New York Nights [Virex 01]

by Eric Brown

  ‘What happened, Joe?’

  ‘LINx worked well. We added to it. We had a vision of what we wanted VR to become, and to achieve this we had to have bigger and better versions of LINx. It was an amazing tool. It was like working with one of the greatest multi-disciplinary minds on the planet, except, of course, it wasn’t really a mind, just a vast com-network. It helped us solve a series of problems, could suggest new avenues of approach, other angles from which to view theoretical situations. Then it came up with the prototype of the Nano-Cerebral Interface. LINx reasoned that for its programmers to work more successfully with its integrated logic systems, a direct machine-mind link would be necessary. Three years ago my design team came up with the first NCI. A colleague called Dan Reeves volunteered for the implant, and it proved a great success. Over the months it was superseded by improved models and Dan underwent a series of operations to have the latest versions fitted, each time with better results. Last year we fitted Sissi Nigeria with the very latest, state-of-the-art unit. It was with the aid of this and LINx that Cyber-Tech was able to steal a march on its competitors and open our VR Bars way before any of the other outfits were anywhere near ready. It made the directors of the company, and all our shareholders, multimillionaires overnight, and all because of a suggestion made by LINx during a routine ideas-session three years ago.’ He smiled to himself. ‘Thing was, LINx was all for having every tech in the place fitted with an interface. But we thought it wise to proceed with caution. It was still a relatively new technology, after all.’

  Kosinski paused there. Halliday thought he saw where this was leading. It had nothing to do with Nigeria’s selling top secret information to rivals: Joe had already told him that inter-company espionage was not what this was about. It was much simpler. The nano-cerebral link with which Nigeria had been fitted had malfunctioned, affected her reasoning, her interface with reality. It would explain the senseless violence, maybe even her own death.

  ‘Joe, did the cerebral units go wrong, send Nigeria mad?’

  Kosinski stared at Halliday, then smiled. ‘Hal, if it were as simple as that I’d be a happy man.’

  ‘Then what?’

  Kosinski rearranged the robes over his shoulder. ‘About three months ago, we noticed that a sizeable chunk of data was missing from LINx’s memory banks. There was an empty space where it should have been. At first we suspected espionage: some rival company had hacked into the system and leached the data, but when we ran invasion checks we found that nothing like this had happened. Then we suspected in-house treachery: someone employed by Cyber-Tech had somehow stolen the data. But, again, we came up with a big fat blank. There was just no way that anyone could have done this without setting off a thousand and one alarm bells.

  ‘At the same time as this was ongoing, my senior research team and I were developing programs dealing with a self-aware, decisionmaking, artificial intelligence - SADMAI - but the project started backfiring. Positive results that we had been getting now came back negative, and we explored avenues of research that turned out to be blind alleys.

  ‘Then, just last week, a junior technician in the lab came up with something. He discovered corrupted files on Nigeria’s and Reeves’ work-stations, files they had tried to delete without consultation, which is against team policy. So we retrieved them and found notes and formulae linked to something allied to the SADMAI project. We assumed that Nigeria and Reeves had been conducting their own, private, research program. We did some more investigating and found that they had logged unauthorised access to LINx over the course of the past few months. It occurred to me that the data missing from LINx might have been downloaded into Reeves’ and Nigeria’s NCIs, something we’d never even thought of checking at the time, it was so improbable. We investigated, and guess what?’

  ‘It’d been downloaded into their units?’

  He nodded. ‘That’s what happened, Hal.’

  ‘So they were committing industrial espionage?’

  Kosinski shook his head. ‘I told you earlier that this had nothing to do with anything as minor as that.’

  Halliday recalled what Wellman had said the other night about the potential catastrophe of industrial espionage to the fortunes of Cyber-Tech, and tried to square this with what Kosinski had just told him about it being a minor event.

  ‘The day we made this discovery,’ Kosinski went on, ‘Nigeria and Reeves disappeared. I broke the news to Wellman, and, of course, the first thing we suspected was espionage. It was the natural assumption. But the wrong one.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘When we found the deleted files in the work-stations, I put a team on working out how much Nigeria and Reeves had known about the SADMAI project. The team came up with a disturbing fact: the information concerning artificial intelligence that Nigeria had tried to delete could not have been developed by Nigeria or Reeves, as it was written in a code neither of them - or their cranial implant - was familiar with.’

  ‘But it was discovered on their work-stations.’

  ‘That’s right, but remember, they’d logged unauthorised access to LINx.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘Think about it, Hal. If Nigeria and Reeves had nothing to do with the data about artificial intelligence...’

  Kosinski stared at Halliday until the penny dropped.

  ‘Christ,’ Halliday said. ‘You don’t mean . . . LINx?’

  ‘It was the only answer we could come up with. LINx had been growing without our knowledge, developing itself and planning strategy. Of course, it had used Reeves and Nigeria as pawns in its game: it had suggested the use of nano-cerebral interfaces, remember? When it achieved self-awareness, it moved that part of its memory from the data banks, which was why we couldn’t find the data. I have no idea where it stored itself - somewhere on the Net. Then, when it realised that we’d discovered the missing data, and were onto Nigeria and Reeves, it downloaded itself - or rather, a part of itself - into Nigeria’s implant, effectively taking control of her.’

