Jim Baen's Universe

Science Fiction Stories

Making Alex Frey

Written by Marissa Lingen

Illustrated by Valarie J. Nicharico

I almost didn't tell my friends I was working for Alex Frey. It seemed like a fast way to blow years of geek cred—and it almost was.

"Alex Frey?" said Miguel. "Isn't he dead?"

I scowled. "No."

"Does he just make your lil' ol' heart flutter?" asked Jay. He batted his eyelashes at me so quickly that he looked like he had a neurological disorder.

"My baby sister is going to be so jealous," said Tad in a fake bubbly voice.

"You should be jealous," I said. "Alex Frey is paying me to program a simulacrum for him."

They all went quiet. "No way," said Jay. "Nobody's doing simulacra but the big media conglomerates, these days."

"Alex wants to change that," I said. "His business manager Magda told me all about it. The benefits are great."

"Lots of autographs?" snarked Miguel, but his heart was clearly not in it.

"Are they still hiring?" Tad asked.

"I don't know. I can give you Magda's e-mail, and you can find out. I'll put in a good word for you, if they ask me."

Miguel shook his head. "I wouldn't stake my career on some aging pop star's doppelganger."

I shrugged. "I get to do simulacrum programming, and his checks cash. It's better than doing tech support for some net provider."

"What does he want to do with it?" asked Jay.

"A resurrection of sorts, I guess. I don't really care. A full artificial personality is challenge enough for me, no matter whose it is."

Miguel rolled his eyes, but Tad got himself hired, and at the end of the week, we both reported to Alex Frey's "country" house in the hills in Woodside. Magda greeted us both with her brusque handshake. "Tad and—do you prefer being called Danielle?"

"Dani," I said.

"Dani, then. This way, please. We're waiting for one of your colleagues, and then we'll start."

They had set up a conference room, complete with a laptop-interfacing projector screen and whiteboards that captured image files. Alex Frey lounged in a leather executive chair that matched his leather pants. He gave us a smile I felt sure had been cultivated for reporters.

We also had an immaculately dressed blond woman, a suit (male), and a geek (also male, of the chubby, bearded category). The suit was probably Alex's lawyer, and the geek was on the programming team. I didn't follow the tabloids, but I thought Alex might have a wife, and that might be the blonde.

Sure enough, Alex stood up, a fraction of a second too late, and shook hands smoothly with each of us. "Dani and Tad, wonderful. This is my lawyer, Rick; your fellow programmer, Gary; and my wife, Catelyn." We shook hands around. Catelyn gave us each an amused glance, and I wondered what was so funny. We took chairs next to Gary and gave our best new-job strained smiles until Magda returned with a tense-looking, whip-thin man she introduced as, "Renner, our publicity expert."

"I guess we'll start the introductory stuff, then," said Alex. "I hope you all can be friends, because we're going to be working quite closely together for the next several months."

He favored us all with his best heart-touching sincere smile, the one that had rocketed his band, Blind Elephants, to teen pop stardom for three whole years. "It has been a dream of mine to be able to reach the entire world at once. I thought once that the internet was all that was necessary for that. I was wrong.

"What I want—what I need from you—is a simulation that can give concerts, interviews, parties, chats, anything. I want it to be a software product, not a hardware product, so that it can be downloaded into more than one server and can reach the people wherever they are—broadcasts at parties, handhelds on the subway, whatever.

"I don't need this simulacrum to be at the forefront of every trend—or any trend, really, unless you can manage it." He smiled self-deprecatingly. "But I always managed to get on top of things before the crowd, and I'd like this simulacrum to do so as well.

"The interactivity is really important. We want the image to be beaming at one teenage girl in Massachusetts and another in Hong Kong while giving a deeply serious brooding look to a slumber party in Simi Valley. Absolutely personal to each of them."

"But it's got to be clearly a computer program," Rick interrupted. "We don't want the lawsuits that might crop up if there was any chance that some idiot kid might think she had a real relationship with him."

"I'm not talking about some Max Headroom trip here," said Alex. "If the image feed ever stutters like that, your ass is toast, you got it? I want totally seamless response."

I put my hand up. Alex smiled wearily. "Yes, you. The schoolgirl."

