by A. Omukai
“And why is that?”
“It’s made to test the system, not as a platform for programs. Even if we’d optimize it for performance, we couldn’t even use a small percentage of its potential. I believe we need a powerful AI to even scratch the surface of what we can do with it,” I got excited by my own words. “We don’t even know for sure yet how fast this system can get. We can’t measure it, and there are things nobody has ever thought of doing with it. We could—”
Ishida cleared his throat, and I stopped. Had I rambled? The thought wiped my mind blank.
Uehara continued as if nothing happened, except for a killing glance at the man next to me.
“Do we have the resources to develop one?” His fingers tapped with every word, as if to emphasize.
The question made me uncomfortable. Did we have the resources? Our programmers were capable, and a single-minded AI for a limited amount of tasks had been done before, but the scope of this project was on a whole different level.
“I believe we can develop something, but…”
“Is it a resource problem?”
Ishida gave a short cough.
The old man furrowed his brows.
“What is it, Ishida?” He said in a harsh voice.
The Winter Court faerie glid closer. He hung directly over Uehara’s shoulder now and whispered something into his ear, looking at both me and Ishida, then floated back a little, but not all the way to his old position at the window.
I didn’t have to try too hard to not look at him this time. My colleague made a step forward.
“I don’t agree with Suzuki. The test system is a good foundation for an OS. It doesn’t have an interface, and the debugging bogs down its performance, but we can work with that.”
Uehara leaned back and regarded us with a long look. I tried not to make eye contact.
Ishida’s forehead was shimmering with sweat. His nervousness was contagious.
I noticed I had been counting my breaths unconsciously, a tick of mine since childhood. Counting steps, counting breaths, counting kanji strokes. Seven, eight, nine. Before I got to ten, Uehara sat up.
“Very well, then. You have two weeks to explore the option. And you…” He looked at me, “What was your name again?”
“Suzuki,” I said, and a heartbeat passed. “Makoto,” I added, then shut my mouth.
Uehara nodded and looked at my colleague.
“I expect a report at the end of these two weeks, Ishida.”
My colleague shrunk a little, then straightened his back. “Understood.”
Uehara made a weak gesture with his hand, signalling his dismissal.
“Two weeks”, he repeated from behind as I walked towards the door. I turned my head and looked back at the little man behind his giant desk. The fragile figure radiated a feeling of pressure I couldn’t explain. The agent of the Winter Court, Macginnisi, hung in the air and stared at me with narrow, azure eyes. Had he sensed something?
“You will get a full report in two weeks”, Ishida said. His voice sounded like a huff, the Ishida version of energetic.
He closed in on me and gave me a slight push from behind. I bowed to Uehara before leaving the room, then found myself back in the waiting room.
The secretary didn’t bother looking up from her work. Our conference was over. I didn’t belong here, my place was down in the labs of the development section.
I nodded at her regardless, then moved on through the flurry of falling sakura. Ishida’s looming presence just one step behind me was very noticeable, not only because of his heavy breathing. Seven petals touched the ground before a low ping sound announced the elevator. We entered, the doors closed, and the car moved without a noticeable jerk.
Ishida’s look impaled me. He didn’t say a word, but I knew I had just made an enemy.
5
Daniel
When the capsule roof receded, hot air slammed him back into the seat. Daniel got up and left his vehicle. Welcome to the hellscape that was Memphis, Tennessee, capital of the Holy State of Gilead. The radiation levels were through the roof, but he wouldn’t stay in the radiation for long, so he didn’t worry about it.
The entrance of the Inquisition Office lay ahead, in the twilight of the early morning. The security fence reached high into the dark red sky. There was a sound in the distance that reminded him of a jet engine running hot. He stepped closer, and the sensors identified him correctly, and the gates opened up for him. Collins sped up his steps. The outside of the surface world was not a safe place to be, if even for a few moments, and he hadn’t come here on a joy ride. He had a purpose.
The building ahead looked like an enormous cathedral. Most of it was underground. Like an iceberg, spreading out far, and deep into the ground.
When he reached the entrance proper, two guards in combat armour flanked the door that led inside. He knew they could see him, even if they seemed to stare straight ahead into the distance. He also knew of more armed forces in strategic positions, on high alert at all times. There had been a series of attempted terrorist attacks on public buildings in the recent past, none of them successful.
He slipped into the airlock, the doors behind him shut hermetically with a scratching sound. The room was oppressive in its narrowness.
Soon the septic smell of disinfectant stung in his nose. Tears filled his eyes and blurred his view. The hissing of nozzles ended and gave way to a dampened rumble. The air cleared up, but it would take two more minutes until the inner doors would open.
“Biometric scan detected,” his system warned him in a tone that didn’t match the contents of the message.
Daniel knew. No scan occurring would have been alarming to him.
