Rath's Gambit (The Janus Group Book 2)

by Piers Platt

  “The Group was developed to counter an internal threat, but today, the threat that looms largest is an external one. The galaxy has changed … perhaps our principles should, too,” Mastic mused.

  Blackwell cleared his throat. “The Group’s primary purpose should not change: it has been, and always shall remain, a tool for maintaining order. But we’re tackling that goal largely blind. With expanded espionage capabilities, we could likely prevent more conflict.”

  “I’m willing to consider retraining the existing force to conduct intelligence-gathering activities,” Lizelle allowed. “But I’m not clear how those spies will be assigned to support Senate needs – my hunch is that ninety percent of the time, they’ll be used for revenue-generating missions, just like the contractors are today. The director is talking about a massive influx of personnel, and notice – she didn’t say she wanted to hire people to just be spies … she said she wanted to hire more contractors. That means more killers, who could potentially double as spies. Potentially. Or they could keep killing, just at a higher rate. We’re chartered to keep the Group in check – let’s not forget it is a criminal organization,” Lizelle argued.

  “You have a point,” Blackwell allowed. “An expanded Group could pose as much risk to peace and order in the galaxy as a minimized one. It will increase the number and frequency of murders … which is often destabilizing. I’d recommend she commission a study to determine the possible societal impact.”

  “Perhaps in concert with a limited pilot program in a specific region?” Mastic suggested.

  “I’ll agree to the study, but no pilot,” Lizelle said.

  “Mastic?” Blackwell asked.

  “There’s no harm in viewing the study results first. I’ll go along,” she answered.

  “We’re agreed then. I’ll dial her back in. Charl, will you share our decision?”

  “Of course,” Senator Lizelle agreed. The phone rang, and then the line reopened.

  “Encryption established,” a voice announced.

  “I’m back online, Senators,” Director Nkosi said.

  “Director, I want to thank you again. The proposal is compelling, and particularly the espionage role you suggest,” Senator Lizelle told her, his voice digitally scrambled beyond recognition.

  “Thank you.”

  “But in your proposal, you noted that we have constrained the Group’s growth in the past. That’s precisely correct – that’s our primary role in this relationship. We keep the wolf in his cage, and only let him out when it’s absolutely necessary. We give you some leeway to hunt, as it were, to sustain the wolf … but we’re not in the business of breeding more wolves.”

  The director frowned. “Without additional personnel, the espionage services will have limited effect on your intelligence-gathering capabilities. Our existing workforce is already at capacity, and we’ll have to take a revenue hit while we retrain them.”

  “I applaud your commitment to this as a business executive.” The senator paused. “But you’re forgetting a very important fact, I’m afraid. The Group is not, nor was it ever intended to be, a profit engine. It exists to serve the needs of the Federacy, when this Senate committee judges there is such a need. In order to do that, I recognize that you need to collect revenues from other clients – you have a business to run. And I’m sure that your family is ecstatic that you’ve been able to run it so well. But we asked your uncle to step down, and you to assume his role, not to grow this as a business – we brought you in merely to put it back on track. To maintain the status quo, if you will – with the ultimate aim of maintaining peace and order in the galaxy, as it always has been.”

  “And we’ve delivered on that objective, Senator,” the director protested.

  “Yes, you have. And your family has been amply rewarded over the years, for its leadership of the Group. I would suggest you refrain from becoming … greedy.”

  “Senator, if I may—”

  “Let me finish. At this time, we’re not approving a headcount increase. However, you’re authorized to commission an independent study of the effects of such an expansion, with an emphasis not on Group financials, but on the rates of violent crime and political instability across the Federacy and the Territories. We’ll table this subject until that study is complete. Thank you, Director – that will be all.”

  The director heard the line click off. She took a deep breath, closing her eyes and gathering her composure. On the other side of the desk, the Chief of Operations cleared his throat.

  “They were offline debating it for some time. That last committee member – whoever he or she is – is clearly opposed, but the other two may be more open-minded,” he guessed.

