The Daedalus Code

by Barnes, Colin F.

  Not that all of New Crete was a bastion of wealth and fairness. Quite the opposite.

  Despite the power balance, he marveled at those great, hulking towers as the sleek FT negotiated the multilayered traffic and rose up through the various levels.

  The journey back into the city gave him the opportunity to read Ariadne’s file.

  Most of it was just results from various coding experiments—charts and graphs depicting a particular code pattern’s efficiency and CPU requirements when under stress.

  He wondered then why it was so important. If it were some kind of insurance policy, he’d have expected some kind of revelation, rather than test results to hypothetical programs he didn’t have the details for. The reports themselves never went into great detail of exactly what these programs were designed for, beyond being some kind of artificial intelligence algorithm. But given Cynthia’s reaction, he trusted her that it was somehow important.

  For now he just snapped pictures of each printed page so he had a digital version in his PR he might recall if he ever needed to. He committed as much of it to memory as possible and focused on his next task: getting into Ariadne’s dorm room.

  He was approaching the tenth-level checkpoint, and that familiar quicksilver feeling of being on the wrong side of the law flowed through his nerves. The security magnets clamped the FT in place. The checkpoint itself was a narrow entrance between two towers. A scanner probed both the FT and Mouse’s public ID…come on, let me through… It took longer than he suspected. His foot tapped against the footrest, his fingers drummed out a nervous beat on the control wheel. His throat was dry.

  What if the stolen ID were already in the system…?

  Another minute passed, stretching his nerves…and then the scanner bleeped and the gates opened.

  He closed his eyes, said a silent prayer to no one in particular and basked in the relief as he passed through the security gate.

  Have a Good Day in the Tenth the sign above the gates spelled in bright red OLED letters.

  Mouse saluted as he sailed through. “Let’s hope so.”

  As the FT continued its ascent to the university’s level, Mouse sent Phaedra a brief video update. He recorded his entrance to the tenth level, and added, “I’ll be at the girl’s uni apartment in three minutes. Will let you know what I find.”

  Thirty seconds later, he received a reply.

  “Don’t hang around,” Phaedra said, her face back-dropped by a classical painting and a glass of wine in her hand. “Good luck.”

  “Thanks. Taking it easy, I see.”

  “Well, with you on the case, I thought I’d put my feet up for a bit…but seriously, I’m researching whatever I can find out about these kids. Each one had won awards for the work on AIs and self-teaching coding paradigms. Anything you can find on that will be a great help.”

  “I’ll keep my eyes open for anything useful.”

  “Be careful,” Phaedra said.

  Mouse smiled, then shut off his feed. The FT pulled into the New Crete Tech Institute’s visitor carport. It was dark inside. Strip lights illuminated the Steelcrete walls, and shadows devoured the gaps. Mouse exited the FT and approached the glass elevator. His PR overlaid the operating menu.

  He checked Ariadne’s interaction matrix and ran a triangulation algorithm for all the people she’d spent time with in the week before her disappearance. His software crunched the data and a few milliseconds later, he got her location: floor 23, room 18. That confirmed the information on the printout Cynthia had given to him, which was now folded inside his jacket.

  He selected 23 on the menu and waited for the elevator to reach its destination.

  It stopped twice on the way, taking on three passengers: two blonde girls and a tall, dark-haired man. All three of them dressed in tightly tailored grey-wool suits. Clones, he thought. They looked right at him, and despite the ID he was projecting, they still turned up their noses. Not surprising when he was clearly dressed like the fourth-leveler he was.

  In hindsight, he probably should have dressed for the occasion. But still, it wasn’t a crime to look out of place—yet. And he was only breaking and entering and stealing information. Not really that big a deal.

  The elevator stopped, opened its glass doors with a silent whoosh. He exited into a sterile corridor that made him think of a medical bay: glossy white surfaces everywhere. Nothing tactile or warm, no carpets or lighting fixtures. Just the cold, hard tiles and wall materials No doubt impregnated with nanoprocessors.

