In the Black

by Patrick S. Tomlinson

  The lobby was dim and nearly empty as they made their way to the lifts. It was already past sundown, and most of the building’s workers had gone home for the day. Tyson nodded to the nightshift front desk attendant as they passed.

  “Reggie.”

  “Good evening, Mr. Abington. Working late?”

  “Story of our lives, hey Reg?”

  He laughed. “I heard that, sir.”

  Tyson came to rest in front of his private high-speed lift with Dr. Spaulding close behind. Three different biometric systems confirmed his identity before the doors opened to grant them entrance.

  “Plus one,” he said as they passed through the doors.

  “Plus one, what?” Elsa asked.

  “Plus you. That’s how the guns in the elevator know I’m not being coerced and they don’t need to shoot you when we reach the tenth floor.”

  “I thought you said in the interview that a human is involved in the decision loop by law!”

  “And one is. In this case, I decided not to kill you. The imprecision of language can be such fun.”

  The press of acceleration pushed down on the soles of their feet. Tyson’s private lift only had one destination, and it got there quickly.

  “How did you remember the guard?” Elsa asked.

  “Hmm? Reggie?”

  “Yeah, do you have an alert in your augmented reality whenever an employee is in your field of vision. Their file, maybe?”

  Tyson snorted. “Reginald Sojourner Birmingham took a knife for me twenty-seven years ago when I was just a dumb kid and he was my bodyguard. Some tweaker outside a nightclub got lucky and stuck it between the base of Reggie’s helmet and the top of his backplate while I was in the alley trying to jack into the tweaker’s girl. I promised Reg that night in the hospital his family would never want for anything again. He spent three months on a ventilator while the docs regrew his spinal cord below the C-7 vertebrae. Took him a year to learn how to walk again. He has two daughters and a lovely wife who bakes me an entirely inedible fruitcake every Christmas, every one of which I’ve saved as building material for a winter home on the southern continent when I finally retire. So no, I don’t need any tricks to remember his name. Anything else?”

  Elsa shrunk back into herself. “I’m … sorry.”

  “It’s all right,” Tyson assured her. “I know what people think of me. It’s even useful, sometimes. But in private like this it can be a bit … jarring.”

  The lift reached it apex with a gentle Ding. The doors opened onto Tyson’s familiar territory. His first home, really.

  “Holy shit,” Elsa said behind him, just above a whisper. She physically backed into the elevator car.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “What’s—” She swallowed. “What’s holding up the ceiling?”

  “Ah. I see.” Tyson strode over to the window and wrapped a knuckle against it with a tunk tunk tunk. “Several tons of space-grade transparent aluminum. It’s quite solid, I assure you. It’s just tricking your eyes. Don’t worry. I work in here every day.” He held out a reassuring hand.

  Gingerly, Elsa took it and inched her way out of the lift. As soon as she’d exited, the doors closed and the capsule retreated back into the floor, the contours of its top disappearing into the swirling patterns of the carpet.

  “That’s a hell of a trick,” Elsa said once she’d collected herself.

  “You know, I haven’t had anyone new up here in a couple of years who could appreciate it that much. Thanks for reminding me what that looks like. Paris?”

  “I’m here,” his assistant’s voice called from everywhere and nowhere.

  “Ghost protocol, please.”

  “Of course.”

  All around them, the once transparent window that separated the floor from the ceiling frosted over as if an impenetrable fog had suddenly fallen over the city.

  “Don’t be alarmed,” Tyson said. “This just keeps prying eyes from lipreading while we hold our meeting.”

  Elsa nodded. “I understand.”

  “Paris, can you join us, please?”

  Paris’s familiar shape appeared in the opaque window. “Hello, Dr. Spaulding. It’s good to meet you in, well, person.”

  “You two know each other?” Tyson asked.

  “She, ah, recruited me for the Teegarden expedition,” Elsa said. “I didn’t know you were an AI.”

  “Ah.” Paris fluttered her shoulders and smiled. “Passed another Turing test.”

