Girl in a Fishbowl (Crowbar Book 1)

by Thomas A. Gilly

  Digby turned from the monitor and looked at Jerome. “Far out,” he said.

  “Yes, very far out.”

  Using the keyboard with his robotic hands Jerome navigated the directory structure of one of his many encrypted drives to a directory called Bang Squad. Amid subdirectories labelled sqlinjectleet43, RodsFromGod, and stuxatron, he found a file called ideology.txt. He opened it and saw that the opening paragraph was identical to the one he had just read.

  “Holy crap,” Jerome whispered. “This is Craynium. David Hicks is Craynium.”

  “Craynium?” Digby said. “That is a cool handle. You should have a cool handle. I mean seriously, how intimidating is Metronome? Most people don’t even know what a metronome is. Most think it’s a small person with good fashion sense. Ha! See? I made a joke. Write that down, I know you’re keeping track of when I make jokes. That was a pun, right? Was it funny?”

  “Yeah that was funny,” Jerome said absently. “I don’t feel so bad anymore about not being able to track down David Hicks. He’s one of the greatest hackers of all time. I remember reading about him when I was a kid. One time he got root access into the NSA and modified a program they used to optimize their databases—he had it instead wipe out their entire face recognition repository. He then spoofed an email from one of their directors telling some low level flunkies to erase the backups. About ten percent of the backups had been erased before the breach had been discovered and the destruction stopped. Even with the remaining backups they were set back for years—the backup and restore procedures had some of their own issues, it turned out. Not so easy to restore such a complex database. They put the hammer down on Bang Squad after that. They caught most of them too, but they never got Craynium. And now I’m one of the few people on earth who knows his true identity.”

  “Wow. And I’m one of the few dragons.”

  Jerome smiled. “Now that was a good joke.”

  “Was it?” Digby said, looking perplexed. “I don’t detect any jokiness in there.”

  “Yeah . . .” Jerome brought his robotic hand up to his chin. “Yeah, I actually don’t know what to do. I now have something I can tell Natalya, but if this gets out we can destroy this man’s life. His son doesn’t even know, apparently. But at least I will have something to tell Natalya. But I don’t know, this is something serious.”

  “Serious?”

  “Yeah, very serious.”

  “Serious.”

  They pondered the seriousness for a minute.

  “I would love to see that software,” Jerome said suddenly.

  “What software?”

  “The software he uses to keep away from the cameras. He must have gotten hold of one of the government backdoors into the VuDyne API. I wonder how he gets on the internet. Do you know where I have to go?”

  “To the bathroom?”

  Jerome sighed. “I’ve told you before, some jokes get old after a while.”

  “That’s only the fifth time I’ve said that one.”

  “I have to get into Hicks’ apartment. I have to get onto his computer. That would be something, to get onto Craynium’s computer. It must be locked up tight. That would be a challenge, cracking that baby. I have to go out there, physically. And I need Natalya’s help. We have to work together.”

  “Hubba hubba,” said Digby.

  Chapter 23

  Two-Guns sat across from Detective Marc LeRue in Pitt’s Pub, the local cop bar. Two-Guns had gone to the academy with LeRue, and for several years they had partnered together. LeRue was a good looking guy, tall dark and handsome—their relationship had always been tight, sprinkled in with some playful flirting, although it’s never gone beyond that, which was fine for both of them.

  LeRue sipped his beer, Two-Guns sipped her rum and coke—the bar was blatant in its patronage of cops—understated décor with framed pictures on the walls of police academy graduations and award ceremonies.

  “I’m glad you agreed to see me,” Two-Guns said. “I’m in the dark here, no one is telling me anything about the case.”

  “No problem Guns. Considering you took the guy out, I figured you should be kept in the loop. Although I have to tell you there are some bad feelings about what happened to Bates. Most agree the guy had to go down…but not so public.”

  “I was on the spot; I wasn’t going to lie on the record.”