  He ran a scan through his entanglement field and was greeted with a set of warnings about information security, proper identification, blah blah blah. The security encryption was good, but he had codes. He found Ariadne’s quarters and hacked the entry protocols with a cracking tool that was widely available in the right corners of the DarkNet. Cost him a few million dollars, but was well worth it.

  He entered the dorm. The place was an OCD sufferer’s idea of heaven. Just a single, undecorated steel chair in front of a glass-top desk. Immaculate: no fingerprints or smudges to be found. Her workstation screen hovered above the desk via a nanotube wall mount. Not a single cable to be seen. He liked the setup, could appreciate the design and cleanliness. Zero distractions.

  The scent of lavender clung to the sterilized air. It was a little too sharp, too crisp—clearly artificial. Mouse scanned the room: no unexpected signals or listening devices.

  He took a seat and activated the workstation.

  A second later and the familiar logo of NeXt2 emblazoned on the display. Followed by their patented 3-D operating suite. Using familiar gestures, he quickly navigated through Ariadne’s file system. Even her research was meticulous and neat. All files perfectly labeled with an accurate and extensive nomenclature system and intralinked to contextual data. Mouse downloaded as much as he could just for the setup. He’d use that himself for managing all his ill-gotten information.

  Eventually, he found the data relating to her dissertation, and the reason why a company snapped her up so quickly: Practicalities and Moral Concerns Regarding the Development and Management of Self-Aware Artificial Intelligences.

  As he skimmed through it, he got that sixth-sense warning feeling. Self-aware AIs? That was bad news. There were plenty of AIs already out there in the Net controlling the Web servers, but they worked within tight parameters and weren’t sentient. Hell, he didn’t even realize it was possible, but as he read through those notes, he discovered that a group of students, including Ariadne, had created such a being—for that’s what it was now, a being, not just code in supervised lab conditions.

  It appeared to Mouse that there was an arms race between the various universities. Ariadne’s didn’t win. No guessing who was funding the winning university. The rest of her report confirmed it. Metion were bankrolling a project headed by Cretian National University.

  Mouse always knew the CNU were shady. The DarkNet was full of viruses developed by the professors and postgrad students. They thought nothing of hacking hackers—often causing permanent brain damage when those poor bastards were caught hooked up to the max via the PREs. But this…this Daedalus Project was off the chart.

  He called up Phaedra. The line buzzed for a few seconds before her face appeared on his PR screen. She looked like she’d had more than just one glass of wine, and after discovering the info about the AI, he wished he had some fine wine at hand.

  “What’s up? Found anything?”

  “I found the girl’s research information. It’s worse than I thought. They developed fully functioning, sentient AIs, and Metion were funding the CNU, who developed the Daedalus Project.”

  “Shit.”

  ***

  Mouse waited for further response from Phaedra, but she just lay there, thinking.

  “Look, why don’t I carry on digging and r
eport back later.”

  “Okay,” she said, “but you need to find a way into Metion, find out what happened to Ariadne. She might still be alive—the others might be still alive. Perhaps they’re working for them? How do we know these kids going off the grid isn’t part of the plan? Make everyone think they’re dead when they’re working on their damned Daedalus Project.”

  Mouse shrugged. “It’s possible, I suppose, but although they wiped her PR records, why leave her workstation open like this? Sure, it was encrypted, but it wasn’t difficult to crack.”

  “Maybe you’re just being modest?”

  He cracked a smile. “Do I look modest to you? Would I want your FT if I were modest?”

  “Fair point. Keep me posted.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Mouse signed off, completed the download of information from Ariadne’s datastore and was thinking about getting down into the sublevels to find a way into Metion when something in one of the files caught his attention—a name.

  It showed up on a number of the test-data documents—and there were mentions of it within the files Cynthia had given to him: Dr. Kalani.

  Mouse ran the name through his search program, pulled up his record.

