by Guy Haley
The Nemesis Worm
A Richards & Klein Investigation
by Guy Haley
If you enjoy this story, head over to your favourite bookstore or eBookstore and buy a copy of the first Richards & Klein novel, Reality 36. Out 4 Aug 2011 (UK and eBook) and Aug 30 2011 (US/Canada).
Richards stepped sideways off the Grid mainline. The slip of the receding Grid was like water sliding off skin, the sensation reminding him of his true shape, if only for an instant; massive, blackly dense with compacted data, alien to him. Then it was gone and he was back in his accustomed form, a man in an office, nothing more.
He could kid himself a little, at least.
The office wasn’t much, a corner of the storage area he kept his case files in. He’d walled it off with a flimsy partition with glass door that banged when it slammed, added bare, stained floorboards, stuck in a sofas, bookshelves and a view of old Chicago to make it a bit more like the places he’d read about in the pulps. It didn’t entirely work, but it felt like home.
The intercom chimed. He ignored it.
“Office isn’t open until 7.00am,” he grumbled.
He dropped into the chair behind his desk, the leather creaking reassuringly. It had been a good night; he’d scored new business, new leads on an old case, had some fun. He felt refreshed, like he was finally getting over that business in Salzburg. He hummed as he poured himself a Laphroig of a type that had never and would never exist, then checked through his messages, which he had manifest before him in the form of typed letters. He bashed out a reply to one that wouldn’t wait on his typewriter and sent it via Gridmail. He was about to start another but the doorbell went again, and again. He sighed, check out the sigs outside. Cops. Not just any cops, Smillie.
“Great,” he said to himself and opened multiple eyes to the Real. That finished his good mood off.
A stinking whisky morning greeted him. Three empty bottles of his best real single malt were on the coffee table in the waiting lounge, their contents evidently now within his partner, Otto.
Otto lay on one of the couches, massive and unmoving , one of the curtains draped over him like a shroud on an elephant. Otto laughed at Richards’ liking for vintage furnishing, now Richards wished he’d paid attention and gone for something modern, it would have been easier to clean up. The curtain pole was hanging off the wall, a grim New London day just visible through the darkened window glass. Richards & Klein’s offices in the Real were toward the top of the Wellington Arcology; off an internal arcaded street that opened right out over the big in-parks. Stunning views inside and out the arco, adaptive furnishings, self-cleaning, an evolving comms grid – all the usual luxury sales points. In eight short hours Richards had been gone Otto had made it his own personal slum.
The intercom now chimed incessantly. The door to his virtual office responded, and shook with furious banging. Richards was angry. He couldn’t cope with Smillie and a drunken Otto. And he was drunk. If you drink enough, quickly enough, booze will overwhelm even healthtech. Last night he guessed Otto had done just that, now his implants would be struggling to clear a hangover the size of a gorilla, and it looked like it wasn’t going without a fight.
Richards vindictively turned the opacity of the window banks right down. Harsh grey daylight flooded the room, catching streaks of rain on the window. Otto moaned and moved his arm, heavy with subdermal polymer muscle, across his eyes.
“Jesus, Otto! You want to get wankered and mess some place up, do it in your apartment!”
“Go away. Let me sleep,” Otto muttered weakly.
The intercom chime stopped. A voice, Scottish, replaced it. “Klein, goddamn it! Klein! We know you are in there!”
“Great. Smillie,” said Richards. “Perfect.”
“Open this door! Bloody…” Smillie’s voice faded into angry inaudibility. Others joined it, their words indistinct. They argued, then the banging started again. “Klein! Come on man, open up! Tell me where Richards is, or I’ll get unpleasant.”
Richards patched himself directly into the intercom panel outside. Three uniformed cops and detective Smillie, gruff and huge in the camera lens, stood in the street running round the atrium of the arco. They were thirty-three floors from the top. Richards could see part of the glass roof, tinged green by reflected light from the park far below.