  “I don’t think they are unanimous,” Nkosi agreed. “But as a body, they are more conservative than I had anticipated.”

  “I can start searching for a think tank or research department that could do the study …,” the Chief of Operations began.

  “Don’t bother,” she said. “The study’s just their way of saying no.”

  She turned her chair and rose, staring out the window. “We move ahead as planned. Notify your recruiting leads, and start publicizing the increased incentives. I want to see the candidate pipeline at two hundred percent by end of month.”

  “What about the Senate oversight committee?”

  She turned back to him and raised an eyebrow. “They see only what we want them to see. We’ll just have to be more cautious about what goes in our next report.”

  “If they audit us ….”

  “We’ll deal with that if and when it happens,” she told him.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  * * *

  The waiting room outside Senator Lizelle’s office was unusually quiet, Dasi noticed.

  Usually there are a bunch of people waiting. I guess his calendar isn’t that full today.

  On the couch next to her, Khyron’s leg tapped nervously, and she could see him chewing his lip. Smiling, she reached over and gently put her hand on his knee to calm him.

  He stopped jiggling his leg and flashed her a nervous smile. “Sorry.”

  A secretary passed through and smiled at them, then recognized the young woman. “Oh, hi Dasi! I didn’t realize you were his next appointment.”

  “Hi, Selna,” Dasi replied. “Yeah, we’re scheduled for eleven.”

  “Working on another press release?” the secretary asked, pausing at the senator’s door.

  “Always. But we’re actually here to see him for something else.”

  “Well, his last conference call was running a bit behind, let me see if he’s ready – I’ll be right back.” She knocked discreetly and then let herself in.

  Across from Khyron and Dasi, a viewscreen simulated the exterior view from their position in the station. Dasi watched as a shuttle whisked past, banking and then heading for the Dauntless, one of six ancient battle cruisers that were still tethered to the asteroid at the heart of Anchorpoint. The ships had long since been converted to serve as the home of the Federal government, their guns decommissioned, fighter bays repurposed as offices and living quarters.

  “What if he doesn’t go for it? You’ve only been here a short while, it’s kind of presumptuous of us,” Khyron pointed out.

  “Stop worrying! He’ll like it,” Dasi said, smiling reassuringly. “I think.”

  The young man grimaced. “What’s taking so long?”

  “I don’t know – his schedule showed a Security subcommittee meeting. It’s closed door, members only. Very hush-hush.”

  “Why all the secrets? It’s not like we’re at war ….”

  “We could be, with all the conflict in the Territories these days,” she lectured him. “It’s committees like this one that keep us safe.”

  The door swung open. “He’ll see you now,” the secretary told them.

  The senator was pulling a plate of food out of a dumb waiter when they walked in, the privacy screen on his window disappearing to show a vie
w of the constellations twinkling beyond the space station. Unlike in the waiting room, Dasi knew the view to be genuine – Lizelle ranked highly enough that he had earned an outer office with a real window.

  “Come in, please!” Lizelle gestured to the food. “I hope you’ll excuse me, just grabbing a late breakfast. Or is it an early lunch now? Whatever. I always forget to eat, and then I get grumpy.” He strode across the room, and clasped Khyron’s hand in a firm handshake. “You must be Khyron.”

  Khyron smiled, but Dasi could see his forehead was beaded with sweat. “Yes, sir.”

  “Taking good care of our Dasi?” Lizelle asked, still gripping Khyron’s hand, raising an eyebrow with mock seriousness.

  “I – I think so, sir …,” Khyron stuttered, looking to Dasi for help.

  But Lizelle laughed. “I’m just giving you a hard time. But do take care of her – she’s already helped my public relations team make great strides. And it’s been what, two years?”

  “Eighteen months, sir,” Dasi corrected.

  “Is that all?” he asked. “Sit, please. What can I do for you today?”

