karr 1

Richard Harrington paced along the verge of a white highway underneath a brilliant noonday sun. Harrington's hair was jet black and rather too long, his eyes large and disarmingly tawny gold. Most people, looking at those eyes, saw them as brown; but at times like this under brilliant light, they were owl-yellow, fringed with black lashes lush as a girl's. His face was lean and tight and chiseled, the product not only of beautiful bones but also the legacy of weeks without rest, days without end, unrelenting stress. The eyes were ringed with violet, and the face was paler than it should have been under the baking heat of the sun. He wore black pants, a dark charcoal shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows, dark boots that made no noise in the white dust of the verge.

The car he now returned to lean against was black, like most things around Richard; black, matte, drawing light into itself rather than reflecting any. It caught the eye; it was a weapon, lying full of indiscriminate power on the white ribbon of the road. Travertine dust had not touched the ebon surface: where Richard's boots were made grey by the brilliant white clouds of his pacing, the tires and the paintwork of the car remained icy black. There was no manufacturer's mark on the car anywhere; no sign that it had rolled off a Detroit production line, or that it had been featured on a primetime advertising spot with a sexy voiceover and a quoted APR. It merely was, like Richard himself: silent, and dangerous, and fascinating.

Richard folded his arms, leaning back against the side of the car. Above him the sky wheeled slowly, bluer than he had imagined possible, and in the distance an engine muttered softly, far away and quiet. He remained still, listening to the faint rumble, the whine of someone shifting up. No use getting up. It was probably nothing to do with him.

The engine note changed, getting closer. Richard raised his head from the warm metal with an effort, saw in the distance a white cloud of acrid dust and a shape within it, approaching. Probably a random passerby, he said to himself.

Ah, yes, he answered his own statement, but how many people are likely to be driving a car with an engine that sounds like that along a lonely highway in deepest Nevada in the middle of the day?

It was close enough now to see the color of the paintwork. White. Nothing remarkable, he thought; lots of cars are white here in the West where it makes a real difference in temperature. Not like mine, he added mentally. Silly, really; the amount of time he spent out in the baking zenithlight, he ought to get a different paintjob.

None of this mattered, because he knew the car, and the driver. He had known since he had heard the gearshift, still a mile away. He knew that gearbox; he had been there when it was put in.

Richard stood straight, leaving the support of the black car's side with reluctance. Acrid dust bit at the back of his throat as the white car slowed to a dramatic halt facing the black one, bitter clouds rising around them. He remained where he was, as the driver's door opened and a leg emerged, encased in black leather, the foot clad in a three-inch heeled boot. The owner of the leg slammed the car door behind her and hurried out of the settling dustcloud to where Richard stood, arms folded.

He hadn't seen the woman who now called herself Riley Stone for years. When he had known her before, her name had been Jane Balardine, and the world had been a great deal simpler. She had been blonde before: her hair was now white-blonde, silvery, and cropped close to her skull. The massive amounts of blue eye makeup she had favored were replaced by black smudged eyeliner and grey shadow, and nothing else. Her lips were flushed, but she had been biting them; her face, like Richard's, was pale and tired under the California tan. He thought again as he had thought so many times in the past, that she was really not beautiful, really not lovely in the classical sense of the word; but there was something about Riley Stone that struck the eye, something that made you turn your head and stare after her as she passed. Much like the black car, he thought suddenly.

"I'm sorry I'm late," Riley said. Her voice was cool, tired, rough.

"I haven't been waiting long," Richard told her. "You have the disks?"

"Yes. They don't know, of course. They'd never let me get out of the complex with them. Grey could give Kitt a run for his money, but I'd still rather they didn't know." Her voice held a note of amusement, but he saw nothing but steel in her eyes. "You have the money?"

He sighed. There was something tremendously theatrical about the exchange of a disk box for a suitcase full of money, but it was unavoidable. Here under the open sky he felt as if he could ignore the feeling of being in a bad spy thriller, but it was with some disgust he reached into the open driver's side window of the black sports car and pulled a locked briefcase from the side door pocket.

"Twenty thousand," he said, handing it over. Riley nodded curtly and went back to her car, returned with a small black box that rattled as she shook it.

"It's all we could find. I know there isn't much left, but this should help rebuild him. They got the data backed up the last time...you know, before it happened....and these are the original backup disks. I don't really know how much was lost."

"It's better than nothing," Richard told her. "Thank you. I....well, thank you. This means rather a lot to me."

"I know," Riley said, and for a moment she looked very, very young. "It's all right. I only wish I could do more. The project isn't really just a project anymore."

