“A topic to discuss when I get up,” I said, feeling myself coming out of the memory and yet not.
I was lying on top of a hospital gurney, and there was no sign of either “Claire” or Rosario. Taking a moment to try to contact Delphi with my IRD implant, I got only empty air, and I rose up to look around at my surroundings. I was in an octagonal white hospital room where the walls were covered with holograms showing the interior of my body, stress lines on my cybernetics, and red areas in my processing system, which indicated my brain was suffering a five-percent slowdown. It recommended I “delete extraneous files” and defrag.
Cute.
There was something peculiar about my surroundings, though. Focusing on them, I moved my hand through the air and saw the air ripple a bit. It was like moving my hand through water, and in the water, I saw lines of code. It took only a second to realize I was inside a virtual reality simulation of a hospital room. These interfaces were extremely common, and doubly so for people who had cyberlink interfaces like myself. It was likely Rosario had attached one as a sort of “waiting room” while most of my consciousness was used as the brute force encryption to get at the data in Claire’s brain.
“I suppose it beats uploading me to an infodisc,” I muttered, turning around and walking to the hospital room doors. They were a double door set with a pair of porthole-like windows that hadn’t been a feature of modern hospitals for decades. Strangely, they were frosted over, and I wondered if there was anything beyond. There was only one way to find out.
Walking forward and pushing the doors open, I found myself in a library that seemed to stretch on for infinity. Both the air above as well as the ground below existed in glowing bytes of information flowing around me. I couldn’t help but wonder if I saw something programmed in, or if it was being created by my mind to provide context for what I was experiencing.
I was a great fan of the physicist John Archibald Wheeler and tended to think of the universe as a place created by the observer—which wasn’t so far from what happened to “virgin code” encountered in places like this where the mind could often create whole bits of reality simply by the unconscious being hooked up to machines designed to stimulate it. That thought lost a lot of luster when I realized I would have imagined myself on a pre-eruption nude beach in Brazil instead of an endless number of bookshelves surrounded by sparkling numbers.
“Well, this is something,” I muttered, going to one of the bookshelves and taking a book off the shelf before opening it up.
It was full of ones and zeroes and seemingly neverending.
“Of course,” I muttered, rolling my eyes. “Why should I expect anything to be easy even in cyberspace.”
“You know what they call the infonet’s virtual reality network?” an unfamiliar male voice spoke behind me.
I paused but didn’t turn around. “The Matrix. Not after the Wachowski films but the old games which they got it from.”
“It’s mostly the Wachowskis,” the voice said. “This place is dangerous for you, Case. You’re just a computer program yourself, and if you die here, then you get erased.”
I snorted. “Human consciousness is every bit the same kind of computer program as AI consciousness. Both of them rely on the tiny movements of quantum waves through machines designed to give them context.”
“Been reading up on new science philosophy, eh?” the voice continued.
“Not new science philosophy, just science and philosophy,” I said, wondering who this was. “I’ve gotten introspective in my old age.”
“Or you’ve gotten to be an obnoxious twenty-year-old,” the voice corrected. “The weight of human experiences is measured differently for those who were born, not created.”
I finally turned around to look at the individual who was speaking to me. I wasn’t expecting the result. I was talking to a six-foot-tall giant panda who was sitting on his butt right next to me, looking both adorable and lazy.
“Are you fucking serious?” I asked.
“Language,” the panda said. “As for how I appear, why shouldn’t I appear as a giant panda? It’s not like I need opposable thumbs in here.”
He waved a paw at one of the shelves, and all the books flew out before stacking themselves in a pile beside me.
“Also, Marissa likes pandas,” the panda said. “Given she’s the god of this little universe, I just have to deal with the results.”
“Who…what are you?” I asked. I was less than happy to have confirmation that this was all my ex’s doing—though it wasn’t a surprise either.
“I am the interface for the Black Dossier,” the panda said. “The Black Dossier is where you are—specifically, inside Marissa’s interactive neural processor implant. It’s sort of like your IRD implant, only it links to her physical brain and doesn’t serve as a substitute for wetware. You can call me Dave.”
“Dave…the panda,” I said.
“If you want to be racist about it,” Dave replied. “It is my job to provide her with all the information she keeps stored away here.”
“If she brings the encryption key,” I said.
Dave snorted. “You didn’t really believe that, did you?”
I paused, thinking about that. “Well, I’m wondering why she’s hooked me up with a decryption expert, so yeah, for a second there, I kinda did.”
Dave smirked. I’d never seen a panda smirk before. “These are the files of hundreds of corporations, politicians, governments, and even religious leaders’ darkest secrets. Most of it is unencrypted, as the only way to get into it is going into Marissa’s mind. There is a large chunk of it, though, that was stolen directly from their decrypted servers. Things like the secret of nanotherapy, Karma Corp, and their ties to the Invisible Hand.”
“Really?” I asked, staring at him.
