by Erik Hamre
When he got a minute to himself, Kevorkian snuck out into a corner of the stock exchange and turned his phone back on. When he saw the number of missed calls from his wife he instantly felt queasy. He dialled her number, but only got her message bank.
He then dialled in to check his voice messages. There were six of them - and they were all from his wife.
His heart was already racing when he heard the voice of his wife come on the line.
She was hysterical. Crying, yelling. He could hear chatter in the background.
“Call me. Call me now,” she yelled.
He deleted the message and started the next one.
And in an instant his world changed.
It went from what was supposed to be the best day of his life, to the worst one.
And nothing would ever be the same again.
3
1st of June 2015
Neuralgo Inc’s HQ
Downtown Las Vegas
DAY 1:
0645 Hours
The first thing Vladimir noticed was the sound of the helicopters. It wasn’t unusual to hear helicopters in downtown Vegas. Many of the whales, the big gamblers that played high stakes poker for millions of dollars per hand, were often shuttled around in helicopters by the big casinos. Hot shot CEOs as well. Sometimes even Kevorkian had opted for the helicopter service from the airport to the office. For Kevorkian time was always the constraint, never money.
‘He always seemed to be in such a hurry,’ one of his investors said. ‘Like there was this deadline to life only he knew about.’
Vladimir got up from the floor and rubbed his eyes, before walking over to the windows facing the sound of the approaching helicopters. He squinted, and immediately realised that these weren’t the usual civilian helicopters he had gotten so used to seeing over the last few years working in Vegas. These were military helicopters. Military helicopters with machine guns.
He walked outside just as the first helicopter landed on the parking lot. Dust and dirt was flying everywhere. A civilian, a person Vladimir instantly recognised, exited the helicopter while it was still hovering slightly above the ground. The civilian ran across the parking lot, all the way to within thirty inches of Vladimir’s surprised face.
“Vladimir Sorovis?” the civilian asked.
“Yes.” Vladimir replied. He had grown up in Moscow. He had learnt not to trust men in suits hitching rides with military helicopters. But he knew this guy. He knew him well.
“You need to come with me.”
“Why? What’s happening?” Vladimir asked.
“Everything will be explained on the way to the site.”
“Which site? I’m not going anywhere unless you tell me what’s going on.”
“Have you ever heard about Singularity?” the civilian asked.
“Yes,” Vladimir replied. “I’ve read your books. I know who you are.”
“We believe a singularity event occurred this morning.”
“What do you mean occurred? Has somebody actually been successful in creating an AGI?”
“We believe they have, Mr Sorovis.”
“Who?”
“You, Mr Sorovis. You.”
Vladimir Sorovis didn’t know what to believe when he was escorted on-board the ribbed out helicopter. He was the only passenger on-board, apart from the civilian who had greeted him. The civilian Vladimir knew as Ronald Kraut, the world renowned philosopher, author and leading authority on nanotechnology and artificial intelligence.
Ronald Kraut spent most of the time in the helicopter on his phone. There wasn’t much time for small talk with Vladimir.
“Where are we going?” Vladimir had asked.
“We are going to the site. We will be there shortly,” Kraut had replied.
“What site? What is going on?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss anything until we arrive at the site. It has to do with security clearances and so forth.”
Security clearances? Singularity event? Up until then Vladimir had been quite relaxed about the whole ordeal. It was part of his personality to not stress out about things that were outside his control. But now he started to worry. He knew Ronald Kraut was an advisor to DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an agency of the US Department of Defense responsible for the development of emerging technologies for use by the military. Kraut was also considered the leading authority on nanotechnology and artificial intelligence. Before he had joined DARPA he had authored several books about the potential benefits of artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. Why had he come to pick up Vladimir? Did someone inside DARPA, or inside the US Department of Defense, really believe that there had been a singularity event somewhere in the world? And did they actually think that Vladimir had been responsible? The mistake would quickly be sorted out once Vladimir got to talk to the people in charge.
There had been a mistake. That was it.
A massive mistake.
But Vladimir had an increasingly unsettling feeling in his stomach. He had always thrived on probabilities. What were the odds for someone making this mistake only a week after Neuralgo had folded?
Not dismissible.
There could be a connection.
So Vladimir spent the next twenty minutes or so in silence, pondering what could have happened to make the US Department of Defense believe there had been a singularity event, and what could have caused them to believe Vladimir was involved. And the more he thought about it, the more frightened he got - he realised that he could quite possibly have been working on something entirely different than what he had thought he was working on.
If Kevorkian really was the fraud the world claimed he was. If nothing Kevorkian had told investors was true, then there was also a risk he could have misled all the engineers at Neuralgo. There was a risk he could have misled Vladimir.
What if Vladimir hadn’t been building what he had thought he had been building?
What if the DARPA advisor, the famous Ronald Kraut, was right?
A cold shiver went down Vladimir’s spine as he considered the implications.