  “Hey, absolutely! I’m on your side one hundred percent on this! You should be aware there are some people who aren’t as reasonable as me. Bates has a lot of allies. Publically they’re all scurrying away from the guy, but privately there’s some grumbling.”

  Two-Guns distractedly stirred the ice-cubes in her drink with her little straw. “So what’s going on with the case? Anything new on the shooter? Any motive?”

  It was publically announced that the shooter, Armin Shubert, had worked for a private security firm called Felicity Black. Other than not having a whole lot of friends, there was little in his past to indicate that he would become a mass killer.

  Marc took another sip of his beer and shook his head. “This case is getting stranger and stranger. We’ve been told not to talk to the press about this latest news, but it’ll get out eventually. You know that first victim? Simon Hersh? Well, as it turns out Shubert worked for him. Not openly as his personal bodyguard, but in some capacity we haven’t been able to get out of Felicity Black yet.”

  Two-Guns leaned forward. “So it was a targeted killing! He wanted Hersh dead! What about the other victims?”

  “We haven’t found any connections yet, but there was audio of Shubert as he was killing people, and he definitely screamed the words ‘Fucking rich fucks’ several times. As you know he didn’t shoot any service staff, waiters or anything, even though he had opportunity. Seems he wanted to take out Hersh in particular and then anyone else who was obviously rich, until those two mall cops came rushing in.”

  Two-Guns winced at the memory. “Class warfare,” she whispered. “The press is going to love that.”

  “It gets weirder. We tracked Shubert’s movements prior to the shooting and it led to a hotel in the Rocks at the base of Fuji. A seedy old place, short on surveillance equipment. That’s where we found the Jane Doe.”

  “The who?”

  “Jane Doe. It’s an old term for an unidentified female.”

  “Oh yeah, Jane Doe, right. So she was unidentified? How much of the corpse was there?”

  “All of it. Sad really. Girl, ten or eleven. Not a scratch on her. She was lying on the bed. As far as forensics can tell her heart just stopped. Thing is, her face isn’t on file, or her DNA. They even went so far as to search finger prints and dental records. Nothing.”

  He paused to let that sink in. When it finally did she said, “How can that be?”

  “Lots of people are asking that question. We’ve been wanting to post her image online to see if anyone knows her, but so far the orders have been to keep this hush-hush. You can imagine the conspiracy theories going around the station.”

  “So what’s the current theory about Shubert’s relationship with the girl?”

  LaRue made a distasteful grimace and said, “The girl had been sexually active, but there was no sign of recent sexual activity in the room. There was a mini-fridge stocked with junk food, a few bags of candy. So it looks like Shubert had stashed the girl there, maybe as his personal play thing. Then when she died he flipped out.”

  Two-Guns stirred her glass more vigorously as she thought. “That doesn’t make sense if there was no sexual activity in the room.”

  “Maybe he didn’t have the time to do what he wanted.”

  “Or maybe he was protecting her. There’ve been rumors for years about an underground sex ring in the city. Most people don’t believe such a thing could exist anymore, but if a fucking unidentified corpse can pop up in the middle of the city then anything is possible. This could be the tip of the iceberg. This could lead to something huge.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not th
e official line we’re supposed to be following. The narrative, as it’s currently being laid out for us, is that Shubert was an unstable pedophile who, in a fit of manic rage and self-shame, went on a wild killing spree. There’s a team of people working right now to determine the feasibility of him bringing in the girl from who-knows-where using his own resources.”

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  “I’m sure they’ll come up with some way he could have managed it—if they try hard enough. Proving it is a different story. But if they could come up with a possible scenario it would be enough to satisfy most of the people.”

  Two-Guns was naturally skeptical of conspiracy theories, but now her paranoia senses were tingling. She knew it was always easier to blame a crazy individual instead of trying to dig into a full-blown slave trade, and the very existence of a sex slave ring would embarrass a lot of officials who would be questioned about how such a thing could exist under their watch. But she wondered how high such a conspiracy could go—especially if someone as rich and powerful as Simon Hersh was involved.

