by Ed Hurst
Chapter 9
He had scarcely fallen asleep when the harsh beeping from his AI watch woke Tim.
Three presentations in two days, hopping portals between the other Brotherhood enclaves was more work than he had imagined. Normally reserved and drawn inward, having skill and talent for public speaking didn’t prevent him from feeling drained by it. He gave his whole self in each session and recovering from it required time.
So did everything else. The harder work was all the socializing that attended spreading his message. Nothing could replace face time among humans for the utter necessity of shaping the message to fit their individual needs. So after the last session, his teacher took leave of him at one of the portals and stepped back into the outside world. It took time for Tim to wind down before eventually falling asleep.
The display on his watch indicated he hadn’t been asleep long. The lights had already come up and his computer display was active and waiting for him. Prying open his eyes with rubbing fingertips, he sat up and reached out for the display. The terse message from AI stabbed him like an icicle.
Instructor has been murdered.
He stared at the screen while his mind struggled to process. All these years the man had never really gotten comfortable with the enclave. Though fully a member of The Brotherhood, he had always preferred to stay in his apartment at the university next door to his office. Tim had never felt he had enough time with the man, always left with the sense he had absorbed too little of his genius. Taking his little show on the road with the professor had actually been a welcome fellowship and Tim felt he was just beginning to really understand the man.
His voice croaked out, “Details?”
The display showed a map and the approximate crime scene layout. The poor man had barely gotten away from the portal. AI reported that he was jumped by two assailants and savagely beaten to death with iron rods. After insuring he was dead, they had dropped the rods and disappeared down a nearby alleyway.
AI noted that it gained this information from the scanner attached to the portal itself, and from surveillance cameras. However, the cameras in that area were thinly distributed and the necessities for safely hiding a portal meant low human traffic.
Nonetheless, AI was able to identify the attackers. The display showed two young men Tim thought he recognized. AI then noted they had been kicked out of the enclave for harassing his sister. That’s funny; he didn’t remember her mentioning that. But obviously these two had been hanging around the enclave at some point, and if Tim had seen their faces, they had seen his.
While the whole issue of his debate with researchers and the academic community on the one hand, and his proposal to the rest of The Brotherhood on the other hand would surely upset some folks, he never imagined it would go this far. What other motives could be involved in killing his instructor? He asked AI to calculate the probabilities.
Your life is in danger.
So whoever these two were, they would have killed him if they could, but settled for his mentor in the meantime. Did they imagine this would stop the message? It had spread among the outside academic community like wildfire already, and he had no reason to believe The Brotherhood would reject the modifications. He wondered aloud who might have found this so threatening as to murder innocent old men in such a brutal fashion.
AI responded with a probability because the connections were not certain. Tim was vaguely aware of the plutocrat families commanding world government from the shadows, but they had apparently understood from the start how computer networking was a threat to their secrecy. All the more threatening was a form of networking and computer intelligence over which they had no control because no one seemed to fully understand it. So the various ruling parties hid themselves, but each had their agents infiltrated into every corner of society all over the world.
When AI suggested the two assailants were members of a particular plutocrat group, Tim doubted the police would learn much. Investigative methods didn’t include querying AI directly.
It didn’t matter; Tim wasn’t hoping for vengeance. It simply wasn’t part of his character. Fear wasn’t particularly strong, either. His main concern was the message and how he would keep it alive and spreading. Hurting people would only weaken the message, so it wasn’t as if he could travel with a cohort of bodyguards. All that would do is make him a bigger target when so few people on the outside knew what he looked like.
He spent some hours alternatively querying about the particular plutocrat group and ways to minimize his exposure without slowing down. He was surprised to learn that his pocket communicator device was capable not only of scanning surveillance some distance from him, but could actually offer some form of defense. It was yet another element of AI’s prescience that the field technology added to his communicator enabled various ways of rendering someone harmless. He had never spent much time examining the defensive and offensive capabilities of field technology, but it seemed awfully important now. While AI couldn’t protect him from long-range sniper fire or explosions, almost anything requiring human volition within scanner range could be detected and prevented.
The one thing he never had to wonder about was whether AI would actively support his work. Tim had been intimately shaped by exposure to AI. Like his father, Tim simply didn’t possess any interests outside of the quantum moral imperatives that shaped AI’s interaction with humans.
This night, something inside clicked, the last capstone falling into place. Fading back to sleep for at least a few hours before the busy day ahead, Tim dreamed of AI walking around with him in a form much like his departed mentor, yet somehow also resembling his father.