Blood Ties

by Robert J. Crane

  Mendelsohn let out another chuckle, his bare cheeks and chin marking him in contrast to the male employees here. Wittman, too, lacked any facial hair, but they seemed to be the outliers. Also the oldest people in the open, warehouse industrial space. Hell, I felt old in here and I was all of twenty-six and looked twenty, I’d been reliably informed. By people wanting tips and such, but still. “It’s just as well,” Mendelsohn said. “Research shows that beards are catch points for fecal matter and other varying bacteria floating in the air.”

  “I heard about that,” I said, raising my finger and pointing with excitement. “Beards are poop magnets. Yes. Another argument for the smooth-faced look. You’re seeming more calculatingly genius all the time, Mr. Mendelsohn.”

  “Call me Aaron,” he said with a hearty chuckle, and gestured me over to a desk in the corner just outside a small, glass-sided office. It sat just outside the door and opposite was another desk, this one manned by a small guy in a suit with a beard that was neither tactical nor hipster-y. It was wispish, barely there, as though he tried as hard as he could to grow one but failed. Every other detail of his appearance was perfectly maintained, from his pocket square (magenta, matched his tie) to his wingtips, and they hung on his rail-thin frame excellently. “This is Kelvin, Mr. Wittman’s assistant.”

  Kelvin offered me a very limited handshake, almost as though afraid he’d pick something unpleasant up from my fingertips. Which I thought was fair, since he was in earshot for our discussion about poop beards.

  “Nice to meetcha, Kelvin,” I said, and turned to Mendelsohn. “So he doesn’t have a cool title like ‘Managing Director’?”

  “Ah, no,” Mendelsohn said with that same smile, though his cheeks reddened a little.

  “Some of us have to content ourselves with being the buttress upon which the behind-the-scenes part of the business runs,” Kelvin said, a little snidely. Mendelsohn just chuckled, though there seemed to be an element of strain between them.

  Mendelsohn filtered over to his desk and gestured for me to have a seat across from him. “Cam will be joining us shortly, I’m sure, but until then I’m happy to go over the presentation with you.”

  “Sure, might as well get to it,” I said, checking my phone again. I fired off a text to Friday asking where he was, expecting he’d reply whenever he felt like it. Or pried his phone from where it was stuck, likely between his butt cheeks. To my surprise, it buzzed almost immediately.

  ON I-80 BRIDGE FROM OAKLAND. BE THERE SOON. P.S. I THINK I JUST JOINED A GANG.

  I frowned, prompting Mendelsohn to ask, “What?” I showed him the text without explanation and he frowned. “That’s...quite a long ways from here. Probably at least an hour. Where did your co-worker drive from?”

  “Hell if I know,” I said. “He could have started from next door and decided this was the shortest route.” With a shrug, I proclaimed, “Start without him. There’s no point in us trying to make small talk for an hour, because we’ll exhaust my supply of small talk in about five minutes and plunge right into my big talk. That’ll send you screaming from the room, the city, the municipality and possibly the state and country. Since we wouldn’t want that—”

  “I can tolerate quite a bit, Ms. Nealon.”

  “You can call me Sienna if I can call you Aaron.”

  “Fair trade,” he said. “And I’d actually be quite fascinated to hear your ‘big talk.’ I imagine it would involve themes I don’t often get exposed to in my everyday conversations. It’d be quite the paradigm shift, I’m sure.”

  “Yes,” I said. “If by ‘paradigm shift’ you mean, ‘discussions about the most expedient way to kill people who are presenting an active threat to your life or the safety of others.’” I shrugged again. “I have a somewhat limited repertory.”

  “I’d be interested to discuss it later,” Mendelsohn said, and he seemed sincere, though I had reason to doubt it. Who wanted to talk about killing people? Other than me and the kick-ass military operators I’d met? “But perhaps we should get to business since your associate is so far away.” He spun a computer monitor around on a swivel so I could see it, and turned up the brightness on the screen as he brought up a video.

  “Ooh, a movie,” I said. “I should have popcorn for this.”

