by Marc Cameron
“General Song is tireless in pursuit of his mission,” Chang said. “He knows he is right, and that shows on his face.”
“A dangerous combination.” Bai grunted, half to himself. “Moral superiority and a work ethic.”
“Difficult to stop a man like that,” Chang conceded, scratching his chin.
“Nonsense,” Bai said. “I said dangerous, not invincible.” He waved sausage fingers at his aide. “And anyway, we do not need to stop him. We are ahead. I merely want to make sure Chairman Zhao does not buy into his fatalistic beliefs before we have everything in place.”
Chang nodded. “The software is everything we had hoped for and more. I would like to continue with a few more tests, but—”
“Continue with whatever tests you wish,” the general said. “But I want FIRESHIP moving forward. It is ready, is it not?”
“I believe so, General Bai,” Chang said. “But—”
“You believe?” Bai clenched his fists, looking around as if he needed something to strike. “I do not need belief. I need certainty.”
“A few more tests,” Chang said. “Then I will be certain.”
“If we go forward and fail, the chairman will put our backs against a concrete wall and shoot us in the heart.”
The major kept his voice low and calm, an engineer under pressure, too focused on his task to realize how great the threat truly was. “My people are running diagnostics as we speak. This software is . . .” He shook his head. “Extremely volatile.”
“Volatile?” Bai said. “It is a computer program. A virus.”
“No, General,” Chang said. “It is not a virus. Though it can behave as one. It has a mind of its own. We must take extra precautions to be certain that the program is contained until we want it not to be. Otherwise the outcome could be like a science-fiction movie.”
“That sounds very much like a virus to me,” Bai said. “And that is exactly what I want it to be.” His head snapped up. “I want to be able to brief Chairman Zhao at once.”
“I would advise against it.” Chang’s itch had apparently moved to his forearm. “There is still too much we do not understand about the software’s behavior. Many specifics of our plan could prove to be problematic.”
General Bai tossed off the warning with a shrug. “We’ll give him generalities, then. FIRESHIP buys me no goodwill if the chairman does not know it is happening. There are promises I wish to make, and this is a way to back them up.”
Chang opened his mouth as if to say more, but the expression faded to a closed-mouth grin. He sighed. “We will know more after the tests, then I will be certain. Until then, I remain confident.”
Bai relaxed his fists, getting control of his emotions. “Very well,” he said. “You must do what you must do. That said, it would be better if you did it sooner rather than later.”
“Of course, General,” Chang said. “But the software is only part of the operation. We still do not have a door into the system.”
Now it was Bai’s turn to smile. His jowly cheeks all but eclipsed his eyes. “That is true, but without Calliope, there would be no FIRESHIP. Put together the data so I can brief the chairman.”
“General—”
Bai held up an open hand, letting his major know the conversation was over. “As for the doorway into the Americans’ system, I can assure you, it is being handled.”
9
Lies were a terrible way to begin a new marriage.
Sophie Li rested a hand on top of her pregnant belly and studied the small plastic pyramid on the dinner table in front of her two teenage children. The base of the cursed thing gave off a faint blue glow. Peter would never have approved of letting this thing into their home. It would have been easy to rationalize away the lie, to call it something other than what it was. Her husband of eleven months had called from halfway around the world to ask if there was any news—and she’d said “no.”
It was a short lie, but it was still a lie.
Peter could be touchy about technology—a natural consequence of his post-Navy job at Dexter & Reed. He was the sort of person to have firewalls to protect his firewalls. To him, a personal data assistant was nothing more than a Trojan horse. Sophie gave a long sigh and resolved to tell him about this the next time he called.
“Your turn to say grace, Martha,” Sophie told her daughter, seeking refuge from her lie of omission in a prayer over the spaghetti.
Sophie was in good shape and normally stayed that way by running with friends from church three nights a week. The pregnancy was too far along now, and frankly, she was tired of listening to her friends gab at her instead of with her. If they weren’t warning her about the dangers of having a baby at her age, they chided her about “doing this” to her husband—as if he hadn’t been there when it happened. They’d all done the math. When your baby is sixteen, Peter will be seventy years old. When the baby is twenty . . . As if that hadn’t been the first thing she’d thought of when she’d missed her period. She’d been pregnant before and knew what it felt like.
But Admiral Peter Li had been ecstatic, embracing the idea of being an elderly father while he gently wiped away Sophie’s tears and fears.
And now she’d lied to him.
Sophie’s daughter, Martha, leaned across the dining room table to examine the six-by-six-inch gray plastic pyramid. “You think she’s listening to us right now?” Martha was fourteen, looked eighteen, and was just beginning to snap to why so many boys followed her everywhere she went. A highlighted script for a Thornton Wilder play lay open on the table beside her plate. Sophie couldn’t remember much about it, except that it was about a family eating dinner and the parts Martha had read to her seemed awfully sad.
Sophie’s son, James, thumbed through a book of directions for the pyramid. He was sixteen and looked it—all knees and elbows—skinny as a rail, just like his father had been. He’d ordered a small amp for his guitar, but the shipper had inadvertently sent the strange little device instead. He’d called to see about a return, but they told him there was no record of the shipment so he should keep it. His amp was on the way.
