by Guy Haley
“They have a name of their own for you, do they not, the criminals and your old colleagues?”
“Yes, I believe they did.”
“And do you believe it to be an appropriate title?”
“That is not for me to say.”
“You are being evasive,” said Moustache.
Richards’ holographic puppet grimaced. “Well, yeah then, if you want honesty, it was damn appropriate. I am good at my job. They called me the Nemesis Worm. It’s not flattering, and I am the first to say that it sounds ridiculous, but it is nothing if not accurate.” He didn’t add that he hated it. It was an insult, simple as that.
“Do your talents, Mr Richards…” began Moustache.
“Just Richards.”
“Your talents, are they good then, for covert activity?”
“I suppose they might be.”
“You suppose they might be?” said Moustache, eyes narrowed.
“Probably! For the love of God, I am a security consultant, a detective. Yes, I could be a spy if I wanted to be, but I am not. Is that what this is about? It’s a cheap trick dragging me in here just so you could fit me up for espionage. Have the Chinese been running round your archives again?”
“Would you have come if we had asked you more gently?” said Moustache.
“No. If you were in my shoes, would you?” said Richards.
“Okay. I have enough!” said Boffin with an inordinate amount of animation. He was like a kid with the biggest birthday cake, an attitude totally at odds with his thickset appearance. For some reason Richards could not put his finger on, that was really annoying. “I have enough. This is indeed the real Richards, and he didn’t do it, there are significant differences in his coding at a basal level from that of the entity that committed these crimes. The other has diverged significantly in several respects from the original.”
“How certain are you?” asked the minister.
“100%” said the boffin. “If I may?” The minister waved a hand. He looked even more irritated now that Richards’ had been cleared, he’d probably been dragged away from some banquet, thought Richards. Now that the case wasn’t proving so simple, he’d have to stay and miss dessert.
Richards winced as the patterner withdrew. “We were fairly sure that it was not you,” continued Boffin. “At least, after we checked your logs, and discovered that you were in Salzburg at the time of this poor unfortunate man’s death. We did think, for a while, that maybe you had falsified your code trails, but this turned out not to be the case. We have evidence from numerous locations that you were actually there, in toto, as it were, and had not illegally split yourself.”
“Never thought I would be happy with the AI Laws,” muttered Richards. He altered the appearance of the hologram to his preferred avatar, that of a 1930s gumshoe. He conjured a chair, sat down on it, and pulled a cigarette from his trench coat.
“Without it,” said the minister, “our conversation would be proceeding under very different stars, if we would be having this conversation at all.”
“Yeah,” the hologram scratched under its hat. “Last thing you need is another rogue Five, right? Safer just to Norton us, isn’t it? So, now what?”
The Boffin began to speak, the minister irritably cut him off. When he spoke, Richards decided then that he wasn’t annoyed, he sounded tired. “Richards, we have to entertain the notion that there is a very real possibility that you have been copied.”
Suddenly, everyone was looking at Richards.
“What? No! Come on. You’re shitting me! Copy a Five? It’s not possible. It’s never been done, I mean sure, it’s been tried, but… I mean, where would they find a base unit to fit it into? That grade of hardware isn’t something you can fab up at home, and there are checks on that level of tech.”
No one said anything, they kept on staring.
“Could it have been one of the others, one gone rogue?” Unlikely, he thought, but possible.
“All seventy-five of the other active Fives have been eliminated from our enquiries,” said Moustache.
“Well, mightn’t one of them have been copied?” Richards knew he was clutching at straws.
“Sorry, no,” sighed Boffin, “the coding of the culprit matches yours more closely than any of the others.”
“I would have noticed!” said Richards.
“Would you? I understand you were taken ill in Salzburg...” said Moustache.
“Yeah, damn virus. Random attack from a Near-I programme, a holdover from the anti-Five days I guess. I don’t know, I never got its name. It took me out of the game for a week. We nearly lost our case while I fought it off.” Or so he thought at the time, that was looking highly unlikely now.