  Chapter 24

  “That’s the best I could do,” Jerome said to Digby. Digby looked at the map of McGee’s Rocks. The map was centered on David Hicks’ apartment, and a red cone grew out of it spreading to the left that ended along most of the base of Mt. Fuji. Jerome had personally examined videos from over fifty individuals—it had cost him over ten-thousand dollars getting all those private video feeds—and only that was the best he could do. It had taken a nearly two days of constant work.

  “That’s the best you could do?”

  “Yep, that’s the best I could do.”

  “I could do better,” Digby said.

  “Be my guest.”

  “. . . if I had been programmed by Craynium.” Digby smiled mischievously.

  “Ouch, that hurts,” Jerome said, but couldn’t help but smile back.

  They looked at the map for a few more seconds and Jerome said, “I better put together the package for Natalya. She is not going to be satisfied with this. No sir she’s not. I wonder if she’s hired another hacker for this case.”

  “Maybe she should hire Craynium.”

  Jerome wasn’t sure if that was a joke or a glitch in Digby’s AI. “How can she hire Craynium if she doesn’t know where he is?”

  Digby shifted his eyes left and right. “She can put out an ad on the programming forums.”

  “But she doesn’t want anyone to know that she’s looking for him.”

  Digby shifted his eyes left and right again. Finally, he said, “But he’s the best person to ask to find out where he is.”

  Jerome leaned back in his chair and opened Digby’s diagnostic window with his phand. He clicked the button to save a snapshot of Digby’s neural net. He would have to check that out later.

  Okay, time to send Natalya the report.

  He still hadn’t decided whether or not to tell her that David Hicks was Craynium. If he told her not to tell anyone else, how seriously would she take it? He was disappointed in himself on not being able to get a definite position on Hicks, and he knew that she would be disappointed, and revealing that he was one of the best hackers ever would help explain to her why he couldn’t find him. But David Hicks’ freedom rested on that knowledge.

  He rubbed his eyes with his robotic hands.

  Ohhhh, people people people people.

  Ultimately, Jerome believed that all problems, if you bore down deeply enough, were engineering problems. But the engineering of people was beyond him. That was one of the reasons why he had created Digby. It was the engineering of human feelings that he couldn’t understand. Virtually every decision you made about people had to take their feelings into account, and you could never be sure about how a different person would feel about whatever you did. Computers were easier. You just had to figure out how to make them do what you wanted then to do, and then make them do it.

  Admittedly, Jerome did have some reservations about how Natalya had used some of his technology in the past. But up to now there had been nothing with this magnitude of seriousness.

  As was usually for Jerome’s wandering mind, when he was having difficulty with one thought—especially when that thought had to do with dealing with people—an interesting technical challenge took over his concentration. He opened his eyes and looked at his office walls, with the posters of various young adult holiday romances surrounding him.

  “You know what would be cool,” he said to Digby.

  Digby had been napping again. His head popped up. “What?”

  “It would be cool to be able to see 360 degrees. Like if I had eyes all around my head. Sometimes I try to imagine my visual field extending all the way around. I can’t really imagine it though. My brain architecture isn’t made for it. I wonder what it would take to modify a brain to be able to see 360 degrees around.”

  “You’re being selfish again,” Digby said, apparently annoyed.

  “Why do you say that?” Jerome asked, a little surprised by Digby’s attitude.

  “You haven’t asked me if I wanted to see 360 degrees around.”

  Jerome raised his eyebrows at the thought. He had created Digby with a 100-degree field of vision, standard for humans. Of course, Digby didn’t see with his eyes, the position and direction of his eyes were tracked and camera input from Jerome’s personal camera and any other cameras in the vicinity were used to extrapolate what Digby should see from his vantage point. That information was sent to the visual cortex of his neural net.

  “What would it take?” Jerome wondered aloud. Turning off his robotic arms he brought up both his phands and accessed Digby’s source code.

