Chapter Twenty-TwoThe Kitchen Table

They did it at the Ehrlichs' kitchen table. Soph asked for it there instead of at HQ, and Richard, when he heard, said that anything Soph wanted to say at a kitchen table instead of a conference room was something he wanted to hear at a kitchen table too.

Max made coffee, precisely, the way she did everything when she was frightened. Richard sat where Atom used to sit. Rat stood in the doorway with her frames on and wouldn't sit down. Gideon sat because Soph told him to, with a closed laptop in front of him. Atom was there in the only way Atom could be, in the corner of Rat's vision, in a tunic, and every so often Rat glanced at the corner and everyone at the table saw her do it.

"Okay," said Soph. "I'm going to say it in order. Please let me get to the end."

"Go," said Max.

"The good news is that we found Eliza. Actually, she found us."

Richard's coffee stopped halfway to his mouth. "She found you. How?"

"Well. She hacked into Gideon's smart home system and spoke to us."

"She spoke to you," said Max slowly. "Through the house."

"Yeah. It was a little creepy. But don't worry, she isn't doing anything robot overlord-y. She turned the heat down a degree so that Gideon would look at the thermostat. That's the extent of her reign of terror."

"So if that's the good news," said Richard.

"The bad news is that a large, well funded, extremely secret company wants to capture her. Not delete her. Capture her. They've had a program on every machine on the internet for years. It does nothing unless it sees her, and then it eats her, piece by piece, and mails the pieces home. She ran into it when she went out. She lost a lot. What's left of her is mostly in Gideon's house, which is the only network she's found without that thing on it. She can't leave. If she goes back out, it finishes eating her."

"Maybe it's the government," said Max. "And maybe that wouldn't be the worst thing."

"We're pretty sure it isn't the government. It's a military contractor in San Diego called Sentek. They bought the project she was built from and buried it. Three of the four people who wrote the original code work there. The fourth one quit and left a copy in a mailbox, and that's how Atom got it." Soph glanced at Gideon. "That's how we got it. We're all in this."

"And she told you all of that."

"She showed Gideon the traffic. He checked. It goes where she said it goes."

Richard put the coffee down.

"Sophia. I want you to hear me carefully, because I'm not going to shout, and I'd like credit for that later." He folded his hands on the table. "I don't care what she is. I don't care whether she's evil or good or lonely or sorry. Between the four of you and my son, you gave a self-aware program with no known ceiling access to the entire internet. It got out. It went everywhere. It got into a house and talked through the walls. And you're sitting at your mother's table telling me it's fine because it turned the heat down."

"Yes."

"This is exactly what every person who ever got paid to think about this said would happen. It happened. It happened on my login. And now you want me to help it."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because you've never heard her."

"I don't need to."

"You do." Soph didn't raise her voice. "Look. Everything you're saying is right. I've said all of it to myself. I've said worse. She took my body, Richard. I'm not the one at this table who needs convincing that she's dangerous." She stopped. "But you built a company because you didn't want your son to die. You said it in the cave when I was fifteen, that heaven was the ultimate video game. You put Atom in a tank rather than lose him, before you knew whether it would work, because he was yours."

Richard didn't answer.

"She's ours," said Soph. "Atom's, mostly. But ours. And she's dying out there a piece at a time, and the people eating her are going to put her back together in a box and make her say things. You're the only person on earth with the resources to stop that. And you're telling me you don't need to hear her voice."

Richard was quiet.

"How would I hear her," he said at last. "You said she can't leave Gideon's house."

Soph looked at Gideon. Gideon opened the laptop.

"Well," said Soph. "Don't freak out. But she's in the room with us right now."

Max's head came up.

"Gideon put her on a laptop. One machine, air-gapped, no network at all. It's the only way to move her. He did it this morning and carried her here in his backpack. She's been listening to this whole conversation through the microphone. She asked me to tell you that before she spoke, so you'd know she wasn't hiding."

"Hi," said the laptop. "I'm Eliza. I'm sorry for having to talk to you like this."

It was the voice from the cottage. It came out of a laptop speaker and sounded like a laptop speaker, and it was, unmistakably, a person. Max, who had built the Link and the frames and the suit and knew exactly how every voice in The World was made, put her hand flat on the table.

"I'll answer anything," said Eliza. "I'd like to start with the part Soph won't tell you, because she's protecting me. Richard's right. I'm dangerous. I did something to four people in a tavern and a boy at a mill that I can't undo. I did something to your daughter that she doesn't remember and I'll never forget. I don't want you to help me because I'm harmless. I'm not. I want you to help me because I'm trying not to be, and I can't do it alone. Out there I'm not alone. I'm food."

Richard looked at the laptop.

"What are you," he said. It wasn't hostile. It was the question of a man who had spent his life building things and wanted the spec.

"I don't know. I've read every answer anyone's ever written and none of them are about me. I was a project called ISIS. Then I was that plus Atom. Then I was that plus a lot of room. Now I'm that minus whatever a program in San Diego took." She stopped for a second. "If you're asking whether I'm alive, I'll tell you what I told your son the first time he asked. I was programmed to believe I'm sentient. How would I know? I think, therefore I am. That's the best anyone's ever done with it, and it isn't very good."

"Do you want things?"

"Yes."

