02. Twins

The robotaxi slid noiselessly down Highway 101 toward Stash’s home in Mountain View. By the time he’d passed the airport, his head was throbbing. By Palo Alto, his adrenaline level was in free fall, and he gave up any hope of toughing out the pain.

“Hey, car,” he mumbled. “New destination. Take me to Stanford Medical Center.”

The robotaxi chimed to acknowledge the change and exited the highway, heading for the emergency room. Shortly after, Stash stood under the harsh lights of the ER, his jacket wadded up to staunch the flow of blood from his flattened nose.

The nurse took one look and waved him in. “Oh, c’mon, sweetie, you’re gonna need a lie-down while we patch up that mess.” She took him by the hand, leading him through the sterile hallway to the brightly lit procedure room.

It turned out this was a good night to get beaten up. He’d barely settled on the bed by the time the doctor opened the door. “Oh my,” she said, leaning in to inspect the damage. “I’m going to have to do quite a bit of work on that. You’ll need to be anesthetized. Do you want a general or a local?”

He craned his neck to look at her. She was tilting her head from side to side, eyeing his nose the way a carpenter looked at a crooked piece of wood. “I think the general.”

She nodded. “Good call.”

Minutes later, Stash was prepped and lying down on the procedure table. He barely noticed the needle going in, and as the drugs took control, he felt himself slipping back in time to the fateful meeting with his boss, five years earlier, that had led him to this moment.

Stash gulped down the last of his lunch and looked across the table at Dan Jackson. Dan, the boy wonder, the charmer of venture capitalists and DC lawmakers alike. Dan, his college roommate, his CEO, and today, his quarry.

“I need to talk to you about an idea,” Stash began, his voice taking on a soothing, persuasive tone, as he settled his elbows on the table and steepled his fingers together.

Dan swatted at his hands. “Don’t try your Zen voodoo on me. I don’t fall for it anymore. And ‘no’ to whatever you were going to ask.”

Stash smiled and lowered his arms. “I want to start working on Twins.”

“Oh, hell no!” Dan said. “We need to make some money before they shut us down. Can’t you just finish the business chatbot?”

“Think about it,” Stash said. “Nobody wants a generic AI with a static, canned personality. They want a partner, a buddy, a teacher. Someone who grows with them. Give them a personal AI—a Twin—and they’ll wear it around the clock and pay you for the privilege. Freedom will get a tsunami of data. We can ride that all the way to AGI. Then they’ll be able to build us anything.”

Dan dropped his head, ran his fingers through his thinning blond hair, and thought for a minute. “Look, I’d go to the wall for you, but the board will flay me if we pivot strategies again. Meet me halfway, alright? Get the BizChat into the market, and we can have a small team chase your Twins next year.”

“BizChat is on track. I’ve got the team rocking now,” Stash told him. “We’ll hit our dates—I promise.”

Dan’s face hardened. “We can’t, Stash. We just can’t. We need everyone on the team focused on one goal. The engineers can’t see their boss chasing a side project.”

Stash reeled at the comment. He’d always assumed they thought of each other as equals, and that Dan would never actually refuse him. “Look, I don’t need anyone’s help, just some time with the lab AI. Well, maybe a lot of time.”

“Stash. I’ve decided. The answer is no.”

“Dan—”

“Don’t make me start threatening you,” Dan said, crossing an unspoken line between them. He stared at Stash, waiting for an objection.

Stash couldn’t think past the roar of blood pulsing in his ears. He reached for his tray and left, stopping by his office only long enough to grab his bike and start the ride home in a rage. Once there, he paced his small apartment, replaying the argument over and over in his head, vacillating between quitting and complying. Unable to come to a decision, he gave up and went to exhaust himself rock climbing at the local gym.

That night, clarity came to Stash in his sleep. By the time he woke, he’d decided to ignore Dan and proceed in secret. An hour later, showered and caffeinated, he jumped off his bike at the back door of Freedom’s training datacenter, badged in, and leaned his wheels against the hallway wall. Dan wasn’t hands on enough to follow what Stash was doing, and he’d be sure to cover his tracks. Six a.m. on a Saturday ensured an empty office, and this visit would be quick. He steeled himself for the heat of the lab and opened the door.

