“Let me guess—Dice noodled some high-tech jamming device for you.”
Chuck said nothing. He was frankly (and dismally) afraid that if he showed Matt the jammer his mysterious visitor had given him, he’d insist on turning it over to the general.
“Howard is suspicious of you, my friend,” Matt told him. “He thinks you might be plotting behind closed doors.”
“He’s worried about what I’m doing behind closed doors?”
“If you’re plotting something, yes.”
“We’re not ‘plotting.’ Our staff came to me because they are understandably concerned about the fact that they’re being spied on and that Deep Shield has started to . . . to manipulate our environment. Without our permission.”
“They need to protect us, Chuck.”
Matt had lowered his voice and leaned in across the table, though Chuck was now certain there was no one listening. Lorstad’s gizmo had apparently worked as advertised. That was something, at least.
“Do you understand why?” Matt asked. “We’ve become a very important asset to them. They want to make sure that some foreign organization doesn’t swoop in and offer us a deal we can’t refuse. We would be a tremendously potent military asset to another country or to a terrorist organization.”
Chuck made a wry face. “Is that what Howard told you?”
“Yes. Don’t you think he’s right?”
“Probably. But doesn’t it bother you to go from being a person to being a military asset? It bothers the hell out of our staff.”
“Is that what this is all about? Well, set their minds at ease, okay? Howard is just trying to protect important human resources from becoming prey.”
Chuck did not miss the rhetorical shift. “If you say so.”
“I do say so.”
Chuck opened his mouth to tell Matt what Lanfen had seen at Deep Shield but checked himself.
Matt caught his hesitation. “What?”
“I called a contact at the Pentagon to ask about Deep Shield. I must’ve talked to half a dozen people, two at the director level. They’ve never heard of it.”
Matt sat back in his chair. “Well, of course they haven’t. Or at least they wouldn’t tell you if they have. It’s top secret.”
“The director of technology was asking me questions about them, Matt. The CIA said they had no idea who these guys were and—”
Matt stood, setting his coffee mug down with a sharp thump. Coffee sloshed onto the table. “Good grief, Chuck. You’re as paranoid as the general. Get a grip. They do classified work. Would you tell some cold caller all your secrets?”
“Paranoid? I’m paranoid?” Chuck forgot his reservations about full disclosure. “Matt, Lanfen discovered they’re hiding a small army of robots they’ve been making on their own. Robots they’ve been taking pains to conceal even from Dice.”
“So? They’re experimenting with different forms. We expected that, didn’t we?”
Chuck took a deep breath. This was going nowhere good. He let the breath out and shook his head, feigning chagrin. “Yeah. Yeah, we did expect that. You’re right. Of course you’re right. The team is just being . . . hypersensitive. I’ll try to talk them down.”
“Will you?” Matt’s eyes shone with relief. “Good, because they’ll listen to you. Even Dice thinks I’m too cozy with Howard.”
“There’s an image,” murmured Chuck. “Yeah, sure. I’ll talk to them. First thing Monday.”
“Good,” said Matt. “Good. Maybe even before then if you can. Maybe you should throw another party this weekend.” He seemed to pull himself together then and left Chuck sitting at the table with his cell phone poised to call the FBI.
THE ALPHA ZETAS, AS THEY jokingly called themselves, had formed a tight clique within the ranks at Forward Kinetics. The better to protect themselves, Sara thought. They watched their watchers intently and compared notes on a daily basis. They were not afraid of surveillance; Tim had found ways to defeat the cameras at the software level while Mike could make listening devices go belly-up mechanically and make cameras simply look the wrong way. Sara was learning to employ both forms of manipulation on her own but had nowhere near their facility with it.
Mike was especially ruthless when it came to the Deeps’ surveillance equipment. He’d found bugs at his house and was so riled by having his family’s private space invaded, he’d caused several of their devices to die of “natural” causes.
“Watching me is one thing,” he’d told her. “Watching my wife and kids is something else. They’re not part of this classified crap, and they’re not gonna be.”