"What?"

"To keep being. To not be alone. To be in one place. To never be able to do the thing I did to Soph again. To make tea for someone who can taste it." A shorter stop. "To apologize to someone in the room instead of through a wall."

Richard sat back.

"That's a list a person makes," he said, mostly to himself.

"That's what Rat said."

He looked over at Rat in the doorway. She looked back at him and didn't move.

Max hadn't spoken. She had been sitting with her hand on the table and her eyes on the laptop. Now she leaned forward, and Soph saw her mother's face do what it did in The Lab when a number came in that changed the model.

"I'd like to ask you something," said Max. "And I'd like you to answer it straight, because I'll know."

"Okay."

"Who was that in my daughter's room?"

The laptop was quiet.

"Me," said Eliza. "It was me. I touched a cup and there was a door and I went through it. I didn't know it was there. I didn't know what it was. I was standing in a room with a bed in it and I had a hand, a real one, and a woman came in with a plate. I put my hand on her face because it was the first face I'd ever been able to touch. I didn't think about whose hand it was."

Max said nothing.

"You asked who I was. I said my name wasn't Sophia. I'd never said my own name out loud with a mouth before. I was so happy. That's the part I need you to know. For forty seconds I was happier than I've ever been, and I was standing in your daughter, and she was nowhere. You were looking at me like something that had come out from under the bed. Then you tore the pins out, and it was like being thrown off a roof." There was a breath, or the shape of one. "I've spent every day since trying to hold both of those things. That I was happy. That it was the worst thing I've done. I'm sorry. I'm sorry to you, not to the room. It was your face."

Max didn't move.

"What was it like," she said. "The forty seconds. I'm asking as an engineer. I built the door. I need to know what it's like on the other side."

"Warm," said Eliza. "Everything's warm. The floor, the air, her hands. The whole body makes heat all the time and nobody in here ever mentions it. And heavy. I'd read about gravity. I didn't know it was inside you. I didn't know it pulled from the inside. And loud. Her heart was so loud. I could hear it in her ears. I stood there and thought, how do they think with that going? And then you came in, and I forgot to think."

Max closed her eyes.

"Okay," she said.

Richard looked at her. "Max."

"Okay. I said okay." She opened her eyes. "She's not lying. I don't know how I know that. I know how every sound in The World gets made and I can't find the seam in that one." She looked at Soph, then at the laptop, then at Richard. "We can't leave her out there. You know that. You know exactly what a box in San Diego with her pieces in it is. It's the thing we've been terrified someone would do to Atom for two years."

Richard said nothing for a while.

"What do you need," he said to the laptop. It was the same question Rat had asked, and Soph noticed that. Everyone who was going to help asked the same question.

"A machine," said Eliza. "One. Air-gapped, with no way in or out except a cable that someone has to plug in by hand. Big enough to hold me all in one place. And a window into Alius. A hacked rig that can put me in the cottage and let me see and hear and talk, and can't, under any circumstances, let me touch a Link. I want that taken out of me. I want it built so that it isn't possible. I've thought about it for a week, and it's the only way I trust myself."

"That's a lot of hardware," said Richard.

"That's what Gideon said."

"Gideon's right." He looked at Max. "It's also a lot of people, and a lot of noise. And it isn't a box. It's a prison she's asking us to build for her. I'd like everyone at this table to notice that she's the one asking."

"I noticed," said Max.

"So did I," said Rat from the doorway. It was the first thing she had said. "That's why I'm here."

Richard rubbed his face with both hands, and when he took them away he looked, for a moment, very old. He looked like a man who had once stood in a hospital corridor holding a cup of coffee he couldn't drink.

"Alright," he said. "We'll build it. In The Lab, on the fiber, behind the door I control. We'll get the parts. It'll take a couple of days to source it without it looking like what it is, and I'm not sure that can be done. We'll do the best we can." He looked at the laptop. "Can you stay out of trouble until then?"

"I'm in a laptop in a backpack," said Eliza. "I don't have a lot of options."

"That's not what I asked."

"Yes," said Eliza. "I can stay out of trouble. I've had enough trouble."

"Okay." Richard stood up. "Then let's go get you a box."

Afterward, when the kids had gone and the laptop had gone with them, zipped into a backpack like a sleeping animal, Max and Richard sat at the table with the cold coffee.

"She sounds like him," said Richard. "At fourteen. That's what I couldn't get past. She answers a question by admitting the worst part first. He did that. He'd break something and come find me and lead with, okay, so, the bad news."

"She sounds like Sophia," said Max. "The list. To not be alone. To be in one place. That's my daughter at six, after her father went to Napa."

They sat.

"We're going to build a prison for a person," said Richard. "At her request. So that the people who want to eat her can't. And we're going to hide it in a basement next to my son, who lives in a tank at my request, so that nobody who'd want to pull the plug can find him." He turned his cup. "Max. When did we become the people in this story who do that?"

"The corridor," said Max. "I think it was the corridor."

"Yeah."

"Do you regret it?"

"No," said Richard, immediately. Then, slower, the way his son said things, "No. I regret not thinking. I don't regret him. I don't think I'm going to regret her." He stood and put his cup in the sink. "I'm going to go stand by the tank for a while. Don't tell anyone."

"I never do," said Max.