Evolved(56)

Jae blinked.

Shaun went on. “I can modify my behaviour so a human believes I am a standard A-Class. I can pretend innuendos go unnoticed or that human manners do not apply to me. I don’t consider this behavioural modification to be an untruth because it protects Lloyd from scrutiny. I don’t care what some passer-by may think of me; their opinion is of no consequence. Lloyd’s opinion matters, as does his well-being. But, hypothetically, if word of my capabilities become public, I will pretend to be as dumb as a post and the person who exposes us will look a fool.”

Jae blanched and looked slightly horrified and even a little scared. “Hypothetically…”

I squeezed Shaun’s hand. “That won’t happen, Shaun.”

“Of course not,” he replied with a smile. “That’s why I added the theoretical qualifier.”

I fought a smile until it won. I even chuckled. “We might need to work on your subtlety.” Then I looked at Jae and gave him a pointed nod. “You see what I mean now? The emotive responses, the initiative, the reasoning, cognizance. It far exceeds standard android parameters, yes?”

Jae nodded slowly. “Oh yeah.” Then he swallowed hard and sipped his second coffee, it seemed, to gather his thoughts. “So why come here? Why me?”

I took a breath. “I need to know more about these processors and what kind of internet connectivity we’ll need. We have two weeks before he needs to be online again and I’d rather bypass the home hub if that’s even possible. I want SATinc out of our lives, for good.”

Jae let out a slow breath. “It’s possible. It just won’t be too legal. It will involve the darknet and running on incognito networks.”

“I don’t care. I’ll do whatever it takes.”

Jae finally smiled. “Really? Because this is the kind of stuff I’ve dreamed about doing! This is black-mirror stuff, man. Going dark, like in the movies!”

I squeezed Shaun’s hand and gave him a smile. “Whatever it takes to keep him safe.”

Jae clapped his hands together. “Right. Then let’s do this. First, I need to know what kind of processors we’re talking about and what kind of software layering has been installed, so if there’s any information you can get from SATinc specifications—”

Shaun smiled. “I can tell you anything you need. I have full access to all information.”

Jae sat back in his seat and smiled. And so they went back and forth with in-depth tech-speak that lost me somewhere after specific configurations and authorisations using non-standard communication protocols. In all the years I’d spent my lunch breaks talking to Jae, I’d never seen him so animated. Maybe it was because I never asked him about what his job actually entailed, and I regretted not seeing this side of him earlier. Shaun enjoyed the conversation too, clearly enthralled in the ability to hold specialised conversations with an expert. I was more caught up in the way Shaun smiled when he listened or used his hands while he talked, and it was pretty obvious that Jae had, at some point in their discussion, forgotten he was talking to an android.

I had fanciful visions of inviting Jae over for dinner so he and Shaun could talk all night about technologies I could only pretend to understand, which was absurd because I’d never imagined inviting anyone over for dinner before. But I wanted Shaun to broaden his circle and have more interaction that didn’t include going downstairs to the lobby to try and hold a conversation with the B-Class android. He was starved for interaction and I had a greater responsibility to provide that.

It wasn’t what I’d expected when I walked into the SATinc office. I’d expected nothing more than quiet discussions on books and meaningless sex. What I got was a whole world apart.

So very much more.

“Isn’t that right?” Jae asked me.

Oh. “Pardon? Sorry, I was a million miles away.”

“I was just telling Shaun his neural networks are very similar to the human brain. Like scarily similar. His MPU is modelled off our neocortex.”

“Neocortex?” I clarified. “Our brains?”

Jae nodded quickly. “Multi-layered processing controls high-order brain functions like sensory perception, motor commands, spatial reasoning, conscious thought, language. And Shaun’s circuitry is much the same.”

Shaun looked at me brightly. “A neural network with a hierarchy of layered filters.”

Well, they were clearly happy with where this discovery had taken them. I was utterly lost. “What does that mean?”

Jae blinked like I wasn’t getting the obvious. “For wireless to work, you need transmitters and receivers at both ends, right?”

I had no idea. I just took the internet for granted. It had always been there. “Um, sure.”

Shaun gave me a patient smile and threaded our fingers on his knee. “I have transmitters and receivers, plus multi-layered networks, dual processors, and filters. I can stay connected wirelessly through the neural network on a separate processor.”

I still wasn’t really following. “So staying off-grid is possible?”

“It is,” Jae said. “But it will require modification. Specialised modification to Shaun’s hardware and software. Which puts it in the not-easy category, but it is possible.”

Shaun opened his mouth to say something when there was a knock at the door. The woman we’d met before poked her head in. “Oh Jae, there you are. Sorry to interrupt, but you’re needed back at the science department. Uh, now.”