Jake hadn’t expected an answer to his question, but it made sense. Max said the same thing just before he died. Psychopaths were something Jake had experience with. Something he understood.
“Careful,” Sheldon said to Jin, “don’t go anthropomorphizing.”
“Meaning?” asked Jake.
“Greek. To make something in our human image. Like when you imagine God, you think of a grandfather in the sky, but that’s not God. God is indescribable, like these new machine intelligences are to us. You can’t think of it in human terms. It doesn’t have an ego, it doesn’t want to dominate the herd and gain power.” Sheldon turned to Jake. “And you can’t think of it as evil. We do that, and we’ll never figure out how to take it down.”
Sheldon pressed his hands together, as if he were praying. “The problem is, when we moved from rule-based systems to machines that learned from statistical inferences based on huge data sets, we opened Pandora’s Box. They don’t operate according to rules anymore. Not rules we understand.”
Jake got up from his chair. The pressure built inside his head. “You’re giving me a headache, you know that?” He was tired of discussing philosophical points. “I don’t care what it is. I want my daughter back.” There were still some things he didn’t understand. “How is this thing able to tap into everything?”
“Easy,” Sheldon replied. “Ever heard of the NSA’s TAO division?”
Jake shook his head.
“Stands for ‘tailored access operations.’ This branch of the US government has a secret product catalogue for ways to snoop and break into anything—monitor mobile phones, get into your computer to look at your screen, log your keyboard strokes. I’d bet Bluebridge has its own TAO catalogue on speed dial.”
Jake pointed at the building in front of them. “I want to kill it. Can’t we bomb that building?”
“You really want to bomb a federally protected building?” Sheldon laughed.
“Maybe.” Jake gritted his teeth. He always wondered how some crazy person ended up deciding that they wanted to bomb a building. Now he knew.
Sheldon’s smile evaporated. “Not that simple. Sure, Bluebridge has ten floors over there, but this thing is a distributed system. At minimum, your friend Sean designed Bluebridge the way any other large corporate system would be designed—with disaster recovery, hot back-up sites, business continuity planning. But at the same time, that’s good news.”
“How’s it good news?”
“Because we know how this thing was designed. It’s not magic. It was built from components and modules, wires and boxes, using standard design principles. If you blow up that building, it’ll switch to its backup systems. I have no doubt it exists on thousands of computers all over the world, all backed-up and supporting each other.”
“You're telling me we're the only ones who've noticed what's going on?” Jake’s frustration mounted. How was it possible that it was up to them to stop this thing?
“We’re not,” Sheldon replied. “The group that grabbed Jin in Shenzhen? We’re pretty sure they were the Chinese Security Ministry. They saw what happened to Yamamoto, then saw Jin digging into those digital corporations. Grabbed her to see what she knew. The CIA is trying to stop the assassin markets, but this is a whack-a-mole game. These autonomous corporations are spawning faster than anyone can stop them.”
“I’m sure other people have noticed,” Jin added. “Investors see something odd going on, but they turn a blind eye. They’re making money. Greed is a powerful tool for making bad things invisible, and Bluebridge is wielding it perfectly.”
Jake stared out the window at the building Bluebridge inhabited. “Max said we might be able to stop it if we can get top-level system access.”
“Maybe,” replied Sheldon. “We’d need Montrose or Viegas-level access, and they’re not exactly around for us to try to convince them.”
“Do we know for a fact that Montrose isn’t alive?” asked Jin.
“No, we don’t.” Jake answered. “That is an extremely good point. Everything is circumstantial. Nobody has ever talked to this thing.”
“You have,” Jin pointed out. “When it was impersonating Sean, and then your brother.”
“Sure, but it was pretending to be someone it wasn’t,” Jake replied. “We’ve never talked to it.” He rubbed his eyes. “This thing wants profits, right? That we know for sure?”
Sheldon agreed, “Yes, but not necessarily all the stuff that we want profit for—power, pride, domination.”