“The latter isn’t as big a revelation as you think,” Dave said. “What you and Marissa think of as the Illuminati is more just the secret backroom deals that keep Western capitalism floating. Eastern now too. Nothing is shocking save the ubiquity of the corruption. Not even that.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked, wondering if Marissa had made a mistake programming this creature, or if its emergent consciousness was a result of being hooked into her brain and not something she had conscious control over.
Wow, I was acting like a twenty-year-old philosophy student.
“Why not?” Dave said. “The simple fact is Marissa needed you, Delphi, and a hacker as capable as BlackCat1 to get the details of all this information. There’s Black Technology, and there’s Black Technology—the latter of which was needed to hack this info.”
I cursed myself for a fool. “That’s what all this was about, wasn’t it? Marissa had access to the files, but she couldn’t get past Karma Corp’s decryption, so she needed me to get it decrypted for her. She put on the appearance of Claire, got A to kidnap her, and made it appear like there was an emergency. That got Delphi and her associates to help as well, too, because they wouldn’t help her but would help me.”
“Close,” Dave said, nodding.
I raised an eyebrow. “What am I missing, oh powerful spirit animal?”
Dave conjured an enormous panda-sized mug of coffee and drank from it with both paws. “You think your spirit animal is a panda? Shouldn’t you have something slightly more menacing? A cougar or a falcon or something?”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“No, I didn’t,” Dave replied.
I thought about what it was saying. “A wouldn’t work for Marissa, at least not for long. He’s the kind of man who requires a particular kind of psychopath to keep in line. A only worked for the IRS as long as he did because they never showed him any kind of weakness like regret, compassion, or friendship.”
The situation, as bizarre as it was, gave me the kind of distance to think through it with my old skills. They’d atrophied a bit in the past fifteen years of frozen hell and anarchy followed by a soft life as a corporat
e hammer with too much money as well as too much power. Here, alone with my thoughts, I could process the situation.
“Go on,” Dave said.
It all made sense after a few moments. “A resented me during our brief conversation. I could feel the anger directed at me and the others involved in Atlas’ founding. He was fine being a soldier when he was working for the Society, but to see people like me rise to the top while he remained at the bottom? That would just kill him. If he was working for HOPE, it would only last until he had something he could take to put him on top.”
The Panda looked enigmatic. Which was an impressive accomplishment for a cuddly ball of fur and fat.
“The Black Dossier,” I said, frowning. “This is all about decrypting it and getting it for himself, then selling it back to Karma Corp so he can make a couple of billion credits.”
“Entirely plausible,” Dave replied.
I took a deep breath. “Why are you helping me?”
“Well, hypothetically,” Dave replied. “Maybe Rosario realized that Claire and HOPE weren’t to be trusted and when connected to her mind, hacked the virtual reality interface to be as helpful to you as possible.”
I smirked. “Well, I guess I owe my sister an apology.”
It still didn’t sound right, and I had the suspicion everything she’d told me was complete bullshit. It might be true, but it didn’t mean I owed Rebecca Gordon a damn thing, let alone needed to consider her family. She was the woman who created me, but that didn’t mean she was related. I felt closer to the late Daniel Gordon’s family than I did to the woman who modified one of their super soldier creations to be her son’s replacement.
“Done,” Dave said.
“What?” I asked.
“The encryption is done,” Dave the Panda replied. “All of the files have been translated into English.”
I did a double take. “Really?”
Dave nodded and conjured a book before handing it to me. “Want to take a peek?”
“Certainly,” I said, taking it and opening it up.
All the information was downloaded into my mind within a second, and I comprehended it.
“Holy shit,” I said, my head full of details on one of the most disgusting and venal plans I’d ever encountered.
The stolen files revealed that nanotherapy was not only smoke and mirrors. It was as valid as homeopathy and New Age crystals and could never work. They’d managed to empirically prove that nanotechnology could be used to dismantle body parts but could not be controlled to do anything better. The dream of immortal superhumans was dead, at least with the current level of technology. In fact, it was actively dangerous and caused sterility as well as premature death in a not insignificant number of users.
The plan was to use it as a ubiquitous treatment given to every single person in the United States and probably much of the First World. People would use it as a cure for the common cold and other ailments, but it would really be a placebo too complex for normal doctors to understand. The ones who could would be fed disinformation or refused access to research on IP grounds. Karma Corp would use algorithms to sort the ability of the public to pay for the nanotech via insurance, government programs, and direct pay.
The poor and those who relied on government assistance would get the dangerous version while consumers, as well as employees, would get the completely inert version. The executives of the corporations, their families, and so on, would receive much more expensive health treatments which were actually healthy without the malfunctioning nanotech involved at all. The company would rake in billions, if not trillions, while also killing people who weren’t going to impact their stock options to begin with.
“This is a stupid plan that will never work,” I muttered.
