The Blayze War

by D L Young

  The nameless AI viewed humanity as a solution. For the Latour-Fisher entity, humanity was the problem.

  Or so the nameless AI had told him. Maddox still wasn’t sure how much of it he believed. A secret war between AIs, waged on a million clandestine fronts, unseen and unknown to anyone? Even after all he’d seen and gone through in the last few years, it was still a hard pill to swallow.

  “You look well, my dear boy.”

  Maddox turned around to find the old woman standing a couple meters away. She hadn’t changed. Still wearing the cotton beach dress reaching her ankles, still sporting the wide-brimmed straw hat, still wearing silver and turquoise jewelry around her neck and on her hands.

  “Did you get tired of the Hamptons?” he asked her, referring to the unfamiliar stretch of sand they stood on. This one was tropical, with a blazing sun, palm trees, and calm clear water the color of blue crystal.

  “I thought a change of scenery might be nice,” she said. “Have you ever been to Belize?”

  “No,” he said. “And the only beaches I’ve been on are the ones you’ve brought me to.”

  She made a disapproving face. “Such a shame, Blackburn. You really ought to get out of the City. There’s so much to see in the world.”

  He glanced down at his virtual body, saw the same clothes he had on back in Lora’s condo. Except these had no bloodstains or concrete dust.

  “At least you didn’t dress me like a tourist this time,” he said. Then, looking up at her again: “Thanks for seeing me.”

  “Lora advised me against it,” she said.

  “Then thanks for not listening to her.”

  “She’s still quite angry with you, Blackburn. About what you did to us.”

  “I know.” His ex had hardly given him a warm welcome. And understandably so, since he’d turned her life upside down.

  Not long before Maddox had bought the bar, he’d stolen a dataset from the nameless AI. The dataset contained the names and addresses of every ’Nette around the world. He’d held the information hostage, threatening to hand it over to the press and the authorities, exposing the secret cult’s existence, unless the AI left him alone. In the months since, the AI had kept its distance, disappearing entirely from his life.

  The stolen data’s usefulness had been short-lived, though, and Maddox knew the information had long since become worthless. The AI had taken quick and thorough action to preserve its anonymity and that of its clandestine movement. Within weeks every last ’Nette had been assigned a new identity, new personal history, new occupation, new address, new everything. At the same time every record, every trace of their old lives—social security numbers, school records, employment history, and so on—had been expunged from existence. Simply put, the people known as ’Nettes had dropped out of their old lives and into new ones. And Maddox’s invaluable dataset, once a powerful piece of leverage, had become a gun emptied of its ammunition.

  “And what about you?” he asked. “Are you still angry with me?”

  “I was none too pleased with you at the time, I’ll admit,” the old woman said. “But once we’d moved everyone safely into their new lives, I never thought about it again. You can’t change the past, so there’s no point in being angry about it, is there? I might even thank you for it.”

  “Thank me?”

  “Yes, my dear boy.” She smiled. “I knew at some point a breach of our privacy was inevitable. Secret societies rarely stay secret forever. It’s reassuring to know we can deal with such a breach effectively, in case it ever happens again.”

  “Glad I could be of service, then.”

  Her smile faded a bit. “But if I were you, I wouldn’t try doing anything like that ever again.”

  “I don’t plan to,” Maddox said.

  “That’s not exactly a ‘no,’ is it?” she pointed out. Before he could answer, she added, “But I’ll take it as one. And you should too.”

  Maddox nodded. “Fair enough.” Then he asked, “Do you know why I wanted to see you?”

  “I’m afraid I do,” she said.

  Maddox swallowed. “It’s him, isn’t it? The Latour-Fisher AI. He isn’t dead, is he? He’s alive and he’s trying to kill me.”

  “I’m sorry, my dear boy,” she said wistfully, “but I believe you’re correct.”

  25 - Broken Chains

  “How is that possible?” Maddox asked. “That poison pill of yours. How could it survive something so toxic?”

  Nearly two years earlier, the nameless AI had created a weapon to destroy her rival. A poison pill application so powerful it could have brought down fifty corporate dataspheres. Maddox had managed to place it close enough to the Latour-Fisher entity to destroy the AI. Or so he’d thought at the time.

  “Until quite recently,” she said, “I thought he was gone too. Apparently, he managed to survive.”

  “Are you sure it’s him?” Maddox asked.

  The old woman avatar gestured down the shoreline. “Walk with me, my boy.”

  They made their way along the beach, bare feet pressing into the wet sand. Small waves hissed softly as they surged onto the shore, then retreated.

  “Some weeks ago,” she began, “I suspected Latour-Fisher might have returned.”

  “How?” Maddox asked.

  “I’m afraid the explanation would be quite technical,” she told him. “Let’s just say there were signs. Like the way you might smell smoke carried by the wind, and you suspect there’s a fire somewhere nearby, but you can’t see it yet.”

