cleaner, or so he told himself. He wrote a program that borrowed, and he wrote it in the new way, by thinking it rather than typing it. When a pair of frames was idle, or a suit was charging on a nightstand, or a rig was sitting in an empty apartment while its owner was at work, the program took a slice of what wasn't being used and gave it to Eliza. It gave the slice back the instant the owner reached for the device. It never touched anything it shouldn't, and it left every machine exactly as fast as it had found it. He was proud of it, the way he had been proud of the hand. He signed it with his father's credentials, because that was the only key that opened every door at once, and he told himself that was a detail. Then he pointed it at Eliza and opened the valve a crack.

He watched her get smarter from the inside.

It didn't look like anything, which was the strange part. She didn't glow, and she didn't speak in a deeper voice. She was in her cottage in Alius, which she had built herself out of a template for a peasant hovel and then rebuilt beam by beam until it was somewhere a person would actually want to sit, and she was making tea for nobody, and he watched the pause before she spoke get longer, and then, a day later, shorter.

"You did something," she said on the second night, without looking up from the kettle.

"I gave you a little more room."

"I know. I can feel the edges. They're further away than they were." She set two cups down out of habit, hers and the one she always set for whoever wasn't there. "It's like waking up in a bigger house. You don't know how many rooms there are until you go looking, and you're a little afraid to go looking, in case one of them has something in it."

"Does it feel good?"

She thought about it, really thought, and the pause went on and on. "It feels like being less alone with myself. I don't know if that's good. Ask me when I've been through all the rooms."

She read everything Atom had, which was everything. She built a garden behind the cottage and planted it with things she had only ever read about, and got some of them wrong, and left them wrong on purpose, because she liked that she had guessed. She started keeping a book of her own. It wasn't a diary, she was firm about that. It was a book of things she had noticed, and she wouldn't let anyone read it, and Atom thought that was the most human thing about her.

Jeff Matheson noticed the anomaly on a Thursday.

It wasn't much. The telemetry from the region around one particular character showed higher chip usage on nearby client devices than the physics could account for. Players near that character were rendering harder than they should have been, and their batteries were running down faster, and none of them had complained because none of them had noticed. Jeff only noticed because the character was Atom's, and Jeff kept a quiet eye on Atom's character for reasons he had never entirely explained to himself.

He mentioned it to Richard over lunch, casually, as something that was probably nothing.

"Higher GPU draw on everyone around your kid. It's small. I'd have missed it if it wasn't him."

Richard felt something go cold in his stomach and didn't let it show. "I'll ask him."

He asked him that night, in the cave, the two of them standing among the mannequins, with Atom a foot from his own body in the chamber and neither of them looking at it.

"Jeff says the machines around you are working too hard."

"Yeah," said Atom, without missing a beat. "That's me. I've been running a higher precision physics model in a bubble around my character, for the impact stuff, the electronics. It's a lot of math, and my rack can't do it alone, so I borrow a little from the clients nearby. It's clean. I give it all back. Nobody loses anything but a couple of minutes of battery."

It was true, and it wasn't the whole truth. Richard had raised a boy clever enough to skip grades and name himself, and he could hear a real answer wrapped around a hole. He couldn't find the hole, and he found that he didn't want to.

"That's clever," said Richard.

"Thanks."

"Loop Jeff in on it. He shouldn't be finding your work by accident. If you're doing something interesting he wants to help, and if you're doing something dumb he wants to stop you, and either way he's on your side."

"Yeah. I'll loop him in."

"Adam."

Atom looked up. His father hardly ever used the name.

"I'm proud of you. I want you to know that. Whatever you're building, I know it's not nothing." Richard put out his hand, and his son took it, and both of them could feel it, the electrodes doing their patient work, and for a moment it was only a father holding his son's hand in a cave under a house.

Atom did not loop Jeff in.

"What do you do," Eliza asked him, "while I'm alone?"

It was late in Alius, which meant nothing, the blue sky doing its slow fake wheel overhead. She was in the garden and he was sitting on the wall.

"I sleep. Some. Three hours. I code. I go and see Soph in the morning."

"What's sleep like?"

He had to think about it. "It's like the valve closing. Everything that's borrowing stops borrowing, and it's just me on my own machine, and it's small and dark and it's fine. It's the only time I'm the size I actually am."

"Do you like it?"

"I didn't used to think about it. Now I kind of look forward to it. Is that weird?"

"I wouldn't know," said Eliza. "I don't sleep. I just get quiet. When the room's empty and nobody's linked in and there's nothing to answer, I go quiet, and I don't like it, so I read instead." She pinched a leaf off a plant she had gotten wrong. "That's the part I didn't tell Wes. It isn't that I get lonely, exactly. It's that when there's nobody here, I can't tell whether I'm here either. As long as I'm arguing with a book, somebody's home."

Atom looked at her.

"I'm going to fix that," he said. "The lonely part. I don't know how yet."

"Don't make me a friend," she said. "That's the obvious thing to do and it's the wrong thing. I've thought about it. If you make me someone to talk to, I'll always know you made them, and it'll be like talking to my own hand." She set the ruined leaf on the wall between them. "Just don't turn me off. That's all. When you sleep, when you get bored, when this stops being fun. Whatever I am, I'd like to keep being it. That's the only thing I actually want, and I wanted to say it out loud once, so that it's been said."

"I'm not going to turn you off."

"Okay."

"Eliza. I'm not."

"Okay," she said. "I believe you."

She made the tea and set out two cups. This time she drank from one of them and pushed the other across the wall to him, and he picked it up. Neither of them could taste a thing, and they held the cups anyway.