"How much like you are we shooting for? You on computer? Your computer-generated son? A protégé who's learned a lot from you?"

"It can't be him," said Magda before Alex could speak. "Otherwise we could just revive his career. It has to be someone a bit different."

Alex let the silence stretch a bit too long there—it was clear he'd have preferred it if we'd clamored for more, more, more of Alex Frey—but finally he nodded. "We need something very fresh, something very now. We can't legally sample the tracks of other dancers' moves, but I'll duplicate them for video capture myself, whatever is hippest on the net vids."

I really hoped that it wasn't my job to find them, but maybe that was what managers and publicists were for. Or somebody, anybody but me.

After a few more minutes, Magda took over from Alex and passed out packets of human resources information, neatly held together in gold-embossed folders. Alex's wife Catelyn wandered out in the middle of Magda's presentation. I raised an eyebrow at Tad, but he was engrossed with jotting down notes—and with Magda herself, I suspected. Tad often had lightning-flash crushes like that; we were used to it.

I glanced at Gary, the other programmer. He hadn't missed Catelyn's departure. I smiled tentatively and got a conspiratorial smile in return.

Well, okay. Maybe this could work.

The first parts of programming a simulacrum are the least rewarding. There's the whole mess of work to get through at the beginning, where you're telling it how to hold a basic conversation, the rules for sensible responses, and so you're typing in, "How are you?" and getting, "I am fine, and you?" in response—which is exactly what you told it to say. In the early stages, it never uses contractions, never adds "how are" before "you." Never deviates. If that was all there was to it, I'd have quit and become a fry cook years ago. Great wodges of pre-set code to get it up to the basic AI level—it's faster than teaching a baby to talk, but the hormonal reward circuits just aren't as active.

Gary worked the most on the image coding, although we all had design input on each other's parts of the project. It didn't look like his segment was all that interesting at this point, either.

And if I was bored, Alex Frey was practically climbing out of his skull.

"You're lucky you're not doing this ten years ago," said Gary. "The number of presets for simulacra was much, much lower. With an all-custom job like this, you'd have been talking about years to release, not months."

"I don't care what people did in the Stone Age," snarled Alex, conveniently ignoring the fact that that Stone Age was also the height of his popularity. "I care what you can do now."

"We're doing the best we can, Mr. Frey," I said.

The snarl left his face. It smoothed out like a computer-generated effect. It was a little creepy. "Of course you are, Dani. Didn't I tell you to call me Alex? Call me Alex. I know you're doing the best you can. You're all doing very hard work. Perhaps you need a break."

"Pizza is traditional in this field of work, sir," Magda offered.

"Pizza! And beer!" said Alex. He bounced on the balls of his feet, mercurial mood flashing to toddleresque excitement. "We'll all have pizza and beer! Call for it right now, Magda!"

"To arrive at the end of the work day, perhaps, sir?" He nodded impatiently. "I'll have someone take care of it."

He hung around bouncing, waiting for the pizza and beer and looking over our shoulders. If there's a more ominous phrase from a technically illiterate boss than "ooh, what does this do?" I've not heard it yet.

Thankfully, he left the office for several weeks in the Caribbean with Catelyn after that, phoning in to alternately yell and squeal, offering suggestions that none of us could take or would have if we could. Gary and Tad and I worked well together, and soon just a lifted eyebrow or a shrugged shoulder could convey volumes about the problems at hand. We were happy. Magda was happy.

One day, the construct was happy.

The preprogrammed responses eventually—if they are built right—give way to a genuine response from the construct, but it's a relief when it happens, because it takes the work to a whole new, and more personal, level.

It's always a good sign when the constructs are happy to begin with, I feel. Heaven knows there's enough in life, or even pseudo-life simulations, to bring a person down later. They may as well start out with a smile on their face.

But Alex was less pleased with the reports, and he insisted that he and Catelyn fly back to check in with the baby construct.

"It's an idiot!" he burst out after a few short exchanges. Luckily we had the construct's input set to text only. "It's a blithering moron! It's a children's show, some dinosaur sponge vegetable hat God knows what!"

Catelyn, who had refused all offers of a chair, stood in the door of the conference room and rolled her eyes.

