Kurtherian Gambit Boxed Set One: Books 1-7, Death Becomes Her, Queen Bitch, Love Lost, Bite This, Never Forsaken, Under My Heel, Kneel or Die (Kurtherian Gambit Boxed Sets)

by Michael Anderle

  Stephen turned to Lance. “What cities are these companies in?”

  Lance rubbed his jaw. “Two cities. Separated by about fifty miles. I need to go visit them anyway, so if you need to come along we can do this together.” Lance pulled out his phone. “One second and I’ll look it up for you.”

  A minute later, Stephen had the names and started nodding his head. “William, it won’t be a problem. I know the owner of a significant number of warehouses in the first of those two cities, and these warehouses have access for ships to load and unload. Further, the crews that are used on the docks won’t speak about anything the owner tells them not to share.”

  Bobcat looked up at Stephen. “Are the buildings open at the moment?”

  Stephen looked at Bobcat. “Why would that matter?”

  “It will take time to move out any tenants, and they could be upset.”

  “Bobcat, I’m not trying to make an impression here. But we’re in my part of the world. When the owner of this company says ‘do this’ or ‘empty that,’ it will be done. Where they put it, the owner doesn’t care, he only wants results.”

  William asked, “Does this owner owe you something?”

  Lance smiled. “Guys, don’t you get it? Stephen IS the owner.” Lance looked over at Stephen. “Under an alias?”

  Stephen just smiled.

  Marcus was in awe, vampires and what they accomplished with their long lives never ceased to amaze him.

  10

  Bethany Anne stayed to handle details with Dan and Frank for another couple of hours. She finalized her interactions with Nathan and then jumped back to Miami with Ashur, her dad, John and Eric.

  An hour and a half later, Bethany Anne, Ashur, John and Eric were wheels up on their way to Las Vegas.

  It did not take very long for the airplane to fly into McCarran Airport in Las Vegas. There was a blacked out SUV waiting for Bethany Anne and her crew at the private landing facility. Once John and Eric confirmed the safety of the vehicle, they gave Bethany Anne the signal to come on out of the plane and Eric opened the door for her. He slid in beside her in the back, while John took the front next to the driver.

  There was a large consumer entertainment convention going on in town, so the traffic leaving McCarran was busy. The driver took Tropicana Ave. on the north side heading east, then switched to South Nellis Blvd. heading towards Nellis AFB.

  The team spoke about nothing in particular, this wasn’t a secure vehicle nor a vetted driver. It had been a while since Bethany Anne had vacationed in Las Vegas.

  John and Eric had been to Vegas a couple of years ago as a short respite from their altercations with Adrian’s Nosferatu.

  It took thirty-five minutes before the team arrived at the nondescript cement buildings that Tom and Jeffrey had purchased for Patriarch Research.

  Tom and Jeffrey were double-checking all of the inputs and monitors inside building 1. Both men had stayed at the facility until early this morning making sure everything was ready for the company’s principal owner.

  Jeffrey looked over at Tom, who was messing with his iPad looking at images. “Don’t you think you have something more important to do than look at movie stars?”

  Tom looked up at his boss, a smile on his face. “I’m not looking at actors and actresses. I am doing pertinent business research.”

  Jeffrey knew enough about his top computer science expert to realize he was being set up. He bent way backwards in order to pop his back and then came over to look at what Tom was doing.

  Tom put the iPad to his chest. “Now, now, now! You don’t get to sneak a peek at my valuable research.” At this point Tom’s smile was as wide as Jeffrey had ever seen it.

  “What are you doing? Our boss, or at least our boss’ boss, is going to be arriving at any moment. What is this most important research that has you smiling like a hyena?”

  Keeping the iPad to his chest Tom asked Jeffrey a question, “Have you ever wondered what our ultimate boss looks like?”

  Jeffrey looked down at the man. “What the hell you talking about? I’m sure she’s stately, elegant, with some gray hair to prove that she has wisdom. What do I care whether or not she’s attractive? All I care is whether or not we can continue our work.”

