MINDFRACK
Page 28
“Ade – please drop my link to your tablet. I think it’s infected by the spybot.”
“Spybot?”
“The hacker.”
“But you won’t be able to speak.”
“That doesn’t matter. You can reconnect me later. Please unlink or disconnect me – and reboot your tablet. Hurry!”
Salvatore opened his mind’s eye. The spybot’s probe was upon him, the end spinning in front of him like a corkscrew; but before it could connect he was snatched out of Goku’s grip.
He felt the GNG cloud spin out from under him and watched in amazement as the spiralling blur morphed into the fabric of a tunnel whose end was so far away that it could have been the Earth as seen from the Moon.
A spot caught his attention as it emerged from the blue and white planet. It grew rapidly into a dark shape before bloating into a familiar, whale-like form.
It was the ugly spybot with Pic’s face. It was pursuing him through the tunnel.
Salvatore willed himself to move faster.
Again, one of the eyes sprouted a protuberance, which grew into a tentacle. It wavered in Salvatore’s wake as the distance between them closed. He felt it reaching into his itch, and braced himself for another violation of his mind.
Nothing happened.
The overwhelming detail and sensations of the cloud-world vanished, along with the itch in his head, as he burst through a membrane and into a black void that he recognised all too well.
***
Within the void, two words. “John …? John Six …?”
His itch had returned.
He reached out quickly.
Ade had brought his tablet back online but had disabled the access to the GNG cloud; to prevent Pic, Salvatore knew, from invading the laboratory systems. Unfortunately, it also meant that he too was restricted, but from the other side of the electronic fence. A conundrum, as he needed to get back to his friends. He stayed quiet trying to think of a way out of his predicament; he really didn’t want to talk to Ade if he could help it.
“John – I know you can hear me. Please respond – or I’ll turn off this tablet for good. You have five seconds. Five … four … three … two –”
Salvatore turned his new eyes towards Ade.
“Ade – I’m here.”
Ade let out an explosive sigh. “I knew it. I don’t know how, but you’ve been fooling us all along, haven’t you, my little man?”
“Please don’t call me that, Ade. It’s demeaning.”
“Whatever. Now, you have some explaining to do. While I waited for the re-boot, I had a good think. Something’s been bothering me.”
“I don’t understand, Ade.”
“I think you do. For example, when I came in here the EEG showed that you were in deep sleep. Yet you were able to talk to me.”
“It could have been the hacker interfering with the systems.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
Salvatore accessed the tablet’s settings as they argued.
“Let me explain something to you, John. I’ve been puzzling over a number of things.”
“What would that be, Ade?” He found the network list. As always, the linkage options were presented to his mind’s eye as doors, though this time they were locked. He started to work through them, trying to find one with a security mechanism that he could override.
Ade stood up and paced the laboratory, running a hand over the scientific apparatus and systems as he passed them by. “A lot of your unexplained progress and activities coincide with usage of this tablet, especially during out of hours. Don’t think we haven’t been monitoring you day and night. Things didn’t tally, despite what the EEG was telling us. Especially the lab’s data traffic – something picked up by one of our support technicians. We wrote these up as unexplained anomalies. You with me on this?”
“It could be the hacker …” He had found a door that led to the GNG cloud – one where he could see its workings.
“Every time, every night? No, I don’t think so. Any cyber-attack from outside our network would not have gone undetected for so long. And what would be the purpose? No. Logic dictates there has been unauthorised activity from inside the lab. You’ve been messing with the systems, haven’t you? I don’t know how you’re doing it, but it is you, isn’t it …?”
“Ade, there is a hacker, he’s dangerous, you must believe me.” He began working around the security codes of the GNG cloud door.
“And then there’s your extraordinary progress with the speech app.”
“His name is Pic, and he will destroy all your work, possibly kill me even, unless you let me deal with him.”
“Kill you? How?”
“I don’t know yet, but you need to trust me.” Success! Salvatore leapt forward through the GNG door. In a fraction of a second he made it to Grist’s penthouse cams. He glimpsed a struggle going on but before he could understand what was happening, his mind’s eye was snatched back to Ade’s tablet.
“No you don’t …” said Ade, engrossed in his tablet. His attention returned to Salvatore and a manic grin slowly spread across his face. “You just did that, didn’t you?”
“Ade, please reconnect your tablet to the outside –”
“So you do admit it!”
“… Yes.”
Ade became animated. “Oh my God. If you can do these things, we could be closer than we think to our goal of freeing man completely from his evolutionary constraints. Do you understand the significance? Immortality …”
“I don’t care about your goals, Ade. You are a cruel man.”
“Rubbish – what I do here is for humanity.”
“I don’t think so. I think it is only for you and your ego.”
“I’m not arguing further. You will tell me exactly what you are capable of.”
“The hacker, we must stop him. Your security is fragile. He wants me.”
“What the hell are you talking about? Why does he want you?”
“Please, Ade, if I do not deal with this, everything will fail.”
Confusion fell from Ade’s face. “I think you’re bluffing – I think there isn’t any hacker. I think it was you all along – and something went wrong. That’s it, isn’t it?”