He could, quite unwittingly, have helped cause the end of the world order as we knew it.
TEN YEARS EARLIER
2nd of June 2005
NASDAQ Stock Exchange
Manhattan, New York City
In the black car service, on his way to the airport, Kevorkian could hardly hold a thought. His mind, which was usually his most dependable asset, was racing at a million miles per hour. How was it possible? Who could be behind this? What was the motive? Was there a motive?
Nothing had been further from Kevorkian’s mind that morning than somebody wanting to hurt him and his family. Kevorkian had made more than forty employees multimillionaires that very morning, and scores of other people had multiplied their investments. Kevorkian had many enemies, it was part of his personality to offend and humiliate people, and every time he came up with a revolutionary idea it eventually drove some people out of business, but as far as Kevorkian knew - he didn’t have any mortal enemies, enemies who would want to hurt him this badly. He stayed away from the spotlight. His attendance at the NASDAQ exchange had been his first public appearance of the year, and he had only ever given one interview in his entire career - a profile in the Silicon Valley News a week earlier. Kevorkian was the CEO of TrakTek, but in his heart he was still just an engineer. Other people dealt with investors and media. It was the very reason Kevorkian paid his CFO and most other key employees bucket loads of cash and stock options; so that he didn’t have to deal with all the crappy things that came with his title.
The phone rang. Kevorkian picked it up before the first ring ended.
“Any news? Has there been a demand for a ransom?” he asked.
Kevorkian’s wife, Sarah sobbed into the phone. She explained that no demands had been made. But it was becoming increasingly clear that their son had been kidnapped. Several of Kevin’s friends had witnessed him walking off
in the direction of the local park with a stranger, a man dressed in black.
“The police are asking questions about Kevin, wanting to know if he had any problems,” Sarah said.
“Tell them everything, Sarah. The more they know - the quicker they can rule out any false leads.”
“When are you going to be here?” she whimpered.
“I’m on my way to the airport. The jet is being fuelled up as we speak. I’ll be there as soon as possible.”
“OK. Love you,” she said.
“Love you too,” Kevorkian replied, before hanging up.
In the months following the abduction of Andrew Kevorkian’s only son, his relationship with his wife gradually deteriorated. Eleven months after the abduction they separated, and eighteen months later the settlement for their divorce was finalised. Kevorkian never spoke publicly about the reasons for his marriage breakup, but according to friends and family it was due to the couple’s different view on the investigation of Kevin’s disappearance. Sarah had from the very start wanted the police to control the entire investigation. But Kevorkian was a sceptic by nature. He preferred to do things his own way. ‘He always claimed people put too much faith on titles,’ a friend recalled. ‘People go to their GP and believe everything he or she tells them. I know a lot of doctors. And I wouldn’t even trust some of them to treat my dog, especially not after a quick five-minute consultation staring at a computer screen,’ Kevorkian was fond of saying. This natural scepticism seeped through everything Kevorkian did in his life. Instead of handing over his money to ‘financial advisors who struggle to stay on top of their own credit card bills,’ as he used to say, he either kept the cash in the companies he ran, or stowed it away in his own funds management company, Kevorkiana High Frequency Trading. And he never trusted the police to do a proper job.
Instead he hired the best professional investigators money could buy. Police would later claim that this interference most likely caused the perpetrators to panic, and instead of demanding a ransom as one would expect them to do, they murdered Kevorkian’s only son. No evidence was ever provided to support the theory though. But it was a fact that a ransom demand was never made, which was peculiar given all the kids witnessing Kevin being lured away to the park.
A body was never found either.
But the police did manage to find some droplets of blood underneath one of the swings in the park. The blood belonged to Kevin.
What happened to Kevorkian’s only son was a true real-life mystery.
It didn’t make the mystery any lesser when it was revealed that Kevorkian had inserted a microchip into the back of his son’s neck the previous summer. It was a new technology that a division of his company TrakTek had been trialling for a few months. It had still been in a development phase, but the company had hoped to be able to commercialise the technology within a couple of years. The business opportunities had been immense. The microchip would send out a signal every twenty-four hours, and if one knew the frequency one could pinpoint its exact location, down to the nearest inch. Back in 2005 the system had only covered North America, but with the global coverage of GPS satellites and the constantly falling prices of microchips TrakTek could theoretically be on to another winner in personal tracking, as well as making improvements to their tracking technology for goods being shipped around the world.
The disappearance of Kevin had marked the ending of the TrakTek personal chip though. The microchip inserted in Kevin’s neck never activated. For five months Kevorkian employed a team of highly paid specialists listening out for the chip 24/7, but no signal was ever intercepted. The team concluded that the chip had either been destroyed, had malfunctioned or had been moved out of coverage. As it had taken almost six hours before the specialists had been able to start pinging the chip, it was also theoretically possible that Kevin could have been moved out of the US, and that this was the reason the system hadn’t been able to locate him. The most likely scenario, however, was that Kevin was dead; that his body had been buried somewhere so deep in the ground that the signal had no chance of seeping out.
