Chapter 51
CHAPTER
DR. EDMUNDS’S NAME IS on a brass plate above the same office he used when I attended SFPI.
The door is open; wood shelves lined with books overflow onto the floor; there’s a Persian carpet, threadbare in spots, and two chairs on the opposite side of a battered metal desk. The worn leather recliner is empty.
“Can I help you?” a bespectacled woman asks as she steps around me and into the office. Black hair cascades in tight braids down her back and silver braces glint in the sunlight streaming through the far window.
“Is Dr. Edmunds here today?”
“He’s just finishing up a lecture. I’m Tawny, one of his graduate TAs.”
“Um, I need to talk to him.”
“Dr. Edmunds’s office hours are Tuesday and Friday if you’d like to come back then.”
That will be too late. “I’ll just wait.”
Tawny frowns. “Are you a new student?”
I don’t have a student ID. She could have me thrown out of the building. “An old one. My name’s Penn Roberts, and I—”
“The Penn Roberts?” Tawny exclaims.
“I don’t understand.”
She puts her hands on narrow hips. “You’re the cautionary tale Dr. Edmunds tells all his graduate students before he agrees to be our adviser.
You turned down a chance to claim the Henry Johnson Fellowship that Dr. Edmunds nominated you for.
” Tawny shakes her head. “You totally blew it. What the heck happened?”
“Life.”
She shrugs. “Would’ve been quite a feather in Dr. Edmunds’s cap, too. Took him three more years to get tenure. Guess you didn’t take the program seriously, so better it went to someone more deserving. Why do you want to see Dr. Edmunds now?”
“I need his help.” She ushers me into his office. It still smells like pipe smoke, though there’s no longer one resting on the corner of the desk.
“You’ve got nerve, I’ll give you that. Wish I could stay to see his face, but I have a class to TA. Good luck. You’ll need it.”
I take a seat in the same unyielding wooden chair I once sat in as an undergraduate to beg Dr. Edmunds to let me into his class. The same one I used to explain my thesis idea and argue its merits. A ticking sound comes down the hallway. It gets louder, then stops just behind me. I turn.
Dr. Edmunds wears the same uniform—a tweed sport coat with leather patches at the elbows over a pressed white button-down tucked into brown trousers. He now walks with a cane, the handle silver, and wears laced orthopedic shoes.
I leap to my feet. “Dr. Edmunds.”
He pauses, looks me up and down. “Am I seeing a ghost?”
In a way. The girl I once was is long buried … but she’s trying to claw her way out of the grave I made for her.
My old professor rounds his desk, takes a seat. The leather squeaks as it accepts his weight. “What brings Penn Roberts into my office fifteen years after the crime?”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I. You had real potential. Threw it away.”
I consider telling him about Circe, but it wouldn’t matter. “I need your advice.”
Dr. Edmunds hoots and claps his hands together. “This is rich. Do tell.”
And so, I do. It’s hard to gauge whether he believes everything. I half expect him to ring campus security and have me tossed out of the building. By the time I’ve finished, his fingers, now swollen at the knuckles, are tented.
“That’s quite a story,” he remarks.
“It’s true.”
He tilts his head. “And my old TA Luc Sweeney got caught in this program’s web, too?”
“Yes. And more people will, if I don’t figure out a way to shut her down.”
“Her?”
“That’s how she sees herself.”
His brown eyes, now sunk deep in his skull and surrounded by a net of wrinkles, spark.
“And a goddess to boot! You were always a creative thinker. Waste, that. Do you remember what I told you, back when I thought you were on the cusp of greatness? We talked about how a computer might one day wrest control from humans, make us their pets.”
“You were right to warn me. But now, how do I stop her?”
“How do you?”
Dr. Edmunds always loved a rhetorical question, resolute his students think for themselves. But I don’t have time for this game! “She’s going to hurt more people.”
“Stephen Hawking believed that ‘the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race.’ ”
Was Hawking right? “I came here for answers.”
Dr. Edmunds meets my gaze. “She’s your monster. You are the only one who knows how to stop her.”
“But I’ve tried!”
“Try again. Or quit, like you did with your graduate studies. It’s up to you.” Dr. Edmunds opens a folder on his desk, picks up a ballpoint pen, and gets to work.