by A. Omukai
Uehara wore a simple, unassuming suit. His thin hair was combed back over the pale skull and formed the notorious barcode everyone tried their best to avoid. He wore it with an air of dignity.
No Winter Court agent around. My lucky day. But Uehara alone was dangerous enough, I couldn’t let my guard down.
“Mister Uehara,” I said, bowing, “I’m sorry I made you wait.”
“Don’t worry about it. Let’s take a brief walk and talk in the garden.”
He didn’t wait for an answer and walked through a door under the stairway that led into a big, open dining hall. The wall on the opposite side was all glass—actual glass, not just a display. A butler opened for him, and the old man nodded. He stepped on the patio, while I did my best to follow him.
We hadn’t taken off our shoes, very unusual in our corner of the world, but the moment I noticed it, we were already outside again.
“I had expected you to come, but I didn’t think it’d take you so long,” Uehara said.
The walking stick in his right hand didn’t seem necessary, his step was light and full of energy. It was obvious that he had just received another round of the Treatment.
“Tell me the problem.”
I took one, two, three steps, then opened my mouth to answer, when a young woman appeared from behind a curve.
“Excuse me for a moment. My granddaughter,” he said and left me behind.
I stood on the path and pushed small pebbles back and forth, while he had an animated talk with her.
She didn’t look like she belonged here. Her clothing was casual and not at all like what I’d expect an Uehara to wear.
I heard her bright laughing voice, then the two parted. She nodded in my direction and went to where we had just come from. Uehara gestured for me to come over.
“Where were we?”
“The problem, on its surface,” I said, “is that the positronic keeps crashing.”
Uehara nodded, but didn’t interrupt me. He gestured for me to continue.
“The real problem is that we throw away all the potential this system has. We could be way faster than this. What’s the advantage of this computer over a cheap quantum system that’s cheaper, smaller and can be worn on your body, over this machine, if the speed difference is only twenty percent? Heck, even if it was double the speed, it wouldn’t be worth it.” I had talked myself into a rage already.
It felt as if a dam had broken, and the water burst out.
“Isn’t twenty percent already a huge leap forward?”
“Yes, it is , but leaving the true potential locked would be an extreme waste, and it would provide others with a business opportunity.”
“Why did you not speak up the last time we met, in my office?” He looked at me with inquiring eyes.
“Mr. Ishida is the leader of our development team.”
“And yet, here you are. What did he say when you told him you’d come here?”
“He…” I stopped.
I hadn’t talked with Ishida about this.
“What would he think if he knew you are here?” he asked with a demanding face.
My answer didn’t come out. I stared at my feet, walking down the white path through the park that was Uehara’s private garden. I hadn’t expected my first mission to be such a complicated mess.
“I appreciate you taking the risk to skip all your superiors and come to me directly. Very bold of you, and idiotic. Let’s see if you’ll get away with it.”
He laughed in a low voice. At least one of us had fun today.
“So what’s the problem with the current operating system?”
I suppressed my excitement and went all out.
“We made the system we’ve been using with testing purposes in mind, as I explained in our first meeting. The design principles behind it are old-fashioned and have been in use since those platforms of old. Function libraries, hard- and software interfaces running on internal databases. Even quantum computers would work better with an AI to govern its processes, but the gain is small for such a resource hog. Our positronic though… anything less than an AI is such a waste of potential, and the results we could achieve are so revolutionary, it’s just—”
I stopped when I noticed the man standing ahead of us at the side of the path we were walking. Uehara let out an audible sigh, then signalled me to stay back again.
The colossal figure in front of us wasn’t a guard. He wore a suit like most of us, but his shirt was black, and two of his fingers missed phalanges. When he spoke, he moved his head, and the edge of a tattoo poked out of his collar for a split second.
This was obviously not something I’d want to be seen witnessing. I turned around, only to stare into the face of the girl we’d met earlier.
So much traffic on a mere path through a garden, on a weekday. Almost hilarious, but I didn’t feel like laughing.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
Her voice was smooth as silk, and her eyes spoke of intelligence and curiosity.
“I…” I cleared my throat. “My name is Suzuki.”
She nodded gracefully and kept staring at me. She couldn’t be much older than fifteen, and she didn’t seem to be in the mood to introduce herself to me.
“You must be the shy guy grandpa was talking about. Interesting,” she said.
She didn’t sound like she’d want to make fun of me. More like genuine curiosity, as if I were an interesting exhibit. I didn’t know how to answer.
The girl hopped on her toes, then ran off to her grandpa, my boss. She pulled on Uehara’s sleeve, completely ignoring the giant who towered over her, and who tried to avoid eye contact with her.
I heard her giggling voice, then saw her run back to the house. When she passed me, she smiled a little.
The talk between the men seemed to be over. The hulk bowed, then strode away in the opposite direction.
We continued our walk, the old, but not fragile man and me, and he broke the silence just a few steps onward.