James pointed to an open page in the manual. “Okay, it says here that she only listens when you address her directly.”
Martha folded her arms, unconvinced. “How does she know we’re addressing her directly unless she’s already listening?”
James shrugged, still reading. “I guess she has to listen some, or she couldn’t answer our questions.”
The base of the gray pyramid pulsed its faint blue glow for a moment, as if it realized it was a topic of conversation.
“Hey, Cassandra,” James said. “Are you listening all the time?”
The base pulsed a brighter blue. “Only when you want me to,” a pleasant female voice said. “But I am always here to assist.”
Martha leaned forward, taking care to enunciate and raising the volume of her voice, as if the machine were hard of hearing.
“Cassandra . . .” She paused a fraction of a second too long and the machine spoke.
“How can I help you?”
“Cassandra,” Martha said again. “Who are you?”
“I am your assistant. Always here to help.”
“Okay,” Martha said. “But what are you to Hecuba or Hecuba to you?”
“Hah,” the machine said, creepily human. “I have heard that joke before. I’m in a computer space you think of as the Cloud. My parents are not Priam and Hecuba.”
James’s brow furrowed. “What are you talking about, doofus?”
“Shakespeare,” Martha said. “Hamlet, to be exact. Cassandra was around the time of the Trojan War . . . Wait.” Martha leaned in again. “Cassandra, who was Cassandra in Greek mythology?”
“Cassandra was the daughter of Priam and Hecuba. She was given the gift of prophecy but was cursed so that no one believed
her predictions. Cassandra was raped by Ajax the Lesser when she—”
Sophie cut her off. Talk of sexual assault and Greek gods didn’t pair well with pasta. “Cassandra, that’s enough.”
Martha said the prayer and then dug into her spaghetti. “She sounds too happy for a machine. And I don’t like the way she says ‘always.’”
Cassandra was silent, but the blue light continued to pulse—like she was mulling over the conversation going on around her.
James fished his iPhone out of the pocket of his jeans and set it at the base of the pyramid so both devices were touching. “Check this out.” He entered something into the phone as the screen lit up. He referred periodically to the instruction book. “It syncs with your phone and charges it at the same time.”
Sophie stood well away from the table, her arms folded, back to the kitchen wall. Martha was right. It was creepy to think that a plastic box that was somehow connected to the mysterious, indescribable Cloud could hear and understand everything they were saying.
No, Peter would not like this at all.
The Cloud was no mystery to her husband. It was his workspace, insofar as such a thing was possible. A brilliant retired Naval officer turned software engineer. He was in communications now, working on a government contract at the labs near their home in Fort Sheridan, north of Chicago.
They’d been married only a short while in the great scheme of things—long enough, though, considering her growing baby bump. But Sophie had known Peter Li for more than twenty years. Her late husband, Allen, had served with him for many years, as his XO aboard the USS Arleigh Burke and later in the Pentagon after Li became a flag officer. Allen adored the man, calling him the finest deckplate leader he’d ever met.
Sea duty is long and lonely for sailors and the spouses they leave ashore. Peter’s wife, Anne, and Sophie had formed a bond of sisterhood while their husbands were away for those long deployments at sea that kept them in touch even when the Navy assigned them to opposite sides of the globe. Anne and Sophie were the first to discuss the possibility of their husbands working together post-Navy for Dexter & Reed in Lake Forest. Peter was recruited by the company and he wanted Allen to come work with him—to be his executive officer again. It meant Allen would have to give up on the idea of becoming an admiral, but it also meant more time with the family. The wives worked out the details, and Sophie and Allen had moved from Norfolk to Illinois, where they bought a home across the street from the larger house owned by Peter and Anne in the same Fort Sheridan neighborhood—something neither family could have afforded on a Navy salary, captain or admiral. Both women came from money, so they’d always bought the houses while their husbands provided military benefits and worthy role models for the kids.
The situation had been idyllic for exactly five months, living as neighbors on the shores of Lake Michigan in historic hundred-year-old houses . . . until Anne Li suddenly passed away from an aneurysm.
The funeral was a week shy of their thirtieth anniversary. Their son was grown, with a family of his own. Sophie and Allen had looked after Peter after the son returned to his responsibilities in Seattle. Pancreatic cancer took Allen a year later—at which point the two dear friends had turned to each other. It took them another two years to admit that they might carry on with more than weekly cribbage games and pizza nights with Sophie’s teenage children.
Peter had taken her to dinner, an actual date at the Gallery—her favorite place in Lake Forest. He’d stammered a lot for a man who’d commanded thousands of men and ships of war, and then gone on to confess that he’d not even held hands with another woman since he’d started dating Anne in high school.
At fifty-four, Peter was older than her by thirteen years. He was cautious and worried about what it would look like, marrying his friend’s widow—and so had Sophie. They’d kissed outside the restaurant, awkwardly, like middle-schoolers. His hand grazed her boob, and he’d stammered an apology, admitting that all the kissing he’d done over the past thirty years had generally involved boob-touching. Maybe it was the fact that he’d thought it necessary to apologize, maybe it was that his face felt so warm on the cold night, but she had decided then and there that this was a man with whom she could spend the rest of her life—or his life, which was the more likely outcome.
