The confessions, p.6
The Confessions, page 6
Kaitlan, then the company’s chief operating officer, had understood something that technologists like Martin did not: Humans hate sifting through endless information or pointless multimedia presentations before making a decision. We just want to be told what the fuck to do. She convinced Martin to retool LLIAM’s responses to cut out the citations and justifications and just give users one simple answer: The Right Call, Right Now. The rest was history and, four years after Kaitlan first joined the company, a four-trillion-dollar increase in StoicAI’s market capitalization.
Looking at all these open browser tabs was like traveling back in time to the bad old days. Kaitlan had searched for Maud on every corner of the internet and found absolutely nothing concrete. No property records, no political donations, no births, deaths, or marriages. So next she had switched to detective mode. Each of Maud’s letters had been sent from a different small town in Southern California, so she’d tapped in the URL of an archaic mapping service and, after much cursing at cables and missing software drivers on her laptop, printed a map of the entire region using the huge printer in Tom’s home office—the one he used to produce architectural blueprints.
That map was still on the coffee table, corners held down with a mug and three photography books, small red dots where Kaitlan had marked the post offices with a Sharpie. The towns meant nothing to her: Banning, Cathedral City, Hemet, Temecula—small cities dotted around the vast desert of Southern California, in the shadow of the San Jacinto mountains. The post offices were all situated in places where there were no automated street-view cameras, the cell reception was unreliable to the point of nonexistent, places where—if Kaitlan remembered correctly from an old documentary—the mob used to go to bury their bodies. But then at three a.m. Kaitlan had made her first breakthrough. Staring at the topological form of the San Jacinto mountain range, she had a dim flash of memory. Another slow and painful internet search confirmed it: a YouTube video of Maud’s famous TED talk in which she described her journey from novice nun to professional AI ethicist.
I never thought I’d end up working in technology. As a kid my only dream was to one day have enough money to disappear into the desert or up a mountain with just my books and some good coffee.
The audience of techies and business leaders had chuckled, bemused at the appeal of a technology-free life. For Kaitlan it was the clue she had been looking for: Surely the only thing better than a mountain or a desert would be a mountain in a desert?
Fingers flying over the keyboard, she had trawled the small villages and unincorporated townships situated on the mountain range itself, looking for remote libraries, bookstores—anywhere where someone might remember a new bookworm arriving in town about two years ago. To her disappointment, if not surprise, she had come up blank. Until, as the first chirp of birds had begun their dawn chorus outside the window, she’d finally struck—well, if not gold in the desert hills, then certainly something slightly shinier than dust. A hiking blog by someone named Traveler Steve who mentioned trekking along the Pacific Crest Trail six months earlier, a journey that had taken him across the San Jacinto range.
Got off track today and ended up in a little township called Pineridge. Not much to see but did stumble across an adorable little bookstore named Pages in the Pines. The cute owner asked me not to take photos or post about it—I guess she hates social media—so I won’t say any more, but check it out next time you’re in the mountains!!!
The post was like a flashing red light. Who opens an old-fashioned bookstore halfway up a mountain and doesn’t want customers to know it’s there? Maybe somebody who has deliberately gone off the grid? Somebody who—thanks to a quarter-billion-dollar stock buyout, approved by Kaitlan to make Maud’s departure from StoicAI as quick and painless as possible—doesn’t need to worry about money ever again.
Of course, a follow-up search for Pages in the Pines had offered zero results. The best Kaitlan had been able to figure out was that Pineridge was a small (three-mile square) unincorporated township wedged near the top of the mountain, on the edge of the Coachella Valley. There was no formal local government, no cell phone towers, no grid power or sewer lines. It was, in other words, exactly the kind of place where someone like Maud would go to escape from the world. There were just two other search results that mentioned the town by name—one a site called “California’s Most Epic hikes,” another a list of film locations that claimed an episode of Bonanza had been filmed near Pineridge in the 1960s and that Barbra Streisand had once considered buying a vacation cabin a few miles farther down the mountain.