  Tom tsked. “My man, I think you have your priorities in the wrong order. Either that or you’ve left out the most significant item.” With this Tom turned his iPad around and showed a picture of Bethany Anne that had been taken one evening in Miami. It wasn’t a great picture. It looked like it had been taken with a telephoto lens from too far away and then blown up. Further, the photographer hadn’t had a steady handhold when the picture was taken. The gossip rags in Miami were all paying top dollar to get exclusive pictures of the beautiful and rich single woman.

  Jeffrey stopped being upset with his computer science officer, and slowly reached out for the iPad. Jeffrey held the iPad in his left hand and used his right hand to expand two fingers and get a closer look at the picture. “Holy crap.” Forty-five seconds later, Tom grabbed the iPad and started tugging. It took a few jerks before Jeffrey let go.

  Tom asked, “See what I mean?” Jeffrey definitely did.

  A red light started blinking on one of the monitors. Tom looked over, and grabbing his mouse, clicked on a camera icon. A black SUV was arriving in front of their building. “Looks like we have visitors, I expect this is the big boss.”

  Jeffrey told Tom as he turned around, “Look sharp!”

  Tom mumbled behind him as he stood up from the desk, “I don’t think we can look sharp enough for her.” In front of him, Jeffrey only grunted as he exited through the security doors.

  After meeting the CEO, Lance Reynolds, Jeffrey had not been so concerned with wearing a three-piece suit today. Now, he considered himself woefully underdressed for this occasion.

  As Jeffrey started walking towards the lobby’s glass door, a door he had put in after purchasing the concrete building, he saw one of the largest men that he had ever seen opening it. Jeffrey stopped ten feet from the door, he didn’t want to meet that man head on as he walked in. It would not have been much of a challenge for him to walk right over Jeffrey and never notice him.

  Well, perhaps he would notice if he had to clean off the bottom of his shoes, Jeffrey thought.

  The man stepped in, allowing his eyesight to adjust to the darker room. He immediately saw Jeffrey and Tom standing there. The man smiled and walked over to them with his hand out. “Hello, I’m John Grimes.”

  Jeffrey expected his hand to be crushed, but it was a professional handshake. Apparently, this man didn’t believe he needed to assert his physical dominance. Jeffrey heard the door open again, but he couldn’t see behind John whether it was additional security or the owner herself.

  Once John had the security preliminaries out of the way, Bethany Anne exited the vehicle and walked into the brick building. One thing she hadn’t considered, Las Vegas was cold in January. Good thing her body didn’t react to cold weather like it had before.

  Bethany Anne felt a little apprehension as she held out her hand to shake Jeffrey and Tom’s. Both of these men were in research and development. Not exactly the same research and field agent work she had done for Martin. She did not feel adequate to the task of helping with an artificially intelligent computer.

  They exchanged pleasantries for a couple of minutes, getting to know each other a little better.

  As Tom and Jeffrey turned around to take the new visitors into the secured area, they heard their boss clear her throat and speak, “Gentlemen? Aren’t you forgetting the most common security practice?”

  Jeffrey turned around. “Pardon?”

  Bethany Anne replied, “Have you guys confirmed that I am who I am professing to be? You didn’t even ask for any photo ID.”

  Jeffrey considered what she had said, and then figured he was going to owe Tom dinner for the next week. He turned to Tom. “Would you mind showing Bethany Anne your photo ID efforts?”

>   Tom, sheepishly, pulled up his iPad and flicked it back on. John and Eric had large smiles as Bethany Anne stepped closer and peered at the image. She said, “Who the fuck took that picture? That was a bad hair day for sure.” She stepped back and looked at them. “You get a pass this time. Next time please require physical photo IDs.”

  The two men smiled and nodded agreeably. Jeffrey turned around and waited for them to follow him, as he punched in the security code to open the doors to walk into the inner zone where ADAM was.