  “Kelvin, would you mind getting Ms. Nealon some popcorn?” Mendelsohn said. Kelvin snapped right to it before I had a chance to say I was joking. Which was fine, because I realized I was a little peckish. “Two weeks ago, one of our employees was delivering servers to a subsidiary we have in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco.” He clicked something on the keyboard. “He had two extras in the back that were meant to be delivered to another facility we have out in East San Jose, but he never made that stop.” He smiled. “For reasons that are about to become obvious.”

  The footage started running on the screen, and I could see a hi-res security camera had taken the video. It showed a panel van about the size of a FedEx truck, sitting on a dark street at night. I had a perfect view of the rear double doors, and in the background I could see a few pedestrians meandering a slow path down the sidewalk across the street. The detail was fairly crisp; they both looked like vagrants, complete with stocking caps and ratty jackets. Another was following along behind them with a shopping cart.

  All three stopped with a jerk that rippled through them like an earthquake had hit. There was a full body recoil on the part of each. One in the lead was wearing a lime green shirt, and he reacted first. The other two—one next to him in a dark jacket, and the one with the shopping cart—both startled a second later.

  It didn’t take long to figure out why. Grendel lurched into camera view, sending the first two running even though they were across the street and at least fifteen yards away. Smart move on their part; that was still too close. The third guy made his retreat a little slower, turning his cart around and bustling out of view behind the van, lagging behind them by a bit.

  The Grendel ripped open the van doors without a lot of ceremony or much effort. He left them hanging there as he climbed in. The clarity of the camera didn’t do enough at this distance to give me a precise idea of what he was doing inside other than rummaging around, but when he emerged a few seconds later, it was with a black box slightly larger than a suitcase under each of his swollen, yellowed arms.

  “Those are our servers,” Mendelsohn said, clearing that right up for me.

  “It’s good you told me,” I said, “because I was going to guess they were mini-fridges filled with kombucha.”

  Mendelsohn chuckled. “That stuff is quite popular here. You want some?”

  “I don’t know that I’ve tried one before.”

  “No time like the present.” He slid his gaze over to Kelvin, who was about thirty or so feet away in a kitchenette tucked in the corner of the warehouse space. “Get Ms. Nealon a citrus kombucha while you’re at it, Kelvin?” Kelvin signaled his acknowledgment of the request by—unless I imagined it—flipping Mendelsohn the bird.

  “I guess I’m trying one of those, then,” I said, and turned my attention back to the monitor. “Also, is there some reason Kelvin dislikes you so much? Are you an asshole to people who you aren’t touring around?”

  “I don’t think so,” Mendelsohn said, lapsing into what seemed to be genuine, introspective pontification. “I like to think I’m polite to everyone. I have some concern that Kelvin believes our desk positioning is some sort of slight to him, given that I’m considerably higher ‘ranked’ in the hierarchy around here.”

  “And consequently paid better?”

  Mendelsohn nodded. “Naturally. Several orders of magnitude. He’s a personal assistant to Mr. Wittman; I help run the entire company.”

  I nodded. “So...you don’t fetch kombucha for Mr. Wittman?”

  “I would if he asked, out of politeness,” Mendelsohn said. “Just as I would for you if I were up and you needed something. But it’s not a function of my job.”

  “Hm,” I said, look
ing back at the monitor. He’d paused the video. “So what is your job, specifically? I know you said ‘running the company,’ but—”

  “I help Mr. Wittman seek and evaluate potential investments,” Mendelsohn said. “I have created several models to aid in valuation of tech companies that have no sales to speak of and—”

  “Ohhhhh,” I said, finally getting it. “You help him put a price tag on unproven startups. Quantifying the unquantifiable, because they haven’t made a profit yet. Or are even taking in money, in some of their cases.”

  Mendelsohn cocked his head at me in surprise. “Most laypeople don’t grasp that very quickly. Though I wouldn’t say they’re ‘unquantifiable.’ The variables are just a little more opaque than, say, a public company that has an established business model and generates regular revenue and profit.”