Jake walked closer to the windows and stared up at the rooftop of the building again. Could they destroy this installation, then find its backups, destroy them? No, it would be like the Hydra: chop off one head and two more would appear.
“Can’t we hack into it, gain top-level system access? Sean always said that any system could be hacked.”
“Possible in theory, but daunting in practice. I’d bet it would be harder to hack into than getting inside the Command and Control of the Pentagon. Getting through its network security is going to be like peeling a giant onion. With the stuff Sean gave you, I’d bet we could skin the first few layers, maybe get into its outside networks. But it knows we’re coming, which makes things much more difficult.”
Jake stared at the building in front of him. “So what do we do then?”
“I don’t know. To get top-level access, you’d need it to give up,” laughed Sheldon. “Voluntarily give you control. Maybe you should ask it.”
Jake slammed a hand into the window. “Goddammit. This thing has my daughter, Sheldon.”
Sheldon cast his eyes down. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to—”
“Cormac Ryker said he didn’t take her.” Jake came and sat in front of the computer monitors. “So who did? And why the hell hasn’t it asked for anything?”
“Because it doesn’t need to,” Sheldon ventured. “This thing doesn’t follow normal rules. I’d guess that your daughter is some kind of insurance policy.”
“Insurance?”
“Like if you blow the lid, if you attack it, it can get you to recant, spin a believable story of deniability. I don’t know. But as long as it thinks you value your daughter above all else, it has leverage.”
“Then what’s it waiting for?”
“For this,” Jin answered. She pulled up an image of Senator Russ, who was now going into the final legs of the presidential election. “Eight weeks and Bluebridge will have bought its way into the White House. After that, it’ll creep into every corner of the government from the top down.”
“And not just here.” Wutang appeared from the bedroom, rubbing his eyes. “This thing is corrupting governments all across the planet.”
“So how do we fight back?” Jake pointed at Wutang and Jin. “You guys were smuggled in by the Yakuza.” He pointed at Sheldon. “This guy builds chatbots.” He pointed at himself. “I’m being hunted by the mafia and half a dozen Federal agencies.”
“Actually, you made the top of the FBI’s ten-most-wanted list this morning.” Sheldon pointed to a webpage he brought up. Jake’s name and face were at number one.
“That’s not helping,” Jin whispered.
“Sorry.” Sheldon closed the browser window. “I’ll finish getting our video link with Dean and Elle up.” He shrugged an apology and buried his nose back into his work.
“Maybe we should use those automated trading algorithms Donovan gave you,” Jin suggested. “Steal some money from the big banks, pay off the mafia. Then give Bluebridge what it wants, the copy of the core. Promise not to make any noise, beg for your daughter back.”
Jake shook his head. “No, it’ll never stop.” He was getting to know this thing. The outline of an idea formed. “Wait, do you think you could use those trading algorithms?”
Jin nodded. “We’d need to hack into some of the trading centers of the largest banks in Manhattan, but I know my way around. I could figure out a way.”
Jake turned to Sheldon. “And you think you understan
d some of that code Sean gave us, the Bluebridge core? Could we get it running ourselves?”
Sheldon stopped typing. “Maybe. We’d need an entire data center, fat pipes into the internet.” He frowned. “And it would have to be somewhere you could defend, physically. Like I said, this thing knows we’re coming for it.”
“Let me worry about that.”
“What are you thinking?” Sheldon asked.
“You said it, Sheldon. This thing doesn’t have an ego; it doesn’t want power or revenge. It wants money. That’s exactly what Elle told me.” He laughed, and then turned to Jin. “Remember the nuggets, that’s what Sean told you, right?”
Jin’s eyes were wide with curiosity. She didn’t know where he was going with this. “What?”
“Sean said you need to look beyond what you think someone wants. If you do that, you’re projecting, exactly like Sheldon said. We need to get to what it’s really after.” Jake stood and grabbed Jin’s arm. “Nuggets, that’s what this thing wants. Nuggets.”
Jin exchanged glances with Sheldon and Wutang, all of whom looked at Jake like he’d lost it. “Maybe you should sit down.”
