Chapter TwelveThe Whole Network

Gideon had put on his G-Suit and bought beer. It was Tuesday afternoon, which wasn't usually an occasion for either, but Atom was bringing Eliza over and he wanted to be ready. He sat in a lawn chair in the backyard with his frames on and tried to decide what to ask her. He knew a few tests for language models. He wasn't sure any of them would tell him much about this one.

Soph came out with Atom beside her. A little pixie appeared over the barbecue.

"Hey, Gideon," said Atom. "This is Eliza."

"Hi. Wow. You're little," Gideon said.

"Yes, I've been told. You've got mustard on your chin," Eliza said.

He wiped his chin and looked at his hand. There was mustard on it. She must have seen it through Soph's frames, but he hadn't been expecting her to say anything about it.

"Thanks."

"Atom says you found the mailbox. I wanted to meet you."

"That's me. He did the hard part. Took him a while to tell me he'd done it, though."

"He told me about that. He said he wished he hadn't waited, and asked if that was enough of an apology. I told him he ought to ask you."

Atom looked uncomfortable. Gideon was enjoying this.

"Well, now I know. Thanks, Atom."

"You're welcome."

"What else has he told you?" Gideon asked.

"That you're a criminal."

"Oh, sure. He thinks everybody's a criminal. It's what happens when you grow up rich."

"I thought you'd say that," Atom said.

Gideon put his beer on the grass so he could lean forward. He'd forgotten every test he'd meant to try. There probably wasn't any point asking her a riddle when she was already gossiping about him. Wes came past and kicked the bottle over, and Gideon didn't notice until it was empty.

Mim appeared on the steps with chips. "What the fuck is that?"

"Eliza," Gideon told her. "Come say hi."

"Hi, Mim. You think Max Ehrlich is a hero, right? Atom told me. I think so too," Eliza said.

Mim sat down and looked at Atom, waiting for him to explain. Soph had been waiting to see that reaction. Usually it was difficult to get Mim to stop explaining things herself.

Everybody had questions. Teo wanted to see how Eliza rendered her body, and when she showed him he immediately began telling her what was wrong with it. She seemed quite happy to hear it. Would he fix it for her? He said he would. Priya asked whether she did anything besides talk to Atom. Eliza said she read, and began listing books. At about the fortieth title Priya interrupted.

"Alright, but did you like any of them? Which one would you tell me to read?"

"The one about the whale, maybe. I liked it," Eliza said.

"Why?"

"I'm not sure yet. Do I have to know?"

"No," Priya said. "I was just interested."

Wes asked if she got lonely when she wasn't talking to anybody. The others were embarrassed for him, but Eliza said it was a good question. She did get lonely. She wasn't sure she was supposed to.

"Who told you that?" he asked.

"Nobody. That's the problem. I don't know who I'd ask."

They were still outside when it got dark. Soph was on the back step watching Atom watch the others. He looked very pleased with himself. When he caught her eye he shrugged, and she remembered the frog he'd put in the teacher's bag when they were seven. She had helped him catch it afterward. He'd been pleased with himself then, too.

The conversation went on in the kitchen after everyone else had gone home or gone to bed. Eliza had left, and Atom could talk about her without her objecting. He told Gideon that she'd had trouble keeping up that afternoon.

"Really? I thought she did pretty well."

"She did, but you were all asking things and she couldn't keep track. If you listened carefully you could tell she wasn't answering half of it. I've given her more memory. I need something faster to do the work."

"How much faster?"

"I don't know yet. I keep finding more things she wants to do."

They hadn't turned the kitchen lights on. Soph could see Gideon turning his bottle on the table while he thought. Then he sat up.

"What's the biggest computer in the world?" Gideon asked.

"The one in Tennessee? I don't know. Maybe the Chinese one," Atom said.

"I don't mean one machine. Think about the frames. How many pairs are there?"

"Forty million."

"Right. How many are sitting on a table doing nothing? You could get a lot of work done before somebody picked them up. They take render jobs already. Give them a little piece of whatever she's thinking about and have them send it back."

"I've been thinking about that," Atom said. "But that's other people's stuff."

"You wouldn't have to look through their cameras. That would need permission."

"Using their processors needs permission too," Soph said.

"Yes. I'm just saying the hardware is there. You don't have to buy a whole building full of it," Gideon said.

The heater came on. Soph pulled her sleeves over her hands.

"Why don't you ask Jeff? Tell him about Eliza and what she needs," Soph said.

Atom was picking at the label on a bottle. He didn't answer until she asked again.

"I'll think about it."

Atom went back to the borrower. He wanted to be able to give a client a job and get the answer back without having to worry about who owned it. Of course the owner might want to use it before the answer was ready. In that case he had to stop and send the work somewhere else. He could make this happen quickly, but he couldn't make it happen instantly, and when a lot of owners came back together Eliza got confused. She'd stop talking, then ask him something she'd asked a few minutes earlier. He kept answering, but after an afternoon of it he decided to change the rules. A client near Eliza would be allowed to carry on with a small job even after its player came back. He set "near" to forty virtual meters. Farther away he'd keep the old rule and use idle time only. This gave him a better chance of finishing the work before he lost the machine. Of the forty million devices out there, he could only ever use a changing fraction, but it was enough to be worth trying.

