An Artificial Life Ch. 03

Ch. 3: David loses Ainsley

Author's Note

"An Artificial Life" is the first story I have written, an exploration of general-purpose artificial intelligence -- how that might come about and what that might mean. I am enjoying exploring the creation of sentience as it relates to the creator, to the created, and to the rest of the world.

This is the third chapter, and it represents a substantial departure from the first two chapters. For one thing, the shift in point of view is obvious. Stick with it, you may learn about the shift in the chapter.

While there is sex in this story, I try to make it part of the story rather than the focus of the story. All sexual scenarios presented involve individuals who are at least eighteen years of age or older at the time the scenario is presented.

Let me know your thoughts. Please vote and comment as you desire. I am open to useful suggestions and constructive criticism. I will completely ignore inappropriate comments or trolling.

Thanks for taking this journey with me. I have enjoyed writing this and reading your reactions.

This chapter has been re-posted to reflect edits. I somehow lost half of the first scene when I originally posted it, and I did not catch the error before hitting "submit." My sincere apologies to any readers who were confused. I am still very new to this. Thanks to SpookMeister and Ravenna933 for the editing suggestions. Any remaining errors are all of my doing.

--DD

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Camden Psychiatric Institute

"This is all just fantasy," Detective Carl Fordham stated to the rest of the room. "He obsessed over her and killed her. It's just that simple." Carl saw the world in black and white, but mostly black. As far as he was concerned, the kid was just a pampered loser that spent way too much time playing video games and lost touch with reality. "I mean think about how much time he spent playing 'Kill or Be Killed.' He did it."

He was getting frustrated, they had been assembled in the clinical conference room going over the case file. "We have been at this for hours."

Dr. Angela Sinclair agreed, "Yes, it is fantasy, Detective Fordham. But it is very real to him. It is clear that he suffered an acute psychotic episode, but I don't believe the evidence indicates he killed her or anyone for that matter."

Detective Fordham, was right about one thing, she thought. They had spent too long in the room without a break. This conference was tedious, but essential, she considered as she looked around at her companions weary expressions. On the wall screens surrounding the long conference table were report findings and highlighted portions of documents, paused videos, and gruesome images of the poor girl who had been fished out of the drainage channel. Following the anonymous tip, the victims identity had been confirmed: Vanessa Amante was dead.

"Carl, there is no evidence that the victim had been to his apartment recently, and the bank's video footage showed her at the teller counter," a rugged-looking man sitting at the head of the table addressed his colleague. "And don't forget the video footage shortly after of her going in to her apartment and leaving. She cleared out on her own." He was tired, and tried not to let it show.

"Think about it: none of the victim's fingerprints or DNA were found at his apartment, but they were all over the computer lab and at the school. It is more likely the poor woman was just robbed, killed and thrown in the drainage ditch." Special Agent Henry Caldwell reasoned to Detective Fordham and the rest of the team.

"I know, I know," Detective Fordham said, "but I can't shake the feeling he did this. What about the hair? Some of the hair samples at the lab matched black hair at the apartment ..."

"That's easily explained as transfer material," Deputy DA Connie Francis piped in. "We know the two of them worked together in the lab. But the bulk of the black hair was from an unknown female, so let's move on."

"Let's take a break, everyone. We will reassemble after lunch." Henry said to the room. Binders closed, and chairs shuffled as the team made their way out of the room. Henry grabbed a remote and pressed a button, causing the wall monitors to change to a panoramic scene of a mountain clearing with spring grasses and flowers gently moving in the breeze. His mood lifted as the crime scene diagrams and photos of the victim's caved in face faded away.

He had wanted to find justice for Vanessa. The initial theory of the case involved Jackson, and he thought this would be an open and shut case. He had been called in because Vanessa Amante had been in the program, and she had been found dead.

Henry had known Vanessa's parents, he had gone through the academy with them. They were good people, and had been assigned to the Organized Crimes Division as analysts. He was surprised when both of them left the Bureau suddenly, but the Bureau wasn't for everybody.