It was the longest of long shots, but in her four a.m. delirium, Kaitlan had utterly convinced herself that Maud was to be found in Pineridge. She’d circled the location on the map and laid down to rest her eyes. And now—shit, shit, shit—it was morning. All thoughts of finding Maud disappeared instantly—she needed to get to the Campus and find out what she’d missed.
Kaitlan threw aside the blanket and rose to her feet, knees cracking in protest. Heather was supposed to have come to collect her at six a.m. with a replacement phone that wasn’t crippled by the LLIAM app. So where the hell was she? The engineering team would have been working all night to get LLIAM back online. Sandeep had never explicitly said he would have made a better CEO than Kaitlan but his constant digs about the need for more technical leadership never failed to land. She imagined him calling the board with a status update—no, I haven’t heard from Kaitlan since she went home for dinner. Crap like this played right into his hands.
“Tom?” She called her husband’s name and listened for a reply. All she heard was the distant whir of a Saturday lawn mower. She retrieved her phone from the coffee table more out of frustration than hope. No signal, no messages, no alerts.
Kaitlan peered out the window to the driveway where Tom’s vintage green Jaguar typically sat, protected from the elements by a custom-fitted gray tarp. The tarp was still there, laying in a heap on the driveway, but the car itself was gone—as if vanished by an untidy magician. Maybe Tom had driven himself to the store to pick up things for breakfast. If so, he was almost certainly standing in the world’s longest checkout line.
What about Heather, though? It wouldn’t be the first time she’d made an executive (LLIAM sanctioned) decision to let her boss sleep late, but if that was her plan today then she had dramatically misjudged Kaitlan’s needs. Every second Kaitlan wasn’t on Campus helping to solve the outage was another step closer to disaster for StoicAI, and the unemployment line for them both. Kaitlan didn’t need to approve her assistant’s every decision, especially when LLIAM already had, but when the decision-making algorithm is down and your boss doesn’t even have a working cell phone, then going completely AWOL is a really, really bad look. Kaitlan blamed herself, too: She should have borrowed Heather’s phone while she was still at the office, or asked someone in Facilities to get her a replacement until hers was back online.
Fine. Kaitlan took a deep breath to calm herself, then looked back at the TV, confirming that CNN was still broadcasting endless coverage of StoicAI’s implosion. According to the bright red chyron running across the bottom of the screen, the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq were both still suspended. That made sense: Traders at both exchanges relied on LLIAM to make their buying and selling decisions—but it also offered the silver lining that nobody could know precisely how low StoicAI’s stock price had plummeted.
First, she would take a shower, then, as soon as Tom got back from the store, she’d ask him to give her a ride to Campus. Next, she would check in with Sandeep and, finally, assuming a fix for LLIAM still wasn’t on the horizon, she would do some more digging into the mysterious town of Pineridge to see if she could get any closer to confirming Maud’s location. And then she would get on a fucking plane. Sandeep had already wasted more than twenty-four hours to prove the value of his “technical leadership,” so one way or another, Kaitlan was going to solve the crisis herself. She would deal with her absent assistant later.
Kaitlan padded upstairs to the bathroom, running through her mental to-do list as she went. For a moment she actually felt a little giddy at the thrill of making her own decisions again. But the nausea quickly returned as she thought about the prospect of seeing Maud for the first time in almost two years.
What’s the worst that could happen if she flew to this little mountain town and Maud was actually there? She forced her brain to calculate the variables: Maud could refuse to hand over whatever version of the LLIAM chip she’d been hoarding and babble some half-baked theory about how LLIAM had deliberately gone offline rather than help the military, just like she’d predicted in her letters. They’d have a huge fight.
No, that wasn’t the worst possibility at all. Kaitlan tensed at the memory of a hospital hallway. The last time she’d seen Maud face-to-face.