"It never was," he said, and suddenly he saw not the white travertine dust of the highway but a darkened workshop full of computer equipment, and the form of a black car not entirely unlike the one he stood beside, and a yellow light that flickered once and died. "Not really. They didn't know what they were doing; they didn't understand. They tried to create a machine and they made life, but they didn't do it entirely right."

"Richard," Riley said gently. "Richard, I know. I was there."

"Yes, of course," Richard said. His British accent was suddenly very much in evidence. "I'm sorry. I keep forgetting; you were so different in those days."

"I know," Riley said, regarding her boots. "I was deplorable, wasn't I....the quintessential child of the Eighties. I've reformed. I'm a cop now. Well, some of the time. A detective."

"Sure you are," he said, the conversation back in easier places, the banter rising easily to his mind. "You're a cop the way I'm the King of Sweden. Mmmm-hmm."

"Oh shut up, Mister Spy," she retorted, without rancor. "You haven't seen my badge yet."

"Spare me the sight of your badge. I believe you; I can't imagine the LAPD would turn down a chance to have someone like you in their finest. The famous daughter of Lord Balardine, owner of Marvel Airlines and one of the richest men in the western hemisphere....the young debutante with experience in the NASCAR circuit...." He trailed off as Riley advanced on him, briefcase raised. "Oh, mercy, I cry you mercy..."

"You're impossible," she said in a perfect imitation of Debbie Reynolds. "Damn you, Richard, you always made it hard to stay sulky, even when I really wanted to. I suppose I have you to thank for Grey, too."

"Damn straight," Richard said. "I connected every system in that car by hand."

"Never think I don't appreciate that," she said seriously, turning to look at the sleek white shape. "Every time I drive with Grey I thank you. It's been amazing. I don't think anyone who's not experienced it would understand."

"I know," he said. His hand reached out almost involuntarily to the smooth skin of the black car beside him. "I know."

For a moment they stood silent in the baking heat of midday; then Richard came back to himself and took his hand away. "Thank you, Riley."

"You're entirely welcome," she said, and her voice was warm and comforting. "Let me know if there's anything else I can do. Please."

"When he's finished," Richard said slowly, "would you...be there, when he wakes up? I think he'd be more comfortable with you there."

"Of course," she said, and there was something strange in her voice which Richard identified in a few moments as...honor, and awe. "Of course."

They shook hands, awkwardly, and then he gave up and pulled her into his arms and crushed her to him, burying his face in her pale hair. He felt her hands on his back move up to his neck, and her lips sought his own, and he met her mouth with his.

Later, much later, as the sun was setting over the distant mountains and striking fire from the mica chips in the road, Richard Harrington sped north and east into Utah. The black box of disks lay on the passenger seat beside him, secured in place by the seatbelt, and the radio was blasting something by Beethoven into the darkened cabin. Harrington drove like a man possessed, hurtling along the interstate at ninety-five, his radar detector dark and silent. Since he had left Riley Stone on the verge of the highway in Nevada he had not stopped, and he was so tired his concentration was beginning to slip; but there was enough iron self-control in him to keep his wandering mind on the road and the eventual objective.

He couldn't get Riley out of his mind. She had changed so much since the days of their common employment at the estate in Nevada that it seemed the woman he had known then and the woman he had held that afternoon were two discrete and separate entities; that she had shed the skin of her old life and become someone entirely new. But there had been so much time between those meetings that he wondered with part of his mind if he remembered correctly how Riley had once been.

Long blonde hair, starlet hair, unstyled. Big grey eyes looking very young under their burden of makeup; the typical fresh English complexion. Her name had been Jane Balardine, and her work for FLAG had been not entirely approved of by her father Hanson Balardine, under whose aegis FLAG had acquired a great deal of exterior funding and computer technology. He had wanted her to be a Valley girl, to be beautiful and beloved and distanced from the danger inherent in what FLAG did; but she had read some papers she wasn't meant to see, and she had learned too much to keep quiet. He remembered her walking into the lab one day when they were working on the project, nearing completion then in 1981, her hair loose and flowing over the shoulders of her mechanic's coverall, a garment so much too big for her that she appeared to be drowning in it. She had said her name was Jane and that she had been assigned as a minor mechanical assistant in the project, and would they kindly tell her where to start.

He laughed, remembering. Of course they'd recognized her, and said Go on, pull the other one, miss, you're not supposed to get your lovely fingers dirty, and of course she had put her hands on her birdlike hips and defied every attempt to reason with her. Eventually they had had to accept that she was of legal majority, and had put her to work doing very light mechanical labor, machining miniature bores, checking the threads on screwshanks, putting together the parts of the speedometer. For a week Jane had sat there in the corner of the lab working diligently over her scutwork, and then one night he'd come in late and found her lying on a trolley underneath the body of the car, with a spanner set.