  Halliday stared at the image of the Buddhist monk and wondered whether he should believe what he was hearing.

  At last he said, ‘But . . . but why did Nigeria allow it to use her? Why did she allow LINx to download itself into her cranial implant?’

  ‘She’d had the implant a year,’ Kosinski replied. ‘She’d interfaced with LINx on many occasions. We can only speculate that LINx implanted a small part of itself in her NCI, or maybe some kind of command, very early on. Effectively, Nigeria had been under LINx’s control for as long as she’d had the implant. The same goes for Reeves.’

  Halliday stood up and stepped from the shrine. A warm wind played on his face, and as from far away he heard the sound of a bell slowly tolling.

  He turned to Kosinski. ‘Do you have any hard, concrete evidence for any of this? It sounds...’

  ‘I know, it sounds impossible. A year ago, I would never have believed it. Evidence? I have files back at Cyber-Tech, a few at the safe house. They wouldn’t mean much to you. More conclusive evidence is what happened to Sissi Nigeria yesterday.’

  Halliday returned to the bench and sat down. ‘Go back a few days. I was investigating Nigeria’s disappearance. I went to her apartment, found a computer console destroyed.’

  ‘That was probably to get rid of incriminating evidence that she had accessed LINx from home. She - or rather LINx - probably wasn’t aware at that time that we had evidence at Cyber-Tech.’

  ‘Then she attacked me, in the disguise of a Latino killer. Almost damned near did kill me...’

  ‘She didn’t attack you, Hal. That was LINx. We’re dealing with an artificial intelligence here. It has no conscience. It possesses knowledge, and the desire to add to that knowledge at whatever cost. It’s a survival mechanism.’

  He wondered why LINx had deemed it necessary to kill Carrie Villeux. He recalled what Anna had told him in the bar yesterday, that Carrie thought that Sissi Nigeria was acting oddly, was not herself. Obvious
ly, LINx had considered Villeux enough of a threat to warrant her death.

  ‘It killed Carrie Villeux yesterday,’ he said. ‘And then it had Nigeria interface with a computer terminal in ComStore, uploaded itself somewhere

  ‘And then downloaded a microwave packet straight into Nigeria’s interface, killing her instantly.’

  Halliday shook his head. ‘But why did it kill its host, Sissi Nigeria?’

  Kosinski gestured. ‘The police were onto Nigeria and LINx didn’t want the authorities, or Cyber-Tech, getting hold of Nigeria’s interface intact.’

  ‘Christ,’ Halliday whispered. ‘Is there any way you can trace it, track it to its . . .’ He shook his head, almost laughed at what he had been about to say. Its lair ... As if it were some wild and ravenous beast, which would kill at every opportunity, savagely and without mercy.

  ‘Track it to wherever it is that it’s hiding?’ Kosinski finished for him. The Net is a big place, Hal. It could be anywhere. It doesn’t need that massive a data-dump to store itself, either. You see, it can divide itself ad infinitum, find a cache in. a million locations from Azerbaijan to Zaire, and assemble itself almost instantaneously.’ He paused. ‘But I’m working on it. I have its signature, you see. I’m writing a program that can work out the code it uses to cover its traces. I reckon I’m nearly there. One day, maybe two . . .’

  ‘And once you locate it?’

  ‘Then I’ll be able to kill it, Hal. I created it, after all, and I have the technology to eradicate it, and any copies that it might make of itself.’

  ‘And until then, it’s free to roam?’

  Kosinski nodded. ‘It’s free to do whatever it damn well pleases.’

  ‘Can’t you - I don’t know - can’t you just shut down parts of the Net?’

  Kosinski laughed. ‘And bring the world to its knees? It’d be impossible. You don’t know how much everything relies on computer networks.’

  Something had occurred to Halliday. ‘What does it want, Joe? I mean, if all it wants is survival, then we have nothing to fear. Perhaps it really is like a wild animal. It’ll fight only to ensure its own survival. Left to itself, it’ll live peaceably.’

  ‘That occurred to me. Hal, but the danger is not so much what it wants - which we have no way of determining, anyway - but what other people, other governments, might want from it. It’s a potentially massive tool in any country’s armament. In terms of computing power alone, it’s staggering, but LINx has the ability to reason, to rationalise, to make decisions, even to grow.’

  ‘You almost make it sound like some kind of god.’

  ‘Well, depending on your definition of a god

  Halliday stared at Kosinski. ‘You said you’ll have the killer-program ready in a day or two?’

  Kosinski nodded. ‘I’m restricted because I don’t have access to Cyber-Tech HQ, where my work-station is.’

  ‘You think . . .?’

  Kosinski nodded. ‘LINx knows I’m onto it. It knows I have the capability to eradicate it - it’s already killed to ensure its survival, and it would kill again.’ He smiled. ‘You ever heard of Frankenstein’s monster? Well, this beast is just a little more fearsome. If I so much as show myself, it’ll have me. I’m holed up in the safe house, now, working round the clock.’