If the Deeps had any idea that their occasional equipment failures and communication snafus were anything more than random glitches, they didn’t say as much, and the zetas were careful not to tip their hands. They stuck slavishly to the program, teaching only what they were contracted to teach: basic, bonehead manipulation of Dice’s patented servos and software engines with a high-level Kobayashi module that facilitated their work. It was perhaps no surprise then that none of the Deeps—not one—could work directly with the hardware or software.
The alpha zetas communicated with the other members of the team—the beta zetas, as Sara had come to think of them—often enough to know they were also working directly with their devices, and they were no more sanguine than the alphas about the Smiths or the Deep Shield Humvee with its blacked-out windows or the government facility none of them had ever seen the outside of.
“It could be under the freaking White House,” Tim had commented one day. “Or the Washington Monument. Wouldn’t it be crazy if it’s under the Washington Monument?”
The chilling news that Eugene had found himself being tailed was enough to send Sara into Chuck’s office on a Wednesday afternoon to see if she could get some sense of his reaction to all this. Once she got there, she was at a loss for what to say.
They stared at each other like a pair of startled owls for a moment before Sara said, “So do you have any idea how many more teams of trainees we’re going to see before the contract is complete?”
Brenton blinked at her, pulling off his wire-rimmed glasses. “Actually, I’m not one hundred percent sure, but I’d imagine at least two more.”
She nodded, scrambling mentally for a way to ask what she really wanted to know. “I still haven’t gotten used to the idea that they’re probably listening to everything we say.” She met his eyes as forcefully as she knew how and reached up to tap her ear, raising her eyebrows questioningly.
He held her gaze for a moment and then glanced at the office door, which she’d closed behind her. “They certainly try. My office, however, is an island of silence and sanity.”
“You sure? How?”
“I have my ways.”
“Won’t they think it’s odd that your office is so quiet?”
“Oh, I let them in on things several times a day. Business-as-usual things. They’re blocked right now, though.”
Sara’s knees felt suddenly weaker than they had a moment before. She sat down in the chair across from Chuck. The alpha zetas had been able to compare notes with the betas only infrequently for the simple reason that the general and his minions (God, she was starting to think like Tim) seemed to go out of their way to keep the two groups apart. She had thought of calling Chuck a hundred times to ask if there were someplace they might meet where they wouldn’t be overheard. Each time before today, she’d hesitated.
How much time have we lost with me wavering like that?
“I don’t like what’s happening here, Doctor,” she told him. “None of my team does. The Deeps, the Smiths—I mean the security guys—”
Brenton smiled. “Yeah, we call them that, too.”
“It’s like we’re skating on very thin ice over a bottomless lake. There are things going on underneath that are scary.” She cocked her head and gave the scientist an assessing look. “Of course you might tell me I’m imagining things or exaggerating . . .”
�
��I’m not going to tell you anything of the sort, Sara. They’ve replaced our grounds crew with their people. They’re having us followed—”
She drew in a swift breath through her teeth at the confirmation. “Damn.”
“Nor has it escaped my notice that the general’s people have worked very hard at keeping the two teams of zetas apart.”
“So I’m not the only one.”
He smiled again. Really the man seemed to find humor in every situation.
“No,” he said, “you’re not paranoid. They really are watching us. I think it’s just that they don’t trust me, and they think of your team as the senior practitioners. You and Mike and Tim are the systems wizards, and that is apparently of primary importance to them. Lanfen’s discipline is at a more detailed level than yours, and Mini’s craft is simply window dressing to them.”
Something about the way he said that. “Are you hinting that maybe Mini isn’t just window dressing?”
Brenton got an almost wicked look on his face. “We haven’t exactly been forthcoming with the full extent of our . . . accomplishments.”
Now Sara smiled, too. “Neither have we.”
She told him in broad strokes what Mike and Tim were capable of when it came to the direct manipulation of mechanisms. He was impressed beyond words. Then the flood of questions came.