"What on earth are you doing, Miss Balardine?" he had demanded, respectfully.

She had rolled out from under the Trans Am and regarded him with disarming eyes and an adorable smudge of grease on her nose. "I knew when they put the engine in that one of the mounts was off. I'm just putting it right. Won't be a minute," and she had slung herself back under the car. He had grabbed her foot and pulled her out again, not ungently.

"Miss Balardine, even were it at all appropriate for you to be here after closing hours, working on parts of the project you haven't been approved for, how on earth do you know the engine mount is wrong?"

"Just look at it," she'd said, rolling back under. With a sigh, Richard had peered at the liquid-filled cylinders of all four engine mounts, and had seen what she meant. One of them was canted at a slight angle, hardly perceptible. He wouldn't have seen it had she not pointed it out.

"My God," he had said. "I applaud you. Where did you learn so much about engines?"

"I drove for NASCAR two years ago," she had told him, still under the car. "My team was good; they taught me a lot about this sort of thing. Ha. Got you," she said to the mount, and there was a clunking noise from underneath the car.

"I had no idea," he had said, truthfully. From that moment on he had had a greater respect for Jane Balardine than he'd imagined possible. Later, after the car was done, and the physical systems were being checked, it was Jane who did the test driving; and there he saw genius. She had such grace and ease of control that he envied her; it was a talent, something very few drivers had.

He turned off the superhighway, heading north now, reaching for the Henry Mountains. Henry, he thought vaguely; wasn't that a familiar name? Something about a red Mustang, and another short blonde woman with a knack for driving. He let the thought go; it did nothing for him. The sun was entirely gone now, fading even from the blue of the sky to leave behind a sickly black purple. He was so cold, despite the summer warmth that still pervaded the black car's cabin, a relic of the sunlight that had burned his neck standing waiting for Riley by the roadside. So cold, and he had a hundred miles to go before he slept, and more than a hundred hours' work before there was anything to look at.

Riley Stone, in the white car she called Grey with the rich girl's knowledge of horsemanship, sat by the side of the sea and refused to weep.

She could still taste Richard Harrington. The waves lapped gently on the white sands of Malibu, the little organisms in the water coruscating and scintillating as they were flung over and over by the force of the surf. She had a sudden vision of another car on these shores, a dark car, silvery underneath, flashing golden light as it turned over and over to land on the rocks at the foot of a California cliff.

Riley put the image from her mind with the ease of long practice. Now was not the time to think of what Karr had been.

There, she thought. I said his name. I said Karr's name. Now nothing can really ever be the same.

I wonder what they all thought when they heard he was dead. I wonder. Wilton died before any of this really happened, of course, but Michael and Devon and Bonnie and the rest of them were so afraid of Karr. And Kitt, never forgetting Kitt...what did he really think of Karr, when the flames of the explosion were washed away by the incoming tide?

An old song drifted into her mind.

Crash and burn

All the stars explode tonight

How'd you get so desperate

How'd you stay alive?

Help me please, burn the sorrow from your eyes

Oh come on be alive again, don't lay down and die...

She hadn't heard Hole for months now. It was hard to stop the memories of Karr now that the words of the song had brought it all back to her. Malibu...crash and burn.....oceans of angels...down by the sea is where you drown your scars....

No. Not Karr tonight. She ran a hand over Grey's steering wheel, tracing the lines of the hard bound leather, sensuously. Karr was not hers; she had sold the disks to Harrington, and Harrington was the only one who could save him now. There had been four of them back in the 80s; herself, Richard Harrington, a computer engineer named Simon French, and a young mechanic called Joly Brice, who had, like herself, been half in love with Harrington...and with Karr. Four of them against FLAG, who had been there at the beginning of it all, when the faces of all Wilton Knight's hopeful stockholders had fallen so comprehensively at the test track where it was proved that Karr's programming made him dangerous to humans. There had been such horror in the crowd that day, such bared fright and terror at the thought of so much power without the concept of human life's value; and they had been deadly embarrassed as well to have sunk six million into the project. She had been there, had watched the mannequin child shatter as Karr's MBS-covered nose made impact, watched the fragments of the mannequin fly high in the air as the sleek black form hurtled by without even slowing. She had understood immediately: they had programmed him to preserve himself, and had not entirely understood what they had meant by adding the codicil at any cost, which included sacrificing human life. She had understood, and she had known what needed to be done. But old Wilton had been so disgusted with the outcome and the embarrassment that he had ordered Karr deactivated and a new project begun under the Knight aegis: the Knight Industries Two Thousand.

