Chasing Rain

by Brandt Legg

  “We’re CHIPs,” 0630 answered. “‘Cranial Hybrid Implanted Person’, which means we have a receptor behind our ears, and a neural net and interface chip surgically implanted.”

  “Sounds painful.”

  “Not at all,” 0630 said. “They tweaked our pain receptors during the procedure.”

  “But you are still human?” he asked as a yellow Lamborghini shot past them.

  “Superhuman, actually,” 0830 said. “That’s why we volunteered. We’re the next step in human evolution.”

  “Well, what’s that mean?” Franco asked, feeling strangely vulnerable, definitely unfamiliar for him. “You can’t fly, or lift cars, or anything—”

  “Our brains are now the equivalent of a networked computer. However, we can easily link with the Orion, TruNeural’s supercomputer, which currently runs ninety-six thousand processor cores with a LINPACK benchmark score of 92.3 FLOPS.”

  “Great, and what does that get you?” Franco asked absently, oblivious to what they meant.

  “Supercomputers are not measured in million-instructions-per-second, which is our standard capabilities while in an unlinked mode. However, when linked, we have the capacity of the supercomputers, which are measured using floating-point operations per second, or FLOPS. Then we can perform up to nearly one hundred quadrillion FLOPS.”

  “Yeah?” Franco said, unimpressed. “How is that going to help us find Chase Malone?”

  “We can anticipate his every move. Our AI-equipped chips mean that in an instant we can explore every single scenario, as if we were playing a game of chess. We know every possible move, and every move based on those results, and those, and those, and so on until infinity,” 0630 said.

  “We’re not playing chess on a finite board, with only so many moves,” Franco countered, now interested.

  “A chess board has sixty-four squares of alternating colors. Each player has sixteen pieces,” 0830 began. “After just the first three moves by each player, there are over nine million different possible positions. After four moves, the number grows to two hundred and eighty-eight billion. Once you get to an average forty-move game, the possible moves far exceeds the number of electrons in the observable universe.”

  “Wow,” Franco said, finally impressed, and also a little nervous.

  “Do you have any idea how powerful artificial intelligence is?” 0630 asked rhetorically. “No. You have no idea, and cannot begin to fathom what we are capable of, how much is feasible, the magnitude of what has begun.”

  Franco whispered the first line of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to himself. “‘You will rejoice to hear that no disaster has accompanied the commencement of an enterprise which you have regarded with such evil forebodings.’”

  Three people watched the passengers board the flight from Sacramento to Vancouver. One, a CISS agent, dispatched by Travis, recognized the other two as a low-level Chinese contractor for the MSS, and a GlobeTec Security person. But the founder of Balance Engineering was a no-show.

  “Clearly,” the CISS agent reported to Travis, “neither the MSS nor GlobeTec believes Chase Malone is getting on this plane, or they would not have sent the second-stringers. So where is he?”

  “Chase is trying to throw us all off his tail because he thinks he’s in serious trouble,” Travis said. “But has no idea just how deep the trouble really is.”

  Rong Lo, furious that Chase had vanished, left the consulate with a new plan. Although he’d been unable to locate the data he’d pilfered from his BE headquarters heist, he did have the MSS Advanced Tracking, or “AT” systems—Artificial Intelligence combined with satellites and other surveillance networks, drawing together grids and suggesting likely movements of targets. Its accuracy was in the seventy percent range, but Rong knew how to improve his odds. When the AT system pinpointed Wen Sung’s probable destination as either Edmonton or Calgary, Rong fed every known MSS data-point about the two cities into the servers and made an interesting discovery.

  “Edmonton is the last known location of an Astronaut,” he told one of his underlings. “Get a team in the air now.”

  “Are you sure we shouldn’t split them, in case she’s actually heading to Calgary?” the man asked.

  “No!” Rong snapped. “She is going for that Astronaut.”

  “Yes, sir,” the man said. “Edmonton. And our orders?”

