Chapter ElevenSomeone New

Atom got back to work in February and immediately began staying up too late. He would sleep for three hours and tell Max that was all he needed. Perhaps it was, he thought; a lot had changed, and she was always telling him they didn't know enough about how it would work. Why couldn't this be one of the good changes? Max wasn't willing to accept his opinion on it. After twenty hours awake he would lose his place in code and start repeating things, which she thought was pretty good evidence that he needed a break. They argued about it until he agreed to keep a schedule. He didn't follow it very well.

Among other things he was learning the guitar. There was a real guitar in a closet in Sausalito which he'd never done much with. Two of its strings were missing. This time he built the instrument himself and could make it sound however he wanted, provided he could work out what he wanted. He got his hands playing it within a week. Then he decided he didn't like the wood he'd used and spent a while changing it. He was painting too. The Direct Interface would give him what he thought he wanted, and sometimes it would give him something else that he liked better. Soph put one of his paintings on her bedroom wall. It was a lake with a strange blue in it. After a few days she realized it looked rather like her father's painting in the hall.

"It's all pretty much the same now," Atom told her. "Music, painting, code. I want a chord or a color or a function and I can feel myself doing the same thing to get it. I don't know how to explain it."

"That sounds nice."

"It is. I keep making things I don't know what to do with."

He was spending less time with her. She didn't mind at first. They would see each other in the mornings and sometimes he would stay for class, finding somewhere to sit as a cat or a moth if he didn't feel like being himself. He usually left before she did. Once she didn't see him all weekend, and when he finally turned up she asked him where he'd been.

"Working. Sorry. I should have called."

"Working on what?"

"I want to show you when it's ready. It's hard to explain like this."

"You could try."

He tried, and she wished she'd waited. She remembered him at nine explaining the trebuchet in the garage. It had taken him most of an afternoon to tell her what it did, and about a second to show her. She told him to call when he had something she could look at.

Gideon was easier to spend time with just then. He liked having an audience, and he was teaching her how to talk to people on the phone. He'd give her a number and ask her to find somebody's extension. Next came an assistant with a boss's calendar. Soph apologized for bothering her, sounded busy, apologized again. The woman went through the whole week for her. Soph hung up with the dates written down and Gideon looking pleased.

"You're a natural," Gideon said.

"I feel bad. She was really nice to me."

"That's why it works. You sound like you feel bad for bothering her, because you do."

"You don't think that's shitty?"

"A little. You got the calendar, though."

He was still trying to get into the mail server. Soph had heard so much about it that she made a face when he brought it up, but Atom wanted to talk about it now. He would turn up as a bird on the basement table and ask a question about the garage in San Diego. Gideon was happy to have someone interested. He explained what he had found and what he thought might be in there, and Atom asked him to show him.

"I can't get in. That's the problem," Gideon said.

"I know. Show me what you've tried."

Atom watched for a while and didn't say much. The next evening he sent Gideon the credential and the listing he had saved. Gideon was delighted, right up until he noticed the date.

"You've had this the whole time?" Gideon asked.

"I wanted to figure out what it was."

"So did I. You could have told me."

"Sorry. Do you want me to look at the attachment?"

"Yes. Send me whatever you find this time."

Gideon kept a copy. Teo put another on a thumb drive shaped like a spider, with eight little legs, and told Soph he wanted the drive back. It had taken Atom several nights to get into the server. Making sense of the attachment took another three weeks, during which Soph saw him twice.

Then he sent her a message.

"Come online. There's someone I want you to meet."

Soph was on the couch at home. Max was at The Lab. She put her frames on and Atom appeared beside her as himself, looking nervous.

"Okay, don't freak out," Atom said.

"What did you do?"

"Something pretty cool, I think. A little crazy. I want to show you."

"Alright."

"It's in Alius, so you can't come in, but I can send you what I'm seeing. You'll be able to talk. Ready?"