It would be 2000 in another few months, Riley mused. She got out of the white sports car and wandered down to the water's edge. Try as she might, she couldn't get the hot test track at the Knight estate out of her mind. Over and over she saw the fragments of the mannequin shatter and disappear with a terrible cracking sound; and later, in Laboratory Three, the last silent sweep of Karr's scanner as all power had been shut off to his CPU. Only later did any of them know that he had remained aware during deactivation.

She gazed up at the skies, gleaming with early stars. She couldn't imagine that; couldn't imagine the terrible sensory deprivation, the deaf dumb blackness of no input. She was terribly afraid Karr was permanently scarred by the experience; any human would have gone irreparably insane under such stress. But Karr wasn't human.

They had blamed themselves, the four of them, when Karr's CPU was stolen from Lab 3. When Karr was stolen and turned into a weapon for a couple of thieves, and when Kitt and Michael had forced him off the cliff into the breaking waves below, they blamed themselves, and they had mourned. Richard Harrington had already left FLAG to work in Utah as a software developer, and the others had been taken off the Knight project, working in another aspect of FLAG's mission, but she had remained. Her father and Devon Miles had been thick as thieves after the old man's death, and she had cadged a part-time job as a mech on the Knight Industries Two Thousand project. Hanson Balardine hadn't seemed to mind when she changed her name to Riley Stone; he had thought it was something to do with the occasional acting she did in indie films in LA. She had become friends with Kitt, as most of them did. Kitt was simply pleasant to be with. She remembered the conversations she'd had with Karr in the darkened recesses of the garage after the rest of the team had gone home, and compared them with conversations she'd had with Kitt; the brothers were utterly dissimilar in most respects, but both of them were curious about human life. Karr was intrigued by the illogic of humanity, had a sort of clinical fascination for the strange reactions of humans, while Kitt was so human himself that she had had to discuss emotions with him as empathetic equals. She had been around when he'd had questions Bonnie or Michael couldn't answer, and she'd learned a lot about how he thought. But always she remembered the dark cold voice of Karr, and the sweep of the yellow scanner in the dark.

She and Harrington were the only ones left. She had called Harrington when Karr's body had been found and possessed by a lucky beachcomber, when he had come back from the dead the second time. She had called Harrington, and he had come down, and they were just in time to see the final epic battle between Kitt and Karr. She remembered so clearly watching the two shadows converge, as the two cars flew towards each other at the height of their turbine leaps, both following parabolic curves that were fatally calculated to intersect. She had wept a little when the remains of Karr were scattered in the desert, for what might have been. She had thought it was over.

Then, two months ago, that had all changed. She had been working late over a particularly knotty little problem in Kitt's fuel system, with Justin Turner, when Bonnie had come into the garage with a strange look on her face and told her someone from Utah was calling for her, and that it sounded urgent.

Harrington's voice had been so desperate she hadn't recognized it at first. "Riley?" he said. "Riley, is that you?"

"Yeah," she had responded, holding the phone a little away from her ear. "Who is this?"

"Richard Harrington," he'd snapped. "You do remember me, don't you?"

"Of course," she'd said. "What's wrong, Richard? Are you all right?"

"Yes, yes," he'd hurriedly assured her. "Riley, back when the Knight Industries project got started, do you remember how the CPUs were backed up?"

"Yeah, they're still using the system. There was a remote backup location, everything was being monitored, backup disks were cut for all core programming. If there was any sort of loss of integrity they'd automatically send all input to the remote location, where the recovery could proceed. Why?"

"Did Karr have a system like that?"

She went completely cold all of a sudden. Could they have overlooked something so elementary? "Oh, my God," she said, and nearly dropped the receiver. "Oh, God, Richard, I think he did. It must have been destroyed, though, when he was shut down. It must have been."

"Check, Riley. Check."

"I will. I have to find an excuse."

"You'll think of something," he said. "You have to, Riley, oh, God, you have to. We could bring him back, the right way. We could rescue him."

In the other room someone's radio was playing. Cry to the angels I'm going to rescue you I'm going to set you free tonight...

"I'll call you back," she'd said. Adrenaline was flooding her bloodstream. She had replaced the receiver ever so gently, returned to the garage and with the trained actor's calm had finished her task with Justin; it was half past midnight when she could get away.