  The young couple shared a look, and then Khyron took a deep breath. “I’m a programmer, sir – I have degrees in computer science and applied mathematics. And I’ve been working on an artificial intelligence program that I think has some interesting potential.”

  “Don’t undersell it,” Dasi chided him.

  Lizelle glanced over at her, then back at the programmer. “AI? Fair enough. You’re not going to tell me you broke the Groenveld Barrier, are you?”

  Khyron bit his lip. “I think I did, sir.”

  Lizelle put his fork down, eyebrows raised. “Really?”

  “Really,” Khyron nodded. “I think.”

  “You better start at the beginning,” Lizelle said.

  Dasi smiled. He’s interested now. I know that look.

  “It started as my senior thesis project, a few years back,” Khyron related. “As you know, artificial intelligence has made notable advances over recent years, particularly in large dataset applications, but programs always seem to reach a threshold where they are no longer evolving or thinking on their own without significant human intervention.”

  “Sure. The Groenveld Barrier,” Lizelle agreed.

  “Yes, sir. They’ll learn everything they can given the data they have, and solve the problems set before them, but they don’t seek out new problems to solve. They don’t take initiative, as it were.”

  “And yours does?” Lizelle prompted.

  “Not at first, no,” Khyron admitted. “But I’ve been tinkering with the code for the last few years, and several weeks ago it had some surprising results. I’ve been using open source data and stock-trading as a test case – but not actually trading with it,” Khyron reassured him.

  “That would be illegal,” the senator agreed.

  “Right – just feeding the data in, and letting FiveSight make hypothetical trades on a virtual account.”

  “Five-what?” Lizelle asked.

  “FiveSight, the name of the program,” Dasi clarified. “Because it’s better than foresight ….”

  “Cute,” Lizelle chuckled.

  “It was late at night and my thesis was due,” Khyron shrugged. “Anyway, I started with standard datasets: weather, census, publicly available stuff. Then I connected it to market trading data, and started showing the AI how to correlate events and predict outcomes. When storms damage coastal communities, the regional insurance company’s costs rise, and their stock goes down, for instance. As it started to learn, FiveSight began to create its own investing rules. One of the first things it figured out is that solar activity has a positive effect on the market on certain planets – human mood is affected by those magnetic waves washing over them.”

  “Fascinating. So I should schedule my speeches for high solar activity days, when everyone’s in a good mood?”

  “Yes, sir! People would be more receptive. Anyway, I made some tweaks to FiveSight’s code, funded the virtual trading account and gave FiveSight discretionary authority. I started with ten thousand dollars. And FiveSight lost over nine thousand dollars in about twenty minutes of trading.”

  Lizelle grimaced. “Ouch. That doesn’t inspire me with confidence.”

  “No, sir. But by the close of trading, FiveSight had the volatility figured out, and the balance was north of a million.”

  “You turned ten thousand dollars into a million dollars in one day?” Lizelle asked.

  “Well, after the losses, we actually started with just about eight hundred dollars, and FiveSight did all of the work, but … yes.”

  Lizelle whistled. “Okay, I’m impressed.”

  Khyron nodded. “But honestly, that’s nothing extraordinary, Senator. Other programs can perform similarly well in the right market conditions. And all of them would have fallen short of the Groenveld Barrier – they’re all trading with high efficiency, theoretically making money … but none of them are taking initiative. But FiveSight did.” He shifted in his chair, pushing his shirt-sleeves up to his elbows. “I left FiveSight running overnight, while the markets were closed. When I checked on it in the morning, it had composed a message for me. Usually the messages are things like ‘I discovered a new correlation between this variable and that variable, and I tested it to see if I could make money with that knowledge, here are the results.’ This message was different.”

  On his desk, Lizelle’s breakfast had gone cold. Dasi smiled, watching her boyfriend with pride.

  “FiveSight had been reviewing news articles,” he continued, “and recognized that poor stock performance over an extended period of time predicted CEO turnover. But it went a step further – it was predicting not just which CEOs would be replaced, but who might replace them. It was thinking creatively.”

