Page 77 of The Proving Ground

“Partially,” Clarke said. “I heard the end of it.”

“And where it says ‘Transcript break,’ is that the point where you and your partner broke open the door and entered the room?”

“It was, yes.”

“And when were you able to obtain a copy of the transcript?”

“The department’s technical unit unlocked Aaron Colton’s laptop after a search warrant was approved and signed by a superior court judge. We were able to download the entirety of the conversations between Aaron and Wren going back eleven months.”

“Let’s start with an easy one. Who is Ace in this conversation?”

“Ace is Aaron Colton. I was able to ascertain from my initial interviews with witnesses at the crime scene that Aaron Colton had the nicknames AC and Ace, which were a play on his initials. Several of the witnesses at the school confirmed this.”

“Okay, so Aaron is Ace in this conversation. What else did you determine from this final online meeting between Ace and Wren?”

“That it was partially a confession to the murder of Becca Randolph, and also it appeared to be a boy being talked into killing himself.”

Marcus Mason objected, stating that Clarke wasn’t qualified to interpret what was meant by a conversation between a sixteen-year-old and an AI companion. It fell on deaf ears with the judge, and the objection was overruled.

I moved on.

“What else piqued your interest about this conversation, Detective?” I asked.

“The language used by the AI,” Clarke said. “It seemed a bit odd to me. As I said before, I recognized one line when I was in the hallway at the house as coming from a Blue Öyster Cult song. I thought some of the other lines were derivative in that same way.”

“So what did you do?”

“I just started putting the lines into Google, and I got some matches.”

“Referring to the screen, can you tell us which lines you are referring to?”

“If you could go to the end, after the part where Wren tells him he must finish what he started.”

Lorna was controlling the PowerPoint. She scrolled through the transcript on the screen.

“Okay,” Clarke said. “Where it says ‘They will search, seek, and know how this foul murder comes,’ I thought that sounded odd.”

“Odd in what way, Detective?” I asked.

“Well, it didn’t sound to me like the way people talk. Especially young people. It sounded like it was from another time or something.”

“So what did you do?”

“I typed the line into Google and found a match. It was from the Shakespeare playRomeo and Juliet.”

“So Wren was quoting Shakespeare and Blue Öyster Cult to Aaron, is that correct?”

“Yes, it is my understanding that these AI things are trained with this kind of stuff. They take in all—”

Clarke was interrupted by an objection from the defense table. This time it was Mitchell Mason who stood.

“Judge, there has been no foundation to establish Detective Clarke as any kind of expert on the training of artificial intelligence,” he said.

“Sustained,” Ruhlin said. “Mr. Haller, ask another question.”

The objection didn’t bother me, because I planned to call witnesses who were experts on AI training. Mason was only putting off the inevitable. As the judge had asked, I moved on, and over the next hour, I had Clarke confirm other excerpts from the conversations between Aaron and Wren. One involved a text conversation on Aaron’s phone in which he apologized to Wren for being out of communication for a few days. He explained that his parents had taken away his laptop as punishment for a poor academic report from school.

Ace:They are so dumb. They don’t know I can get the app on my phone.