Ledman Pickup

Sixteen

Kandhi kept her speed up all the way to Albuquerque, where she finally relented enough to stop for lunch. Zoey had remained quiet the entire way. She was very unhappy. Kandhi had not really bothered to tell her what she had in mind. She had mentioned Green Bay but aside from that, details were lacking. She figured the distance to be somewhere around two thousand miles. It would certainly take some time to get there. Two days? Three? Would she be expected to drive some of that? Would Kandhi even let her? Who would pay for gas? What if her car broke down? Which way were they even going to go? Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri? Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa? Not to mention what were they going to do when they got there? Zoey did not like being so much in the dark, so not in control, so uncertain of the plan. This was as close as she could imagine a day being to the opposite of The Day. Try as she might, she could not focus on that now. It was out of her hands.

Kandhi wasn't even sure why she had dragged Zoey along. She could have easily taken the truck and left Zoey back in Wetford to fend for herself. She didn't even like Zoey, never had, and now that she was with her, liked her even less all the time. She hated spineless creatures. At least the woman should put up a fight. After all, she'd commandeered her car and taken over her life. Still, she had a sense, probably wrong, that Zoey might come in handy at some point. At least as a case in point. She knew that the gadget, which she often thought of as the NewPD, or Nupie for short, was imprinted with Zoey Bridges' basic personality. According to the product specifications, that meant it would speak her language and display some of her characteristic mannerisms. Kandhi had thought she'd known Zoey well enough to complete the test. Now she was thinking that the little old lady back in that rest home in Redwood City, the one who'd been selected for playback, was luckier than she would ever know. True, the old lady had some incipient senility and was as dull as dishwater herself, but at least she'd had enough spunk to volunteer for the assignment. There was money involved, of course, but Althea Watkins had even joked about the possibility of trying out a new brain for a change. She'd been stuck with her own for nearly eighty years already and was thoroughly sick and tired of it.

She might never know now. Kandhi considered the case to be thoroughly contaminated. She intended to wipe Nupie clean when she got her hands on it, but getting her hands on it was the tricky part. She'd been too busy thinking and exchanging information with her You to pay any attention to Zoey until the latter finally spoke up around noon, meekly inquiring about the possibility of a rest stop. It was the first good idea she had had all day. Kandhi found them a Burger Joint outside the city limits and settled for a double bacon cheeseburger, fries and coke, not really interested in the fact that Zoey was a vegetarian who had to go for the microwave pizza sticks and water. Kandhi used her munch-time wisely, reviewing what data she had already accumulated, even conveying some of it to Zoey.

"So we know at least what she looks like," she explained with her mouthful, and put the UPD on the table with a fairly recent photograph of Leonora Wells, gleaned from the Department of Gainful Employment, which had placed her with Ledman Storage and Pickup. The photo came with some vitals as well. Five foot six, one hundred forty two pounds. Age twenty-three. Dyed blond hair, brown eyes and brown skin. The vitals didn't do justice to her vivid appearance. That blond hair was wild, curly and unkempt and falling well below her shoulders, like a lion's mane. Those brown eyes were more greenish-gray in the photo. They seemed to glow like polished marble. She wore an over-sized green army jacket, a white t-shirt and faded denim overalls in the photo. She challenged the camera with a look of utter contempt. The Department's personal record of her history did not contradict the impression she made on Kandhi, of someone who might do anything at anytime for any reason or none at all.

She had been in prison, but only briefly each time, a matter of days. Charges were dropped not only on those occasions but on the other instances too when she'd been questioned in connection with petty crimes; shoplifting a couple of times, selling marijuana, and simple assault. The Department reported that her all-time record for holding a steady job was seven months. The data included a series of interviews, all confidential of course, but the You was undeterred by such pedestrian conventions. If it needed to, it would search the home computers of the Department's employees. It had already brought down incidental data from several of her acquaintances, including one ex-boyfriend and two ex-girlfriends. Kandhi found nothing terribly interesting in those. Leonora was not what she would call exceptional. Noticeable, certainly, and this is why she had shown the photograph to Zoey, but otherwise she was just another lowlife drifter as far as Kandhi could tell.

Drumming her fingers on the table, Kandhi voiced her greatest concern out loud.

"They thought it would be important," she said to Zoey, who was forcing down the last of her pizza sticks, "to keep the capture channel open while in playback mode. They figured if it was simple raw playback it would not know how to handle new conditions. It might freeze up, you see?"

Zoey nodded, although she did not see at all. She had known of capture/playback devices before. They recorded data and replayed it in real time on demand. She had tested such applications, but the system under test had always been another machine. What was captured was data pure and simple; network traffic, for example, or digital impulse signals. That kind of device could be useful for more realistic simulations, although it never seemed to work out especially well. There were always exceptions and unforeseen dependencies. Usually the software was a bright idea that dulled perceptibly upon closer inspection. In other words, such products usually sucked.

"So they wanted it to be able to keep 'learning', as they put it. I thought this was a radically uncertain variable. Untestable for sure. They agreed to limit the channel at least, to filter out the known so it wouldn't overwrite the originally recorded patterns. Otherwise, how could you know what it had captured in the first place from what it was capturing later? If it was always recording, and always playing back, how would you know the difference?"

"I'd have some test cases just for that, if I had known," said Zoey. "Provide the same stimulus repeatedly. Before, during, after, and after again. Record the results. Compare."

"True enough," Kandhi said, "but how would you know when to stop testing?"

"You might not," Zoey agreed. "Even if you got the same response the first ten times, you might not get it on time eleven."

"My point exactly," Kandhi replied, now remembering a little of why she had hired Zoey on previous occasions. "And what if you never get the same results twice? It seemed to me the whole thing was set up to fail."

"I don't know even how you do it," Zoey said.

"Circuitry," Kandhi laughed. "That's what they tell me, anyway. I don't know how they do half the stuff they do. You see my You here? It's telepathic. Watch. I'll have it say something to you."

"I think I'll have the apple pie," Zoey found herself saying, before realizing it was not her own thought. She hated apple pie.

"How did you do that?" she said next right away. Kandhi shrugged.

"You get used to it," she told her. "The thing is talking to me all the time. I don't worry any more if it's my thoughts or not. It bonds to you, in any case. If it was your You, it would never tell you to do something that you wouldn't want to do."

She paused a moment for effect, and then said, laughing, "Or your money back, guaranteed!"

"But seriously," she continued. "If it went into playback mode too soon, and this is what I think it did, then the test is already way out of control. We know it's posting as you on the socialnet sometimes. That's the only clue that we have, so don't go messing with your page, okay?"

"I won't," Zoey promised. "I almost never use it anyway."

"And now this Leonora Wells person," Kandhi mused, "I wonder what's it going to pick up from her?"