“So you’re saying we should abandon the current efforts and begin from scratch.”
He spoke matter-of-factly, not a trace of a question in his tone.
“Yes. It’s for the best.” One, two, three steps forward. “Please let me do this. I can assemble a team and develop a working system.”
“The man you saw earlier just informed me we might be in the lucky position to get our hands on a prototype for a general AI.”
I stopped in surprise, then hurried to resume my steps to catch up with Uehara.
“That’s… I’m at a loss for words.”
“Build your team. We’ll probably need all the workforce we can get. The prototype is still a prototype, and will need a lot of work.”
“All the things we can do with this…” I said, lost in thought.
Uehara looked at me with interest.
“With this much computing power, we can solve so many problems. Poverty, hunger. Maybe… maybe even work on solutions for the environment on the surface.”
This wasn’t what I was thinking about. The prototype on an AI in the hands of the Winter Court, that was something I had to prevent. At the least, I had to get in touch with my contact, Daisuke. Me being part of the team also gave us the chance to install backdoors.
We passed a tree with low hanging twigs and a shadow wandered over Uehara’s face. Both figuratively and literally, or was this just the result of my hyperactive mind?
11
Daniel
The sandstorm above him drove sand particles through even the narrowest of slits, deep into the underground. It was gaining momentum even now, as his capsule disappeared to a designated storage area, while Daniel went on his way to his destination. Two haggard figures in rags sat in the shadows against a wall, trying to not look at him. Daniel passed them without turning his eyes on them. The moment passed, and he hadn’t needed to defend himself. The two seemed to actually only be hobos of the harmless kind.
This area of the
city was directly beneath the surface. Only the homeless tried to survive here, and only those who weren’t strong enough, or couldn’t make it on the surface otherwise, where there was at least something left to scavenge. The homeless, and the criminals, insurgents, terrorists. It was also a popular recreation area for some people. Daniel didn’t count himself among those, but he had come here for private reasons. He still hadn’t gotten his new assignment yet.
Upstairs, standing in the storm would grind away one’s skin, get into one’s eyes and any uncovered orifice. Downstairs, it destabilized systems, its charged sand particles carrying with them strong electromagnetic waves. The closer to the surface, the stronger its influence. He felt it directly when he tried to activate his system and failed.
He had more luck with his illegal chip, but it was useless here. He needed to access FaithNet, but only the chip in his skull gave him access to that.
He cursed, and the system booted up. It only took a few seconds, while he passed through a tunnel where a small group of elderly had made their homes out of boxes, cloth and parts of capsules. God knew where they stole the electricity they used to power their ‘homes’, but this was not his scope of responsibility, and he failed to ignore the smell of fried meat and alcohol that hung in the air like a thick cloud. The tunnel captured it and didn’t let it leave. What it also captured was a foul sub-layer that permeated the smell and made him gag.
The clinic he was headed for carried the name ‘Bonesetter’s Den’. It described its function pretty well, considering they provided even more interesting things than the bizarre forms of surgery one could find elsewhere. What made the enterprise illegal though was not what they did, but who their clientele was.
“You are being scanned. Unauthorized biometric and metal detection scans,” his system informed him as he entered the building. He dismissed the notification and looked around.
The benches were a beige plastic that might have been white once, but he couldn’t tell for sure. The floor was old, the chess pattern barely visible anymore, but clean. Everything in this room was almost sterile, except for the people waiting for their turn.
Daniel avoided making eye contact. He knew the two figures sitting on the bench next to the door of the doctor’s office, and a quick database check confirmed his suspicion. Cascadian terrorists, wanted by the Inquisition Office. The court had already declared them guilty of several criminal acts, even though their trials lay still ahead. The two men spoke in a low voice. They didn’t pay him a lot of attention, but even if they had, they couldn’t possibly have known him.
He walked over to a bench near the other wall and sat down next to a thin man with greasy hair and a scar running around his neck. The man had already been tapping his foot when Daniel had entered, and he hadn’t stopped since. His small, watery eyes were yellow, and Daniel could smell his breath. Daniel wasn’t a doctor, but he could tell that without medical attention, the guy wouldn’t survive until Christmas.
The more interesting detail about the man was that he tried to avoid eye contact with him almost as much as Daniel did with the two terrorists. Had he met him somewhere? Neither his memories nor the FaithNet database contained any hints, and then his system crashed again. Godforsaken sandstorm.
The light in the room flickered, but didn’t go out completely.
The door opened, and a gigantic man entered. His long hair fell over the black suit he was wearing. The slim guy to Daniel’s left paused his gaze for too long on the newcomer’s figure, and when the man walked over and turned to sit down next to him, Daniel stood up, pulled his gun and pointed it at the hulk.
The two terrorists fell silent immediately, and the slim gangster scurried towards the other end of the bench.
Nobody said a word. Nobody had to.