  It really wouldn’t take that much work at all, he thought. It would all be peripheral vision, not focused vision, so at most I would only have to double the amount of memory he uses to process vision. I have enough cameras in the room to cover the whole 360 degrees. I would just have to change a few constants here and there.

  Of course it required a little more tweaking than that, but after an hour he was done.

  “Alright Digby, are you ready to see 360 degrees?”

  Digby sat up and grinned. “Really? You’re going to do this really?”

  “Yep, I just have to reboot your system and that will be it.”

  “What? You didn’t say anything—“

  Jerome rebooted Digby.

  Digby vanished from the top of the desk. A few seconds later he reappeared.

  “—about rebooting my . . . system.”

  Digby’s body remained still as his head slowly swiveled to one side.

  “Woah,” he said, and stopped moving his head. “Woah.” He swiveled it slowly in the other direction. “Woah.”

  “So how is it?” Jerome asked.

  Digby’s head started to lower down. “This is freaking me out man. Freaking me out!”

  “You okay?” Jerome asked with concern.

  “Make it stop man! Overload! Major overload! They’re all around me man!”

  “Okay okay!” Jerome said and shut Digby down. Digby once again vanished from the desk. He restored Digby’s source code to what it had been before the changes. Jerome had programmed Digby to react with surprise to unusual input, but he hadn’t expected such a strong response. He debated whether or not to restore his memory files to what they were when he took the snapshot, so Digby wouldn’t remember the experiment. No, he decided, he wanted to see Digby’s reaction to the memory of the event.

  He rebooted Digby.

  “Never do that to me again!” Digby exclaimed when he reappeared. “Blew . . . my . . . mind! Blew my mind man! What were you thinking? Are you some kind of crazy mad scientist?”

  “Sorry Digby, but you asked for it.”

  “I didn’t know what I was asking for. I didn’t even know what you were talking about.”

  “Alright, we won’t do that again. But keep that in mind the next time you ask for something you don’t understand.”

  “Righ
t! You better!” Digby said. “Hey, I know how you can make this up to me.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You can finish making that real body for me. I want to feel the sand between my toes. I want to feel the wind beneath my wings.”

  A few months ago Jerome got the idea of having Digby run a remote control toy dragon that had come out in the stores called My Friendly Dragon. He had one down in his basement workshop with the necessary modifications just about finished. The toy company had designed it to be semi-autonomous, responding to a child’s voice commands. It had cameras in its glowing eyes, a mouth that could speak, and tactile sensors in its feet. When Jerome had described what it would be like for Digby to feel the sensations of the robot he had used the phrases feel the sand between your toes and feel the wind beneath your wings. He was glad to hear Digby repeat them back to him in the proper context.

  “I’m just about done. The representations of tactile sensations use a different format in the robot than the one we currently use for your collision avoidance. I want to make sure it’s an accurate conversion.”

  “Well, get working on it. I’m sure Craynium would be done by now.”

  He sure has latched on this Craynium theme, Jerome thought. He took another snapshot of Digby’s neural net. He would have to make a thorough examination of the affect coding system. He was aware that Digby couldn’t actually feel anything, his emotional emulation was all ones and zeros, but as the dragon was gaining experience of the world Jerome was more and more surprised by his behavior.

  Okay, okay, stop avoiding this.

  He looked back at the physical monitor with David Hicks information.

  Alright Natalya, I’m trusting you with this. Show me that you’re worth it.

  Chapter 25

  Natalya’s dance studio was in an inner room of her apartment—no windows—two facing walls were paneled with mirrors, infinitely reflecting upon themselves and whoever was standing on the hardwood floor. Currently that was Natalya and Terri in their dancing tights. Ivana Utkin had no reflection—her partially transparent blue image stood facing them, projected from her studio in Moscow directly onto their retinas. Terri always thought it was kind of creepy that she had no reflection, like she was a vampire.