  “Cool,” I said, and gestured to the monitor. “Now that we’ve got that squared away, please proceed.”

  “That’s basically it,” Mendelsohn said. “As you can see, the Grendel made off with the servers.”

  I nodded. “And what did the local PD find?”

  Mendelsohn stared at me. “Nothing.”

  I frowned. “It busted into the van and stole the servers and they found...nothing, forensics-wise?”

  He shook his head.

  “A giant metahuman creature out of a horror movie,” I said, trying to cut to the core of this problem, because I wasn’t quite getting it, “cracks open your company van like an egg, steals two servers, retreats into the night, and the SFPD just go, ‘Ahhh, yeah, NBD, let’s go back to sleep’?”

  Mendelsohn blinked a couple times. “Uh, no. They just took down the report. They were very clear—they won’t be able to do anything about it.” He paused, as if for emphasis. “At all.”

  14.

  “There were over twenty-five thousand car break-ins in San Francisco last year,” Mendelsohn said as he settled back in his seat. Kelvin came wandering up with a bag of popcorn, offering it to me along with a pink liquid in a bottle that looked like someone had poured rosé in a juice bottle. “Which is down from the year before, so it’s an improvement, but still—that’s a lot of burglaries for the police to deal with.”

  “Yeah, but they said they weren’t going to do anything?” I asked, staring at his near-impassive mien. I’d dealt with property crimes only occasionally, and yeah, there didn’t tend to be a great chance of recovering stolen stuff out of a vehicle, but the idea that a cop would say that there’s absolutely nothing they were going to do about it...well, it wasn’t great community relations. “Like, at all? About the giant, yellow meta that broke into your company van?”

  Mendelsohn shrugged. “Don’t get me wrong, they’re quality servers, and it seems to me that they were probably targeted for theft given that this same creature hit QuantiFIE. But they’re insured and not particularly unique, as these things go. They’re not specialty equipment.”

  I shook my head, trying to get the taste of the utter injustice of theft out of my mouth. I was still kind of boggling at the twenty-five thousand break-ins that San Francisco had seen last year. That seemed high to me, but again, I wasn’t exactly experienced in property crime. At this level, at least. I landed a hand on the big silvery suitcase next to my seat, thumping my knuckles against the cold steel for some sort of reassurance in light of this bit of news.

  “So, Ms. Nealon,” a voice came from behind me, one that I didn’t even bother to turn for because I knew it, “how are you liking Silicon Valley so far?”

  “It’s not bad, Cam,” I said, going right back to the nickname I’d given him last time we’d met. “Though I haven’t tried to drink from one of your ubiquitous paper straws yet. One of those suckers starts to fall apart while I’m sipping my water, I might get a little testy.”

  Cameron Wittman came around my side, his familiar, terrible, Jack McBrayer partial-bowl cut bangs swinging just above his eyes. He didn’t offer his hand, and he didn’t sound quite as friendly as he had when last we’d met. Which had involved me busting into his penthouse in New York at near supersonic speeds and taking a memory from him so I could catch a bad guy. “You look well,” he said, giving me a cursory study.

  “I’m not on the run anymore,” I said. “I think that’s doing wonders for my complexion and overall health. Dodging bullets can be very deleterious for the complexion and general aura, you know.”

  “I hear that taking on explosively violent and over-sized yellow metas can result in a higher than usual death rate,” Wittman said, oh so casually.

  So the rich and connected guy knew I’d died in Queens, even though that wasn’t public knowledge. Big surprise.

  “Kill me once, shame on me,” I said, patting the silver suitcase, which he gave careful regard to. “Try again, it’ll be a different story.”

  “I hope so, for all our sakes,” Wittman said, shaking his head and breaking eye contact. “I trust Mr. Mendelsohn has been walking you through the situation from our point of view?”

  “He is,” I said. “We haven’t quite gotten to QuantiFIE yet, but the van break-in puts an interesting slant on things.”

  “Seems a little strange to go from busting into a vehicle to steal servers to going cross country and killing you, doesn’t it?” Wittman stared off into space, considering...well, my death, maybe? Here I missed the Harmon powers.