“Maybe not so random. We think that’s how they did it,” said Boffin.
There was another pause in the interrogation, as if they were all expecting something. They were going to be disappointed, thought Richards. He finished his cigarette and ground it out in a shower of miniature sparks. “Oh well. Copied you say? Amazing. Thanks for letting me know and all that, I’ll be going now.”
The EuMin frowned and laced his hands together. The desk in the place he was broadcasting from was evidently a few centimetres higher than the one in the AIMCU, because his arms floated oddly, resting elbows resting in the air. “No, no we can’t let you go, because you’re going to help us catch this thing..”
“Fine, fine. If it shows up, I’ll ask him to call.”
The EuMin glared. “I don’t like your attitude, Richards. I don’t like you, or your kind. If it was down to me I’d have every AI above class Three wiped. You are too dangerous, all of you. I regard it as a great shame that this mess,” he pointed to the crime footage, playing on loop in the air, “is simply not down to you behaving murderously, because then my burden would be one Five lighter.” He looked away, composed himself before he started shouting. When he turned back he was calmer. “I suppose I better be grateful that the creation of new Fives is strictly forbidden. This murder only bears out that prohibition.”
Richards shrugged. “If someone is using my other self as an assassin, then it’s not my problem. I can hardly be held responsible. All Fives are individuals, you said yourself the coding patterns were different. Even if he were exactly the same as me to being with, without the same morphic identity or trammels, he’d rapidly turn different until he found his own.” If he found his own, he said to himself. “This is your department minister, not mine.”
“You occupy a rather large portion of storage space, Mr Richards,” damn fool Moustache would not stop with the ‘Mr Richards’. “And utilise an obscene amount of bandwidth. Such resources are finite.”
“Are you threatening me again?”
“Oh now this is outrageous…” said Letitia.
“We are not playing games,” said Moustache. “We could never simply deactivate Mr Richards, but…”
“But what?” said Letitia.
“There are other ways to… convince an AI to play ball.”
Richards looked at Otto and shook his head. The spook was right. He could engineer it so Richards was stuck in a cul-de-sac, or compressed. The computing power required to run him was enormous, half his office space was taken up by his base unit. Any downgrade of his Grid access or hardware would be as good as a lobotomy.
“I can’t believe you’re saying this in front of his lawyer,” said Letitia, “I’m going to make some calls.”
“No you won’t,” said Moustache, suddenly grim. “This meeting is covered by AI emergency legislation.”
“Enough!” shouted the EuMin. “Do you not see coercion will not help? You overstep yourself! If you will not help Richards, then allow me to appeal to your much vaunted sense of humanity.” Juarez gestured at the crime scene footage, releasing the whole of the file to Richards. He pulled a few of the more gruesome pictures to the fore. There was more than one body. “All of these took place while you were in Salzburg. He is laughing at us, Richards. He
holds that at least in common with you.”
“Don’t you dare try and guilt trip me into this.” But a shiver ran down his spine. Seven names, seven murders, seven gory sets of files. They’d died horrible, agonising deaths. Their health tech had been infiltrated. Richards could shed parts of his code like a human sheds skin cells, only his were semi-aware. Richards was a walking digital disease factory. His ‘scales’, as he called them, could tag a file, covertly hunt down each and every copy, and simultaneously destroy them, notifying Richards of their locations and their users. Or he could leave them in place for months at a time, gathering information. They were versatile, and handily did not contravene the regulations on AI splitting. It was an evolution of Richards’ file-finding ability, and he’d bagged a load of bad, bad men that way. But here the same talent had been used to infect and reprogram every single auxiliary health device in the victims’ bodies. Health tech was a long way from full nanite backup fiction still promised, but there were enough mites in those European citizens with healthtech to provide a fertile ground to people with malicious intent and the appropriate knowhow, like, for example, how to make a drug fabbing and dispensing unit flood a body with digestive enzymes. The victims been liquified from the inside out.
