by A. Omukai
He had been right. Several people left the church. A middle-aged couple, two Asians, a trio of business people and a suspicious guy who looked like he could have fit his profile.
Not good enough, Daniel decided, and swallowed a curse. He would have to do it the hard way.
A few moments later the Russians left the building, three of them. The third one must have waited for them inside. Not a terrible decision. That left the fourth companion, his primary source of worry. If he was with them today, he would have secured the scene on the outside. Daniel couldn’t see him, but that meant nothing. He had no choice now, he’d risk following them. With luck, they wouldn’t notice, but he wouldn’t bank on that. Worst case, they’d await him. He sighed and watched them take a taxi and leave. He looked up the number of the capsule, then called one, too.
***
He had just closed the door of the vehicle, when the migraine hit him out of nowhere.
“Syncing,” his system announced. Daniel ground his teeth and gave himself a shot. He had no idea how much time he had left until he reached his destination, but with everything that had already gone wrong today, he didn’t expect the side effects to expire in time. He let out a moan, closed his eyes and tried to relax.
If he was right, he had a shadow following him, and the other three were aware of him. That meant combat, and he had a hunch this wouldn’t go well on drugs, at least not on these.
He tried to think through the headache. What other options did he have?
He could try to talk, maybe even hire them. Money wouldn’t be an issue, the church was very liberal with money, under the right circumstances.
The capsule stopped with a jerk for a jaywalker. The pain, already on the retreat, exploded again, and he saw white fireworks behind closed eyelids.
They wouldn’t be interested in cooperation, but they might sell him the buyer information for the right sum. He decided he had nothing to lose.
When the taxi reached the hotel, his clothes were drenched in sweat. His knees felt weak, but he didn’t have time to waste. He entered, looked at the elevator display. Eighth floor. This was probably where the Russians had gone. No one else was in the foyer.
When the doors opened, he entered without hesitation.
His body had begun the recovery process, but he was still far from being in shape.
The car arrived, the doors opened, and he stepped out into the corridor. Soft, indirect light came from somewhere above. No sounds. He gave it five minutes before he’d knock on the door.
The elevator didn’t move. If he had a pursuer, he’d come up the stairs.
Daniel smiled. The guy would spend his energy for nothing.
The door to the staircase opened at the same time as the room he stood in front of.
He raised his hands.
“I’m here to offer you a deal.”
16
Makoto
When Uehara called the next time, I sat on the toilet—again. I wouldn’t be able to get up, so I decided to accept the call without video.
“Suzuki, what’s with your system?”
“I’m all right,” I said, without explaining any further. “What can I do for you?”
“I’ll be in the labs in ten minutes. I have something I would like you to take a look at.”
I nodded, remembered that he couldn’t see me. “Ten minutes, laboratory. I’ll be waiting for you.”
Uehara ended the call and I hurried to get out of there.
Last time this had happened, Ishida had come in. He didn’t seem to be at work today though, again. Wondering what was wrong with him, I rushed back to the lab. Being late wasn’t an option.
“Mister Uehara will come down to our labs in a few minutes,” I said while entering the room.
My three colleagues turned their heads toward me. My pulse quickened and I let my eyes wander over the room. ‘Laboratory’ was a generous word for our tiny development studio. Five seats, one for each member. The main positronic system, and our work systems, which we could not access directly from our private ones.
“What do you think he wants from us?” Inoue asked.
I shrugged.
“He said he had something he’d like us to look at.”
“That’s odd. I thought he had something to say about Ishida.”
“Would he come down for that?”
“Probably not.”
I tapped the desk with my finger, once, twice, thrice, stop it. It would only betray my nervousness.
Exactly ten minutes after our call, the door opened silently. The CEO of the megacorp entered the room, followed by a woman I didn’t know. He didn’t look a day over sixty today. How could that be? Probably another round of the Treatment. Most people could barely afford it once in a lifetime.
“This,” he said instead of a greeting, “is an AI we just acquired from a source I cannot disclose. It will need extensive checks and rewrites, but I trust you to be able to do this.”
He put the storage medium on the desk next to the positronic.
“With your newly hired staff, you will need a bigger room. I made an arrangement for you to move to the second floor immediately.”
“What about Ishida?” I wanted to know.
“Ishida? I’ll tell my secretary to look into that. Don’t worry about him. Take over the team for now, get the move done, set the place up and get to work as soon as possible. By the way, this is Ms Maeda, my personal pick for your team. She’s an encryption expert.”
The women smiled and bowed. Something about her felt unnatural, and I couldn’t make out what it was. Her eyes told me that she felt similarly about me, which was not good at all.
“Nice to meet you,” she said with a voice that didn’t betray whatever it was she was hiding.
I returned the bow.
“Encryption?” I asked.