No, I –”
“Shut up – I’ll tell you what we are going to do. We’ll get a new device for you to interface with, but not this – this is way too easy for you to breach. First, I’ll disconnect you from my tablet to stop your little games, so you’d better prepare yourself. You might be spending a little time in isolation. When you come back online, things will be different. Then, you are going tell me everything.”
“No! You don’t understand.”
“Oh, but I think I do, my little man …”
55
“What’s wrong?” said Logan, under his breath.
“The little shit drone just fired a laser at me,” said Wanda, her voice coarse and fragile, “… hit the top of my shoulder – it hurts like hell.”
“Just hang on.”
Logan turned his attention back to Grist. The old man was a sad sight. He’d obviously donned his exo without help and in a hurry. The exo’s mesh, actuators and joint servos were on top of his evening casuals that appeared rucked and twisted underneath; it couldn’t have been comfortable. In addition, his exo gloves were hanging from his wrists. They looked the fiddliest to get on.
He raised his right arm, until it was extended out in front of him, wavering, despite the exo’s efforts to steady it. In his weak, naked hand was a gun.
“You?” he said. A thin humourless smile spread across his face. He kept his weapon trained on Logan. “I’d be perfectly within my rights to shoot you and kill you where you stand.”
“It’s pretty obvious that you haven’t handled a gun for some time, Mr Grist; why don’t we just put our weapons down. Look, I’ll put mine here, see?” He placed the police-issue puncher on the table, knowing it didn’t have enough juice to take down a fly.
Grist replied but Logan didn’t hear him; he was distracted by Wanda’s iSense view. She was looking down. There was a flash of light.
“I’ve been hit by a laser,” said Carrie.
“Ohmygod, they’re below us as well?” said Wanda.
“I see three of them,” advised Carrie. She had a wider visual bandwidth even than iSense. “No, make that four, one just came out of a side tube. What do I do?”
“I don’t know, I really don’t know. Shit!!” Wanda yelped again, her view lurching sideways. There was a puff of smoke coming from her gloved hand “Nearly lost my grip ... It really, really hurts!”
“Dammit – just try and avoid them … What did you say, Mr Grist?”
“I said yes, I do … Who are you talking to?”
“My friends. They’re here. Hidden. Waiting for my command.” It was mostly the truth.
“To do what, exactly?” Grist looked perturbed but not particularly anxious.
“Can’t say, Mr Grist – except that you’re going to be in a lot of trouble unless you do as I say.”
Grist snorted. “Really?”
“Your iSense is offline, in fact all comms are dead for you. I’ve deliberately trapped you up here with me.” Another lie.
“You need me, don’t you. If you were going to kill me you’d have brought a better arsenal than that.” He bobbed his hand at Logan’s puncher.
Grist’s confidence was returning and Logan had to admire the frail old man’s bravado. “It would do the job, but you’re right, I do need you.”
“Why?” asked Grist, looking genuinely intrigued. He sat down on a chair and placed the gun down close to him.
“Because I know all about Dexy. She was your daughter.”
“So what?”
“And her twin brother – your son.”
“Ah – that. But again, so what?”
“And I know what you did to Mireille – and why.”
Grist faltered. No wonder. Logan knew they were in sensitive territory now; Shala had downloaded copious information into his mind regarding the suspicious death of Grist’s wife, twenty-seven years ago.
“Congratulations – now you have my attention, detective. But cheap media slur made those allegations as well, and they were quickly shot down as fake and –”
“No, you don’t understand, Mr Grist,” said Logan shaking his head, “I know the truth. I know exactly what you did.”
Grist narrowed his eyes, and the fingers of his hand that rested on the table began to tap out a subliminal rhythm saying, Tread carefully.
“Then I’ll go on. You, sir, murdered your wife Mireille by employing an assassin to fake an accidental fire at her home in Nice. You intended to kill her unborn child.”
Grist baulked. “And why would I do that?”
“Because you married someone a lot younger, in the heat of passion – and it was a mistake. But your legal aids weren’t stupid. They tightened up the prenup considerably. A clause stated that Mireille must forego children else could only make claim to a severely reduced inheritance, if you were to die. She understood and, at first, went along with the contract; she had beauty, French heritage and nobility, but little wealth. And she performed for you didn’t she? Indulged in your fantasies, am I right?”
Grist grunted.
“But after the first couple of years she became more demanding, she wanted children despite the contract. That was unacceptable to you – too many unknowns, too many risks. You further modified your will and restricted her potential inheritance even further – almost to nothing – if she had your children. And those children would also suffer from those restrictions. Is that pretty much as it was?”
“Conjecture. Many biographies have been written about my life.”
Logan continued undeterred. “Your marriage soured. You became suspicious of her other relationships. You had a state-of-the-art 5thgen PA assigned to her. Told her it was a gift. In fact, it was an expensive spy, reporting back to you regularly. You became increasingly controlling and Mireille became more and more frightened of you. Mireille returned to her home in France on a regular basis, the PA in tow, reporting to you, covertly. From one such trip she didn’t return. You learned through your 5thgen spy that she was pregnant. At first you thought she was having an affair, but then you discovered she had impregnated herself with your sperm, your DNA. There was a loophole in the prenup regarding her impregnation across borders. She intended to launch an international legal case challenging the prenup. She’d done her homework.”