The three screens in front of them lit up, casting the four of them in a soft glow. Dean appeared on one screen, and Elle on another. “Ah, my video link is up.” Sheldon turned their audio feeds on.
“Jake, is everything okay?” Elle asked through the video link.
“Everything is fine,” Jake replied, nodding at Dean and Elle on the two screens. “I know what we need to do.”
AUGUST 26th
Friday
37
Kahnawake Indian Reserve
Quebec
Dean rubbed his eyes, and despite the fear gnawing in the pit of his stomach, he yawned. “I sure hope you know what you’re doing,” he said to Sheldon over the video connection.
“Me too,” Sheldon replied.
Between arguing over Jake’s idea and starting the work to implement it, it had been a long night. Locked inside, Dean had little sense of time, but from the way his body was waking up, he guessed it was midmorning. The small hours were the worst, when his mind screamed for sleep, his eyes drooping. But when he stayed up all night, the fog had usually worn off by noon; his body accepting that sleep would come in the next cycle.
Dean hadn’t told his body yet that it wouldn’t get sleep the next night, either.
The Link Room in the Mohawk Institute of Technology, the corridor between Server Rooms C and D, was usually empty, with nothing inside except the LCD panels fixed to the cinder-block walls, waiting for customers who needed to plug in and connect to the network. Now it was full of equipment. Dean’s technicians had worked all night to wire up a new server farm in here. This was going to be the command-and-control center of their operation.
He’d also cleared off everything from the servers in sections A through C, sending out terse emails to inform his online casino customers of the temporary interruption in service. He rerouted most of the service through the Mohawk datacenters in Gibraltar, Singapore and London, but it was still a breach of their SLAs—service level agreements. The penalties were piling on fast, but if this didn’t work, then it wouldn’t matter. Nothing would.
In the parlance of his casino clients, they were going ‘all in.’
Dean had initialized an instance of the Bluebridge system core on a cluster of servers in Server Room A. He’d created a private cloud, disconnecting all outside lines except for one, the blue CAT-5 cable snaking under his chair. This was plugged into a single machine hosting a dedicated VPN channel to Sheldon in New York.
“You sure this is secure?” Dean asked.
“Nothing’s secure,” Sheldon replied. “But it’s as good as we’re going to get. Stop worrying so much.”
“Easy for you to say,” Dean muttered. Sheldon wasn’t sitting on top of this powder keg.
Dean watched the Bluebridge system develop on his private cloud of two hundred servers. It would outgrow Server Room A in the next hour. It started with a hundred gigabytes, but Bluebridge was a learning system, and Sheldon was busy feeding it. Except this wasn’t Bluebridge, this instance of the system they’d named MOHAWK, and MOHAWK was coming to life before Dean’s eyes.
“You need to fight fire with fire, isn’t that what they say?” Sheldon remarked, busy typing away on his end.
“They, whoever they are, have never sat in this chair.” Dean did some quick calculations on a piece of scrap paper. By the end of the day, MOHAWK would occupy his entire datacenter. Fighting fire with fire sounded like a recipe for all-out escalation warfare.
Jin appeared over Sheldon’s shoulder in the video feed. “Sun Tzu said that if you use fire in battle, you better make sure that you’re not flammable yourself.”
“It’s feeling pretty damn hot already over on this end,” grumbled Dean.
Sheldon laughed. “I guess we’ll find out which proverb wins soon enough.”
A ringing sound startled Dean, who at first thought some alarm had been triggered. When he realized it was the front desk downstairs, he punched the ‘answer’ button on the VOIP application on his laptop screen.
“Doug Hamer is here to see you,” came Angela’s voice, the security guard at the entrance. “6—2—3,” she added.
Dean had given her a one-time pad, told her to keep it in her purse and keep it secret. He hadn’t told her why, but she trusted that he had a good reason. He pulled out the matching pad from his pocket and peeled off the top sticker, “6—2—3,” it read. It was his jury-rigged method of trying to manually ensure secure communications.