She found the backup mainframe. Dusty as hell, buried under a pile of boxes, its LEDs dark and cold, it had sat here since Karr was deactivated the first time. She had found it, after seven hours of looking, and she still had no idea if there was any vestige of Karr left in the black box.

She had been too exhausted to try anything that night. She had searched through the FLAGNet inventory for any official acknowledgement of the mainframe's existence, but couldn't find it anywhere official. It must have been assumed to have been destroyed when Karr was deactivated. Officially it didn't exist, which made her job so much easier.

Riley had looked up her old friend Simon French the computer engineer. He still worked for FLAG, but had no official connection to the Knight project. He gave her a long cool look when she walked into his office, but when she mentioned Karr's name he leaned forward and breathed sharply, hanging on her words. She told him she'd found the mainframe, and he nodded.

"I knew they'd forgotten to destroy it. I signed a form saying all vestiges of the KARR were gone, deactivated, burned out, when Wilton gave the order, but I 'forgot' to make sure the mainframe was fried. It should still work, I think, if we can find the backup disks."

"You don't know where they are?" she asked, defeatedly.

"I don't know. But we'll find them, Riley," he had told her, taking her hand in his. "I've waited for the right moment and the right people to do this with. I think this may be the right time, and I know you and Richard are the right people."

"I wonder what made him think of the mainframe?" she said aloud.

She'd found out. Richard was a software developer; Richard had just finished a program that worked like the old-style 'tapeworm' had done, only more effectively and efficiently: it moved through the memory circuits of a computer, selectively targeting and erasing or altering specific memories or directives. It was the most sophisticated reprogramming aid ever developed. He had been sitting at his computer finishing the code when the thought of Karr had drifted into his mind, and he had suddenly thought how perfect his program would be for reprogramming Karr's CPU to erase the memories of deactivation and to alter slightly the prime directive. Immediately on the heels of that thought had come the knowledge that Karr was destroyed; and then, staring at his active matrix screen in the blackness of midnight in Torrey, Utah, he had thought simply of the backup mainframe. Was it possible that Karr's recovery mainframe had survived the purge?

He'd called Riley. And Riley had come through.

She and Simon French scoured the R&D complex until they found the backup disks, the tiny slivers of black plastic and magnetized tape that would allow them to reinstall Karr's program core. It took them two months, but they found them. It was a solemn moment when Simon slid the first of the seven disks into the drive on the side of Karr's mainframe, and waited to see if he would come back to them.

She would never forget the surge of unspeakable relief that flooded through her at the sight of the LEDs lighting up on the front panel as the lowlevel functions came online. Karr was still there. Hurriedly they switched the computer back off, secure in the knowledge that in a safe place he could recover; he could be brought back, this time correctly. It was possible.

Richard had come down in the dark of night to take the mainframe back to Utah, where he could work on duplicating the circuitry, rebuilding the basic forms of Karr's CPU, and they had set to work copying the seven disks, backing up the backups. Two days later, with a copy of the disk set locked safely away in her apartment in LA, Riley had driven out to the Nevada-Arizona border to meet Richard and hand the backup disks over to him. She had seen the black car he was driving, and knew he planned to put Karr into it, planned it as his new body. It wasn't a make she recognized, which led her to believe it was a custom job. She knew most of the makes in production in the Western world. It was beautiful, as Karr's old body had been, but instead of the silver fade on the lower quarter of the old Trans Am, the new car was matte black all over, sleek and dangerous and beautiful. Her own Grey was a Stingray, 1963, matte white, custom V-10 engine, and as Richard had said, he had put in the systems himself. Grey wasn't sentient, exactly, but he was highly responsive. Richard was a software man, but his first love was the automobile, and like herself, he was a highly competent driver. She didn't know if the black car was his own work or one of his body-shop friends, but it had a Bill Mitchell air to it that she loved; it looked, in the words of the master, like it was going like hell just sitting still.

She had to wonder what Karr was going to be like when he came back. She was afraid of him, of course. She had feared him, but she had also acknowledged that his indifference to human life was natural for him, was not his fault, was the way he was programmed. He had a personality, even then, even back when he was just activated. She'd always been drawn to the dark side of things, and darkness, deep voices and flickering lights made her catch her breath; Karr had all three in spades. She flattered herself that he might have taken some interest in his conversations with her; otherwise, why would he have bothered to respond to her overtures?

She was cold. She found herself still on the beach, watching the scintillation of bioluminescent algae and plankton in the curling lip of each wave, shivering in the dusk. Stiffly she rose, walked back to where Grey waited for her, gleaming dully in the dark, like bone.

***