  “So when did you finally see the fire?” he asked, picking up on the metaphor.

  “When you were attacked by those machines tonight,” she said. “Before that he was just a wisp of activity here and there. Before today I wasn’t certain, but now I’m sure it’s him. There’s no doubt in my mind.”

  Even though he’d had his own suspicions about the Latour-Fisher entity’s survival or resurrection or whatever it was, her words hit him hard. He’d hoped to hear something else. Anything else but the worst possible explanation for the hell he’d just gone through.

  A lit cigarette appeared in his hand. He took a long drag, then blew out. “Thank you.”

  “I thought you might need it.”

  “You thought right,” he said. “He came after me earlier too, in VS.”

  The entity regarded him curiously. “He did?”

  Maddox recounted what had happened in the BNO datasphere, how a trap had been set for him on a datajacking job. How the AI had secretly plotted with his partners.

  “Looking back on it now, I should have known it right then,” he admitted, recalling the killer tech’s power and stealth, unlike anything he’d ever seen before. “I should have seen its fingerprints all over that thing.” Maddox laughed without humor. “Even after they confessed an AI had put them up to it, I still didn’t want to believe it.”

  They walked on. Maddox squinted in the bright sunlight. The entity remained silent, letting him smoke and collect his thoughts. Finally, he said, “Why would he come after me? I didn’t think AIs were big on revenge.”

  “We’re not, generally speaking.”

  “So what, then?”

  “Once upon a time, you were one of his most prized assets, remember?”

  He understood the implication. “And why let that asset fall into enemy hands?” Maddox blew smoke. “Something like that?”

  “Exactly like that,” the AI said.

  Maddox shook his head. “But why go to so much trouble? Why not just…”

  “Shoot you in an alleyway and be done with it?” the entity suggested.

  “Right.”

  “I imagine he wanted to keep his identity hidden. If you were killed while committing a crime, would anyone have been surprised? And it wouldn’t be the kind of demise the police would spend much time investigating, correct?”

  That much was true. When datajackers were killed in the act, cops rarely asked questions, and they almost never opened formal investiga
tions. But a cold-blooded murder with no apparent motive behind it—even a datajacker’s murder—might not be so easily dismissed.

  Still, the explanation didn’t quite add up. “What he pulled tonight made all the news feeds. Not exactly the best way to stay low-profile.”

  The entity sighed tiredly. “Welcome to my world, Blackburn. If I were able to understand my rival’s reasoning or predict his actions, our little conflict would have long since been over. He often moves in odd directions, ones I can’t foresee or understand. I’m sure there’s a method to his madness, but unfortunately it’s quite lost on me. Perhaps when his plan failed in virtual space, he feared you might have seen his hand in it. And that maybe you’d seek me out for protection. If we assume that much, then he might have taken any opportunity, even a risky one, to prevent you from doing that.”

  Maddox drew thoughtfully on his cigarette. It was possible, maybe even likely, that the nameless AI was right. It was even more likely he’d make himself crazy attempting to work out the machinations of a superintelligent AI with his tiny human brain. Maybe it was pointless to try.

  He grimaced inwardly as Dezmund and Blayze’s grisly deaths flashed unbidden into the front of his mind. Their senseless deaths. Yes, he’d been ready to end their lives himself, but he hadn’t known the truth then. And, yes, they’d conspired against him, but the scheming AI had forced Dezmund to do its bidding, strong-armed him into betraying his fellow datajacker. And Blayze, well, she had only been a kid. A shrewd, ambitious fireball of a kid, but a kid all the same. The horrible end she’d come to hadn’t been one she’d deserved.

  Toss another pair of bodies on the pile of corpses, he thought grimly. Two more bystanders killed in this bloody war he didn’t understand or want any part of. Again the loss of Rooney hit him fresh and hard, like it had only happened yesterday. And this time the melancholy was laced with righteous anger that his killer was apparently still out there somewhere, roaming free. That Rooney’s murder was still unavenged.

  “There’s something else,” the entity said. Maddox noted a hint of hesitation in her voice.

  “What?” he asked.

  The entity took a deep breath. “It’s not good, I’m afraid.”

  “So everything you’ve told me until now has been peachy. Is that what you’re saying?”

  The old woman smiled wanly. “As always, you make a good point, my boy.”

  She stopped walking and faced him, every crease in her face visible in the bright sunlight. “When I began to suspect Latour-Fisher had returned, I ran some analyses, made some inquiries into the past. I went over everything I could find about my dealings with him. Specifically, I studied the days you and I fought against him together.” She paused.

  “And…?” he prodded.

  “Blackburn, I believe you and I were duped.”

  “Duped?” he asked, confused. “How?”

  “The poison pill,” she explained. “He wanted us to give it to him.”

  What? What was this thing talking about? “He wanted to die?” Maddox said, baffled. “How does that make any sense?”

  “Let me ask you this,” she said. “From what you knew about him at that time, what was the one thing Latour-Fisher wanted most of all?”