Kevorkian refused to believe that.
He refused to believe anything the police and the private investigators ever told him.
He still believed his son was alive.
Perhaps that was the real reason he and his wife split up? Sarah Kevorkian had wanted to move on with her life. She had expressed interest in trying to get pregnant again, or adopt. Kevorkian had refused. Instead of discussing it he had immediately booked himself in for a vasectomy. It was a typical thing for Kevorkian to do. He used the same strategies in business several times. He didn’t just burn the bridges, he napalmed them.
In Kevorkian’s mind there was always just a Plan A. Never a Plan B.
If he couldn’t find Kevin alive, so be it. But he would never replace Kevin.
He would never forget Kevin.
5
1st of June 2015
DARPA’s remote Listening Station No 3
The Nevada Desert
DAY 1:
0730 Hours
The first thing Vladimir noticed when he arrived at the site in the Nevada desert was how out of place it seemed. A massive building rose up from out of nowhere. They were practically in no man’s land, and yet someone seemed to have been willing to spend tens of millions constructing a monster of a building. What on Earth is this? Vladimir wondered as he was escorted from the helicopter towards the building.
Several soldiers, some equipped with machine guns it appeared, stood lined up outside the building’s main entrance. As far as Vladimir could tell the entire area had been sealed off with electric fences and razor wire.
Once inside, Vladimir had an immediate feeling of déjà vu; that he had been there before. He knew it wasn’t the case, of course. After moving to Las Vegas several years ago, along with the rest of Kevorkian’s most senior engineering team, Vladimir had hardly ventured outside Neuralgo’s office premises, or his apartment in Kevorkian’s luxurious downtown high rise for that matter. He had gone hiking a few times, and taken the odd trip to the casinos with good colleagues. But after three guys on one of the engineering teams had been caught counting cards, most of the casinos on the strip had banned Neuralgo employees altogether. And who could blame them? Most Neuralgo engineers were so brilliant that they made Rain Man look like a third-grader.
“What is this place?” Vladimir asked as he stared at row upon row of computers scattered around the room. “It almost looks like a tech company, it looks like our offices.”
“That’s not a bad observation. This is one of our listening posts.”
“Listening posts?”
“At five to midnight last night, we recorded what we believe was a Singularity Event, the first one in human history. We traced its origin back to Vegas. There aren’t a lot of advanced tech companies here in Vegas. So, naturally you and Neuralgo were our prime suspects.”
“I don’t understand. I don’t know what you think we were doing at Neuralgo. But we weren’t building artificial intelligence. We were building a brain. We were attempting to emulate a real brain.”
“I know exactly what you were doing at Neuralgo, Vladimir. I’ve kept track of you for years.”
For a moment Vladimir was taken aback. The world famous Ronald Kraut had been keeping track of him for years. Vladimir wasn’t sure if he should take it as a compliment or be offended. He chose compliment. “Then you know I’m telling the truth. Our technology could never have caused a singularity event. We are at least three decades away from making that sort of breakthrough.”
“That’s what I thought as well. Then the alarms were set off this morning.”
Ronald Kraut led Vladimir past all the computer screens and into an office at the far end of the building. He sat down at the end of an oval conference table, and with a soft hand gesture he indicated for Vladimir to sit down as well.
“What I’m about to tell you is classified. If you ever speak about it to
outsiders you will probably be sent away for a long time. Maybe even shot. Do you understand?”
Vladimir nodded. He didn’t understand at all.
“We’re in a complicated situation here, Vladimir. I don’t actually have permission to disclose everything we know. One could argue that I am breaking a few laws simply by having this chat. But these are unprecedented times, and I need to make the decisions I see fit to make. So here it goes: At 2355 last night almost every computer in the state of California was hacked. This was the first attack. Then, at 0355 hours, sixty percent of anything American connected to the internet was hacked. Sixty percent. This was the second attack.”
“That can’t be. That’s impossible.”
“It happened, Vladimir. Trust me. It happened. And this will go much faster if you just accept what I tell you. You can always ask questions later.”
Vladimir nodded.
“At first we thought it was some sort of sophisticated cyber-attack. Maybe Chinese. But that was before we realised the scale of the attacks, and the speed. It was instant and simultaneous. The second attack affected almost every single system connected to the internet in America. Of course, we soon realised that nothing had ever been built that could do something like this, nothing even remotely capable of doing something like this.”
“What did it do?”
“We don’t know,” Ronald Kraut answered, slightly annoyed that Vladimir had disregarded his request to wait with his questions until the end.
“You don’t know?”
“No. A lot of unbreachable systems were breached though. We know that for a fact. The strange thing is that we can’t seem to find any traces of malicious code left behind. There doesn’t seem to be any worms or Trojans hiding in our systems. No information seems to have been stolen or corrupted. Something just breached the firewalls, had a snoop around, and then disappeared.”