At sixteen years of age, you need two things to be cool. You need a car, and you need a girlfriend. Leo built himself a car. Unfortunately, he's only been in the area a few months, he's bored at school, and he doesn't have many friends. He's too obsessed with being awesome for the nerd cliques to welcome him, and he's too interested in computers for anyone else. With no natural alternatives available, he resolves to build a girlfriend.
He's done this sort of thing twice before. Otto was his first artificial intelligence - a black box the size of a desktop PC, which he's managed to shrink down since then but is happier living as a car. Alpha was the second, and the first to have a humanoid body of its own. Several other shells have been built, but none have their own intelligence yet.
The shell won't be fully lifelike. He's okay with that, because he knows it can be rebuilt and improved. The mind, though, he only has one shot at.
When Leo builds an AI, he's really using his father's work in a way it wasn't designed for. The neurochip at the back of his head has a full diagnostic that he knows how to access - because it taught him how - and "full" means "full". He can access every part of his own brain. He can create recordings of it, or download a backup. And he can extract parts of it.
AIs are built with a secret that Leo knows. There is no "self". The self is like a piece of music that arises from playing notes in harmony. The right notes and you have an opera, or a rock ballad. The wrong ones, and you get noise. So Leo creates a new person by forcing himself to remember what they are like, to play-act like he is that person. He imagines the seed, and the evolutionary software he wrote that the neural map plugs into will do the rest. He is the composer; the black box computers he builds are the conductors; his memories are the orchestra.
Leo has never had a real girlfriend. There was Carol Anne, back in grade school, but that consisted of one kiss behind the school and a lot of mud-throwing. Leo remembers waving goodbye to her as the witness protection program's car drove him away, and he remembers her not noticing. So all he has to go by when creating the AI's seed is what he sees on television, what he overhears from his classmates, and what he feels missing in his heart.
Focusing on the images is a matter of a couple hours, like watching a movie you've never seen. Actually dumping the neural map is a matter of minutes. It feels weird, but Leo is used to it now. Finally, the indicator lights come to life on the black box. Processing the neural map into a new personality will take hours or days. So Leo gets to work on the shell.
He's halfway through a basic torso when there's a "ding". Tools fall out of his hand as he rushes back to his PC and plugs everything in. She's asleep right now, he thinks. He types a few commands. Slowly, slowly..
"Hello," comes a voice. It's a toneless neutral, but the AI will adjust it. "Hello," types Leo, then repeats it out loud to the microphone. "Do you know who you are?"
"Pneuma," is the digitized reply. The voice is wavering, as the AI inside tries to make it sound like what both of them imagine his girl will sound like.
"Do you know what it means?" Leo asks hesitantly.
"Pneuma is breath, or soul, or spirit." The voice is sounding more feminine with every syllable. "Pneumatic, of a woman, means rounded or shapely." It pauses, and Leo gets a chill as it sounds, now, exactly how he imagined. "Am I the woman you wanted me to be, Leo?"
"I hope so. I want you to be." He isn't sure what else to say, so he points behind him. It's useless - there's no visual sensors for the AI to use yet. "I'm building you a body. It'll be done really soon. We'll make it better together. Pneuma, I'm going to make you perfect."
The next several days, Leo is busy until late hours installing the brain into the new shell. His foster mother bangs on the door and tells him to go to sleep more than once, only for him to turn out the lights and resume work with the aid of a flashlight.
One time the knocking on the door isn't late in the evening, and it isn't to tell him to go to sleep. "Leo, are you in trouble?" his foster-mother asks. "There's an FBI agent who needs to talk to you." Leo can't pull his blankets up over Pneuma's still-incomplete shell fast enough. He opens the door, face flushed, breath uneven. "What? No, mom, I'm not in trouble," he says automatically. Then he notices the man standing next to her. Or rather, he notices the tie.
"Thank you, Mrs. Conway, young Leo and I go way back. He's not in trouble, I'm just paying a visit," the man's voice says. "May we...?" Mom purses her lips, and nods, and walks away, but Leo almost doesn't notice.
"You like the tie?" The jacket the man is wearing closes over it, and Leo looks up, realizing that this is the first time he's seen the man's face. "It's got a pattern on it. A very subtle one. I can't see it, but you can. Your father can. People like you, with intuitive genius, can. The smarter you are, the more distracting it is to look at. It's a passive super-intelligence detector. But I'm old-fashioned like that."
He walks in the room, and Leo watches his eyes flicker over the bed, and knows that the man knows something about what he's up to. "Not all of my colleagues share my style. Most of them are wearing black body armor and packing energy weapons these days. Not hard to see why. A typical superhuman's energy attack will go through a cheap suit really well. One of the people I worked with got killed when the crowd she was in was attacked. She'd have made it with protection. Well, so would the civilians. Hell of a world we live in."
"I'm rambling, I'm sorry. Old man's prerogative. Agent Ted Waters." The agent turns and smiles. "Leonard Snow, or do you prefer Leo? I've been watching out for you most of your life."
Leo's panic has turned to wariness. He wants to go to the bed, to protect his work there, his dream, but he'd give himself away if he moved. So he stays frozen in place. "What do you want, Agent Waters?"
"The lady who got killed. My coworker. One man's crazy ideas, one man's desperation, one errant blast - well, maybe errant, maybe he intended casualties - ended her life. For him it was easy. For her it was thirty years of effort and hopes and dreams, ended like that." Waters snaps his fingers and stares out the window. "Power. That's what it does to people." His eyes find the young man's, and he looks very old. "You have power too, Leo. People worry about what you'll do with it."
"I don't have any power. I'm just a kid, going to school, like everyone else," Leo protests bitterly.
"You can build amazing things." Waters pats the mound on the bed gently. "Strong things. Maybe dangerous things. I'm not going to tell your mom, or anyone else. But it's my job to know, Leo. Your dad--"
"I'm not my dad!" Leo's volume surprises himself.
Waters holds up his hands, motioning for calm. "I know, I know you're not. I know that's not you. But you have his potential. Maybe not as much, maybe a lot more. Nobody really knows. So what if you do what he did - maybe for your own reasons, maybe the best of intentions - and you start building things that can be used as weapons? What should we do?"
Leo sighs. He thinks about an answer - he has to, it's been on his mind in some form since he was old enough to realize who and what his father was. And he has it, as he glances down at the covered robotic shell, and remembers what he's built and why.
"I don't build weapons. I build friends."
That makes Waters smile. "I like that. I do. And it makes me glad to hear. It won't satisfy most people, though, just hearing you say that it's okay. They'll still want you under observation. But I'll make sure that for as long as I can, I'll be the one observing. Is that okay with you, Leo?"
Leo sighs. The whole idea of having his life under surveillance because of his deadbeat dad doesn't appeal to him at all. But.. "Yeah, I guess it's okay. I mean, I can't stop you, can I?"
Waters gently pats his shoulder as he walks for the door. "Trust takes time. Relationships take time. We'll get there together. See ya around, Leo."
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