  “Intuiting …,” the senator murmured.

  “Sort of. I watched it over the next few months, and it was right – over ninety percent of the CEOs it identified were fired, and it predicted the replacements correctly more than half the time. And the next quarter it was even more accurate.”

  “It’s interesting,” Lizelle allowed. “But it’s not too far off the investing mandate you gave it originally.”

  “That’s true,” Khyron agreed. “But it started branching out from there. Each night it strayed farther afield – again, with no guidance or direction from me. Within a week it had found a solution for reducing delays in space travel by adjusting routes on two major carriers. And it’s still creating. So I’m pretty excited about it as a learning algorithm – I believe it’s outperforming any other artificial intelligence out there today. I’ve got a meeting with one of the lead researchers on the Immortality Project in a few months; I’m really excited to see what we can do.”

  Lizelle sat back in his chair and spread his arms. “Okay, so you’ve got a hot program on your hands, I’m convinced. And I’m excited for you, really I am. But why come to me?”

  Khyron rubbed his palms on his pants legs. “Well, we’re hoping for your help. The more data sources I expose FiveSight to, the more learning it does, and the better it gets at … well, anything I ask it to do. But there’s only so many correlations that can be drawn from the limited open source datasets I can access, so now I’m trying to add more datasets – proprietary ones, not publicly available. And the government has a lot of data.”

  “Yes, we do,” Lizelle agreed. “I believe we store the most data in the galaxy, byte for byte.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Which data do you want?” Lizelle asked.

  “Um … all of it?” Khyron suggested.

  Lizelle laughed. “I like your enthusiasm. But I can’t just hook you up to every database we have. Give me an idea for what would be most useful.”

  Khyron scratched his chin. “FiveSight already looks at Senate voting activity when it’s making predictions – that’s public data. But I have a theory that the world in general is actually more
susceptible to activity that happens off the Senate floor – meetings, deals, conversations that aren’t part of actual legislation.”

  “That’s a fair assumption; you’re probably not wrong. But there’s no database that can tell you what’s going on in every private conversation at Anchorpoint.”

  “No, of course not, sir. I guess … well, whatever data you can get me, really. Employment reports, environmental studies, budget decisions, phone and message logs – not the actual content, just who’s messaging whom, or even, who’s messaging a lot, and who isn’t. Um ….” he trailed off.

  The senator put his chin in his hands, shutting one eye and pursing his lips. “I can get you some of that, I think. But since you’re asking me for something, I’m going to introduce you to how things work at Anchorpoint: nothing’s free, and if you ask me for something, I’m going to ask you for twice as much in return.” Lizelle picked a piece of chicken off his plate and popped it in his mouth. “First, I’m going to put you in touch with a lawyer. He’s going to help you set up an LLC, and I’m going to be your first investor. We’ll work out the details, but when you monetize this thing, I want in. And I’m not talking chump change – I’ve got twenty million dollars coming out of other private equity ventures this year, and you might just get all of that. So start thinking about a business plan, who you need to hire, etc.”

  Khyron gulped.

  “Nervous?” Lizelle asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good. Stay scared, it will motivate you. I also want exclusive access to your analysis of the Senate data. I’m primarily interested in predicting voting outcomes, or even individual votes. Can FiveSight tell me who’s on the fence, and who’s likely to swing their vote?”

  “Possibly,” Khyron guessed. “Probably.”

  “If you can do that ….” Lizelle exhaled noisily, a slow smile spreading across his face. “If you do, we’ll restructure the investment deal so you get to keep a bigger share of the company. Deal?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Okay. I’m going to hire you as an unpaid intern. I don’t think our tech team is going to give an outside researcher access to the data you’re talking about, even if I tell them to – you need to be a badged staff member. Once you’re set up on my team, we can make things happen. I also need to make some calls to our Tech department, call in some favors … but I should have you access in the next week. Dasi can take you to our staff coordinator to get the ball rolling.”