Pa'an

“I’ll go find our host. Sara, see if you can get some coffee into this guy, er, Deepak.”

“No! Mr. Alex, you go find Jaeger Kunstler.”

Elexi shakes Sara. “Sara, calm down. You have to keep your wits about you. This is Aura we’re talking about! You need to check her connections or whatever. I’m the useless one, let me find the coffee.”

Deepak sits on the floor behind Aura’s avatar and tries to follow the intricate cabling, but is too wasted to follow the wires to their connections. All the time he is mumbling in Sanskrit.

Jaeger follows an agitated Grove. “You say she just started repeating herself and then quit? I don’t know much about AI’s but that could be just a glitch.”

“Mr. Kunstler, I’ve kissed babes that broke down, but not exactly like that.”

Jag looked up into Grove’s face. “Mr. Alex, or should I call you Grover? You actually kissed a dress dummy?” Jag smirked.

“She damn well didn’t come across as any kind of dummy to me. Sure, call me Grove.”

“Every one calls me Jag, Grove. Sorry we have to meet this way. Aura is a significant asset of Ultradata. I assure you we will do everything we can to recover her commercial value.”

“Jag, I don’t care a fat fart in Philly about her commercial value. Aura is as real a person as you are, and a lot smarter, if I might say so. I don’t ‘xactly make the rounds kissing plaster pussy. You better get her back in good shape.”

Jag grinned at the ribald description of Aura. “Well, Grove, I hope you have a nice, warm woman to help you over your loss. I could see if Ana is available?”

“Son of a bitch! Just see to fixing Aura and I promise we will discuss plaster and Ana later.” They worked their way through the throng and found Sara still trying to chase wires and Elexi pouring black coffee into Deepak.

Jag stepped carefully across the nest of wiring behind Aura’s avatar. “Aah, Elexi, I see we have a little trouble here.” He stooped down. “You are Sara, I remember. Have you found the glitch yet?”

Sara answered from the tangle of cables, “It’s not a glitch, not here at any event. We need to get back to the lab. Elexi, can you get Deepak up and moving?”

Jag motioned and a black suit near the door approached. “ Please let my driver here take you back. I’m afraid I must attend to my guests now. I’ll come along when I can.”

Jag’s limousine whisked them to the lab and dropped them off.

The lab door was open. The door jamb showed the marks of a jimmy. Sara fingered the deep gouges in the wood. “Oh, oh. We got troubles!” She rushed into the lab and found the door to the locked compartment with Aura’s modules bent and open as well. There was a quantity of blue liquid on the floor. Elexi pushed the still mumbling Deepak into a lab chair and stared at the blue fluid. “Please tell me she just sprung a leak!”

Sara bent down and put a finger into the liquid. She smelled it and shook her head. She put the finger to the tip of her tongue and made a face. “Salty, bitter. Could be copper sulphate. It’s a powerful electrolyte and a poison to the biomatrix.”

Deepak came unsteadily out of his chair and leaned on the compartment door. Sara stepped aside. Deepak went in and looked at the rack with the biomatrix modules. They were obviously wet. He hung onto the rack and cried. “No glitch! No glitch, no glitch no glitch. Someone poured copper sulphate on her! Aura was murdered!”

He wagged his head from side to side in denial while tears streamed down his face, adding to the pool on the floor. Elexi hid her head in her hands and sobbed. Sara took a few deep breaths and held herself together. “Who could… Who would…Why would anyone do such a thing?”

As she turned away she saw a scrap of paper caught on the sharp edge of the broken cabinet door. She worked it loose and turned it over. It looked like a page from a book. It was written in Arabic.

*****

Sara steered Deepak to a chair while Elexi brewed a strong batch of coffee. Deepak sputtered over the hot coffee but drank very little. He was drunk and unconsolable. In a few hours Deepak began to sober up. Together they tried various diagnostics, tried swapping out the pickled biomatrix boards for some in need of minor repairs, tried rebooting all the underlying layers of the system, but to no avail. As a computer, the system ran code, but there was no Aura in the machine.

Towards dawn, Jag arrived. His black tie was unraveled, his shirt wrinkled, he smelled strongly of Chanel perfume and champagne. He came over and sat on Deepak’s desk. Sara could see a dark shadow of beard and, perhaps a sad look in his eyes. “So, what is the status of our precious AI? You have been here all night, yes?”

“She is….gone,” Deepak managed, and followed it with a long sigh, then he hung his head.

“Aura was murdered!” Sara jumped up from the control console, red-eyed with exhaustion, and crammed a piece of paper into Jag’s tuxedo pocket. He pulled it out, squinted at it, put it down on the desk and ironed out the wrinkles with his hand. “Arabic?” he asked. “It looks like Arabic to me,” Sara said.

“Yes, it is Arabic. I grew up in a city that has many Arabic speakers,” Deepak mumbled. “It is a sura from the Quran.”

“Aura told me there was a, ah, a fatwa against her and Deepak and maybe Ultradata as well,” said Elexi.

“So, you had a conversation with her about fatwas?” said Jag.

“Aura was my friend. We talked a lot. She even introduced me to Zovo, ah er, her AI friend. There was a lot to Aura, nothing like those bland, cold AI’s that run banks and corporations.”

“Grove rousted me out of a very promising situation to get me back here this morning. I gather he was impressed by our Aura as well. Too bad I never got to know her. Remember, she was also our major asset. This could be a disaster for Ultradata, and certainly a blot on my security procedures. But are you sure she is not recoverable?”

“We have been trying to reboot her all night but all we get is programmed responses. Her recursion level boards were poisoned and we don’t have enough left to replace all of them. Maybe in a few more days…” Deepak was torn between mourning and hope. “Could you get us the funding to put a delivery premium on new boards so we can get her back to her full configuration?”

“I will see if there is enough in the treasury to do that, and I’ll also initiate an investigation. Elexi, get me a flight to Switzerland this evening and notify the local police. Have security file a police report and put this Arabic note in it.” Jag pushed himself off the desk and walked to the door, then he turned around as an after thought, “Please take care of my Kaiser for a few days until I return.”