The living room disappeared. Soph was looking down a grassy path toward a stone cottage with smoke coming from its chimney. There was a garden inside a fence, with tall flowers she thought were hollyhocks. It wasn't the mountain room she knew. Atom must have spent a lot of time on this.

"You built a house?"

"She did."

"Who?"

He went down the path and the gate opened as he approached. Something flew out of the cottage and stopped in front of his face. It was a little woman, maybe eight inches tall, with dark hair and dragonfly wings. Soph supposed she was a pixie. She was very pretty.

"You're late," the pixie said.

"Four minutes. Eliza, this is Soph. Soph, Eliza," Atom said.

"Hi, Soph! I've heard a lot about you," Eliza said.

"Hi. Can she hear me?" Soph asked.

"Yes, I can hear you. Come inside. I made tea."

"It's her own recipe," Atom told Soph as he followed her. "I haven't got a taste for it yet. It's not in the library."

The cottage was full of books. A kettle was boiling on the stove, which seemed an odd thing to bother with in a virtual house, but Soph liked it. Eliza sat on the edge of the table and folded her wings. Her feet didn't come anywhere near the floor.

"So, what are you?" Soph asked.

"That's what everybody wants to know. Atom, do you want to explain?"

"You can."

"Have you heard of ISIS?" Eliza asked.

"Gideon's mail server thing?"

"The program he was looking for. That was me, sort of. There were four people at MIT trying to make a system that could understand language. What somebody means when they say something, with all the things they haven't bothered to say. They got pretty far and then they stopped working on it. I don't know why. Patel left a copy on that server. Atom got it running and made some changes."

"What kind of changes?"

"He connected his Direct Interface. I can think of something I want to do and do it, the way he does. Then he gave me access to the character creator and the speech engine, so we could talk. We've been talking a lot."

"For three weeks," said Atom. He sounded proud of himself.

Eliza lifted a cup nearly as large as she was. Soph watched her manage it with both hands.

"Did you choose to be that small?" Soph asked.

"No. He did that."

"You can change it, though?"

"I'm figuring it out. I should have done that before I made the house. Look at the shelves. I can't reach anything."

"I thought it would be easier if she looked less—" Atom began.

"Yes, you've told me. Soph, would you rather I looked like you? In size, I mean."

"I'd rather you picked what you liked."

"Thank you. He keeps showing me pretty faces and asking which one I want."

Soph laughed. Atom went to get the kettle.

"Why Eliza?" Soph asked.

"There was an old chatbot called ELIZA," he said. "It repeated things back as questions. People knew how it worked and still told it all their problems."

"I wanted Cortana," Eliza said. "Apparently I'm not allowed that one."

"It's taken," Soph told her.

"So is Eliza. I looked it up. I don't see why that one's allowed."

"She's still got a few bugs," said Atom. "Sometimes she doesn't notice she's repeating herself. You can ask the same question three different ways and she'll give you three versions of the same answer. And if something is complicated she has trouble going very deep with it. I'd like to give her more processing power, but all I've got is my rack."

"I'm right here, Atom," Eliza said.

"I know. Sorry."

"He's right about the bugs," she told Soph. "I can tell when it happens sometimes. I go to think of something and I can't get any further. It's irritating. I'd like him to fix it."

On the couch Soph took her feet off the table. She had been watching as if Atom were showing her a new game, and she felt embarrassed about it now. Eliza was sitting in there waiting for somebody to help her think.

"You should meet Gideon," Soph said. "All of them, actually. Mim knows a lot about distributed systems. She's been doing that stuff since she was twelve."

"I thought of that," said Atom. "I wanted you to meet her first."

"You should bring her over. Gideon's going to lose his mind."

"Good," said Eliza. "I keep hearing about him. I'd like to talk to somebody else. Oh, congratulations on your class."

"What class?" Soph asked.

"The one you got an A in. Atom said you were crying about the assignment and then you did really well."

"You told her I cried about it?"

Atom came back with the kettle. "I was happy for you."

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