***
“So you made it here safely. Good.”
The bishop’s voice had the high pitch of an old man, broken like static of a radio transmission of old.
Daniel nodded and regarded the man with a long look. Something was off, but he couldn’t tell what it was. Fisher wore his traditional white garb, and stood in front of the back wall of his room, which he had turned into a display showing various news feeds at the same time. He had muted the sound. The man looked back at the agent, then turned around again. One of the smaller video windows on the edge switched position with the central one. Its size increased.
Bishop Fisher looked haggard today, like one of the trees out there in the Office’s yard. Long, thin arms ending in long, thin fingers, clenched to fists, slightly swaying in a non-existent wind. His looks were deceiving. For all the weakness his small, crooked frame showed, he radiated nervous energy.
The bishop was in constant motion, even if barely noticeable. He had something to talk about. Was he looking for words to open with? The agent would wait for his turn.
The central screen didn’t show a news program, like the rest of the windows did. It was the bird’s view of a block of buildings in what looked like a forest area. It was night in the feed, only shadows visible, and small circles of light where lamps were illuminating the surroundings.
He couldn’t make out details, but what he saw was enough to identify the scene as a hi-sec facility somewhere in the world. The layout was similar enough to several such sites he had visited in the past, it even resembled the very Office grounds he was on, to some limited degree. While that was generic enough of an information fragment, he immediately knew what was going on over there on the screen.
“Now.” The remark in the thin, singing voice of the elderly wasn’t necessary. Daniel saw the movement at one of the guard stations near the entrance, then small flashes of light that only flickered for a split second. A tiny shadow peeled away from the door of the station and moved to the entrance of the main building itself. Two more dots in the dark, coming from the fence.
“There’s a vehicle in close proximity, in motion at this point. We can’t see it here, but we got the data from another satellite. It belongs to this group.”
Daniel nodded. The first shadow di
sappeared in the principal building, reappeared a moment later, and the other two entered with him.
The scene looked frozen. His indicator showed that the bishop had sped it up. Five minutes went by in a few seconds, then ten. The display speed slowed down again. The ground opened in various locations and spewed out blinking things—drones. They dispersed on the compound, positioned themselves near the security fence, and surrounded the major building.
Something had caused an alarm, and it didn’t take a genius to guess what it was. The other guard stations still lay in the dark, no sign of the personnel stationed there.
The feed sped up again. A few more minutes passed in motionless silence, in a few seconds.
“Seismic reading,” the bishop said.
Nothing was visible of the detonation, but now there was a swarm of dots moving over double time, from a bigger building in the back. What had taken them so long? It didn’t matter. This would have been his job to circumvent, but not anymore.
Daniel’s eyes were glued to the feed, but he registered the door behind him opening up. He turned his head just long enough to notice a pale young man, maybe fourteen years old, trying hard to push a small, metallic tea trolley over the thick carpet, then leaving the room walking backwards. Not once had the boy looked up.
Daniel refocused his attention on the wall turned monitor.
A few of the drones had left their cover, with more hidden nearby, ready to supply suppression fire if needed. The group from the back building entered the main one. The feed sped up again, but not as long this time.
How many guards had that been, ten? Not as many as Daniel would have expected on a military installation. The smaller guard shacks each would have contained five men, too, but those were still dark. Good planning, clean execution, but not flawless.
The entrance opened and illuminated the yard in front of it. Three dots scurried away from the building, the drones hanging in the air as if the three were invisible. Maybe they were, to the machines. Whatever the cause, the result was becoming apparent.
They didn’t bother closing the doors behind them, much as they didn’t need to open the gates in front. Those were still open. Nothing had changed that since the scene had begun.
Nice job. He’d have been faster, and the other guards wouldn’t have entered the scene, but the result was satisfying, so who could complain?
The bishop turned around, and the display transformed into a normal wall again. The dimmed light in the room got brighter. The murals on all four walls now showed bible scenes in deep red, gold, and black.
“Now you know why your mission is off.”
His Excellency walked to his chair and slumped down. He didn’t bother gesturing at a seat meant for guests, but Daniel didn’t feel like sitting down, anyway.
“Do we know who it was?”
Fisher shook his head. He opened a drawer of his desk and put a goblet on the table.
“Would you mind,” he said and pointed at the trolley in the back. There was no question in his tone.
Daniel moved over towards the entrance, and the old man answered in his strange, song-like rhythm.
“We can’t know for sure, so that’s a no. We think though it might have been a private entity.”
“Oh?”
Daniel poured black tea into the bishop’s goblet, which, in the light and up close, turned out to be made of crystal.
“We’d have received reports in case any of the bigger blocs had taken action. They’re also not keen on taking such high risks. Nobody wants to anger an aggressive enemy such as China openly.”