When he was assigned Vanessa's case file, he learned what had happened to his friends from long ago. Her real parents had been informants, and they were killed presumably by the terrorist organization they had been informing on. Vanessa had survived, and his friends adopted her, entering the protection program and abandoning their careers to keep her safe.

Vanessa's parents had been heroes, he read, and Agents Sara and Michael Donovan made sure the Bureau did not forget its debt to Vanessa. Their names had evidently been changed to Amante, and they had disappeared.

The dossier noted the Donovan's had died a few years back in a crash the Bureau determined was "not suspicious." They clearly believed they were in no danger, having removed Vanessa from the program when she turned eighteen. He wondered if she had ever known the real story of her adoptive parents, and knowing the professionalism of Sara and Michael, he doubted she ever did learn the truth.

Now that Vanessa had died, the Bureau was taking a hard look, and they assigned him to her case. He had wished they had more on file: her fingerprints, her DNA, anything at all -- but the files either were sealed away or no longer existed. At least he couldn't find them, and he was known to be very good at finding things. The one set of dental x-rays from the University dental clinic was sufficient to make the identification. It was good the locals had found the x-rays, otherwise he would have never been brought in.

Special Agent Caldwell had an impressive reputation for following every thread, unraveling several complicated conspiracies that very few people in the Bureau, and no one in the press, ever knew existed. Only four people were aware of the true reasons Vice President Tracy had resigned years ago. And only two people were still alive who knew why President Victor Donald Goldstone III did not seek a second term. In both cases, Henry Caldwell was one of them.

Everyone else assumed that it was due to the president's claim that Washington was too broken to fix, and that he wanted to spend time with his wife and travel the world. Washington was broken, Henry thought, but at least he didn't have to listen to that idiot anymore. The next president had been a more skillful idiot, but he wasn't Henry's problem.

Special Agent Caldwell's assignment to Vanessa's case came with a very clear mandate: investigate whether the death was related to the victim's relationship to the program or if the death occurred "outside of the concerns of the Bureau." It was basically to determine whether the Bureau could pass this off as someone else's problem. "Henry, do we even care about this?" was actually what he was sent to find out, he could hear the deputy director's voice during the assignment briefing.

Thank god the Bureau had gotten on this before the press got a hold of it. The press only complicated things and made the witnesses scatter, and the ones desperate for their brief five minutes of fame invented stories that later became conspiracy theories and dominated talk radio for months, even years.

No, Caldwell thought, this was much better. He liked being able to work quietly in the background, with the freedom to investigate leads without the bright lights and cameras following his every move. Not that the press wasn't useful in certain cases, but more often than not, they were a nuisance.

Most likely it had been the section of town in which this had happened: away from the sprawling university and bustling skyscrapers, hidden where homeless and drug addicts staked their small claims.

At first it had seemed plausible that they had the right guy. This suspect fit the profile: lonely, mediocre, failing at school, sexually frustrated, obsessed with Vanessa. All of this came out from the interviews of witnesses at the university. They didn't say these things exactly, but Caldwell was trained to see what wasn't said amongst the niceties of an interview with a concerned friend, colleague or teacher.

No one described the suspect as "well-liked" or "brilliant" or even "smart." He was a "nice guy," a little "nerdy at times," and "kept to the lab." When asked about his friends, he heard three variants: "I didn't know him that well," "I think he has friends back home" and "Vanessa." No one knew of a girlfriend or boyfriend, not one offering "maybe back home," and a few ventured "I think he likes Vanessa, but she's not into him like that." And his school project was unknown to most, with even his advisor calling it "a little research project on AI ... I'm not sure how that's going." Not a picture of a well-adjusted, socially involved, successful grad student.

When the suspect finally started talking, he claimed he hadn't seen Vanessa after she withdrew, and that he had been alone in his apartment since he had left his lab, not even leaving for food. He refused to speak further when confronted with the evidence of vaginal secretions taken from his penis, face, torso and back; the semen stained laundry in his hamper; the black hair of a woman found in his bed, shower and dryer lint trap; and the drying, but previously sopping panties found in his bed, tangled with the sheets hurled to the bottom.