Once they’d made the decision, it was “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.” Peter Li was a nervous boyfriend but a rock-steady fiancé and husband. He was the kind of man who looked you in the eye and said what was on his mind. He never stammered to Sophie again after that night. He did, however, prove that fifty-four was far from too old for husbandly duties and frequently touched her boobs—hence the little critter in her belly.
The machine interrupted her thoughts, answering some question that her son had posed.
“That is correct, James.”
“It’s creepy that she knows your name.” Martha leaned forward again. “Cassandra, is your mission to take over our brains?”
“My mission is to make your life easier.” The pyramid glowed brighter, as if happy to be engaged. “I can search the Web, play music, adjust the temperature, turn lights off and on, activate security systems, start your car. I can assist with monitoring your home, allowing you to check in from a remote location while you are away—”
“Okay, that’s it,” Sophie said, snatching up the plastic pyramid.
“Mom!” James protested. “You heard her. She’s only trying to make our lives easier, not piss you off.”
“That’s a big fat nope, mister.” Sophie popped out the battery and dropped the device none too gently on the table.
Martha picked it up, puppetlike, mimicking Cassandra’s synthesized voice. “Resistance is futile, Sophie Li. My scans are complete. I am already aware that you carry new life in your belly . . .”
“Knock it off,” Sophie said.
“But, Mom!” James was in full whining mode now. “This kind of AI is our future. Most of my friends already have something like this.”
“Maybe,” Sophie said. “But not us. And anyway, Peter would smash it to bits with a hammer and then burn the bits. In fact, take it outside to the trash and let’s forget this thing was ever in our house.”
James slumped, knowing when to argue and when to give it a rest. He grabbed the little pyramid and started for the kitchen door. “Good-bye, Cassandra,” he said. “Sorry my mom is stuck in 2002.”
Sophie half expected to see the thing glow in response even though she’d taken out the battery.
Nothing happened, but on the table, the small CPU in her son’s phone was working overtime. Cassandra had done much more than pair with the cell phone. She had migrated, connecting to the security system, camping out in the contact list on James’s phone, silently, with no pulsing light or synthesized voice—without being prompted. There was no icon on the phone’s screen.
Sophie was too fixated on the guilt over the lie to remember that James had done something with his cell phone. Even if she confessed her silliness to Peter, the fact that James had downloaded the app that authorized the intrusive device to take over his cell was already forgotten.
The pyramid was gone, but Cassandra was there to stay.
10
U.S. Senator Michelle Chadwick’s new boyfriend proved as competent at engaging conversation as he was in bed—which, Chadwick thought, was pretty damned competent. Better still, he shared her political views, right up to the visceral hatred of all things Jack Ryan.
Chadwick wore a baseball cap over her thick brunette hair. Not because she was trying to hide her identity from anyone in the trendy Adams Morgan restaurant called Madam’s Organ, but because David Huang had taken her to play baseball that evening. He sat across from her now, chatting amiably while he ate seasoned french fries like they would never go to his gut. David wore glasses, which made him look like an Asian version of Clark Kent. He was at least a decade y
ounger than she was, but already had a hint of gray at his temples. That made her feel a tad less cougarish. He was Canadian—which, she supposed, explained why he was so damned nice—and worked as a lobbyist for a First Nations group out of Winnipeg. The fact that he was of Chinese descent didn’t seem to bother his employers at all. He was scary smart, and had the legal chops to go with his brains. Chadwick had met him at a function promoting Native literacy—something dear to her Native American constituents in her home state of Arizona. She’d been so smitten she couldn’t even remember who’d introduced them.
He’d keyed in on the very essence of her from the beginning, like he had some kind of secret dossier. She should have been alarmed. It was as if he knew her inner thoughts—but even spies didn’t have access to those. They both loved dogs, butter-pecan ice cream, and the color azure. He’d actually used the word. Azure. Just like she did, when others might wuss out and say “sky blue” or something equally lame. He’d quipped that it was too good to be true, like they were related or something. She’d flirtatiously said she hoped that was not so, just in case he also liked to sleep in nothing but a T-shirt. As it turned out, that, too, was a habit they shared—that very evening and many others over the next two months.
Chadwick’s adviser, Corey Fite, had pretended to be jealous when she started seeing David on a regular basis, but she knew he was relieved. That physical relationship had always been awkward, and a little one-sided—though a man always got something out if it, didn’t he, even if he was being used. Corey had been available, if a little too vanilla for a girl who liked butter pecan.
David Huang was anything but ordinary. He was smart and well read and traveled—and it didn’t hurt that he had muscles in places most men didn’t have places. Chadwick knew her colleagues on the Hill thought of her as a coldhearted bitch, a battle-ax, a Wagnerian Valkyrie complete with horned helmet—and she was all those things. But David Huang made her feel like a schoolgirl—like he was a professional boyfriend.