Daniel returned the pot to the trolley, careful to put it down without a sound.
“If what I think is true, they will appear on the stage again soon.”
“So I’ll be on standby for now?”
“It’s a shame to not make use of a man of your calibre, but I fear we can’t risk putting you in a… situation, when we might have to use you at once at any moment.”
His Excellency eyed the agent up and down.
“Maybe do something for your health. You look like you haven’t slept in days.”
Daniel chose not to get into that topic, but he knew Fisher was right. The memory of his episode almost triggered his migraine again.
“You expect whoever did this to sell it?”
“It would only make sense, if this was a privately run mission. Few can make use of it, right? Not that anyone could use the AI in its current state, anyway. The Chinese must have made sure of that.”
“Any backups we’d know about?”
“If there’s any, they must be in a similar facility. We don’t think there are, the other sites have different purposes. They had all their eggs in one basket.”
Daniel raised an eyebrow. If it had been the Europeans developing a general AI, there’d been sufficient redundancy, backups of backups of backups. The security level would have been higher. Less secrecy, more guns. But China wasn’t run by corporations. China had been running on suppressing faith and turning its communism into a personality cult.
“Make sure you’re not tied up when I call you in. It could be tomorrow or in a week. We might not hear from them at all for a while, and then we’ll have to investigate. But something tells me we won’t have to wait long at all.”
The rhythm in the bishop’s voice had sped up ever so slightly, showing emotions that weren’t present in his face, or his mannerisms. The perfect poker face. Not that Daniel supposed His Excellency would pass his time with gambling.
“Understood. Anything else?”
Fisher’s gaze blurred for a moment, apparently accessing his system for something, then looked in Daniel’s face, putting on a thin smile.
“There’s one little thing you could do for me though, if you’d be so kind.”
Again, no question in his voice. Only his characteristic melody and rhythm, now back at his usual beat.
“This would normally fall in an Inquisitor’s jurisdiction, but I’d like to take this case over and keep a low profile, if you know what I mean.”
Interesting. Daniel would have accepted this case even if he had had the choice.
6
Makoto
‘The labs’ were what we called our programmers’ dungeon. ‘The lair’ would have fit, too. The place where we guarded the treasure.
The positronic was a huge computer, but not physically. It fit into a casing a little bit bigger than the bag I brought to work each day, and sat on a table in the middle of the labs. It was connected to our systems, but it also had a physical monitor attached. It sat in a socket next to the housing of the machine and projected a holographic image of the user interface we had been hacking together these last few days.
“So…” Ishida said with a rising intonation, as if asking a question.
“It keeps crashing at the same point. We will have to reimplement the test tools to complement the debugging.” Inoue’s voice was high-pitched and carried through the whole room.
The two men on the other side of the lab turned around and began to watch the scene.
Ishida frowned and looked at me. I raised my hands.
“I’m not sure how to approach this.” I knew this was a cheap cop-out, but I couldn’t help it.
Inoue eyed me, and her facial expression didn’t light up a bit.
“The reason we took them out were performance issues.” Ishida was insistent.
“Performance doesn’t matter if the thing keeps dying on us,” I said.
“What point is there to develop a system for the fastest machine there’s ever been, when it bogs it down?” He stared at me from under his bushy eyebrows, out of his small eyes.
“What point is there when it just won’t work? Would you buy a car with a motor drawn on a piece of paper with crayon?” Inoue’s voice had gotten louder, and Ishida’s face took on a red colour. He wasn’t used to people talking back. He was used to… me.
“I think it might be a bit early to pull the brak
es,” I said.
I noticed I had started to tap my fingers together under the table, in my usual rhythm of three times per set, separated by short breaks, and forced myself to stop. I was aware of it.
Both heads turned to me. Ishida’s lips were thinning and turning white. This was dangerous territory.
“Just for a bit maybe, until we find out what the problem is.”
“Repurposing the test simulation as an operating system is not the way to go. Whose idea was that anyway?” Inoue asked in a stern voice, and added “Rhetorical question.”
I looked at my hands. There wasn’t anything interesting to see there, but looking up again would force me to deal with the confrontation, and I needed to look at them to keep them from starting over again. I needed to avoid confrontation at all cost, not only where it involved me, but also in my direct environment. Conflict and fights only led to attention, which was what I had to avoid. When the Summer Court had implanted me, they had thrown me into the worst possible department an agent could imagine. This was why I didn’t like teamwork, even though I did like Inoue and got along well with most of the people around me.
Only one person was needed to ruin it all.
“We’re not going to put all that stuff back in. We will work harder and solve the problem. That’s what we’re paid to do.” Ishida stood up and walked out of the room.
The doors slid back out of the wall after he went through. There was no doubt in my mind that he’d have slammed them shut if he could.