by A. Omukai
This was interesting, because it allowed me to make assumptions. What intentions had those coders had, and what were the official guidelines that prescribed what the code would have to look like? Uehara still hadn’t given us his version. Of course not, the Winter Court’s specialists would have to sit down for a while and design their rules, which would take time. Their goals were no mystery. They had given up on the humans, but since we needed the presence of people to live, the Winter Court had decided to get them under control, or rather, to enslave them and keep them like cattle. I pushed the irrelevant thought away.
Additional checks had revealed backdoors that allowed for external connections, and a whole hidden interface. Did they have backups? They must have some, putting all your eggs in one basket wasn’t a sound strategy in any case, it just wouldn’t work. Version control had been a tried and true way in not only software development, even if one programmed solo - but especially for teams.
Also, they had to at least have communicated their goals and methods somehow. My goal was to find those traces. They were still there, like bread crumbs. They looked like isolated spells within spells, doing their own thing and influencing the main program. Tricky to see for a normal human coder, but sticking out for me.
Much of the AI core was done, most of the unfinished parts in the Chinese original were control mechanisms. Our team had localized and taken them out already, but I had kept them for reference, along with any comments I could find, even though I couldn’t read them. There was also a kill switch, a shutdown function for emergency cases. I had shut the last backdoor I could find, but removing it was not possible without hurting other functions. We’d have to write new code to bridge gaps the removal would create, but in this version, it was still in, just commented out.
I closed my eyes and heard a low hum. Opening them again stopped the sound, closing them, it restarted. My mind started to wander. Just a short break. A few minutes to get back into it, then I’d follow that yellow brick road to the core of the learning algorithm they had used. Only a short…
***
I drifted toward the surface of consciousness, but not on my own. Something buoyed me up. I wasn’t quite awake yet, when I heard the voice, and it blended in with imagery from the dream I had just watched and already couldn’t remember. It was a male voice. Another man answered what sounded like a question. Something about Ishida. Suppressed laughter.
I opened my eyes to a completely dark lab, but didn’t move right away. Lethargy lamed me, the exhaustion taking its toll. Again the familiar name, Ishida. I concentrated, but couldn’t quite make out what they were saying. They stood outside the lab, next to the door. Maybe, if I got closer?
Not a good idea. If anything went wrong, if I made a noise—and I was the clumsy and unlucky type—and if what they talked about was something not meant for me, and if… Too many Ifs for my taste.
Ishida. I hadn’t thought of him for a few days. All my energy had flown into the project. Partly because of its nature, and because I was naturally curious, but also about how this work would influence us in the future. Giving the Winter Court something like this, it hardly mattered if we still had access to it, unless we could utilise it ourselves. This was something the officials of the Summer Court had to agonise over, though.
I shook off the thought and sat up. My body was extremely heavy, as if I had gained fifty kilograms. Ishida. What had become of him anyway?
“Ishida doesn’t work for us anymore.”
Uehara’s words resounded in perfect clarity, as if he had just spoken them.
I listened again, but the two voices outside the door had stopped. Too bad. I had opened the Ishida personnel file without consciously thinking about it. Now that the file was open, I scrolled through the general info part, meant for the HR staff, and the management notes. Nothing caught my eye. No revolutionary news to unveil, no scandals. No termination note either, which piqued my interest. This here was the HR department’s file. It contained more than just the base info, however, attachments had various levels of restricted access. I wondered how far my new status as project leader would take me and went through the file list.
There was a psychological profile I wasn’t interested in, but noticing its existence alone made me shiver. Did I have one, too? I was pretty sure I did.
His academic and work history. I knew he had graduated from a prestigious university, which had brought him into this team. Not his skills, and surely not his team spirit.
Boring, I scrolled on.
There was an attachment from Uehara’s office. It was unnamed, and I wondered if I could open it. I could! I surely wasn’t supposed to see this, but I couldn’t help but start reading, after I looked around to make sure I was alone.
There was no need to feel guilty. I was the leader of this project. Checking personnel files was my duty.
A report of a person who didn’t state their name started the page off.
Ishida had been a regular at ChuChu, a soapland establishment near the station. This didn’t surprise me.
He had debts. Well, most of us had. I did not, but I didn’t really have a life outside work. Not something to brag about.
His debts came from gambling. This, too, was not unusual.
What was unusual was, again, the mere existence of files that read like secret service intelligence reports, something that had no place in my image of the corporate world. It was obvious for whom this kind of information was.
A video was attached to the message from the unnamed person, it showed Ishida ‘in action’ during one of his visits. A comment from Uehara himself said ‘unusable’.