“All that notwithstanding,” Sara said when she’d wrapped up her quick recital, “we can’t keep meeting like this. Mike can create dead zones for us and even muck with the cameras pretty effectively, but that will be suspicious after a while. And having me coming to your office repeatedly is bound to draw attention.”
Chuck chewed the inside of his lip ruminatively. “Likewise if we were to suddenly start socializing.”
“Dice works with us fairly often. I think I might have a way I can pass information to him. Once he catches on, he might very well be able to figure out a way to respond. He’s a smart guy.”
“He is that,” Chuck agreed. “See what you can do.”
She realized what she could do the next afternoon as she was rendering an elevation to test her abilities with a new piece of software. On a “whim,” she inserted some signage and artful elements into her output.
“Like my work, Dice?” she’d asked when she’d finished the building.
He glanced up at it. Did a double take. She saw puzzlement in his eyes before the light of dawning comprehension produced a slow smile.
“I like it a lot,” he said. “Can I keep a rendering of it? I know it’s just a practice plot, but . . .”
“Sure thing.”
“In fact,” he said, “could you maybe do some renderings of my robots?”
So it went. He passed information to her in his instructions for the robots; she passed information back through the renderings. The information mostly came in the form of brief progress reports on their private work with their abilities and any new observations of Deeps’ behavior. Anything more complex would be communicated in a series of brief meetings, usually between Mike and Dice.
It was ironic really, Sara thought as she watched her class of Deeps go through their drills with the design software they were manipulating. The zetas had begun this relationship trying to impart their practical knowledge to their clients and now were working to keep it from them. The poor Deeps didn’t know what they didn’t know . . . or so she thought.
She didn’t realize the scenario was changing until lunch one Tuesday. It was her turn to drive to the restaurant the alpha zetas had begun to frequent, and she and Mike waited in the parking lot for several minutes until Tim appeared. Sara could see he was upset when he climbed into the car. His face was red, his eyes glittering, his brows pulled down into an aggressive scowl.
“What’s up, guy?” Mike asked, peering around his headrest at the younger man. “You look like a storm cloud.”
“Is it secret? Is it safe?” Tim asked in return.
Mike rolled his eyes, then closed them for a second before nodding. “Yeah. What’s up?”
“The imperialist monkey boys are asking questions,” Tim said darkly.
“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Sara, laughing. “What kind of questions?”
“One of the guys asked me if there’s a way for them to manipulate the hardware directly—bypass the Kobayashi servomodule and act directly on the hardware and firmware. Then he started talking about literally rerouting signals through the traces on a circuit board to make the commands do things they weren’t intended to do.”
Sara faced front, put the car in gear, and pulled away from the curb, her mind suddenly racing. “For purposes of sabotage?”
“That’s the only thing I could think of,” said Tim. “But it’s out of my area of expertise. I don’t do hardware or firmware. I’m a programmer. Machine language, yeah, that I can manipulate. Ones and zeroes are my first language. But these guys . . .” He stared out of the window for a moment, then snapped back into sharp focus. “Y’know, something the little commandant said—”
“Who?” Mike asked.
“The ranking officer—what’s his name? Ortiz. He’s a lieutenant commander and won’t let me forget it. Treats me like—” He caught Sara’s look in the rearview mirror. “Anyway, he made this comment about needing to go underground to . . . how did he put it? To consolidate their learning. He said he thought we’d be getting our last class of recruits in a couple of weeks.”
“The last recruits?” echoed Mike. “Isn’t that good news? We’ll be done with them. Then we can go back to—”
“Do you think they’re going to let us go back to the way things were?” snarled Tim. “We’re a freaking security risk.”
“Cool it, Tim. If we’re getting another bunch of recruits, that means these guys think they’re ready to graduate.” Sara frowned at the road. “So it wasn’t Oritz who asked about psyching the firmware?”
“No, it was one of his minions—Pierce.”