The theory from Fordham was that Vanessa had given him what he wanted, but told him she was leaving when he snapped. The suspect had ransacked his own place, to make it look like he had been robbed when his real plan was to get rid of evidence. Caldwell thought this was nonsense, no hard core gamer would ever trash his own gear like that.

Fordham was a good man, but he let his feelings get in the way of the evidence, Caldwell concluded. There were just so many holes in his theories -- why didn't the suspect get rid of the panties, or why didn't the suspect take a shower? Still, you had to admire Detective Fordham's passion.

It would have been easy to accept Fordham's theory and let this hapless kid take the fall. But the day Henry showed up was the suspect's lucky day -- he had the Bureau working the case. Special Agent Caldwell had the tools to find out if the suspect was right for this case. He would use them.

And that is how Jackson wound up here, Agent Caldwell smiled, as he walked through Dr. Sinclair's institute. One of the only good things President Goldstone had done, in Henry's opinion, was to force through a series of anti-terrorist laws which gave an extensive suite of tools to the Bureau to fight terrorism. "But not torture ... we don't torture -- even though they deserve it, am I right?" the president had said winking to his followers during one of his rallies.

These laws had blossomed over the years so that if the Bureau suspected terrorism, the Fifth Amendment could be suspended, and a suspect could be required to speak, even compelled to speak (but not "tortured" to speak).

When Agent Caldwell arrived, he took over the investigation, and it suddenly and secretly became a terrorist investigation until proven otherwise. He obtained the proper warrants and moved the suspect to Dr. Sinclair's psychiatric facility. Dr. Sinclair was able to perform a chemically-assisted interview allowed by the warrant.

During the interview, Jackson appeared cooperative and told a fantastical story where he essentially admitted turning Vanessa into what Detective Fordham concluded was "a mind-controlled sex slave." That was a stretch, Agent Caldwell thought, but it was interesting nonetheless.

Jackson could not explain how he was found, with his apartment essentially ransacked, his computers and game systems all taken. The suspect was most distressed regarding the loss of the "Creator Terminal" and, even with the assistance of the drugs, became distressed and agitated to the point of requiring sedation.

The interview seemed promising to both Detective Fordham and Agent Caldwell. Clearly, David Jackson was making things up to avoid admitting his guilt.

Jackson couldn't bring himself to say it, even though he could come close by creating a fantasy. He had sex with Vanessa and killed her, Fordham emphasized. Jackson's story became ever more delusional and desperate as he denied any involvement with "that woman" pointing at the pictures.

He insisted that he did not have sex with Vanessa, and that Vanessa was alive. He claimed the pictures were of some other woman, that she looked nothing like Vanessa screaming at them "Vanessa had red hair" which contradicted earlier admissions.

When presented with the overwhelming evidence that Vanessa had been murdered, the suspect broke down sobbing, and became unresponsive, asking for Ainsley who he claimed was Vanessa. At one point, he suggested it "was my fault," but when pressed he said he allowed Vanessa to become Ainsley and should have said "no" but he could not refuse her.

Fordham insisted he was making this all up and trying to create a defense of insanity, but that Jackson had committed the murder. Agent Caldwell gave approval to conduct an interview with the suspect placed under chemically-induced hypnosis. If Fordham was right, they would know.

Hypnosis places a subject into a state of relaxation and overcomes their natural inhibitions, allowing them to act on impulses that they actually desire. At least that is what is popularly known. Under chemically-induced hypnotic interviews, the subject is given strong hallucinogens and the interviewer is able to get a subject to relay highly accurate accounts of events with no fear of discovery or recrimination.

CIHI (pronounced "key-high" for some reason) was far more invasive than a chemically-assisted interview, and the restrictions on its use were onerous, but Agent Caldwell had already covered the eventuality of its use in his earlier warrant application.