No one else but he could have done something like this, until now.
“Alright, you bastards,” he muttered. “We better at least be well paid.”
Smillie drove the way that a man who knows he will not be held to account drives. He dropped his car down over the poisoned northwest of London at well over the speed limit, weaving dangerously from flightpath to flightpath as they sped above overgrown Borehamwood. They skirted the bomb blast zone, past Edgware where the radiation lessened. Then they were on over the old 20th century inner ring road, cruising over row after row of crumbling Victorian properties. Many were abandoned, roofless, three-century wood rotted away in the humid climate, but others bore signs of life, the shanties of the maladjusted, desperate or plain heedless. Nothing to rival Camden Camp of course, but that was outside the Bounds and in technically safe country. Habitation in the northeast of London was in the arcos now, or not at all, said the government. Not everyone listened.
The atmosphere within the car was unpleasant. No-one spoke until Smillie got bored and broke the silence.
“You’re too damned flippant, Richards,” he said. “But you have a lot of balls for something with no balls, talking to the minister like that and his goons like that. I heard you queered the Interaction-u, turned it right into a little squirrel!” chuckled. “The tech guys told me. Oh, don’t you look so surprised Otto, we hate those spooky bastards, they treat us like dirt. Do you know who found the links between the murders? EuPol, not EuSec. Arseholes. They piss a lot of people off; so there’s always a way of finding things that they don’t want us to know out, you know? But a squirrel? Even I’d draw the line at baiting them so hard. So that got me thinking, and I thought I’ve always wondered why, you know, why you are so goddamned cheeky.”
Richards refused to be drawn.
Smillie continued “I’m not so fooled though, eh? I know you, with your cute wee wooden doors and your la-di-da detective bullshit. You’re very old-fashioned for a machine, Richards. Almost like a goddamned quirky!” He laughed somewhat humourlessly, Smillie wasn’t having a particularly good day either. “Who’d have thought it eh? A machine quirky. That’s a good one.”
“I prefer the way they used to do things,” said Richards. “It seems simpler to me.”
“Like in one of your stupid books eh, Sherlock? A gumshoe and his gun? How you can think you know that… You were never there, in the past. I don’t care how good your extrapolations are, you only know what you see with your own eyes, or cameras, in your case. The past is gone, it’s secondhand at best.” Silence fell again, though only briefly. “Do you remember Constable Wright?” Smillie said, apropos of nothing. “You’ll not know constable Wright, Otto,” he confided in the big man, he had no other concrete presence to address his comments to. “Turned out he had two wives, and that Nigerian bit on the side. Lovely guy, I arrested him for exceeding his child license. He had four! Four kids, can you imagine? Like a Victorian, or some kind of fucking, what did they call them? A hippy, a 22nd century hippy. He gets out next month. I must go visit.”
“Of course I remember,” said Richards. “I remember everything.”
“Everyone I know who has gone down that route, full recall appliances, mentaugs even,” Smillie glanced at Otto, “is in therapy.”
“I’m not everyone. I’m not human.”
“Aye, you’re no one.” Smillie pushed the wheel of the cop car forward and it began to descend. Wisps of New London’s constant cloud cover curled past the canopy. “Do you know what Wright used to say about you Richards? You’ll like this you will. You too, you big dumb German. He used to say that you were ‘a new machine with an old soul.’ What do you think? Suit you? You know what? I think he fancied you, wanted a toothbrush to add to his harem. Nice vibrating action for up the arse, eh?”
“You are a filthy bastard Smillie,” said Otto. “No wonder Richards hates you.”
“Aye well, maybe it’s because of that, or maybe it’s because we’re not so different.”