  “Find the Astronaut and you’ll find Wen. Find her and you’ll find Chase. When you find them, kill them all.”

  Forty-One

  Boone called as Chase was backing up the AI anecdote work on a flash drive and putting away his laptop in anticipation of boarding the commercial flight to Edmonton. He looked around the gate area as he answered. Still no sign of Flint.

  “My flight boards in five minutes,” Chase said.

  “Where to?”

  “Don’t ask. Did you get Mom and Dad out?”

  “Yes, I personally put them on a flight to Cancun. I’ve got a friend who lives down there. He’s going to meet their plane and take them to the resort.”

  “A resort? You call that hiding?”

  “Relax. I had my buddy make all the arrangements. Nothing is in their name.”

  “Okay,” Chase said, not convinced, but knowing he couldn’t micromanage everything. “Let me know when they land. And have your friend hire some reliable local security to keep watch. I’ll pay, just call Adya with whatever you need.”

  “Roger that,” Boone said. “Now what about you? Are you safe?”

  Something in his brother’s tone, the voice of someone he trusted so completely, caught him off guard, and Chase choked up for a moment. “I don’t know.”

  Sitting in an aisle seat, waiting for take-off, Chase found his mind racing. He’d assumed a new identity, yet he wasn’t exactly an anonymous figure. Sooner or later, a facial recognition system is going to snag me. Beltracchi had told him there were ways to beat the algorithms, if he got that far. This could be my last flight. Fortunately for him, only a few airports had thus far introduced facial recognition for standard boarding.

  Fragments of the competing calamities in his life swirled in his mind. Can I find Wen? Will the MSS find my parents? Will the Garbo-three get me the data keys in time? Does my backdoor into RAI still work? Will Franco Madden or Rong Lo find me first? Where on earth is Flint Jones? And Wen . . . Wen . . . Wen, what the hell is all this, Wen?

  Chase estimated that he had another ten hours of coding on the AI Anecdote until he could go no further without the Garbo-Three giving him the keys. What if they can’t get them? Even if they did come through, the final step required something that had never been done before. The backdoor Chase had planted in RAI could only be accessed through a neural interface, and that meant coding in the ethers. If I pull it off, I could win a Nobel Prize.

  Too bad no one will ever know about it.

  “So, what line of work are you in?” the old lady in the window seat next to him asked, interrupting his thoughts. He glanced over and could sense that she was hoping for a long conversation to pass the flight time away.

  “I sell life insurance,” Chase replied with a big smile. “I also love to wood cut.”

  “Oh,” she said, “that’s nice.” But the woman’s face didn’t agree with her words.

  “It’s a three hour flight, that would give me enough time to tell you about all of our products.”

  “Oh, uh, I’m sure it would,” she stammered. “It’s just that I’m in a book club and I need to finish this.” She held up a copy of CapWar Election as if it were a shield.

  “That’s okay,” Chase said, returning her smile. “I’ve got a big-save-the-world report to finish, anyway.”

  “Good,” she said, sounding relieved as she opened her book.

  A few minutes later, Flint Jones walked down the aisle, the second to last passenger to board. Chase noticed his cowboy boots first, then looked up at his face, rugged, determined, like a hero from a classic western film. Flint gave Chase an almost im
perceptible nod as he passed, inconspicuously slipping him a note. It was an update report on the threat status they currently faced.

  If you are reading this, then I will have already watched every passenger board and believe there are no MSS or GlobeTec agents among them. We should be safe until we land in Edmonton. However, it is not beyond the realm of possibilities that the MSS has the capability and desire to bring down the aircraft in other ways—surface-to-air missiles, or planted explosives in the cargo hold. Those scenarios would require more prior planning time than they would have had. An additional, and potentially more likely threat, could be carried out by either GlobeTec or the MSS involving the jamming of the plane’s onboard computers, navigational, mechanical, and operational equipment. The Chinese have extensive experience in this area, including reversing and defeating electronic counter measures. These attacks can be conducted almost instantly, if your flight has been identified.