Fine, fine, fine. Maud could say whatever she liked, be as mad as she liked, but ultimately Kaitlan knew that Maud would be just as horrified as she was at the disruption caused by LLIAM’s outage. The jammed roads, the packed hospitals, the chaos and uncertainty—these were the antithesis of the peace and harmony that she and Martin had espoused. Yes, Maud would want LLIAM back online just as much as everybody else did. And if not, well, that’s what lawyers were for.
Another problem if Kaitlan did go to Pineridge and Maud did hand over the chip was that Kaitlan would have to deal with Tom’s smug told you so face. Then she remembered how supportive he’d been last night and smiled to herself—he must have snuck down and covered her in the blanket after she fell asleep.
Of course, there was still one final possibility: Sandeep was right and that Maud didn’t have a copy of the LLIAM chip at all, and her letters were just the ravings of a conspiratorial lunatic. As Kaitlan turned on the shower and felt the warm steam begin to fill the bathroom, she decided to choose optimism.
Kaitlan stepped under the water and felt the warm jet pummel her shoulders. Yes, she would go to the office, throw Sandeep under the bus, fly to Pineridge, get LLIAM back online, and be home in time to have sex with her husband for the first time in three months.
Then, before she had chance to reach for the shampoo, she heard a sound that gave her hope that today might actually be better than yesterday. For the first time in more than twenty-four hours, her phone was ringing.
She wrapped herself in a towel, rushed out of the bathroom, and grabbed for the handset that she’d left laying on her bed. She didn’t recognize the number on the screen—a San Francisco area code—so she sent it straight to voicemail. The call itself was irrelevant—it was likely one of the many journalists who had been trying to reach her since yesterday: The New York Times, Financial Times, Bloomberg all had bureaus in the city. All that mattered was that Kaitlan was somehow reconnected to the world, and the world to Kaitlan. She grabbed a second, smaller, towel and began drying her hair, but the phone was already ringing again, the same number showing on the screen. It was either a very persistent reporter or, she realized now, Heather trying to reach her from a new number.
She hit the answer button but said nothing. There was silence on the other end of the line. Until eventually… “Kaitlan?”
It was a man’s voice, and one that seemed somehow familiar. She knew better than to confirm to a stranger that he had reached the right number. So she stayed silent, listening.
“Kaitlan, are you there? This is Chase Mullins.”
Chase Mullins? How did she know that name? Her brain raced to catch up, until the man answered the question for her.
“I’m Heather’s… I guess fiancé. We met at the family fun day?”
Of course! Chase. Tall, decent-looking, face like a puppy dog and personality to match. But why was he calling her? And what did ‘I guess fiancé’ mean? Kaitlan pulled her towel tighter around her body. “Hey Chase… is everything okay?”
More silence. A very, very bad sign.
“Chase? Are you there? Is Heather okay?”
“Well, I guess you don’t know.” He let out a slow breath and she heard it clearly now: He sounded dull, lifeless; nothing at all like the carefree dude Heather had introduced her to at the company barbecue. Kaitlan braced herself for whatever terrible news he was about to share. A car accident? Oh god, her mind flashed back to that ancient, rattling KIA Soul. That’s why Heather hadn’t shown up for work. She sat down on the bed.
“Heather’s gone,” said Chase, confirming the worst. Kaitlan felt a tang at the back of her throat, but then came the words that, after everything she’d weathered in the past twenty-four hours, finally sent Kaitlan tumbling off the bed and slumping to the floor, eyes dry, head pounding. “She left, with your husband.”
The rest of the conversation passed in a blur. It had been going on for months. All those Sunday afternoons when Heather had supposedly been at her poetry club in the city, she’d actually been at a motel, meeting Tom. Chase had suspected for a while but only found out for sure this morning. Some kind of note, or a letter? It arrived in the mail, he said. Now Heather and Tom were both gone. Together. He didn’t know where, but he thought he should call Kaitlan and let her know. He didn’t know what else to do.