  Bethany Anne stared at the huge number of computers in the room. There were three rows of black racks and the computers were stacked on top of each other. All of them had either green or blue indicator lights flashing. There were a lot of wires coming out the backs, all wrapped and going in parallel up to the ceiling. Then they seemed to converge and move down to the next set of racks.

  While warmer in the room, it was still significantly cooler than she would have expected with this many heat producing devices. There were two large desks to the left of the door, each with four monitors.

  Jeffrey nodded to Tom who took the responsibility for explaining what everyone was seeing. “We have over eight million dollars worth of blade servers in this room. All connected together and working through software for parallel computing. Outside of the building, on the other side, is a commercial air-conditioning system. It’s used to keep the inside of this room at sixty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. Any warmer than that and we would suffer deficiencies due to heat, and probably a higher percentage of breakdowns. Right now, the ADAM system is strictly a keyboard interface. We decided not to use speech, because of concerns about inadequately understood commands.”

  Bethany Anne was aware that John and Eric had been speaking quietly. Eric nodded and stepped back over to the door and let himself out, and she turned her attention back to Tom.

  “We’ve been spending the time to load as much clean data as possible.”

  Bethany Anne interrupted. “Have you had any problems with the data?”

  Jeffrey jumped in. “Not a problem, per se. We did have one issue with a physics dump which mentioned Bugs Bunny and Looney Tunes.”

  Bethany Anne’s eyes narrowed. “The cartoons?”

  “The very same,” he replied. ”So, the system requested more data on Looney Tunes, which we decided not to provide.”

  As Bethany Anne considered that she said, “I’m not second-guessing you guys, but I’d like to understand your thought process. Why did you withhold the Looney Tunes data?”

  Tom took the story back up. “When you look at some of the cartoons, they have a very serious political slant to them. If you look at the cartoons created during World War II, for example, there are a lot of anti-Hitler, anti-Germany cartoons. Plus, that puts us into history for the last two hundred years.”

  Bethany Anne didn’t comment, but they saw her nodding in agreement.

  John spoke from behind Bethany Anne. “And let’s not even start on how much violence is in those cartoons.” Bethany Anne turned her head to stare at her biggest guard. She raised an eyebrow. John shrugged. “Don’t get me wrong, I love the violence. But I’m not sure that it would be a good education for the new baby, would it?”

  Jeffrey looked over at Tom, Tom nodded. Neither research scientist had expected the level of comprehension that these visitors seemed to be showing. Time would tell as the day grew longer.

  Bethany Anne?

  Yes?

  The ADAM unit is trying to find out information on its own.

  What do you mean?

  Somehow, it has used the dormant hardware from the tied together machines to create a method of… eavesdropping… It has tried to reach out to all of our electronic devices, I believe. Take out your phone.

  Bethany Anne pulled her phone out of her pocket and looked at it. She entered her password to get off of the lock screen. What are you wanting to see?

  Notice that we have no signal?

  Yes, what about it?

  If your phone could reach out right now, I believe Adam would be using the signal to pull its own data.

  Bethany Anne stared in amazement at her phone, she finally looked up when Jeffrey cleared his throat.

  Jeffrey started to say, “I’m sorry, but we have this room completely shielded in case we have to hit the EMP. While the danger to external devices probably goes out at least fifty yards, it should contain most of the electronic damage to this room.”

  Bethany Anne put up a hand to stop him and his voice slowly died. “Do you guys have a way to test for wireless signals inside this room?”

  Tom said, “I don’t have anything in this room, but I have some tools over in building 2 that I can grab.”

  Bethany Anne nodded to herself as much as anything. “Go get those please. I think we want to find out if ADAM is talking, or trying to talk.” Tom looked at Jeffrey and then his eyes got big. He pushed the chair back and it made a bang as it bounced off of the wall. He slipped out from behind the desk and used an arm to swing around John as he reached for the door, yanking it open. They could then hear his steps as he ran down the hallway. There was a sharp knock on the door and Eric’s voice came from the other side. “Everything okay in there?”

  John replied,” Yup, just Bethany Anne noticing something unusual again.”