  Chase stopped work on the AI Anecdote and started to type a letter to Wen. In trying to explain why he might not reach her, for the first time, he laid out the enormous odds he faced, and not since the day he and Dez read the final simulation had he repeated the words “End of humanity.” So much had happened in the four days since, that he now believed there was even less time to save the world.

  His letter, instead of being a farewell to a lover, became a plea for help. He listed contact information for Dez, Adya, Boone, and Mars. There is an AI arms race, he wrote. It must be stopped. Chase added details of RAI, and TruNeural, warned her about Franco and Sliske. He didn’t stop to think that she might not be capable of the mission any more than he ever questioned his own credentials. It was a job that had to be done.

  SAVE THE WORLD! he typed in all caps.

  Forty-Two

  Wen pulled up to a gray brick house in the upscale Glenora section of Edmonton and double checked the address. As soon as she received the location of the meeting, she’d done a search and found that the property was valued at more than $2 million. The home didn’t belong to the person she hoped to see. Astronauts are smarter than that, and she’d heard that this one was among the brightest of their exclusive club.

  Less than a minute after she arrived, a florist’s delivery van rolled in behind her car. She watched through the rearview mirror as a young man wearing a colorful uniform got out and walked toward her side of the vehicle. He stopped at the driver’s window, which she lowered while keeping a finger on the trigger of her Glock, concealed under a magazine. He held two long stem roses in his hand—one white, the other red. He looked at her expressionlessly for a moment and then smiled. Her finger moved a nanometer—another pulse in her veins and he’d be dead.

  “This is for you,” he said, extending the white rose. Wen took it. The man immediately turned and walked back to his van before she could thank him. Seconds later, the van pulled away.

  She found a tiny piece of green paper wrapped around the stem and carefully pulled it off. An address was neatly printed in white ink. After punching the street number into the car’s GPS, she did a U-turn and drove 2.3 kilometers to an even larger home—also not belonging to the Astronaut. The instant Wen arrived, a large garage door opened and, without instruction, she drove inside. The door immediately closed behind her.

  At least six vehicles could have easily fit in the wood paneled space. White concrete floors helped brighten the dimly lit garage. As her eyes adjusted, she spotted an older man with thick gray hair leaning against a beautifully restored vintage Mercedes-Benz 220. The Astronaut, she thought.

  “She’s a beauty, isn’t she?” the old man said, stepping away from the car and motioning his arms back to it, as if he were a salesman pushing the latest model. “1968, 116 horsepower, converted to bio-diesel. Course, that’s not the original paint. Hard not to love space-metallic-aurora-silver. Wonderful name for a color, don’t you think? I might have just called it plain ol’ silver cause that’s what it is, but I bet they sell more of it with that fancy name. No matter, I think a special auto-mo-bile such as this deserves a special color such as space-metallic-aurora-silver.”

  “Are you the Astronaut?” she asked, now doubting that this character could be a beyond-brilliant math savant.

  He squinted at her. “Why do they call us that?” he asked. “Maybe it’s similar to the paint. Makes us sound fancier.”

  “Thank you for agreeing to meet me,” she said, not sure how to proceed. “Do I get to know your name?”

  “Of course, where are my manners. I know you are Wen Sung. It does seem quite rude if you don’t have the same privilege. I’m Nash, Nash Graham.”

  “Like the singer?”

  “There’s a singer named Nash Graham?”

  “Yes, only his name is Graham Nash.”

  “Then not the same as the singer.” He winked at her.

  “Can you help me?”

  “You want an Antimatter Machine?”

  She nodded.

  “Do you know why we call it that?”

  “Because it’s a computer that cannot be seen or traced, like antimatter?” she replied.

  He smiled and walked back to the trunk of the Mercedes. “Antimatter possesses the opposite qualities as normal matter. We didn’t know for sure it even existed until tests detected it in particle accelerators.”

  “Meaning even an Antimatter Machine can be detected?” Wen asked.