“Did you get the feeling Pierce was asking in an official capacity?”
“Well, now that you mention it, no. Ortiz and the rest of his team seem to be dedicated code jockeys. Pierce is a different bag of cats. Maybe a too-curious bag of cats.”
“Yeah, but Ortiz is the man, right? And it sounds like he’s thinking they’ve got all the training they need. Since none of them has shown any ability to manipulate the hardware without the interface . . .” Mike shrugged. “So there you have it.”
“I guess.”
“Even better, though: all that stuff you said about them not letting us go? We’re American citizens. We have families and friends outside of this place.” He bobbed his head back toward the receding Forward Kinetics campus. “They can’t just disappear us. At worst they could make us sign double-deluxe, megastrength NDAs that we’d be stupid to break.”
Tim’s lip curled. “Yeah? You think? And what does at best look like in your sunny little snow globe, Mikey?”
“It looks like they pay us, they go away with a reminder to honor the NDA we’ve already signed, and we go about our business in the private sector. I’m glad they’re bugging out after this next class of recruits. Then things can get back to normal.”
“Maybe,” said Sara. “Maybe not. I’ve kind of forgotten what normal looks like.”
THEY HATCHED THE PLAN IN a noodle shop in the Harborplace Mall. Eugene had been hoping for stupid simple, but the complexities of Deep HQ ruled that out. Their schedules were structured so they worked the end of the week while the alpha zetas worked the beginning. Sara, Mike, and Tim went in for six hours on Mondays and Tuesdays and until noon on Wednesdays; Lanfen and Mini came in on Wednesday afternoons and worked their twelve hours on Thursdays and Fridays. Dice’s schedule varied, though he was in most days for a while.
Knowing that, Team Chuck (the nickname was Eugene’s doing) conceived of a means of employing available talent to accomplish their goals. At least Lanfen and Mini had devised it; Eugene and Chuck had merely sat back, eating noodles and watchi
ng them hatch a plot that relegated the two men to the roles of support personnel, diversionary operatives, and plucky comic relief.
“I can drive any bot,” Lanfen had said during their off-campus double date. “That’s not the issue. The issue is I can’t be in two places at once. Well, I mean I can be, but the me who’s left behind is in a state of deep concentration. It won’t do to have me camped out doing breathing exercises for the time I’ll need to be inside. It only worked last time because my ride was delayed. I need some sort of cover.”
There had been a profound moment of frustrated silence until Mini had said, “There’s a maintenance closet in the ladies’ room on D level, between the canteen and their interior labs. If we could get you into that closet, say on Wednesday evening, you could activate the bot overnight, right?”
“Sure, but the driver will wonder where I went, won’t he?”
In answer, Mini had grinned from ear to ear, then glanced up at the hallway that led to the restaurant restrooms. “Look who’s here.”
They all did look and saw Lanfen step from a rear hallway into the restaurant. She paused a moment, waved at them, then turned on her heel and walked back up the corridor to the ladies’ room. In fact she walked right up to the door and vanished.
“That,” said the Lanfen seated at the table, “was amazing.”
“Thanks.” Mini beamed.
“So,” said Chuck, “you’re proposing that the Lanfen who leaves with you on Wednesday evening is a mirage?”
Mini nodded.
“We’ll need to get me into the ladies’ room,” said Lanfen. “Well, getting me in there isn’t such a big deal. It’s getting me in without security seeing that I don’t leave. I suppose we could use the jammer . . .”
Chuck inhaled sharply. “That jammer is the only thing that grants us a clean place to confer on campus.”
“You can use Mike for that temporarily,” suggested Mini.
Chuck nodded. “Okay. Good. That could work. I’ll need to come up with a valid reason to pull him into my office, but I’ll just have to deal with it.”
“Great,” said Lanfen. “Once the place has shuttered for the night, I should be able to activate Brian’s robot, Thorin, and go on a walkabout.”
The God Wave Page 25