Caldwell had witnessed interviewers convince subjects that they were confessing to a priest during last-rites, or describing a movie of what they saw. Only highly conditioned agents had ever been able to defeat the artificial realities imposed by the drugs and a skilled interviewer. Dr. Sinclair was one of the best interviewers, having been involved in the development and research of the technique.

Dr. Sinclair got to know her subjects better by giving them a series of questions and playing a word association game with them while they were given a cocktail which consisted of a sedative and a smaller dose of the same drugs used for chemically-assisted interviews, along with a few other drugs to induce a state of euphoria. Applying her technique to the suspect, she found he fancied himself an author and he found tropical beaches and Japanese-styled gardens to be peaceful settings, although he had never been to either, and he had never written anything other than computer code and papers for his degree program.

Dr. Sinclair then administered hallucinogenic agents and convinced the subject that he was a skilled author, and he was writing an autobiography of his experiences so that others could understand and feel what he had been through. Using sounds and wall panel displays, she imposed a reality of a private tea house overlooking a secluded quiet Japanese garden surrounding the interview room.

She told him that she was his personal assistant and that she would write down everything he said for him. She encouraged him, telling him she was sure his novel would be a best-seller if he took the time to include detail and draw the reader into his story.

Agent Caldwell and Detective Ford watched the interview through monitors as it was happening. Dr. Sinclair was good, very good at her job. She guided him to the portion of his story that preceded his encounter with the victim on Sunday morning. The two listened to the interview begin and heard the suspect David Jackson dictate the lines of his first, epic novel:

"I had just spent the last thirty-six hours reworking a section of code trying to understand why I was getting the behavior I was seeing ..." he began. Dr. Sinclair occasionally interrupted, asking for additional description or more technical details where appropriate, and prompting him to fill in background necessary.

As the interview went on, Detective Fordham stomped around, saying "that's bullshit!" and "the little fucker is beating the system," while Caldwell just looked on. He doubted Jackson was that gifted, it made very little sense.

"You need to trust Angela, she knows what she is doing." Caldwell assured his local colleague. "I've seen Angela convince a drug lord that he was a DEA agent, and had him plan out a take down of his entire operation."

Ford looked at him in disbelief. "Maybe so," he said grudgingly, "but this kid's playing us, I can feel it." They watched the entire interview, and reviewed the tapes afterward. Summaries of the interview were prepared and analyzed.

And then the forensics came in. Vanessa's fingerprints did not match any fingerprints found in Jackson's apartment, and her DNA and hair samples did not match the hair samples or female DNA taken from the suspect's body and bed after he was found. He had been with a woman, just not Vanessa.

More importantly, the fingerprints taken from Vanessa's body matched fingerprints found at the university lab where she worked. The suspect may have killed Vanessa and dumped her body in the draining canal like Detective Fordham strongly believed. But to Agent Henry Caldwell, the case against David Jackson didn't add up.

Yes, Henry thought while taking a gulp of his coffee before heading back to the conference room, it was lucky for David that he'd been assigned the case. David clearly needed mental help, but if it weren't for Henry's involvement, David would have found himself charged and convicted of the murder of Vanessa Amante. He's just a fucked up kid. Now to convince the rest of them.

Agent Caldwell sighed as he headed back to the conference room. Somebody had killed Vanessa, it just wasn't David. Caldwell noticed the shift in his thinking now that he no longer considered David Jackson to be a suspect. David's just a kid who couldn't cut it in grad school.

The team reassembled in their chairs and the wall monitors redisplayed the violence of Vanessa's end of life. This was day three of the investigation, and this conference was necessary to decide David's fate. Either they would agree to his release, or he would be given a very quiet trial in front of a special judge and sent to a very secure cell to live out the remainder of his days.

Special Agent Caldwell took charge. "Let's summarize where we are," he began.

Deputy District Attorney Connie Francis began running the case. The autopsy report revealed the victim died most likely from blunt force trauma to the back of her head, although significant abrasions were found on her back and arms and perimortem injuries had seriously damaged her face. No signs of sexual trauma were present, although it could not be ruled out. The one set of dental records that had been found from the University dental clinic confirmed the identity of the victim.