Something caught Smillie’s eye, maybe it was the light showing the panel to be occupied, maybe it was the cartoon Scotsman waving his privates that Richards had marching up and down the screen embedded in the unit. Smillie bent down and peered carefully into the camera. He turned his cigarette off and pocketed it. From the smell it gave off the device was full of expensive tobacco, gengineered to be carcinogen free. “Richards, is that you?”
“Smillie. How marvellous. What brings you out of your bothy so early in the morning?”
“I’m glad the brains of the outfit have shown up, saves me talking to that lummox you have on the payroll.”
“I am so very glad to see your ugly face spoiling my expensive view. What do you want?”
“I’ve come to talk to you. Nicely like. Are you going to open the bloody door, or do I have to stand here all pissing day?” said Smillie.
“I am not opening the door without Otto’s permission.”
“These are your offices.”
“They are,” said Richards.
“Then open the door.”
“Technically, and I am speaking technically, AI are not permitted to hold property alone. In cases of ownership of physical property by both corporeal and AI persons, the meat takes precedence. You wouldn’t want to get me into trouble with the law. The door stays closed,” Richards said.
“We both know that’s not really the case. You’re being a damn pedant,” said Smillie. “Stop pissing about and let me in.”
“Smillie, I don’t want to talk to you, and Otto is in no fit state to,” Richards had the cartoon Scotty blow a raspberry and waggle its bare arse “Hoots mon!” it squeaked. “The days when you could order me around are long past, and I don’t care to be reminded of them. Go away.”
“I never did like you, you know that?” growled Smillie. He took out his cigarette, put it in his mouth, took it out again without turning it back on. “You always were an insolent bastard.”
“I love you too. Honestly, I mean it. I’d give you a cuddle, but as I am not wearing my sheath right now you’ll have to go and fuck yourself.”
“Smart mouth eh? Fine door you’ve got here,” Smillie stroked the wood, running his hands over the lettering on it. ‘Richards and Klein, security consultants’, it read. Richards had chosen the name himself. Most people in the security business went for nonsensical buzz-words – ‘Intech’, ‘SpyGen’, ‘Securicenture’. Richards preferred language that meant something. He’d had it actually painted on by a real sign writer too, cost him a fortune. “Mahogony is it? Very expensive eh? Lets your clients know they’re getting the best, having an endangered species as your front entrance? Vulgar, I’d say.”
“And also very closed. It’s triple-deadlocked, shielded, encrypted and locked with a genuine key, and there’s a heavy gauge blast door just waiting to drop down over any hole you might care to make. It is closed. It is going to stay that way. Now go away, I have to deal with Otto.”
“Let me put it like this,” said Smillie. “How about I kick it in?”
“If you are here for a nice chat, I don’t see how that would serve your purpose.”
“There’s nice, and there’s a nice big hole. You choose.”
“Legally, and I mean really legally, and I’m using that word on purpose, whether the door stays closed or not is Otto’s decision; not mine, and not yours without a warrant. Otto can hear you. He is lying on the co
uch. He is not looking his best, but he can hear you, and I think he says ‘no’.”
“Open the door,” growled Smillie.
“I also say no, and more emphatically,” said Richards.
Smillie curled his lip, tapped his cigarette on his teeth. “Lads, get this door down.”
Richards swore and ducked back into the apartment, leaving a small part of himself in the intercom unit to keep an eye on Smillie.
“Otto, get up!” said Richards. Otto snorted. Outside, Smillie turned to his men and waved at the door.
“Break it in,” he said. The uniforms looked at one another. “Don’t just stand there, let me deal with the paperwork, you’re not paid to think, you’re paid to do, so do!” That was the Smillie Richards knew well, there wasn’t a day that he didn’t trot out some bully-boy cliche. “Break it in!”
“They are going to do it, Otto.” said Richards. “They are going to hurt my door.” Otto did not reply. “Otto!”
Two officers hefted the ram, a stumpy high-density carbon job, then Richards’ outside eye went blind as the third uniform zapped the door with an EMP gun, disabling the intercom unit along with the deadlocking mechanisms and the blast door. The door had been reduced to the status of expensive wood. He opened it remotely before the cops could swing. The deeds might have Otto’s name on them first, but it was he who paid the bills, and he liked that door.
