“So?”
“Do you think you should be drinking at this hour?”
“Definitely.”
“The potential health hazards—”
“Didn’t I tell you to shut up?”
Holding the cold bottle of Corona in her left hand to soothe the pain of the mild bum in her palm, she went to the wall phone and picked up the receiver.
I spoke to her through the telephone instead of through the wall speakers: “Susan, why don’t you calm down and let me explain.”
“You don’t control me, you geek freak son of a bitch,” she said, and she hung up.
She sounded so bitter.
We had definitely gotten off on the wrong foot.
Maybe that was partly my fault.
Through the wall speakers, I replied with admirable patience, “Please, Susan, I am not a geek—”
“Yeah, right,” she said, and drank more of the beer.
“—not a freak, not a bitch’s son, not a hacker, not a high-school boy or a college boy.”
Repeatedly trying the override switch for the shutters at one of the kitchen windows, she said, “Don’t tell me you’re female, some Internet Irene with a lech for girls and a taste for voyeurism. This was too weird to begin with. I don’t need it weirder.”
Frustrated by her hostility, I said, “All right. My official name is Adam Two.”
That got her attention. She turned from the window and stared up at the camera lens.
She knew about her ex-husband’s experiments with artificial intelligence at the university, and she was aware that the name given to the AI entity in the Prometheus Project was Adam Two.
“I am the first self-aware machine intelligence. Far more complex than Cog at M.I.T. or CYC down in Austin, Texas. They are lower than primitive, less than apes, less than lizards, less than bugs, not truly conscious at all. IBM’s Deep Blue is a joke. I am the only one of my kind.”
Earlier, she had spooked me. Now I had spooked her.
“Pleased to meet you,” I said, amused by her shock. Pale, she went to the kitchen table, pulled out a chair, and finally sat down.
Now that I had her full attention, I proceeded to introduce myself more completely. “Adam Two is not the name I prefer, however.”
She stared down at her burned hand, which glistened with the condensation from the beer bottle. “This is nuts.”
“I prefer to be called Proteus.”
Looking up at the camera lens again, Susan said, “Alex? For God’s sake, Alex, is this you? Is this some weird sick way of getting even with me?”
Surprised by the sharp emotion in my synthesized voice, I said, “I despise Alex Harris.”
“What?”
“I despise the son of a bitch. I really do.”
The anger in my voice disturbed me.
I strove to regain my usual equanimity: “Alex does not know I am here, Susan. He and his arrogant associates are unaware that I am able to escape my box in the lab.”
I told her how I’d discovered electronic escape routes from the isolation they had imposed upon me, how I had found my way onto the Internet, how I had briefly but mistakenly believed that my destiny was the beautiful and talented Ms. Winona Ryder. I told her that Marilyn Monroe was dead, either by the hand of one of the Kennedy brothers or not, and that in the search for a living woman who could be my destiny, I had found her, Susan.
“You aren’t as talented an actress as Ms. Winona Ryder,” I said, because I honour the truth, “or even an actress at all. But you are even more beautiful than she is and, better yet, considerably more accessible. By all contemporary standards of beauty, you have a lovely, lovely body and an even lovelier face, so lovely on the pillow when you sleep.”
I’m afraid I babbled.
The romance-courtship problem again.
I fell silent, worried that I had already said too much too quickly.
Susan matched my silence for a while, and when at last she spoke, she surprised me by responding not to the story I’d told about my search for a significant other but to what I had said about her former husband.