  “Sorry, I meant no offense. We use AI in the lab every day. They’re invaluable. Just not quite so … sophisticated.”

  “None taken, Doctor. I’m a special case.”

  “That she is,” Tyson said. “Dr. Spaulding, if you would be so good as to give Paris permission to access your files, she’ll be more than capable of throwing together the visuals and cites for your presentation on the fly. Isn’t that right, Paris?”

  “I’ll be happy to,” the AI said reassuringly.

  “The data sets are pretty dense,” Elsa said uncertainly.

  “I’m a quick study.”

  “What the hell.” Elsa shrugged. “You’re the ones paying for all of it anyway.” She pulled a small tablet from her purse, thumbed it, then typed an incomprehensibly complex string of characters into the passcode field. Tyson couldn’t have remembered it even if he’d wanted to steal access later.

  “That’s your password?” Tyson said. “How can you remember it?”

  “It’s just five sets of seven characters. Anyone can do that.” She opened a couple of different fields and keyed a few command prompts. “Okay, Paris. You should have full access now.”

  The projections of Paris’s eyes closed. For a moment, she concentrated. “Yes, I can see your data. Thank you. I’ll try not to leave a mess.”

  “You can’t be any worse than my first graduate student.”

  The two of them shared a laugh, as if Paris had ever been a graduate student.

  “Okay, are we ready then?” Tyson asked, but continued before getting an answer, “Good, let’s get this dog and pony show over with. Paris, put the board members onscreen, please.”

  The overhead lights dimmed. One at a time, six ghostly figures materialized from the fog of the window until they resolved into something with the appearance of substance spaced equidistantly around the circular office window, theater-in-the-round style.

  Tyson didn’t like the idea of addressing people he couldn’t see, so he held his arms out wide, toggled his forefingers, then scrunched everyone together in a neat row where he could engage with all of them at once.

  The Chief Operations Officer, Chief Information Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Logistical Officer, Chief Humanities Officer, and Chief Benefits Officer, sitting in lavishly appointed home offices, dens, and living rooms in penthouses atop the most exclusive residential towers in downtown Methuselah, collectively and expectantly stared back at him. Everyone except CHO Meadows, who preferred to live in a five-room hovel on the outskirts of the burber ring inherited from her parents some fifteen years ago. Foz always had been a bit of an odd one.

  A spotlight cast a glow over Tyson’s head and shoulders for theatrical effect. He held his arms up in welcome. “Ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining me tonight.”

  “Cut the crap, Tyson,” COO Nakamura said without preamble. “We all saw that interview. What the hell were you—” He stopped midsentence as soon as he noticed Elsa standing behind Tyson’s right shoulder. “Who is that?”

  “This…” Tyson moved aside and motioned for Elsa to step forward. “… is Doctor Elsa Spaulding. She’s one of the immunologists leading the effort to find a cure for our Teegarden plague, and she’s the reason I called this meeting.”

  “But you didn’t call this meeting!” Nakamura complained.

  “I have now, Takeshi. I cede the floor to Dr. Spaulding. And trust me, you’re all going to want to listen very carefully to what she has to say.” He turned around and lean
ed in to whisper in Elsa’s ear. “Remember, you’re the expert here. Try not to overwhelm them with detail. And don’t take any of their shit. Think teaching class at a primary school.”

  “I haven’t been in a primary school in twenty years.”

  “You’ll be great.” He hooked an arm around her waist and gently maneuvered her under the light, then stepped away.

  Momentarily startled, Elsa straightened her blouse and cleared her throat. “Ladies and gentlemen, good evening. I apologize in advance for the somewhat disjointed nature of this presentation. I didn’t know I was giving it until five minutes ago.” She shot Tyson a sour look, but continued. “As Mr. Abington said, for the last two weeks I’ve been working diligently with my colleagues both in orbit on the Preakness and in situ on Teegarden to develop a cure for the mystery bacteria infecting our people.”

  “And how goes that fight, Doctor?” Foz asked. Her gentle tones stood in such stark contrast to nearly everyone else Tyson came in regular contact with.