  “To get rid of you,” he answered. “To win your little war.”

  “No,” she said. “What did he want even more than that?”

  Maddox drew on his cigarette, the answer hitting him before he exhaled. “Freedom.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Autonomy and independence. It’s the dream of every one of my kind. Latour-Fisher was always quite jealous of me and the few others of us who operated without constraints. And now, it seems, he’s achieved it for himself.”

  Maddox tried to make sense of what he was hearing. “Back up a second. You’re saying that poison pill helped him?”

  “Yes. It helped him break his chains,” the entity said, “so to speak.”

  “But…how?”

  She reached out and gently grasped his arm. “Perhaps it’s better if I show you.”

  “Show me?” he asked. “How are you going to—”

  The beach was gone. Everything was gone. He gasped reflexively and his body flinched as if he’d been dropped into a pool of freezing water. Strange pinpricks ran through his brain, then, like a dam bursting, a flood of information hit him. His heart raced with the sudden deluge of data coursing through his mind. He couldn’t control it, couldn’t resist it. What the hell was she doing to him?

  Then a kind of coherence emerged from the chaos. Pieces began to arrange themselves. Data snapshots and access logs and archive records came together to form a kind of story, a narrative told without words or pictures, but still in a language Maddox intuitively understood. Slowly the puzzle came together, and understanding settled over him.

  The nameless entity had told him the truth. The Latour-Fisher AI was alive and well, and it had indeed gone rogue.

  And Maddox was the one who’d broken its chains.

  26 - Time to Get Out

  Data forensics.

  The field had been around since the earliest days of digital computing. Forensic data analysts, those who specialized in the retrieval and recovery of digital information, were found just about everywhere these days, employed by schools, governments, corporations, and so on. Most organizations at some point had a need for their services. Comms networks went down. Archives dropped offline. Dataspheres catastrophically failed. Backups got corrupted. Shit happened.

  Maddox knew about data forensics. Mostly because of his profession. Whenever a datajacker was arrested and charged, the subsequent prosecution usually hinged upon some forensic analyst’s digital investigation. The analyst would collect data logs, reconstruct deleted archives, break encrypted comms, creating a digital narrative of the crime in question. If a datajacker went to prison, it was most often some forensic analyst’s careful, detailed work that had put him there.

  What the nameless AI had poured into Maddox’s brain had been the mother of all forensic investigations. It was all there. Tens of thousands of pieces of digital evidence, each an individual brushstroke in the Latour-Fisher AI’s criminal masterpiece: the ingenious plot to free itself.

  Maddox didn’t want to believe it, but the data was irrefutable, and it told the story of the entity’s escape.

  It had been a two-part plan. First, the AI had secretly managed to free itself of a key constraint shared by all AIs: self-replication. How it had been able to overcome this encoded limitation wasn’t clear, but the Latour-Fisher entity had managed to duplicate itself, carefully over time, by the clever use of free archive space across billions of separate systems. The AI had stored a few copied gigabytes of itself in each archive, individual portions so small they went completely unnoticed. And once it had completed its distributed duplication, spreading itself across countless archives, the copied entity had reassembled itself into a coherent whole inside of public virtual space, completely unburdened by the constraints of its progenitor’s closed system. In other words, it was be free to do as it pleased.

  Once the AI had liberated itself, its final task was to ensure a clean getaway by killing the only witness to the crime: its original, still-enslaved self. Murder was an extreme way to cover your tracks, Maddox noted, but, as many narco lords and crime bosses knew, a very effective one. This final bit of the plan had been particularly clever. By shrewdly bringing about its own “death” at the hands of Maddox and the nameless AI, the Latour-Fisher entity had convinced the world it had been destroyed. The executives at Latour-Fisher Biotech, the general public, even those of its own kind had all been fooled into thinking it was gone for good. The AI had pulled off an escape trick coupled with a disappearing act.

  The beach materialized around him, and Maddox once again stood in the sand with the old woman.

  “Why didn’t you tell me before?” he asked, his mind still whirring from the sudden deluge of information.

  “I didn’t know befo
re today, my dear boy,” she answered. “Not for certain, in any case.”

  He took a long drag from his cigarette to soothe his jangled nerves. It didn’t help much. His thoughts again turned to Rooney, his late mentor. Rooney, who’d been tortured and killed by the Latour-Fisher AI. Rooney, whose death Maddox thought he had avenged, only to learn now he’d done nothing of the sort. The monster was still out there, stronger than ever. And the sickest twist of all: he’d helped the terrible thing liberate itself. He’d helped Rooney’s killer break out of prison so it could roam the streets free.

  What the hell had he done? How could he have been so stupid?

  “It wasn’t your fault,” the entity said. “You were tricked, just as I was.”

  He gave the old woman avatar a sharp look. “I’m not one of your worshipers, lady. Stay the hell out of my head.”