“Thank you,” said Smillie. He pushed past the uniforms into the room. “Otto! Get up you drunken shit!” He strode across the office and kicked the couch. “My grandma could drink more than you. What kind of soldier are you?” He kicked again.
“I am not a soldier any more,” Otto said, and rolled over to face away from the detective.
“Feeling sorry for yourself, eh? You’re pitiful.”
Before the words had finished reverberating molecules in the air Otto was up, smooth and fast like a puma. He pinned the detective to the wall by his throat. One of the cops made to grab Otto’s arm. Otto pushed him over as if he were a toddler.
“Don’t annoy me,” said Otto quietly. “Not today.”
“Ah! It lives!” said Smillie, his voice was a reduced to a hoarse rasp, but his sneer was undiminished. “Morning, you Kraut bastard.”
“Otto put him down!” said Richards. He hadn’t put his body on yet, his voice emanating from acoustic panels in the walls. “What do you want Smillie?”
Smillie looked meaningfully at the cyborg.
“Otto!” Richards snapped at his partner. The day had gone to shit already, before opening hours, a new record. Otto lowered Smillie to the floor.
“Someone’s dead,” said Smillie, straightening his tie and staring hard at Otto. “And I have some people who want to talk to you both about it.”
“So? I haven’t killed anyone in a long time,” said Otto. His accent, not normally strong, thickened when his head thickened. His breath stank, Smillie recoiled.
“No-one said you had.” Smillie threw a packet of pills at Otto. “Accelerants, nothing nasty. They’ll clean whatever shite you’ve been drinking out of your system. And eat some mints for fuck’s sake, you stink.”
“Not ‘shite’; my best scotch,” said Richards. “All of it.”
“Shame,” said Smillie. “You won’t be able to offer me a drink then. Anyways, time is a ticking, we need to be going.”
“Wherever you are going, I am not coming,” said Richards.
“You are, because you don’t have a choice. You’re both to come with me willingly or not.” The cop with the EMP gun patted it meaningfully. “You wouldn’t want old Bobbie here to accidentally let that off in this fancy pad. It’d take a tidy fortune to get it all fixed up nice again, eh?”
“I thought you said ‘nice’,” said Richards. “I take it the lack of a warrant doesn’t matter a damn.”
Smillie shrugged. “And leave your sheaths here,” he pointed at Richards’ wardrobe door. Within were his android shells, standing inactive, “you’re to come remotely.”
“Come where?”
“To see the minister for AI Affairs, that’s where.”
“Euro, or local?” said Richards.
“Euro, Richards. He’s here by projection, in person.”
“Ah,” said Richards. That made him nervous. It didn’t mean much that they’d bypassed local admin, but if it was nothing that could be offloaded onto junior Eurocrat, it was serious. “Very well, but this better not take long.”
Smillie held up a radio key, top whack, quantum encrypted. He waved it across the room and its dumb mind thought right into Richards’. “And I don’t want you lurking about in my car, go directly there. When you log back into the Grid, you’ll find a secure line out from your base unit. The encryption in this key is nothing compared to what they’ve put in the data tunnel. It’ll turn your brain inside out if you make a run for it. Understand?”
“Of course,” said Richards.
The location the key sent him appeared on no map. A sequence of co-ordinates pinpointing somewhere in the grid that was officially nowhere, though Richards knew it well: Scotland Yard2’s AI maximum containment unit. Richards had not worked AI Affairs when he’d been on the force. Even so, his own work had taken him to the AIMCU several times, though never on the wrong side of the table. Once he got in, it would be very, very hard to get out if the powers that be decided they’d rather he stayed. This was not good, not good at all.
Salzburg and Launcey, has to be, he thought. Things got nasty there, he knew there’d be aftershocks on that one. He put in the call to his lawyer. Then he slotted himself back into the netherworld of the Grid.
As he phased into the second world, he kicked himself mentally. Of course Otto had got hammered, of course he was in a bad mood.