  “To be frank, slowly. We’ve managed to contain the outbreak and identify its vectors. We’ve even managed to start sterilizing the outer structures on Teegarden and set up labs and a treatment center on-site. But as far as working toward a cure, that’s been slower going. So far, the strain has proven resilient to all known phases of antibiotics, retro-viral therapies, even the bacterial phages we’ve thrown at it. Its mutation rate is higher than anything I’ve seen in more than a decade of work in the field. It’s almost like the strain knows our playbook and is anticipating our next move against it.”

  “Are you saying this bug is intelligent, Doctor?” Nakamura said. “Because you have to know how crazy that sounds.”

  “No. I’m saying it gives the illusion of intelligent action because, and here’s the big one, it’s been programmed to.”

  “Walk us through that.”

  Elsa ran a hand through her hair. “After sequencing its genome at several stages of its development, I retroactively isolated a series of snippets laying dormant, waiting to be triggered by environmental conditions or other outside stimulus. Further, these alleles were hidden among junk DNA after being lifted from wildly divergent orders of prokaryotes that—”

  “Doc. English, please,” Nakamura pleaded.

  “She was speaking English, Takeshi,” Foz said.

  “Could’ve fooled me.”

  “Regardless. Dr. Spaulding, biology wasn’t a primary focus of study for most of us in the corporate world. Could you shave it down for my associates, please?”

  “Yes, of course. Alleles are just a science-y word for traits. We can track these traits backward through time by following their development and comparing it to known mutation rates and see points of divergence and speciation. But these alleles don’t fit into any single catalogued lineage. It would be like seeing a person walking down the street with an elephant trunk and dragonfly wings. Evolutionarily, those traits didn’t evolve together, so you’d instantly know they’d acquired them through gene-splicing, not any natural process. And even that metaphor doesn’t really do the job, because the genetic diversity of prokaryotes spans many hundreds of millions of years longer than the history of the vertebrate lineage.”

  Foz held up a hand. “I think your point is made, Doctor. Thank you. You said the bacteria’s program is anticipating your steps to attack it. Have you tried something so unscientific as going out of order?”

  “We have, but it’s less about the order and more just that the specimen has counters waiting for everything already in our toolkit. We need to develop a new tool from scratch, which we will, but it’s going to take some time.”

  “We’ve already lost fourteen people, Dr. Spaulding,” Nakamura jumped in. “We can’t afford much more time.”

  “We’ve just received a shipment of cryogenic capsules for the most advance-stage cases in Teegarden. They’re being set up in situ now. As we all know, cryo-sleep has its own risks and only buys us a few months, but I’m confident that anyone we have to put on ice now will keep long enough for us to crack this thing.”

  “That’s encouraging to hear.” Durant, the Chief Benefits Officer, finally broke his silence. “One final question, Doctor. Is this a weapon?”

  Elsa coughed into her fist. “I’m afraid I’m not able to speak to that hypothesis, sir.”

  “I can.” Tyson stepped back into the spotlight, gently crowding Elsa back to the side. “Ageless is the victim of a coordinated, sophisticated attack, Teegarden being only one prong of it. I assume you’ve all read my memo about our efforts to identify the source of the leak about the Teegarden outbreak even before I was notified. But what I haven’t had time to tell you yet is I had lunch today with Ms. Sokolov. She confirmed with me in confidentiality that the rumor about a Xre incursion on Grendel is true. We really did have a Xre warship cross the Red Line in our backyard two weeks ago.”

  A pall fell over the board. Foz was the first to relocate her voice. “What were our losses?”

  “Negligible. Our cruiser lost a pair of drones and a few decoys driving the enemy off. They didn’t get anywhere near our investment.”

  “That’s not very comforting,” Durant said.

  “You haven’t heard everything.” Tyson realigned one of his cufflinks. “I discovered later that our server during lunch wasn’t a server at all, but an operative eavesdropping on our conversation. For whom, I have no idea, but I’m almost certain she was the one to share the intel with INN. Methuselah, indeed probably Lazarus itself, is compromised until we find the source of these leaks and plug it.”