  He nodded slowly. “Perhaps . . . it is possible. Whether the watchers have progressed that far or not is unknown. But always remember what happens when matter and antimatter meet.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Both are annihilated.”

  She stared at him for a moment. “I’m in a dangerous place,” she said.

  “Of course you are, or you would not require an Astronaut.” He reached in his pocket. She stiffened. He pulled out a Chapstick, applied it to his dry lips, and chuckled. “Nervous, you are, eh?”

  She nodded, liking the old man very much. “You don’t do this just for the money?”

  “No,” he said, as if it were an outrageous idea. “But I don’t do it for any great and noble reason either.” He could see her disappointment. “I do it because I have to. My brain is wired differently. I can tell you the day of the week on any date you name for the past two thousand years, I can recite the number Pi carried out to nearly a million digits by memory. Or ask me what twelve to the fifth power is or any number you like.”

  “Okay,” she said hesitantly. “What about twenty-six to the eighth power?”

  “My mind is instantly filled with digits, and I can tell you the answer is two hundred eight billion, eight hundred twenty-seven million, sixty-four thousand, five-hundred and seventy-six.”

  “That’s amazing.”

  “Not to me,” he said. “There are always numbers and equations moving through my head, and they are all different colors—extraordinary colors. My point is that I have to continually use the equations, push the mysteries to solve, problems needing solutions, things wanting to be created, or . . . ”

  “Or what?” she asked, enraptured by his passion.

  “If I did not answer the equations, I . . . I would go to a place where the numbers stopped making sense. A dark and random world where I would be lost . . . where I would go mad.”

  She didn’t know what to say, but his words made her sad. She felt sorry for him. “Can I hug you?”

  “I don’t do well with people touching me,” he said apologetically.

  “Can I try?”

  He nodded slowly and whispered something she didn’t hear.

  Wen reached carefully around his back and hugged him softly. “Thank you for saving my life.”

  Forty-Three

  Flint caught up with Chase after the pair had independently cleared customs in Edmonton and Flint had collected his checked bag, which contained a Beretta 92FS 9mm semi-automatic pistol, a short barreled shotgun, and plenty of ammo for each. Chase, anxious to pick up the rental car and get into town, h
urried his bodyguard.

  “Still aren’t telling me where we’re headed?” Flint asked as they crossed to the counter.

  “No,” Chase replied. He’d decided after Vancouver that secrets were easier to keep if only he knew them.

  The car had been reserved in Flint's name, so he handled the paperwork and paid with his credit card. The lot employee reviewed the vehicle to make sure there were no dents or scratches, got Flint's final initials, and then hurried off to help another customer.

  “Dodge Challenger,” Chase said, admiring the shiny black muscle car. “Good choice.”

  “Best getaway car they had,” Flint said.

  “Expecting trouble?” Chase asked rhetorically as they tossed their luggage in the back.

  “Always.”

  “Then you better give me the keys.”

  Flint shot him a confused look.

  “I’m a professional race car driver.”

  “Really,” Flint said, flashing a rare smile. “Works for me, because I’ll bet you don’t know how to use a gun, and I’m a professional shooter.”

  “Isn’t that what you get paid for?”

  “Let’s hope not.” Flint undid his suitcase, pulled out the two hard cases containing his firearms, unlocked them, wrapped them in a black t-shirt, and put them on the floor of the front passenger seat. He reached for a protein bar and offered one to Chase. “Maple pecan or wild blueberry?”

  “You really are expecting trouble,” Chase said, buckling his seatbelt and declining the offer.

  “They don’t call it riding shotgun for nothing.”

  “It’ll be different this time,” Chase said, thinking of Bob, Dave, and Twag as he eased the Challenger out of its parking slot.

  Flint nodded wistfully. “I still don’t feel good about this. We really should wait for my team. They’re about ninety minutes behind us, on a chartered flight out of LA. With travel time, that means they’ll be here in two hours. Can we hang tight until they get here?” He finished the bar, slid the wrapper in his pocket, and then wiped a scuff off his cowboy boots.