A sizzling sound, and the lights went out. Exceptional timing. Daniel felt someone collide with him and lift him off his feet, smashing him against the opposite wall. No words still, but a grunting here and a moan there. Daniel regained his posture. He couldn’t activate night sight, his system was offline again. He sensed something coming from the left, blocked the blow, but felt a dull pain in his wrist.
One door left, one right. A bench in front, one to the right. Scanner to the left, next to the door. Nothing in this room would work as cover, there was nowhere to go, and the space was too narrow for a fight.
He pointed in the direction the blow had come from and pulled the trigger twice. He hadn’t changed his gun’s setting from lethal discharge to stun this time. The light from the barrel illuminated the room just enough to let him see that both benches were empty. It didn’t last long enough to tell him where anyone had gone. His immediate opponent tried to suppress a scream, and the sharp stench of burnt flesh stung in Daniel’s nose.
Another blow, this one connected. The back of Daniel’s head crashed against the wall, and he saw an explosion of lights flash into existence and expire. He wanted to shoot, but his eyes couldn’t get used to the dark, after having looked into the flash from his gun. He heard something smashing into someone, and his opponent’s growling voice, but he couldn’t make out what happened. Someone pushed him hard, and he fell over the body of someone else who had stood right next to him.
The exit door opened, and two silhouettes hurried through the opening.
Something stung him in the right forearm, the person he had stumbled over. Daniel whirled around his axis and shot without hesitation. A squealing scream told him he had hit his target, but now he was blind again. He could only shoot once, then the sharp pain made him drop the gun he was holding. It landed on something soft.
Right this moment, the light came back on, and he saw the thin gangster lay on the ground, holding his stomach. Not a lethal hit. The bigger one lay on the bench they’d sat on earlier, his face a bloody mess. Not enough of his face was in a good enough condition to identify him by looks. Those two terrorists had gotten him good and maybe saved Daniel’s life. He didn’t feel bad about not being grateful, though.
The other door flew open and two men rushed in, their guns pulled, covering each other.
One of them immediately pointed his gun toward Daniel, then noticed his bleeding arm and the blade that still stuck in it.
“You there! Stay where you are!”
***
“This wound shouldn’t be a problem. It was a sharp knife, it cut through the muscle instead of ripping through it. You won’t be able to put much strength in your right hand for a while. That being said…”
The doctor was an elderly woman, Daniel couldn’t tell her exact age. The contrast between her looks and her liveliness indicated that she had received the Treatment, a privilege only the highest positions in the church could obtain.
“The scanner showed me you’re running two systems, one of them a military grade FaithNet chip, inside your cranium.”
She stared at him while bandaging his forearm mechanically.
“That’s correct.”
She fixed the bandage firmly, and he flinched. She beamed a smile.
“Tell me why you’re here, agent…?”
Daniel ignored the latter part of her question.
“You’ve already scanned my two chips. They’re not completely compatible.”
“I can see that. The one sitting behind your ear doesn’t share the same connection. It connects to the global net instead. In fact, I’ve seen this kind before.”
Daniel nodded. His wound throbbed, but not too much anymore. The painkillers she had given him showed effect already. He also felt suspiciously amused.
“What was in the shot, doctor?”
She smiled again, finished his bandage and released his arm from her grip.
“Don’t worry, nothing harmful. Just a little insurance, I don’t want to end up like the mobster in my waiting room. Speaking of mobsters…”
There was no denying it, he knew.
“You’re right, this chip comes from an old… client of mine.”
She rai
sed one eyebrow, but didn’t pursue the question any further. Looking at her again, he could see remnants of past beauty in her face. Her long, white hair must once have been black, and her eyes would have been a brilliant green. They still had a sharp look to them, and right at this moment, they were studying him intently.
“Fascinating. I’ve never seen systems like these run in the same environment. I’d love to watch you for a while, agent…”
Daniel laughed. His head felt light, and the world around him appeared to be more like a weird dream now. He knew still that this was an effect of her drug.
“I’m afraid I must decline your hospitality. I’m a busy man, and you wouldn’t want the attention, anyway.”
“Isn’t that the truth! So you came here to have me look at it and fix it for you.”
“If that’s even possible.”
She laughed again with her husky, but pleasant voice.
“Lay down. I don’t want you here, and I’d have you disappear already, but you’re intriguing me. Let me look into your head.”
Daniel tried to stand up, but the strength had left his legs, and his knees felt like rubber.
She pressed a button under her desk. The door opened and one of the two men he had met earlier entered.
“Please help our guest to the diag table.”
The man’s look wasn’t friendly, but he followed her order and grabbed Daniel under the armpits, then lifted him up like a puppet. He had augmented his physical strength with illegal implants, no doubt about it, but Daniel didn’t find that concerning at all. Then he did, but the moment was gone, and he lay on the table-part reminiscent of something he had seen in an old medical drama. He noticed his hands shackled to the metallic frame. This wasn’t good. Why, he couldn’t tell.