Yesterday was the anniversary of his wife’s death.
He felt like a shit. A Five had perfect recall, but his lower selves were strictly hierarchical, passing up information to his higher functions and tasks in order of urgency. Pretty much like a human, really, not that knowing why it had happened made any difference. He’d forgotten because he was busy, pure and simple.
He had no more time to think before the strong arms of Smillie’s radio key wrapped around him, and shot him across town.
****
Richards was no stranger to code string searches, but the level of scrutiny he was subjected to at the AIMCU was something else. Near-I ’bots combed every inch of his being for embedded malware or hitched-on remoras. The guards were dumb things, mono-tasked, but whoever had made them had ensured that they would do their one job exceedingly well. They were not the usual kit that the AIMCU employed. Richards felt them up a bit, and rapidly came to the conclusion he wouldn’t have been able to crack them. They had military written all over them, Norlot Corp’s work, if he was any judge.
When the ’bots had done poking at him they withdrew and left him sitting stewing. The lobby was a no-place, a bunch of numbers, nothing for the senses. Richards thought about trying to sneak part of himself out round the firewall, but simply considering it brought the ’bots back, interest redoubled, so he sat tight. He didn’t fancy being stripped down.
Eventually a surly, disembodied human voice said “Your lawyer’s here,” and he was dumped out of the lobby back into the Real. He was given access to an interaction unit set into a desk, a holographic model that projected a half-size man. Currently it was inactive, the plain figure standing ramrod straight in a cone of blue light, arms out to his side, eyes unblinking. It was a Swaledale, the worst kind of cheap Sino-siberian rubbish hidden under some folksy Anglo-name. It was not a good make, but like everything else here that was no mistake, it was probably intended to wind him up, because Richards noted its coding was far from rubbish. Half the room was bright with hard light, bleeding the angles of shadow, blurring it all out, very predictable. Where the authorities got their interior designers from Richards had no idea, but they were creatively bankrupt. He supposed it was meant to look intimidating,
but who for? He didn’t know why they bothered with these psychological tricks. Similar might work on meat, or on the biddable Fours, Sixes and Sevens, but certainly not Fives. Being as they were pretty much the only ones that ever came through here, it was all rather pointless. Any sane Five-series AI that was brought to the AIMCU wouldn’t care, if they even noticed, and most criminal Fives were so nuts as to be on another level of not giving a damn altogether.
Otto was sat behind the desk on a moulded carbon chair. He was almost as motionless as the holo-puppet, though he looked somewhat better than before. The other half of the room was dark, diamond weave glass shield down, blocking out the far side of the desk. Sound in the room was sharp and clipped, an effect of the acoustic privacy shield that enveloped them both. A deep, barely audible hum started up as Richards brought the hologram to life. It was as clumsy as it was ugly.
“You okay?” Richards asked Otto. He probed gingerly at the hologram’s code, like a man probes at a sore tooth with his tongue. Security programmes scuttled menacingly round him, sharp pieces of themselves raised like pincers. “Sorry I forgot. I’ve had a lot on.”
“Unh,” grunted Otto without looking at him. He farted, and Richards was glad the interaction unit was too cheap to boast an olfactory sense. “It’s okay.”
“We’ll get a drink together later, yeah?”
Otto shrugged. “I’ve done enough drinking this week.
Great, thought Richards, a sulky German killing machine.
“Can I get my lawyer in here please?” said Richards testily.
“You have five minutes,” said the surly voice.
A door with a predictable whoosh opened behind him. Richards turned his hologram round to wave at Letitia Pound, the best practitioner of AI law in the south of England. She was wearing an attractive gynoid shell, a sheath so human in appearance all but an expert would not have been able to tell. Most lawyers weren’t real, numbers were much better at pernickerty ruthlessness. They also had fewer material needs so had priced meat out of the market, but Letitia was a soulcap post-mortem simulation, a pimsim, and thus at least had the distinction of actually having once been a person. Though that didn’t mean she made people feel any more at ease. She’d been frosty while she’d been alive, as a machine, she was approaching absolute zero.