“I’ll be responsible for protecting the system from being stolen and made usable,” our new team member said. This would be the best answer I could get. Maybe we’d talk later and I’d get more information out of her. And more importantly, about her.
***
So this was our new lab.
It was triple the size of the old room, more than we would need. I had asked for three AI specialists with coding skills, and HR had promised them to me for next week. This move wasn’t a big deal. We’d just transferred all the work stations over and were ready to look at the AI. I was more than curious. AI was a part of daily life, our systems ran several of them, but all of them were specialized, and calling them ‘intelligence’ didn’t really fit. The term had stuck around for some decades now, though.
I was alone with Inoue. The two others would get the positronic down here, while she and I worked on the data transfers from the old lab.
“Did you hear about that explosion in China?” she asked.
“What explosion?”
I wasn’t on top of the news. Never been much of a news viewer.
She raised an eyebrow, started her transfer and turned around to me.
“They say Gilead performed terrorism in China. That’s some scary stuff. How come you don’t know?”
I shrugged. What should I say? What was the point anyway?
“China has a track record for retaliatory strikes. Remember when the Russians sank one of their fishing boats?”
“What does that have to do with us?”
America was far away.
“Everything. It’s a small world, you know, and Gilead calling them heretics in the last press conference… that’s fighting words.”
I wasn’t convinced, but I had no idea how to answer that. My world was small. Get up, work, go home, sleep. And of course, my actual job, making sure Uehara corp was a Swiss cheese, full of holes to penetrate whenever necessary. This company was the Winter Court’s main attack vector on Earth.
If a war between humans started around me, I’d probably not even notice until bombs dropped on my head, unless someone told me.
“A
part from that, what do you think we need an encryption expert for?” I attempted to change the topic.
Inoue laughed.
“You have strange priorities, Suzuki.”
“I guess so. I’m sorry, but this here is keeping me busy enough to not worry about what’s outside the lab.”
She smiled and nodded. Normally when Inoue did that, my heart skipped a beat. Not today though, the stress was getting to me.
“I think her job is to make sure none of us steals the new operating system. We’re getting a bunch of new people, right?”
“Yeah, three coders, and her. That makes us nine.”
“Maybe, or eight. How long has Ishida been away? And nobody knows anything.”
A moment of silence, then she turned around again and continued her work. Yeah, maybe eight. I didn’t feel guilty for not missing Ishida, and I wouldn’t mind him not coming back, but his replacement might be even worse. This was an entry very high on my priority list. This smelled like Winter Court, but if Maeda was one of their agents tasked with checking me, I wouldn’t find out.
***
Uehara’s second call of the day came just when the transfers had finished and two men in suits entered the room. While Inoue took care of them, I opened the connection.
“Suzuki, I sent you two security people. They’re there for your protection.”
Why would we need protection all of a sudden? Maybe the source of the AI wasn’t quite kosher. I’d not have expected that to be the case, anyway. I took a quick glance at the two. Both looked athletic, but otherwise like typical businessmen.
“What do we need protection for?” I said out loud and regretted it instantly.
I was more careful under normal circumstances, but there was so much going on right now.
“Getting bolder I see. Maybe not a bad thing. Anyway, we bought this software on the black market. I assume it’s stolen, but frankly, I don’t care. All I want is you and your team to fit it to the positronic and make it all work. Remember what you came to me for?”
I did. Him being so open shocked me, but not as much as it should have. The prospect of getting my fingers on a general AI cast a goofy grin on my face before I was aware of it and could suppress it.
Uehara didn’t seem to mind. He chuckled.
“I guess you also want to know what Ms Maeda’s role is in all this?”
“I think I have an idea.”
I didn’t dare ask him questions about her origins. There would be ways to find out that didn’t put me in the spotlight. I did way better in the shadows.
Uehara nodded. He seemed satisfied with the result of this call.
“If there is anything you need, you now have clearance to call me directly. I think you won’t abuse that privilege, you seem to be an intelligent man.”
With that, he cut the call and I closed the system’s main menu. I swung around to the two newcomers, who regarded me with expectant looks.
“Welcome to our lab. My name is Suzuki.”
***
The Booze Exchange wasn’t quite as busy today. It was the middle of the week, not usually a peak day for the bar. Daisuke and I would normally meet two days from now, but he had asked me to come there today, which was great; I’d have tried to ask him to meet me otherwise. He hadn’t mentioned why he needed me, and when I walked through the room, I saw him sitting in a corner, raising his hand to get my attention. Him being here before me was a first, too.
“What news do you have?” I asked while hanging my jacket on the wall.
“I’m great, thanks, and you?”
“How rude of me,” I laughed and bowed deeply, then sat down.