  ‘But you called us via the communications network earlier.’

  Kosinski laughed. ‘What do you take me for, Hal? The background of the apartment I was in, the view of the World Trade Centre, it was a holo-projection, just in case. I used a scrambler to kill any trace-signature on the call, too.’

  He paused, looking at Halliday. ‘The reason I called you, Hal, is that I need your help. You see, the program I’m writing will eradicate LINx, but before then there’s Dan Reeves at large, or rather LINx in the guise of Reeves. He’s the second and last person on the planet who LINx can manipulate: get Reeves out of the way, and we’ve confined LINx to the Net. My guess is that when LINx uploaded from Nigeria, it downloaded itself into Reeves’ NCI. LINx knows I’m onto it and wants me dead before I succeed, and the only sure way it can kill me is through Reeves.’

  ‘What can I do, Joe?’

  ‘I have an idea. It might be dangerous, but then you and Kluger are in that line of work anyway, so I thought you might not balk at a little risk.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘You contact Wellman while he’s at Cyber-Tech. You drop some information, more or less saying where I’m holed up, except, of course, I’ll be nowhere near there. You stake out the place and take Reeves when he shows. That’ll be LINx’s representative on Earth sorted out. All that’ll remain then is to scour it out of the Net for good.’

  ‘You sure there’s no one else LINx has downloaded itself into?’

  ‘Nigeria and Reeves were the only people at Cyber-Tech to be implanted with the interface. You understand now why LINx wanted more techs to be fitted with the interfaces? Thank Christ we thought to restrict the surgery to Reeves and Nigeria.’ He paused. ‘And I’m pretty sure that none of our competitors have the technology or know-how.’ He looked at Halliday. ‘So . . . are you up for it?’

  Halliday nodded. ‘In principle. Of course I’ll have to see what Barney thinks, talk it over.’

  ‘If you do decide to go ahead with it, go and see Wellman. He might come over as an insufferable asshole, but he’s okay at heart. Tell him what I’ve told you about the plan. I can’t risk contacting him over the com-net with that information. He’ll be able to help you out in terms of expenses. You’ll need a chu. LINx has seen you once and would recognise you again. Wellman will equip you with one. Also, he’ll be able to hire a neuro-surgeon to operate on Reeves and excise the implant.’

  ‘You want Reeves taken alive?’

  Kosinski looked at him. ‘If possible, Hal. He’s a good man. Remember, he had no choice in the matter. He’s been used against his will. Don’t worry. The man you’re up against might be governed by a machine intelligence, but physically he’s no stronger than he would be normally.’

  Halliday nodded. ‘I know that. It’s just the thought of not succeeding and Reeves - or rather LINx - getting away. I’ve seen the damage Nigeria did with the cutter. I don’t like the idea of failing to nail Reeves.’

  The Buddhist monk looked at Halliday, his expression stern. ‘If you can’t take him alive, then ... for the sake of anyone who might get in his way in the future, it might be better if he were dead.’

  Halliday nodded. ‘How do I contact you?’

  ‘You don’t. I’ll contact you. Whether you decide to help or not, get in touch with Wellman and inform him of your decision.’

  ‘I’ll do that.’ Halliday stood and stepped from the shrine. He stared down the mountainside, a part of him still finding it hard to accept that this was no more than an incredibly complex computer-generated image.

  Kosinski joined him. He smiled. ‘With luck, when all this is over, we’ll be able to meet again in the flesh.’

  ‘I’ll look forward to that, Joe.’ He paused, considering everything Kosinski had told him.

  ‘Where’s all this leading to, Joe? I mean, the AIs. If this one is any indication of how they’ll behave in future...’

  Joe was shaking his head. ‘I don’t think it is,’ he said. ‘What is happening with LINx, the killings, is just an unfortunate aberration. At least, I hope so. I mean, the development of AIs is inevitable. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question is, who will do the developing? Such power in the wrong hands, as I’ve said, could be catastrophic. Also, there’s the very real danger of them developing themselves -but I’d rather not dwell on that, Hal.’ He smiled. ‘It’s time I wasn’t here.’

  The Buddhist monk raised his hand, touched the base of his index finger. ‘See you around.’

  Joe Kosinski vanished. One second he was standing beside Halliday, and then he was gone, edited from the scene of the mountain pasture in an instant.

  Halliday turned his hand, looked at the circular indicator. Only a slive
r of crimson remained, signifying that he had spent almost an hour in the jellytank. He took one last look around the mountain paradise, then touched the circle.

  The Himalayan idyll disappeared. He was floating, without bodily sensation. Gradually, his senses returned and he sat up, blinking through the faceplate at the stark reality of the white-tiled booth. It was as if the Himalayan site, and what he had experienced there, had been no more than a dream.

  He showered quickly, dressed, then contacted Barney.

  ‘Hal? How’d it go? You meet him okay?’

  ‘We met, Barney. I can’t talk now, okay? I’ll tell you about it when I get back.’

  ‘Sure . . .’ Barney sounded concerned. ‘You okay, Hal?’

  ‘I’m fine. See you soon, Barney.’