The next entry was from someone named Takeuchi, it described how Ishida had been contacted by someone he named ‘those Koreans’.
Korea was part of Australasia, a federation of states that worked together, with local autonomy under the larger coalition. Korea, Japan, Indonesia, Australia and many others were part of the same entity. This didn’t refer to the government. It meant a Korean company, or other private entity. I skimmed through the text. Someone had made him an offer. He had accepted. They had met at a bar in New Ikebukuro. ‘The transaction’ had happened.
The entry ended, with another comment by Uehara. ‘Eliminate’.
The comment had a reply. ‘Done. Corpse recycled cleanly.’
My heartbeat sped up. This absolutely wasn’t meant for me. The act of reading this meant danger already. Would anyone be able to trace my file access back? Certainly. Whether it happened or not would depend on necessity. Was there a reason to trace it?
Panic threatened to sweep me away. Ever since that last talk with Uehara I had at least a rough impression of the kind of company I had been working at. Not only was Uehara connected to the Winter Court, he also ran a Yakuza organisation. With all the context, it was easy to see what ‘The transaction’ was.
It was clear now, that we didn’t deal with a company our adversaries used to gain an advantage in our race to influence the course of humanity’s fate. We dealt with an organised crime syndicate that doubled as world leader in tech development, and had gotten their hands on the first general AI. There was no need for the Winter Court to trick them into doing their dirty work. They just needed to do a trade to get what they wanted. They were dealing with killers, which rewrote our rules of engagement from scratch. Another bit of info I had to get into the right hands as soon as possible.
I needed some distance first, time to think. See what I could do. The very first thing I would do though was, copy the rest of the source code to my private system. I had most of it already, mostly for performance reasons while working, but it was bits and pieces related to what I had worked with, chiefly the removal of the stops and breaks in the program. If I quit this endeavour, I wouldn’t leave this piece of work behind without taking at least a copy for our own purposes. I didn’t want to get this project to a finished state. Not anymore. This went way beyond what I felt we could leave in the hands of the Winter Court
.
Deleting it from the Uehara servers was not possible for me. I had access to our dev environment, the backup servers were part of a different department’s responsibility. I could not take it from them, but I could take a copy.
I could have misunderstood the meaning of all this, but I had my doubts.
The other info in that personnel file had been just as much a list of red flags, one after the other.
The transfer finished. The raw amount of data wasn’t an issue for my system, I could have carried several copies. Compiling, then starting it though would lead to rapid growth in size, as it assembled parts of its personality and achieved sentience. If it even worked, but if it didn’t, then would Uehara have bought it? And what about all the security measures? No, this was the real deal, that much was clear.
Could I just walk out of here? I was the leader of the project. Doing additional work late in the night wasn’t weird. Leaving the building though, where to go at this time? The last train had left the station—I checked the time—thirty minutes ago.
It didn’t matter. First things first, out of here.
I grabbed my jacket, shut down the dev consoles and opened the door.
“Oh Mr Suzuki! Didn’t expect you here!” The taller of the two men said. His name was Kaneko, just another trivia completely unrelated to what I was supposed to think about at this moment.
“Yeah, I fell asleep at my console. Was a hard day today. See you on Monday.”
“Have a good night,” he said, and we bowed.
I turned around and walked at a deliberately slow pace. My exhaustion was completely gone—but it would return, sooner or later.
***
The street lights were the only source of light. No moon, no stars here, deep underground. A breeze touched my face, artificial like everything else in this world. Why did I think about such weird stuff?
I walked on, one, two, three steps. One, two, three. My system opened and I called up my contacts. Daisuke, text message.
“I need to meet you ASAP. I guess I’m in trouble.” Eleven words. I changed “I’m” to “I am”. Send. Sent.
Going nowhere, but keeping in motion.
I couldn’t go back to work next week. Heck, I couldn’t even go home now. It would take them a while to notice what I had done, but there was no telling when that would happen. I didn’t know anything.
The only other person I could think of right now was Inoue. She wasn’t part of the Summer Court, but she was the closest to a confidant I had, outside our spy versus spy games.
“We need to talk. Please let me know when you’re available.” Fixed ‘you’re’ to ‘you are’. This felt much better. Send. Sent.
23
Daniel
Daniel looked around the examination room of the clinic. The interior was clean and modern. Two nurses greeted them at the reception, none of them confident speaking English, but showing them his wound, they knew exactly what to do. They led him from the waiting room straight to the back, and hooked him up with a new round of painkillers. He had no idea how long he would have to wait, but he didn’t mind too much anymore.
The boat had departed soon after they had stepped on land in Niigata. Nadya had brought him to the clinic, then left to arrange hotel rooms for them. His wound would set them back a few days, but they’d have to assess the situation anyway. Running into this blindly would only cause new problems.