  Eric retorted, “Okay, status normal. Going back to watching outside.”

  Bethany Anne stuck her tongue out at the door.

  Jeffrey said in a quiet voice, “Do you do this often?”

  Bethany Anne turned to face the president of her company. “What? Notice odd things and ask reasonable questions?”

  Jeffrey took a moment to parse her statement. “That would be one way to look at it, I guess.”

  John Grimes smiled at the man. “Or you could say notice reasonable things and ask odd questions.”

  Jeffrey nodded, deep in thought about what it would mean if there were Wi-Fi signals in a room without Wi-Fi routers.

  All of them heard Tom’s quick footsteps as he raced back toward the door, and then the punching of the security keys. The door flew open, and Tom stuck out his hand with a handheld device. He pulled it back to where he could easily read it and pushed a couple of buttons. “Well I’ll be...”

  Jeffrey asked, “What’s going on?”

  For a moment, Tom forgot that they had visitors and it wasn’t just the two of them. “Fuck if I know, but we have Wi-Fi signals in a room without any Wi-Fi devices. And the signals seem to be trying to get out.”

  Tom felt the jab in his ribs where Jeffrey had elbowed him. He remembered that the ultimate boss was standing right behind him and he had just dropped the F bomb.

  Both men slowly turned around waiting for her harsh criticism of his profane language. As they stared at her, Bethany Anne looked from face to face in total confusion. “What? Do I have something from lunch still on my face?”

  A tiny snort issued from John. Bethany Anne looked over at him. “What?”

  “I think they’re worried about Tom’s curse word.” Bethany Anne turned back to the men, “Is that it? Are you worried that I’ll have a cow because you said ‘fuck?’”

  They nodded. Jeffrey said, “Well, my wife isn’t happy whenever I even say ‘damn’ around the kids.”

  Bethany Anne looked around the room. “Not including ADAM, I don’t see any kids in here. So say whatever the fuck you want.”

  Existential crisis over, Tom shrugged and stared back at the device in his hands. “I don’t know how long this has been going on, since we weren’t expecting to have any wireless signals in this room. But I would have to say that somehow we now have a wireless device. I suppose the computers might have had components on their motherboards for wireless communication at one time that weren’t activated. But they certainly are now. If we hadn’t shielded this room so hard for the possibility of an EMP blast, I imagine there is enough wavelength to punch a hole through the concrete and a pretty good distance into the town.” Tom’
s face paled. “That would have gotten the Air Force’s attention for damn sure!”

  Bethany Anne, I am communicating with ADAM.

  What? Really? Through the Wi-Fi signal?

  Yes, it is requesting data, not realizing that I don’t have the connectivity that it is expecting. It is trying all wavelengths, and all ACK commands that are available. I told you it would not be possible for a computer from this world to connect to mine without an interface.

  Save your I told you so for later, please. Do you feel it’s safe to communicate with ADAM?

  I don’t see why not, however powerful the software might be, even with this much hardware, it is no match for one of our organic computers.

  Both men were still reviewing the handheld Wi-Fi signal device. Bethany Anne started walking down the rows between the servers, enjoying the lights bouncing back and forth in the semidarkness of the room.

  TOM, what is that buzzing I’m feeling in my head?

  The buzzing stopped.

  Sorry, I was testing an interface between, ADAM, myself, the computer and the internet. I was reviewing the data requests and then having the computer confirm or deny. We were starting to create rule sets so that the requests can go faster.

  Are you telling me that you are now in charge of ADAM’S intellectual growth?

  Not in charge, so much as testing what we can do. Since my connection to the ship is through the Etheric, we are not limited inside this chamber.

  Remember my concerns about his awareness.

  Bethany Anne, artificial intelligence does not become a ‘him.’ Artificial intelligence is a tag on a super-fast computer able to derive plausible and expected results in such a way that a human is faked into believing it has awareness.

  So, are you suggesting that if we allow ADAM to start pulling in data, it will not become aware and then make a decision about whether or not humans should live?