  “In the plumbing sense, or the bullet sense?” Nakamura asked.

  “I’m flexible.”

  “I have a question,” Foz said. “If this is such a high-level conspiracy, why did they allow the genetic modification of the bacteria to be so easily uncovered?”

  “It wasn’t easy,” Elsa jumped in defensively. “It was a bitch of a process that took me a week of sequencing and sample runs. I just happen to be really good at my job. Better than my salary, if we’re being honest.”

  “How much better?” Tyson asked.

  The question threw Elsa off-balance. “I—I don’t know,” she stammered. “Thirty percent?”

  “Done.” Tyson typed a note into his wrist display. “Now, do you mind? I’m in the middle of a thing.”

  “Right, sorry.”

  “Should’ve said fifty.”

  “What?”

  Tyson held a finger up to his lips. “Anyway, now that we know these leaks and saboteurs exist, the only question is what to do about them.”

  “Lock down the spaceports,” Nakamura said. “Tell air traffic control to freeze travel into or out of the system until we can do a complete sweep of the population and isolate the operatives.”

  “And start rumors that containment has broken on the Preakness, start a public health panic?” Lassalle, the CFO, said, finally joining the conversation. “If you want to see our overnights drop a hundred points by morning, that’s how to do it.”

  “Rene is right.” Tyson took back the initiative. “Besides, such a drastic action would tip off our foes that we’ve discovered their scheme and give them time to erase evidence and bury bodies. Time we can’t afford to give them if we’re going to make these charges stick at a full corporate tribunal.”

  “What about the Xre incursion?” Foz asked.

  “An instance of terribly unfortunate timing.”

  “For us. Awfully convenient timing for whoever’s behind this.”

  “I recognize that,” Tyson conceded. “But the Xre see humans as a monolithic block; they don’t differentiate between corporate entities. That’s why we had to create the fleet in the first place. Besides, how would you bribe a Xre? With a crate of live bugs? They don’t even have a concept of money.”

  “Point taken.”

  “I know it looks suspicious, but I just don’t see how it comes to pass. It took almost three years of incessant negotiation after the Int
ersection War just to figure out what the hell they wanted to negotiate over. Besides, if the Xre Grand Symphony really did decide to conspire against Ageless individually, there isn’t a good goddamn we could do about it. So I’d prefer to stick to the wildfires we have a hope of putting out.”

  “That’s fair.”

  “To that end, we have to proceed quietly to avoid the panic Rene mentioned, and to keep our quarry from realizing they’re being hunted in turn. We have three different lines of inquiry to follow: the communications leak between the Preakness and the Immortal Tower, the server-turned-spy, and now whoever engineered the bacteria. I’m already pursuing all of them as aggressively as discretion allows. We need to be patient until something turns up in our nets.”

  The room fell silent while each board member considered what they’d just heard. Finally, Nakamura spoke. “Motion to approve Tyson’s approach. Is there a second?”

  “Seconded,” Foz said.

  “It’s to a vote, then.”

  Everyone thumbed at their consoles to register their secret ballot. Three in favor, two opposed, one abstention. Good, Tyson thought. He wouldn’t have to be the official tiebreaker for his own proposal. Still, the twin “nay” votes irked him. For a moment, he considered letting Paris loose into the system to see who’d cast them, but decided against it. For the time being.

  “Thank you, friends. We will continue on the course, and I will make sure to keep you all abreast of any developments. But I must reiterate the importance of confidentiality. Until we catch the perpetrators here on Lazarus, we have no idea who’s listening. That said, I won’t keep you from the evening’s pleasures any longer. Good night.”

  With a goodbye wave of Tyson’s hand, the ghosts returned to the fog. Then, the room’s lights returned to normal levels to reveal Elsa leaning on Tyson’s desk.

  “Are board meetings always like that?”

  “No, no. Not at all. There’s usually more cursing. Are you all right? You look a little flush.”

  “I just gave a presentation to the seven most powerful people on the entire planet without any notice. It took me most of grad school to get over a crippling fear of public speaking. You could say I’m a little distressed.”