Skeleton-in-Waiting Read Online Free PDF

Louise.
    â€œUh?”
    â€œDon’t tell him I’ve told you. He says I always make things simpler than they are, especially anything to do with AI.”
    â€œTrying to get computers to think for themselves, I tell people. Heard Uncle Boot ask him what was the point and Piers said he didn’t guarantee a point. Very Piers. Quite a bit going on, I gather.”
    â€œLots, and all beyond me. Piers’s line is trying to get the brutes to evolve a bit of intelligence for themselves.”
    â€œTake him a few million years, won’t it? Did us.”
    â€œHe’s not going that far. I only said ‘a bit’. He doesn’t want to evolve the whole shoot—in fact he says we didn’t either. We evolved bits too, to cope with different sorts of things, and then lumped them together. He says I’m not really one person having one lot of thoughts and feelings, like I think I am. Really I’m a sort of committee, different bits of me politicking and squabbling away and then coming out with a sort of agreed statement and then I say to myself ‘That’s what I think’ which makes me think there’s a whole me thinking it. We’ve got to think like that or we’d go potty.”
    Louise realised that Soppy had stopped listening in order to gobble with yet more concentrated ferocity.
    â€œAre you having problems with Bertie?” she murmured.
    â€œNo.”
    Soppy had answered automatically and was about to shovel another forkful in when she seemed to pull herself up. Her eyes flickered over Louise’s shoulder. Louise had herself glanced into the pier-glass between the windows before she had asked the question. It was all automatic, not that you knew there were people in the room who were likely to pass the gossip directly on to the hacks, but less obvious lines of communication—Aunt Eloise Kent hinting to a crony, the crony tattling to her chiropodist—lay always waiting, like the tentacles of a sea anemone poised in their pool for scraps. Soppy popped the fork-load in but munched more slowly, apparently thinking how much to say.
    â€œIt’s not Bertie”, she said. “I mean, yes it is, but not like that. Hasn’t got a girl, far as I know, still expects a good bit of action in bed. Anyway, it isn’t just him. He’s different, I’m different, everything’s different.”
    â€œHave you talked to him about it?”
    â€œWouldn’t know what to say. Scared of burning my boats. See a psychiatrist, d’you think?”
    â€œThey say it isn’t much use unless you actually want to.”
    â€œDon’t. Anyway, I’m too young to go potty. Auntie Kitty was pushing sixty. Got any plans for that bit of duck? Thanks.”
    Louise let her plate be raided. Soppy sounded more than a bit miserable, curiously ashamed and scared. Her great-aunt, Lady Kitty Bakewell, had gone round the bend about the time Louise was born and had barricaded herself into the stable flat at Coryon and, with the help of her butler and a pair of shotguns, had held out for several days. She’d still been alive when Albert’s engagement to Soppy had been announced, and hacks had actually broken into the home where she was kept and tried to interview her. Other hacks had speculated on the possibility that the madness ran in the family. It had all been fairly typically unpleasant, not helped by the fact that there was something a little odd-looking about Soppy, something out-of-proportion, which came out in certain pictures, though in others she simply looked like the GBP’s dream, the doll princess.
    â€œWould it help if I talked to Bertie?” said Louise. “I wouldn’t say anything direct.”
    Soppy shrugged.
    â€œProbably just the time of year,” she said. “Always used to look forward to it. Skipped the whole grisly Christmas hoo-ha by nipping off to the Argentine for a couple of