Pygmalion Unbound Read Online Free Page A

ready?”
    “She was activated yesterday.”
    “Excellent. You’re ahead of schedule. What’s her status?”
    Crane glided the mouse over its pad, clicked several times, and linked the room cam to Danner’s terminal.
    “Doesn’t look like she’s doing much.”
    “The brain is a prototype. She’s got all the knowledge stored inside. It’s just a matter of integrating it.”
    “How long will that take?”
    “I’m going slowly, to be cautious. You can force-feed the brain too much, short it out, and you’re left with a lifeless shell, and we have to start over. We let the unit activate, grow, let the neural connections develop, do MRI and CT scans, maybe program that into the next generation of brains so we have a higher baseline as far as behavior. We might be able to drop the lag between inception and operations to a matter of a few days by the fourth or fifth prototype. Don’t worry. You’ll get your money’s worth.”
    “I certainly hope so,” Danner said. “DARPA’s plowed twenty billion into your lab over the past ten years, for this and the ESI work. Inside of five years, you could have a regular assembly line going.”
    Danner was ambitious, he could see that the first time they had talked. She had stumbled across his monographs in some obscure journal and had immediately convinced her superiors of the potential for real-world and military applications.
    “Maybe. But they won’t be all identical,” Crane said. “You wouldn’t want that. Each individual droid is going to be unique, with different responses, different ways of adapting to a situation and solving a problem. Makes it harder for an enemy to anticipate and prevent.”
    “And when do I get to run her through the O-course at Quantico?” Danner asked.
    “Three months, tops. You can put her up against a platoon of your best Marines, Navy SEALS, Airborne — she’ll beat every one of them without breaking a sweat.”
    “She’d better. I’ve got a lot of two- and three-stars and Congress types breathing down my neck wanting to know where their money’s gone.”
    And, Crane thought, a star of your own at stake.
    Her rise had been rapid. But she’d clearly spent more time in grade than she was comfortable with. Another year, maybe two, and if her name wasn’t on the promotion list for Brigadier General, she would undoubtedly call it time to retire. She’d find a job in the private sector, maybe even as a consultant or lobbyist for American Cybernetics. But he knew a revolving-door civilian job would bore her.
    “Three months, Colonel. And then you’ll have your own stars.”
    Danner watched Kelly talking with Maria on the monitor, with Franklin hanging back.
    “Take good care of her,” she said, and she cut the link.

3
    Franklin watched Alannah Kelly with his creation. His , just as much as Crane’s.
    Crane did the work on force-growing the tissue samples with nanobots to get a fully formed body inside of three months in a tank. But the brain — the brain had been Franklin’s work, using the DNA coding research done years ago by Bell Labs, MIT, and IBM back in the ’teens and running with it. Take stem cell tissue, combine with adult brain tissue, and grow a brain. It was in essence an organic CPU, complete with a few hundred gigs of RAM, ROM — not quite a Deep Blue or a Cray teraflop, but damned close and far more portable to boot. It was a superbeing with an IQ in the 300-400 range. Numbers like that would make Einstein look like a dimwitted second grader. But now —
    Now he watched as Kelly talked to the droid as if she were the dimwitted second grader. That was the big bug — he’d had a hell of a time booting up the system. Couldn’t go too fast, this wasn’t like unpacking a Dell laptop and plugging it in to run gaming apps. It wasn’t hard-wired of silicon chips and preset codes. The organic circuitry was designed to grow, to develop, to develop engrams unique to the unit. Force-feed it Fermat’s Last