The bar’s system was as laggy as I had expected it to be, but I didn’t care today. Half of me was still back in the labs, poking around in the entrails of our new acquisition. I ordered a glass of water, as always. Nothing to eat today, I wasn’t hungry at all. Daisuke didn’t have a meal either, but the big glass with a brown fluid on the table gave off an alcoholic smell.
“Getting drunk in the middle of the week?”
“I can afford that today. No work tomorrow.”
“Wish I was my own boss, too.”
“You could be. You chose not to, so you can’t complain.” He laughed.
“So what’s new?”
Daisuke sipped the drink and put the glass down carefully.
“My bunker on the surface will be done next week. Construction is quick for such a simple building. Wanna come visit when they’re done?”
“Sure,” I said.
I wasn’t too thrilled about a box of concrete on the surface, of all places, but this one was important to him.
“What about your old server farm?”
“The new building will house servers for a new customer. Guess for whom.”
His face showed nothing, it was perfectly neutral. Daisuke would have made an awesome poker player.
“Uehara?” I asked, a shot in the dark, and I wasn’t really serious.
He beamed.
“Never!”
“Yes. Your boss is now my number one customer, he’s renting the full capacity of the new farm.”
I sat in shock for a moment, then raised my glass of water to him, and he raised his glass to me.
This was unexpected. Why did Uehara need an external server, if the company had such extensive resources, too?
“When did you make that deal?”
“A while ago. Sorry, I couldn’t talk about it.”
“I understand, no worries.” This was no lie. Our business had its own rules, and he was just the type for it.
“By the way, we got the prototype of an AI from somewhere.”
This was something an employee wasn’t supposed to talk about outside the company, probably. Nobody had told me not to, but that was hardly relevant. Of course I’d do the opposite, this piece of information needed to be relayed. There was only one person on the planet I could talk about it with, and that was Daisuke. He’d know how to forward this piece of information to the places that needed to hear about it.
“What prototype?”
He didn’t seem impressed, but I took a sip from my glass, and his eyes followed my every motion. He had just made the ‘deal of his life’, we now had two operatives behind enemy lines, so I wouldn’t be disappointed if he was distracted, but his eyes were very awake, and he leaned toward me. Daisuke had that rare talent of knowing an opportunity when he saw one.
“To be honest, nobody knows where it’s from, but this is a general AI, Daisuke. The real thing. If we can start it up, it will… awaken.”
“Nobody knows where it’s from?”
He leaned back and folded his arms. Lines appeared on his forehead.
“Well, I guess the boss does,” I said, “and probably his special friends.”
“Something like that isn’t on the shelf in a grocery store.”
“Yes, it’s fishy. But we need it to use the positronic to full effect, and I don’t want to assume anything.”
“Did you hear about that incident in China?”
I squinted. Why the sudden change of topic?
“I heard about it. What’s up with that?”
“Do you know what it was that got blown up, Makoto?”
“You’re going to tell me.”
“What did we just talk about?” He answered my question with a question.
My breath stopped and I felt cold creep through my veins.
But this was not the time to flinch.
“I need you to find something out about someone.”
He looked at me and raised an eyebrow.
“Her name is Maeda. She’s a new member of our team, Uehara himself introduced her.”
Daisuke laughed.
“Do you want me to sift through every Maeda, or only those few million in Australasia?”
He had a point, but I needed the info.
“I suspect it’s not even her real name, and I felt something in her presence.”
His facial expression changed. The grin was gone, and his eyes glittered.
“Do you think they suspect something?”
“Not yet, no. But the AI is special. They’ll want to make sure it’s safe. I’m pretty sure she works for… them.”
Daisuke looked at me without moving a muscle in his face, then nodded.
“I’ll see what I can find out. You, stay under the radar. No unnecessary risks.”
Unnecessary risks were the last thing I’d bother with right now.
17
Daniel
Daniel felt the push between his shoulder blades and didn’t resist. He stumbled into the room and looked around. A large double bed in the middle of the room, two nightstands at the wall, next to the top end. The room was rather narrow, not much space to maneuver. Another door connected this suite with the neighbouring one. Good choice, he’d have taken a similar arrangement, had he been with a partner.
The door slammed shut behind him, and he turned his head to take a look at the man who had pushed him.
“Offer, huh. Blyat.” The guy looked like a walking square, almost as wide as he was tall. Even his face was a square. Daniel wouldn’t have a chance in a purely strength-based fight, and agility wouldn’t help him in these close quarters.
One of the two women in the room stood up. She looked athletic, too, had long, blonde hair and wild eyes. He remembered her from the church earlier.
“I’m sure you knew I’d come.”
“Damn right,” the hoarse voice behind him said.
Adam lowered his hands. Nobody objected.
“Like I said, I’m here to make you an offer. I want what you just sold. You don’t happen to have a copy?”
“What’s your name?” the blonde answered with another question.