Grist had become quiet. His eyes were as intransigent as diamonds and Logan felt he was being assessed for the best means of execution.
“But this is where the story gets really interesting,” he went on, prodding at the table in front of him. “Someone, an unknown robotics genius, circumvented the programming of the 5thgen PA, so when it reported back to you it was telling you lies. You never knew about the surrogacy, nor did you know she was having twins.”
“All right, enough. Tell me what you want.”
“I haven’t finished, Mr Grist – there are things I need to get out into the open. They are critical, and relevant to what happens next.”
“Such as?”
“I’ll keep this next part brief. The twins survived as the surrogacy was hidden from you. But you thought you’d killed two birds with one stone, if you’ll pardon the sick pun. The body was so badly burnt in the fire it was impossible to tell if Mireille was carrying, or not. But you naturally made the assumption. In Dexy’s own words, you must have crapped yourself when you realised who she was. And you effectively murdered her again – your own daughter. How could you …? By the way, we know how that was done, too – we have the evidence.”
The evidence they had was tenuous at best. The assertions, however, seemed to be unnerving Grist, as he swallowed thickly. He raised his chin and drew himself up. Slowly and deliberately, he said, “You have no idea what is at stake, detective, the sacrifices that have to be made.”
Logan went on, ignoring Grist, the words continuing to emerge from his implanted memories as though it were Shala herself speaking on behalf of the Xenos; maybe that was her intention. “What you didn’t know at the time was that the 5thgen PA – there weren’t any 6thgens then – was reverted in functionality to a Bestie-doll to stay with Dexy, and later, during her teens, upgraded to a 6thgen and renamed Carrie. The problem is that her upgrade wasn’t entirely successful: many of the original memories have become tied up in the 5thgen part of her subconscious and are inaccessible – unless you have the maintenance key to access them.”
“All right, enough. I’ve no idea how you put together this … story … but what do you want? Money?”
Grist was visibly shaken. Of course he would admit to nothing. He’d been down these paths of accusation before, but it was doubtful that anyone had laid bare such detail. Logan had wondered whether Xiang had seen everything using his farsight.
It was time to capitalise on their impromptu stand-off; perhaps this would work out better than his original plan, he dared to consider. “No. This isn’t blackmail – well, not quite …”
“I don’t follow.”
“I’ll make it as clear as I can. We have enough evidence to have you incarcerated for the remainder of your life – I doubt even your Guild friends will want to be associated with you after that. And I doubt you will have access to your cryogenics – no coming back, Mr Grist, not even for you.”
He recoiled at that statement and was hurting; no mean achievement.
“You still haven’t explained.”
“I want you to help me get into Carrie’s mind. I want to know what she knows about your son. Where he might be.”
It was the first time that he’d he
ard Grist laugh. It was an empty and soulless sound. “What, give you access to more evidence? And why would I do that?” he said, scathingly.
“Because you and I well know that your son – if he’s out there – will be found one way or another. He’s the wild card in all this. And this is my offer. If you do this your secret stays safe – we won’t bring any legal case against you for any of your past misdeeds involving Mireille or Dexy. It may be that your son may not even exist, he might be dead – or he might not want to cooperate. Hell, he might even want to continue your work in the Guild.” Grist’s mouth shrank into a thin white line. “I think neither of us want that scenario.”
Grist slumped back in his chair. “What’s stopping you from making your accusations, even if I do what you want?”
“Quite simply? We would prefer you stay in control of GNG – at least for the remainder of your natural life. You will effectively be a known quantity, given that you know we can bring you to account at any time.”
Wanda’s voice in his buds distracted him. “All right, we’ve found a tactic,” she said. “I’m using my rucksack as a shield. Carrie is taking hits, but it doesn’t seem to bother her so much. She’s knocked some of them off of the wall. I think the lasers are just designed for small pests like rats, mice, that sort of thing. But I don’t know how long this is going to work. I think more are coming ... Hang on a minute, what’s that?” Her iSense view flicked upwards, just for a few moments, as she was worried about taking a hit from a laser to her eyes. But it was long enough: there was a flying drone in the shaft with them. “Damn, I think someone is watching us. It can’t be Salvatore as he would have –”
Wanda’s viewpoint disappeared.
Logan’s iSense had gone offline, which could mean only one thing. He turned his attention back to the penthouse. Grist had a smile on his face.
“It looks like your little game has failed, detective,” Grist said. He got up out of his seat and approached Logan. He’d left his gun behind such was his confidence. “It seems my security has re-established comms. They are on their way right now. And we have your partner in crime conveniently trapped in the riser, with Carrie. My, that was a stupid thing to do, wasn’t it? And you really thought I would acquiesce to your ridiculous demands? I’ll take my chances if you or your friends pursue any legal process. Ask yourself, how will it look? You broke in here and attacked me. I have access to the most comprehensive legal teams in the world. I never lose. Now, before they get here …”