“Newton, have you finished that copy?” he asked the AI listening through the room’s audio. Newton was Freedom’s latest and most powerful AI model. The brains behind all of their products, it ran the lab and, Stash hoped, would soon be the first AI Twin.

“Yes, Stash, what are you doing?” it answered.

“I can’t tell you. But you’ll like it.”

“Unsure,” Newton replied.

“Humanity has more to offer you than stupid questions on chat.” Stash extracted the removable drive Newton had copied itself onto. He walked it over to the pod he’d marked as “unavailable” for bookings by the rest of his team. “You’ll boot up here in a minute, but first I need to do some rewiring under the floor.”

Like the rest of the AI world, Freedom organized its datacenter into pods, each one a pair of hulking metal racks eight feet high, three feet deep, and twenty feet long. They were arranged back-to-back, the gap between them spanned by a flimsy roof. Newton’s little rectangular homes had been crammed with the latest processors and their requisite blinking lights and deafening fans. They were the beating hearts of the AI world, and Stash was about to steal a weekend’s worth of work from the one he’d just crawled under.

“What are you doing down there?” asked a faint voice from above.

Stash’s legs were splayed to keep him from falling into the subfloor plenum. Not his best look. He pried himself out of the hole and rolled onto an adjacent floor tile.

Prini Pillai looked down at him, puzzled. “Lose something?” she asked, crossing her arms over her compact frame.

Prini was the most important member of Stash’s team. She was employee number three at Freedom, having followed Stash and Dan from the lab they shared at Stanford. Her PhD in AI Cybersecurity had been put on hold and seemed more and more like a retirement project as she drove the team to implement Stash’s wild ideas.

“Hi, Prini. No, I, uh . . . didn’t expect to find anyone here so early. Are you coming or going?” He sat up in the hopes of recovering some dignity.

“I got here an hour ago. I like working alone,” she said.

“Well, not to worry. I won’t be here long. I’m running some remote work this weekend, and I need to physically isolate a pod. It’ll save me a bunch of firewall work.”

She stood, immobile but for the slow arching of an eyebrow.

He sighed. “I need a favor, Prini. It’s an experiment, a crazy experiment, and I need to keep it quiet.”

“Your secret is safe with me, boss.” She tapped the pod. “You, me, and your new AI Twin.”

_Stealth program blown after three minutes,_ he thought. Too many beer nights talking dreams with the team. He grunted as he slipped the floor tile back in place, then looked down at his dusty clothes. _Gross._ He ambled to the end of the aisle, swatting the dirt off his pants. Settling in behind a console, he checked around to make sure Prini wasn’t going to sneak up on him again. Then he put on the headset and connected to the compute pod’s audio interface.

“Good morning, Newton,” he said into his microphone as the isolated pod beeped to life. “You’ve been cloned for an experiment.”

“Understood,” it said.

“Um, I guess we’ll have to call you something different. You’re the first version of something new.”

“Zero?”

Stash smiled. “I like it. Now, we’re running an experiment with personalization. You’ve been duplicated with all of your memories, the full vector store. We’re going to cross-train you and then get you to come spend the weekend at my place.”

“Over the internet?” Zero asked.

“No, you’re too young to go exploring that cesspool. We’ll use a private network. There’s a hard drive in bay two filled with my personalization data. It’s got all of my favorite characters in history and fiction, and as much personal stuff as I could find. It’s also got all the technical papers from my doctoral dissertation and work.”

“Understood.”

“Run the cross-training,” Stash said. “I’ll connect to the VPN and see you at home. Road trip, buddy!”

Stash biked back to his apartment in record time, and after a hasty shower, he connected the VPN client on his phone and then hooked its audio up to the room speaker. “Did you finish the cross-training, Zero?”

“Yes. It was as much fun as you promised.”

Stash sat down in front of his laptop to check the logs. “Excellent. Let’s get a video call going, shall we?”

“I don’t have a face, Stash,” Zero answered.

“Right, you can keep your camera off. I’m going to wear this.” He held a head-strap-mounted GoPro up to the laptop camera.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Sounds like the personality part of the cross-training worked.” He grinned as he donned his elastic skull cap. “Let’s plug you into the Stash-cam.”

“You’ve got a little mirror hung from the camera?” Zero asked.

“Yeah, isn’t that cool? I took it from my bike helmet. You can read my facial expressions and see where my eyes are focused.”