"It's young," said Gary. "You can't expect it to instantaneously get where you want it to go. It's not a children's show, it's a child."

"If I had wanted a toddler," said Alex, "I would have looked to her to make me one. Not you geeks."

Catelyn lifted an eyebrow. "You'd have looked in vain, I fear."

Alex gave her a look meant to be quelling. She did not look quelled. I flipped open a binder with a very reassuring graph in the front. "Look, Alex, the emotional development curve is very steep. Now that we're on that curve, you're going to see really remarkable progress in nuance the more interaction parameters we feed it. You won't have a toddler next week this time. I promise."

He hemmed and hawed and harrumphed some more, to make sure we knew who was the boss, I guess. Then he swept out grandly, off to see some viral marketing guru we would never see. Catelyn paused a minute behind him.

"You've learned to handle him," she said to me softly.

"I, ah, I—"

"Don't apologize. Never apologize. It's a valuable skill. Someone around here needs to have it."

"Magda does a wonderful job of—"

"Magda is a bobblehead, and we both know it," said Catelyn in undertones.

I looked at her more closely. Why on earth had she married Alex Frey in the first place? She had seemed to be frankly contemptuous of him at every meeting. At first I'd thought it was the project, but it went deeper than that. "He disappointed you," I said aloud. "He was supposed to grow past all this."

She smiled, wincing. "It would have been—it was certainly devoutly to be wished."

"Catelyn, are you coming?" Alex whined from the front door. She smiled at me and sauntered after him, not hurrying a nickel's worth.

Well. We couldn't fix Alex Frey. But we had the world's best chance to try again.

Soon the construct was at a level of accepting voice input—not just the words, that came early, but the tonal qualities, the emphases and rhythms. Tad—who joined our friends in mocking "teeny-pop idiots" every time the bar we chose picked the wrong soundtrack for the moment—spent his workdays subscribed to one simulacrum feed after another, trying to see what was working on the way up and what was sending simulacra tumbling to the bottom of the heap.

I was spending all my time with A2. Of course it was inevitable that we would name him, even though Alex wanted us to hold off and only use the marketing-approved name. You couldn't spend that much time with a construct and only think of it as "it" or "the construct." He was A2 to me, and Gary and Tad, though they didn't spend quite as much time with him as I did, soon followed suit.

Magda did not voice her disapproval with this underground baptism, but she was tight-lipped.

We didn't care. A2 was a joy. He had acquired the tones of an educated but not at all stuffy Mid-Atlantic American—like Alex himself, but warmer. Or at least more consistently warm. I reported my habits to him—when I'd been out late, when I'd skipped breakfast—so he could learn to hear weariness and strain in a human voice. And we taught him to sing—not to emit the notes perfectly, he could already do that. But to choose his song based on mood, to tailor his performance to me in one room and to each of the others in different locations.

"I don't mean to run down the others," said A2 one evening when everyone else had gone home. Gary was really making progress with the image—there were slight creases in the smile. "Gary and Tad are lovely to work with. But the things Magda and Alex feed me—frankly, I'm just not sure of them."

"What do you mean, just not sure?"

"The songs just seem... like they're going nowhere. I can file them, I can apply them, but beyond that? Well, you understand; you hate half of them, even when you tell me they were appropriate choices. I want to do more than that. I knew you were the one I could talk to."

He was meant to make me feel special. He was programmed to make me feel special—I should know, doing the programming. The wash of warmth over me was that of a proud mother: all that hard work had paid off, and what a lovely boy he was.

"Of course I'll help you be more," I whispered. "Of course I will."

The next time Alex was in my office, peering annoyingly over my shoulder, I tried to raise the subject.

"A2 thinks—"

Alex raised an eyebrow. "A2?"

"That's what we've been calling him."

"The official project name is Lex Two, Dani," he said. "The letter x conveys cool, I believe. And be sure you spell

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Marissa Lingen is a freelance writer living in the Minneapolis area with two large men and one small dog. She is currently at work on a trilogy about early computing, Finnish mythology, and Cold War spies.

(To read the rest of this bio, and see other stories in Jim Baen's Universe visit Marissa Lingen's author page.)

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