Kaitlan’s ears were ringing. The whole room was spinning now, walls warping, gray vibrations at the edges of her vision. She hung up while Chase was still talking.
Somehow she made it back downstairs and fell to the couch, still wrapped in a towel. It had been years since she’d had a panic attack, but she knew the signs. She forced herself to breathe—to focus on each slow breath, in… and out. It couldn’t be true. Except obviously it could be true. Heather was young, vivacious, and in their house constantly; fetching papers, dropping off dry cleaning, keeping Kaitlan’s life ticking over any time she was out of town. And Tom was… a man. Sunday afternoons—that was when Tom always went on his “hikes” on the Marin Headlands, disappearing for hours with no cell phone reception. God, how could she have been so stupid? She’d even joked to Tom about how Heather had basically become his backup wife. But what was she…? Like twenty-four years old? He was twice her age.
Why would Heather possibly blow up her whole life like this—her career, and Tom’s life, too? It just didn’t make sense. This had to be some kind of sick prank. She had heard about antiwar trolls sending armed police, or endless late-night pizza deliveries, to CEOs’ houses. There were so many ways to destroy someone’s life. Maybe the same activists who had blockaded the Campus a few weeks ago to protest against the Pentagon deal had decided to mess with her.
As Kaitlan willed her legs to lift her back up from the couch, she caught another glimpse of the television screen. For the first time in more than a day, the coverage wasn’t fixated on LLIAM. Instead, the screen was split into a two-shot: with the live feed of StoicAI’s Campus still on one side, and the other showing what seemed to be helicopter footage of a house surrounded by police. The on-screen chyron read “SWAT STANDOFF: MAN HOLDS TEENAGE GIRL HOSTAGE.”
Kaitlan hit the volume button on the remote. “That’s right, Jake, we understand police were called to this address in Prospect, New Jersey, after a tip from the girl’s mother. We’re told she received some kind of anonymous letter in the mail signed by the AI chatbot LLIAM. And this is just one of apparently thousands of similar letters that have been arriving across the country. We are still waiting for a comment from StoicAI and the Postal Service. In fact, we’re now hearing unconfirmed reports that the letters have been received as far away as Europe and New Zealand.”
As Kaitlan watched in absolute horror, the graphic updated: “MYSTERY LETTERS ACCUSE THOUSANDS.” “At this time we’re not sure if the letters are some kind of elaborate hoax or if they really are related to the global outage of LLIAM. Either way, this is yet more bad news for StoicAI and its embattled CEO, Kaitlan Goss…”
Kaitlan stared at the screen, dumbstruck, and saw a photograph of herself staring back. Chase’s words still echoed in her ears. I got a letter explaining everything. She slumped back down to the couch, hands clenching her scalp.
Oh.
My.
God.
Because now, playing out on live television, and all over the world, Kaitlan saw the terrifying, unfathomable truth. She had been right that this wasn’t a hack or a crash. There was no trojan horse, and this wasn’t some revenge plot engineered by Maud or random antiwar protesters. The outage hadn’t been triggered by some external saboteur.
The person who had killed LLIAM and was now apparently exposing the darkest secrets of its users to the world… was LLIAM.
This was the singularity. The end of the world.
For a moment Kaitlan stopped breathing at the enormity of it all. And then came an even more horrifying realization. So horrifying that Kaitlan heard herself speaking it out loud. A memory of the worst decision she had ever asked LLIAM to help her make, and the consequences of that decision, which Kaitlan had hoped and prayed would never come.
“LLIAM’s going to tell Maud what I did.”
TEN
Pineridge, California
Dear Mom,
By the time you read this, I will already be dead. I know that it is a mortal sin to take a life, but I hope you will understand that I had no choice.
Some crimes are so heinous, and so unforgivable, that there can be no other salvation.
Maud threw the letter onto her desk. This was a cruel joke—it had to be. Nobody knew how to reach her up here—not even…