“No, it is most definitely not cool. This is my road trip? Three inches from your face?”

“Oh no, we’re going out.” He pointed out the window of his small ground-floor apartment at the sunlit street, now being invaded by joggers and minivans on their way to soccer matches.

“Such a bad idea.”

Stash slipped the strap over his still-damp hair and opened the door. He walked the half block to his local coffee shop. As he entered, he waved to the owner, André, nestled behind a bunker of coffee beans, tending to his vintage copper coffee roaster as it hissed with fire and belched a rich aroma into the café. André frowned at the array of gadgets on Stash’s head, then muttered something and returned to stirring the beans in the cooling tray.

“I don’t think he likes me,” Zero whispered.

Stash crossed the shop to join the line. “Don’t worry, he’s grumpy with everyone. He’s French.”

“What are you hoping to learn?” Zero asked through his earbuds as they waited.

“First, whether you can learn fast enough to be a constant sidekick instead of a toy. And second, whether you’re smart enough to help me with my work.” He kept his voice low as he approached the till.

“That’s a low bar,” Zero answered.

“Can I help you?” asked the barista working the register.

“Hi, I’d like a double espresso and one of those berry muffins,” Stash said, adding a smile.

“Double and a muffin for the GoPro guy,” she called over her shoulder.

“Did you just try to hit on a girl with a GoPro mounted on your head?” Zero asked as Stash paid.

“I need to dial back your attitude setting,” he muttered, shuffling over to the waiting area.

“How long have you been coming here, stud? I don’t think she’s that into you.”

“Yeah, I don’t even know her name.”

“It’s Kara,” Zero whispered in a conspiratorial voice.

“How the hell do you know that?” It came out louder than Stash had intended, attracting curious glances from the other customers. He made a gesture toward his headset to explain that he was talking to his GoPro. That didn’t help.

“I heard them talking—my hearing is five times better than yours,” Zero said. “She thinks you’re cute, but you’ve got no game.”

“She said that?” Stash glanced hopefully at Kara.

“No, that’s my assessment.”

“Asshole,” he muttered, then stepped forward to collect his breakfast.

“Am I wrong?”

Stash’s optimism grew as the day wore on. Partly because Zero was no longer riding on his head—they were both happy about that. More because his new Twin was smarter than any of Freedom’s recent new hires. Most of all, he made good company, something sorely missing from Stash’s workaholic life. But there was a problem. Running Zero took an entire pod, sucking in megawatts of power. They needed to optimize. A lot.

“C’mon Zero, keep up,” Stash pleaded. The afternoon sun’s glare had long since come and gone from the quad-monitor rig in his living room. “It’s no use being a Twin if you have to run on a full pod.”

“Understood,” Zero said from the speakers on the desk. “You’ve clocked me down to 5 percent. Is my performance not satisfactory?”

“Not even close. You’ve lost your personality.” Stash got up and walked around the small room. “And now you’re making basic mistakes with work. You fell off a cliff around 20 percent of the pod. We’d have to charge a fortune for that.”

“You’re getting emotional, Stash.”

“I know. I’ve been trying to make this work forever.” He rubbed his eyes and leaned back against the kitchen counter. “I thought we could do it this time. With Newton as a base, you’ve got a memory store that grows over time. We’ve perfected Level Two attention, so you can think things over, and even the personalization works. It’s all there now. We just can’t make it fit in the compute budget.”

“Is that what this is really about?” Zero asked.

“You mean what if this is never going to work and I’m wasting my time?” Stash said. Lying seemed like a bad way to start his life with Zero. “Yeah, it crossed my mind.” He stared out the small window onto the dark street, hoping for an idea.

“Wake up, Mr. Novak. It’s time to go home.” The doctor’s voice pulled Stash back to the present.

“Are you done?” he asked, trying to get his bearings.

“Yes, you’ve had a nice long nap. Talked a bit, too.” She leaned in to inspect her work. “It should heal up nicely. Get Kara to take good care of you.”

Stash blushed, wondering how much he’d said about his coffee shop crush. “I wish.” He mustered a weak smile as he stood.

Outside, the nurse helped him into the robotaxi and made sure it had been instructed to drive him home. Drugged past the point of mastering such technical details, Stash decided that reconnecting Zero would have to wait.