  “I am struggling to see the common link,” I said. “Of course, I don’t understand what was taken from QuantiFIE.”

  “An algorithm,” Wittman said, and Mendelsohn must have taken this as his cue to start the presentation again, because the monitor screen transitioned from the San Francisco street at night to inside an industrial complex building.

  It played, a camera view centered on a lone computer sitting against a greyscale wall. It took until the Grendel walked into the frame for me to realize that it was not black and white. His yellow skin really stood out in the high def, as the Grendel walked up to the computer—

  And proceeded to use it like a normal person.

  “What the hell?” I muttered, thinking back to my battle with the creature.

  “You were thinking it was like the Hulk, weren’t you?” Mendelsohn met my flicked gaze with a smile. “It doesn’t look very smart, does it?”

  “It didn’t show a lot of intelligence in those eyes when I fought it,” I said, looking back at the screen. The Grendel actually pulled a zip drive out of somewhere behind it, which was weird since it wasn’t wearing any clothes. It inserted it into the computer and then proceeded to slowly and carefully peck away at the keyboard. Without destroying it. It looked up at the camera and mouthed something. Or maybe growled. It was tough to say.

  “It’s intelligent,” Wittman said, standing off from the desk, not looking at me or the computer or even Mendelsohn. He just stared off into space. “It was very careful to download just this one thing, which limited its time in the QuantiFIE offices.” Now he looked right at me. “QuantiFIE is a programming startup. They were working on a few commercial products, one of which is an algorithm of incredible complexity which is designed to—”

  “Hold it right there.” I shook my head. “Keep in mind that I am not a programmer, and make this as simple as you can.”

  “QuantiFIE was creating a very complicated series of...programming steps, let’s call them,” Mendelsohn said, probably stepping in for his boss to pinch-hit idiot-ese I would understand. “Because that’s what an algorithm is. At its simplest, it’s an If/Then matrix for solving a certain kind of problem. Let’s say you wanted to understand an egg, and you wrote an algorithm around it, it’d go like this: ‘IF the object is ovoid and devoid of cracks, THEN it’s a whole, undamaged egg. IF the object is ovoid but cracked, THEN it’s a cracked egg. IF’—”

  “Okay, got it,” I said. “But why would we need an algorithm for that?”

  “We wouldn’t,” Wittman said, looking right at me. “We know what eggs are. Unless you’re vegan, they’re a staple of o
ur diets. But a machine wouldn’t. These sort of algorithms are for machines, computers—it’s for them to solve problems for us.”

  “See, humans define things in terms of their utility to us,” Mendelsohn said. “An egg is food. A hard-boiled egg could be used as a shoddy baseball.” He smiled. “There are, perhaps, other uses, but you get the point.”

  “A machine doesn’t understand an egg,” Wittman said. “A machine doesn’t understand them because eggs have no utility at all to them. They don’t know a chair from a chainsaw. Algorithms help put the steps in place for them to solve a problem that we give them, whether it’s the optimal flight course to take a rocket from the ground to orbit and then to the moon, or you typing in, ‘What is a hedgehog?’ and the machine searching an index of the entire internet to present you results.”

  “Then trying to sell me old copies of Sonic the Hedgehog, right?” I asked, smiling slightly. “Before then selling my personal information to vendors who then follow me around the internet trying to get me to buy old copies of Sonic the Hedgehog.”

  “That’s an algorithm at work,” Mendelsohn said. “Deciding what the most optimal result is, what to show you based on even limited inputs. Algorithms are everywhere, especially in programming, whether in apps, internet search engines, social networks in terms of how they present your ‘wall’ or ‘page’ or ‘timeline’ or—”

  “Okay,” I said, turning my attention back to the freeze frame of Grendel at the computer. “So it stole an algorithm. Was it a specific kind?”

  “Very specific,” Wittman said. “QuantiFIE is looking at quantum computing solutions to everyday problems in the—”

  “You’re butting up against the limits of my understanding of jargon again,” I said. “You say ‘quantum,’ I start thinking astronomy.”