From the information she had found out about the identity of the two killers in Frankfurt, he was sure they hadn’t been Australasian intelligence operatives. This looked more like the work of mobsters. They had done a lousy job anyway, with their frontal attack. Had they just underestimated the Russians, or had they thought the two women alone? They had obviously had ways to uncover the identity of Nadya and her partner, so whoever they worked for must be well equipped.
Either way, they had handled this like amateurs, which didn’t sound like an official state operation.
This was no reason to be careless. The other side must already know their men were dead, and calculate the chances of someone following the trail to Japan. The chances for this to happen were slim, yet here they were, and the gangsters would be prepared for this unlikely case.
The door opened and the doctor entered, followed by a nurse. He looked mid-forty, but looks were deceiving.
“My name is Yamada. Please tell me what happened.”
He looked at Daniel with interest. They hadn’t used the fake Russian ID here, that name was burned now. Meeting Americans outside America, especially Gilead people though was something that happened rarely, so his curiosity was understandable.
“I got assaulted on my way to Japan.”
Telling the truth was the easiest way out in most situations. The doctor nodded.
“When did that happen?”
“Two days ago.”
A brief moment of silence, before the doctor continued.
“I assume you had your circumstances. A day later though, and you’d be in serious trouble. Let me see the wound, please.”
The annoying habit of stating the obvious in an admonishing manner seemed to be a universal trait among physicians.
“So, can you patch me up, doc?”
“You’ll be as good as new - after two weeks and a good rest. There’s other health problems I’m more worried about though.”
Daniel touched the spot behind his ear, and the doctor nodded.
“I’ll have that taken care of when I’m back home.”
Whether Yamada was convinced or not, wasn’t obvious, but he didn’t object.
“What about your wrist?”
Daniel looked at the bandage. It was worn out and needed to be renewed, but he was painless, as long as he didn’t grip anything too tightly. He nodded.
“The infection in your leg has progressed quite far. The bone took damage as well. You’ll have to take meds for a week.”
That sounded all right. He’d had worse expectations.
“Will I need a crutch?”
The doctor raised his eyebrows.
“A crutch? No, we don’t do that anymore. I’ll attach a brace, it’ll fall off after two weeks. You can take it off manually, to take a bath, just remember to put it back on. It’s self-adjusting.”
***
Nadya waited outside the clinic, in a taxi capsule. He walked over to her, and she opened the door.
“You’re walking again, good.”
It was still more limp than walk.
“Back on my feet. Did you find a place?”
“It’s a cheap hotel, I rented two connected rooms for a week.”
Daniel climbed into the vehicle and closed the door. The clinic was located in the middle of a shopping district, the capsule moved with less than walking speed. There were way more people on the street than he’d ever seen in one place back home, and this wasn’t even a major city. They’d continue their travels via high-speed train, again, but the week here would be necessary. Not only to recuperate. He needed to know if the inquisitor was aware where he had gone, among other things. Then there was still the AI question. Following the breadcrumbs was no good if the other side expected you.
“Do you think the Russian authorities will send people after us?”
She cocked her head. “I don’t think so. Maksim and his gang weren’t important enough.”
That was good to hear. The last thing they needed were yet more pursuers.
He was completely pain free for the first time in quite a while, but tired. Just a short break would go a long way.
An incoming call announced itself with a flashing icon. Seeing who it was that called him, he couldn’t just ignore it. He opened the video feed..
“Daniel! You have been missing reports three days in a row! Brother Gregor has arrived in Frankfurt now, where are you?”
His Excellency sounded different, and Daniel needed a moment to find out why. He hadn’t spoken in his usual sing-song, that had thrown him off for a moment.
“I lost the buyers, but got back on track now.”
“I must insist that you come home at once.”
“I’m sorry, can you repeat that please?”
The bishop frowned, his big, bushy eyebrows throwing deep shadows over his eyes.
“China evicted our diplomats. Don’t you watch the news? Things are getting serious, we need you here. Break off your mission and-”
Daniel killed the call, then immediately called back.
“What’s going on!” The bishop’s voice went up at least one octave.
“I’m not sure, I lost connection to FaithNet for a moment. What did you say?”
“I said we need you back immediately! You are to break—”
He killed the call again.
He wouldn’t abort this mission.
If it was true that the ends justified the means, there had to be ends.
He needed to destroy the AI. For one, because it was blasphemous. And more importantly, he wouldn’t allow an artificial life form to subdue humanity. He’d also burn in hell if he had nothing to show, after all the blood he spilled, but he pushed that thought away with a sneer.