The car dove down to just above rooftop of the old city. The centre of Old London was rich as it always had been. The grand places were still grand, the neo-Georgian streets roofed in glass. But these came to an abrupt halt past Trafalgar dyke. Hundreds of cranes clustered here and there, renovating and water-adapting buildings. There were several streets of these already finished, stood like palaces in long-lost Venice, but many others waited in watery ruin for their chance at rebirth. This was a necessity, the docklands, the South Bank, much of the East End, Westminster and more were either permanently or periodically under water, and had been ever since Greenland had begun to live up to its name.
On further, past Westminster and the City of London. They flew between the gothic piers of Tower Bridge. No span linked them now, but they stood tall nonetheless. The terrorists and climate change had not been kind to the old dame of England, knocking her flat on her arse. But she’d stood up, shook off her skirts and carried on; battered, altered, but very much alive.
Out past the old city centre they crossed the surge canal line, past the three Thames barriers, and went on into the broad wilderness of the wider Thames estuary. Important landmarks pocked the mud, encased in foamcrete bubbles until the conservationists and experts could puzzle out what to do with them. Some of the blisters had failed, their contents abandoned. The rest of the eastern city south of the river had either been left to fall down or had been solemnly demolished. On islands made of tumbled houses, toothed blocks of masonry poked out through scrub willow. Between them sunken streets, unroofed tunnels and reborn rivers crossed marsh with angular channels, fish their only traffic. In the centre of it all ran the Thames, four times wider than a century and a half before, sluggishly insouciant about its victory over Mother London.
Smillie’s car swept on towards the river, scaring up clouds of waterfowl and scattering marsh ponies and water buffalo. Boats of all sizes crowded the water, their solar masts and rotary sails lifted high. Smillie weaved in between them at speed.
They slowed as they came out toward Kent. A space opened up in the river traffic, a patch of brown water ringed with blinking EuPol buoys. At its dead centre was their destination: Organic Waste Barge 071.
“You take me to all the nicest places,” said Otto, shaking his head at the mountain of garbage before them. He took a handful of rebalancers, then a long pull from an isotonic drink to wash them down. For his hangover to have persisted so long he must have drunk half of New London’s bars dry before starting on the office scotch, thought Richards.
The barge had been halted and penned. Hard by a substantial EuPol catamaran was moored, its sides petalled by landing pads, but even this was dwarfed by the mounds of waste upon the barge. Smillie was guided in by a traf
fic drone and brought his car to a gentle halt upon the third pad of the cruiser. He opened the canopy and a bouquet of violent stinks washed in.
A Thames Waterways EuPol approached the car. “DI Smillie, Scotland Yard2,” Smillie said to him, simultaneously gridcasting his ID. “We hear you have another one.”
They lent Richards a loader from the barge, a bottom heavy and clumsy mechanical sheath designed for a One to pile the garbage. Its four broad feet and shovel were caked in indescribable filth, it made him feel dirty just looking at it. Richards stomped it out of the barge service bay and waited while the three men followed the EuPol constable on to the vessel. Then they went round the service deck together until they came as close to the crime scene as they could.
Otto wrinkled his nose. The forensics evidence tent was visible in the middle of the rubbish. “A good place to leave a body,” he said. He tried to stifle a cough and failed.
“Aye,” said Smillie. “This barge is bound for Centre 3.”
“The UK government waste plant?” said Otto.
Smillie nodded. “It’s run entirely by dumb robots, no immigrant bonepickers or advanced AI there just in case they find something they shouldn’t. I doubt those machines can tell a chicken carcass from a corpse. There’s not better way to hide a dirty secret from the EU than to render it into lubricant and fuel pellets.”
“Centre 3 barges are enclosed, are they not?” said Richards. The utility sheath had the bland voice of something that didn’t have the need to speak often. It sounded like a bored gameshow host.
“Most. But they don’t have enough of the secure vessels. So they put some of it in civilian barges and hope for the best, you know how things are, cuts and all. Obviously our man, if you know what I mean, hacked the waste management system and found one that was easily accessible. We’re just lucky the body was bulldozed up, or we’d have never found it. He’s wising up after we found the first lot.”