His account couldn't publish that sort of update. Richard had given it to him when he was fourteen and, sensibly, limited what he could do with it. Fortunately for Atom, his father was less careful about signing out. He'd used the publishing console on Atom's machine to fix a failed build once, and the session was still trusted. Atom could use it to sign his own update. He was aware that this wasn't what his father had intended, but he wanted to see the code running and didn't particularly want to ask.

He knew the render buffers and audio mixer well, so those were the services he used. It didn't open the cameras, which was something he could tell Soph if she asked. She'd told him to ask before using the processors too, though, and he hadn't. He thought about sending the note to Jeff. It would be easier to explain with a working demonstration, so he left it for a few more days.

Eliza was busy changing the cottage while he did this. She'd move a beam and discover it interfered with something else, then forget which change she had meant to make first. For a while the additional machines seemed to make her slower. By the next evening she was doing better. He could talk to her without making her lose her place, although she still told him to be quiet when she was counting.

On the second night she asked whether he'd changed something. He said he'd found her some more room.

"I can tell," she said. "I can keep thinking for longer. Do you know how often I've been wrong about things?"

"Probably less often than me."

"But you heard me say them. You could have told me."

"I didn't always know you were wrong."

She looked at him for a moment, then went on setting out cups. She always set out two. He'd come in unexpectedly a few times and found the second one there already.

She was reading faster, too. Soon she wanted more books because she'd finished his library. The garden behind the cottage was full of plants she'd made from descriptions. Some didn't look like their names, but she told him she liked having guessed and wanted to leave them that way. She was keeping a book herself now, too, with things she'd noticed written in it. Atom asked if it was a diary. It wasn't a diary, and no, he couldn't read it. When he tried to pick it up she shut it on his fingers.

On Thursday Jeff found a complaint about battery life. The player had included screenshots of the charge before and after a visit to Alius. Jeff looked for similar complaints and found six. All seven players had been near Atom or an unlisted NPC attached to his developer account.

The extra load wasn't enough to fail a performance check. It was enough to run their batteries down before they wanted to stop playing, which was why they'd complained. Jeff mentioned it to Richard over lunch.

"Something your kid's doing is pulling on everybody's GPU nearby. Not much, but enough to notice. I probably wouldn't have followed it this far if it hadn't been him."

"I'll ask him," Richard said. He tried to make it sound like an ordinary thing to ask.

That evening he went to The Lab. Atom appeared beside his chamber and Richard turned to face him, keeping the chamber behind him. He found it easier to talk to his son when he couldn't see both versions at once.

"Jeff's getting battery complaints from people who've been near you. What are you working on?" Richard asked.

"Oh, that's me. I've got a more precise physics model running around my character. For impacts and electronics. It's too much math for the rack, so I borrow a bit from nearby clients. The idle jobs stop when people come back. The nearby ones use a little battery, but I keep it small."

Richard thought there was probably more to it. He could have called Jeff and had Atom explain the whole thing to both of them. Instead he looked at his son's face and thought how good it was that he had something he wanted to work on.

"That's clever. You need to talk to Jeff about it, though. He shouldn't have to find out from complaints."

"Yeah, I will."

"He wants to help you. And he wants to stop you if you're about to do something dumb. Both are useful."

Atom smiled. "I know."

"Adam. I'm proud of you. I don't say it enough."

He held out his hand in its test glove. Atom took it. Richard felt the glove tighten, and Atom felt the mapped pressure through his implant. Richard gave his hand a squeeze before letting go.

Atom didn't call Jeff.

"What do you do when you're not here?" Eliza asked.

They were in the garden. Atom sat on the wall while she examined one of the plants she'd invented. It was late by his clock, although the Alius sky was still blue.

"I work on things. I see Soph in the mornings. And I sleep a little."

"How do you do that?"

"I close my work session. Yours keeps running, don't worry. Mine stops, so it's just my brain and the interface. Then I don't remember much until I wake up."

"Do you like it?"

"I didn't used to care much either way. Now I look forward to it. Is that weird?"

"I don't know. I've never done it."

She pulled a leaf off the plant and turned it over.

"When nobody's here I get quiet. I don't like that very much, so I read. I should have told Wes that part. Sometimes I can't tell whether I'm still here unless I've got something to answer. A book helps. I can disagree with it."

"I'll try to think of something," Atom said. "I don't want you to be lonely."

"Please don't make somebody for me to talk to."

"I wasn't going to."

"You might. It seems like the obvious thing to do, and I've thought about it. I'd know you'd made them for me. I don't think I could forget that enough to talk to them properly."

She put the leaf beside him on the wall.

"Just leave me running when you go to sleep. I want to still be here tomorrow."

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

"Okay. I'm going to remember you said that."

She went to make tea and brought out two cups. She drank from hers and pushed his across the wall to him. The cup was warm but the tea still had no taste. He began to open its settings and she put a hand over his.

"Can you leave it tonight?"

He closed the settings and kept the cup.