Doug Hamer was the junior RCMP liaison dating his daughter. Nice guy. But Dean was a little busy.
“Can you tell him I’m not available?” Dean replied, pulling up the video feed from the camera in the front office. It was Doug, all right, standing in jeans and a black-and-red-checkered lumberjack coat, staring up at the camera.
“He says it’s urgent, and it’ll only take five minutes.”
Dean sighed, stretching his neck back. “Sure, I’ll be out in a second.”
Logging off, Dean shut down his laptop and grabbed the Bluebridge memory key out of the USB slot of the desktop tower in front of him. After flashing his badge past the RFID sensor and keying his thumb onto the biometric sensor, he opened the door to the Link Room and walked out, heading down the corridor.
Doug seemed like a nice guy. He was three years older than Dean’s daughter, but Dean was okay with it. He hadn’t seen Doug since that time with Jake in the Kicking Horse Saloon. No sign of him at their last family barbeque, but Dean hadn’t asked his daughter why. Figured Doug was busy. Having a future RCMP officer in the family wouldn’t be such a bad thing. He opened the door to the waiting room with a smile on his face, “Doug, nice to see—”
“Don’t move.” A man in an expensive-looking suit held a gun level with Dean’s eyes. Two more heavyset men in suits stood behind him, flanking Doug, while a fourth jumped forward to prop open the door Dean came through.
“What is this, Doug?” Dean sputtered.
The man who jumped for the door secured it and turned to Dean, grabbing his arms. Dean felt the cold metal of handcuffs against his skin, and then the click-click-click of them ratcheting shut. The man in front of Dean holstered his weapon.
“You can’t arrest me.” Dean stared at Doug in disbelief as he was shoved forward. The RCMP had no jurisdiction here.
“Sorry, Dean, I had no choice,” Doug replied, his face beet red. “These guys, they’re—”
“This isn’t an arrest,” said the man who’d pulled the gun on Dean. “I believe you’d call this a rendition.”
“For what?”
The man shrugged. “Weapons smuggling, racketeering, harboring terrorists, take your pick.” He turned to the two men at the door. “Take him outside, get him in the car. We’re going into the server rooms.”
They shoved Dean forward again, and he cursed, “Get your goddamn hands off me.�
� One more push and he was out the door, blinking in the morning sunshine. A black Cadillac was parked in the gravel out front.
But that wasn’t the only vehicle out there.
Parked on each side of the Cadillac were dark blue Dodge Chargers with ‘Peace Keepers’ stenciled in red across their sides. Mohawk Peace Keeper officer Daniels sat on the hood of one of the cruisers, smiling. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked the men holding Dean’s arms.
“Get out of our way,” barked one of the men behind Dean.
From behind the police cruisers, five men in camouflage stood, black masks over their faces, holding large assault rifles.
“I don’t think so,” Peace Keeper Daniels replied.
The door behind Dean opened, and the man who’d pushed the gun in his face came flying out, tripping down the stairs into the gravel to thud against the door of the Cadillac. More men in camouflage poured in through the door. They must have come in through the back entrance. They pushed the men in suits down the stairs and surrounded them.
Daniels smiled at Dean, who was still handcuffed on the landing. “Guess it’s time to call up the Mohawk Warriors, eh?”
38
Little Italy
New York City
Jake stared up into the rain, tipping his umbrella sideways to see the street sign.
This was it, Mulberry Street.
He looked up and down Canal Street to his left and right. Even in the rain, the street vendors were still out, selling their fakes. Jake came on foot through China Town. It wasn’t more than a ten-minute walk from the Two Bridges apartment complex. Nobody took pictures in the rain. His umbrella concealed his face, so it was safer than risking the subway or getting in a taxi.
And it was good to get some fresh air.
A call came in from Dean before Jake left. Some kind of Federal US agents had tried to raid the MIT building and arrest him. The Mohawk Peace Keepers had politely showed them, from behind assault rifles, to the edge of the reservation. Dean said the DHS had stepped up border security and started drone flights over the reservation.
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