“Won’t it?” Dave asked. “The cigarette companies managed to keep a steady rate of death going until the invention of the cancerless cigarette. By the way, they’re not actually cancerless. There’s also how the food industry lied to the public about their products being fat-free but full of artificial sweeteners that were actually toxic.”
“I think there’s a difference between a nanite murder plague and unsafe products,” I said.
“Is there?” Dave asked, shrugging. “Some may argue the product is a good thing, especially if they make money from it. The fact is overpopulation and demand exceeding resources is the biggest danger to the planet right now. The super-rich want their worry-free planet back, and that means the populace needs to go down by about half or at least stop growing.”
“Still stupid,” I said, ignoring the itch in the back of my mind that they could blame any number of reasons for why the poor started suddenly not having kids or dying off en masse. Indeed, there were plenty of reasons already. Would a few extra percentage points really clue the public in, or would they just be grateful the bread lines weren’t as long?
Dave shrugged. “Phillip Morris once advertised this exact same benefit to the Czech Republic. Besides, most of this information is restricted to only a handful of people who have been bought off or killed off since this project began. This is really the only collection remaining of the product’s true nature.”
I sighed. “So, it’s not the key to the Invisible Hand but just another shady corporate plot.”
“Is there a difference?” Dave asked, again answering questions with questions rather than giving a straight answer.
“I want you to download all this information into my IRD implant,” I said calmly. “Actually, no, I’d like the whole Black Dossier copied to me unless there’s a booby trap I don’t know about.”
“There is, but they were removed,” Dave said. “BlackCat1 is very thorough. You might want to make sure she doesn’t get away with any copies.”
“You’re right. Delete this entire collection after uploading it to me.” I blinked then, realizing what he’d suggested. “I thought she’d reprogrammed you. Why would you work against her?”
“Sadly, someone else is hacking into me now,” Dave said, as nonchalantly as someone discussing the weather.
That was when Dave exploded into a collection of blocky pixels, and I saw A standing behind him, pointing a finger gun at him before blowing it.
“Hello, G,” A said. “Nice to see you again.”
Chapter Sixteen
I stared at A—Arthur—and briefly considered going after him. It took a second for me to process the fact that this wasn’t a place where physics mattered. I was only as fast, strong, or tough as the rules of this place allowed me to be. It was, for lack of a better term, a video game, and I was faced with someone who had just displayed the ability to eliminate a fundamental aspect of the reality I inhabited. Poor Dave the Panda. He’d never really lived, and he was already dead. Like so many citizens these days.
Seeing the murderous look in A’s eyes and knowing I was doomed if I tried to fight him, which I only had a small chance of winning even if I was at my best, I resorted to my best weapon: speech.
“I confess, you’ve impressed me. You had me fooled from the very beginning and managed to figure out Marissa’s secret.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere, G,” A said. “Honestly, I should kill you for the very fact that you’re talking. You were always the most silver-tongued of us. Persephone saw it, but she doted on you. Now she’s dead.”
Yeah, this conversation didn’t take long to get Freudian. A had always been a psychopath, but apparently, he’d lost his more subdued reserved elements over the past fifteen years.
“Persephone was killed by Daniel Gordon, whom I killed.”
Persephone, real name Elizabeth Patterson, had been my boss at the old International Refugee Society. Quite possibly the most dangerous woman who ever lived, with the possible exceptions of Elizabeth the First or President Douglas, she’d been finally outmatched by circumstance.
Daniel Gordon blew up the building she’d been in with a drone, and all her intelligence hadn’t been able to protect her from a disaster that ki
lled almost four hundred people. It was an unworthy death for one of history’s greatest spymasters even if she—by most moralities—had it coming. I hadn’t killed Daniel Gordon to avenge her. I would have killed Persephone if I’d had the opportunity, but I was hoping it would go over with A. He’d loved her for all the murder and wealth she’d thrown his way.
“The man you’re cloned from!” A growled, a silencer-equipped pistol appearing in his hand.
He fired the gun past my head before I could move, causing an all-too-realistic ringing in my ears. Thankfully, it faded.
“Do you know what you did to the world?” A asked, almost accusingly.
“Which time?” I asked, my voice more frustrated than I wanted it to be. “I’ve done a lot of shit to the world.”
A looked like he was going to shoot me, but instead waved his hand and caused the gun to disappear. “There you are. There’s the real you. Much better. The sarcastic, snide piece of crap who thinks he’s better than everyone else but does his best never to show it.”
Well, he had me there.
“I figured out what’s going on. You want the Black Dossier to build a power base and make up for all those fifteen years I suspect haven’t been a walk in the park for you.”
“You betrayed your employers,” A said.
I blinked. “Which time?”
“That’s the problem,” Arthur said, his voice low and cold. “First you betrayed the Society, and then you betrayed the President. Both of them were people who kept the world in balance. Did you notice how everything went to shit after the International Refugee Society collapsed? There was no one left to eliminate all the loose ends, manipulate the media, and kill the threats. We were a force for stability in the world. It was the purpose of the Letters.”
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