  Dr. Kalani, thirty-nine years old. A professor overseeing Ariadne’s research. No convictions, stellar record in research and development of advanced information systems.

  Decent guy, Mouse thought. Even his interaction matrix and PR records were clean as a whistle: not a sign of a deviant sexbot or artificial highs anywhere. And the most useful thing was that he was actively online, alive and publicly available.

  While Mouse exited the university and seated himself inside the FT, he called up Kalani via the PR.

  A bearded Asian man stared at Mouse with a mixture of confusion and fear. “This is Dr. Kalani, may I help you?” he said.

  “Oh, hi, Doc. You don’t know me—obviously—but I know that you worked closely with a girl called Ariadne.”

  The man’s eyes drooped slightly and a shadow crossed his face, relaxing all the muscles and instantly taking away his friendly demeanor, replacing it with the heavy weight of grief. “I was her supervisor. What’s this about?”

  “I’m working with the IDE Agency and following up on her disappearance. I’m assuming you know about that already?”

  Kalani nodded, dropped his head to his chest. The strain was clear from the tight worry lines on his balding forehead. He looked up and choked out, “Any news on her yet?”

  “We’re working on it, Doctor.”

  Kalani took a deep breath and sat up straight. “May I see your ID credentials?”

  Mouse quickly spoofed a fake Agency ID, sent the record across to the doctor. It was a hastily made file with none of the encryption Mouse would usually spend longer incorporating. But it’d have to do.

  The older man quickly scanned it, seemed convinced. “I already spoke with your colleagues. Has there been any news?”

  “We’ll get to that. But first, can you tell me again what you know about her disappearance?”

  He shrugged. “Like I told the other agents: I don’t know anything! I reported her missing as soon as she didn’t turn up for her dissertation meeting. I was expecting her, as it was her last assessment before I gave my final grade.”

  “Can you tell me more about what she was working on?”

  “I’m assuming you’ve commandeered her research by now?”

  “We’re currently getting familiar with it. But it’d be quicker if you could tell us what you know.”

  Kalani fidgeted on his office chair, seemed to weigh how much information to relinquish. Mouse waited patiently, not wanting to take the conversation off into a different direction.

  “Basically,” the doctor said, “she and a group of others were working on a multicored, distributive, intelligently aware AI system. Its function was to manage the flow of information across networks. It was…brilliant…”

  “And dangerous?”

  Kalani’s face twisted and his voice rose. “No! Not at all. It was completely safe. Ariadne, myself, and the others had done extensive parameter testing and it never once broke its protocols.”

  “Others? The other kids that have gone missing, too, right? They were all working on the same project?”

  He exhaled deeply, his shoulders slumping. “Yes, I’m afraid so.”

  “What happened to them, Doctor? What aren’t you telling us?”

  His looked away, seemed to shrink down into his chair under the weight of some great truth. He dropped his head into his hands, mumbled something and when looked up, his eyes were reddened. “I don’t know,” he said, “I just don’t know!” He wiped the tears from his eyes. “It’s the truth. I told IDEA everything I know…”

  “Everything?”

  “What are you suggesting?” He looked down, broke eye contact.

  Mouse had done enough face-to-face deals with shady characters to know the good doctor was hiding something, and his heart rate was jumping, too—clearly a sign of subterfuge. Mouse kept his eye on the man, waited, all the while running background checks and letting his gopher program spider its way through the man professor’s employment and financial records.

  “I’m not suggesting anything, Dr. Kalani. Sometimes, it’s easy to forget to mention something that would be important,” he said to buy time while his code returned its findings. “It might seem insignificant or even trivial to you, but in this game, the slightest thing can break a case wide open. You want us to find her, right?”

  “Of course I do! For Job’s sake, I’m going out of my mind with worry for those kids—and even for my own family. What if they come after me, too?”

  “They?” Mouse asked. “Do you have an idea who might have taken these kids?”

  He shook his head.

  Mouse’s gopher returned with a set of search results. A red flag jumped out immediately while he gleaned the doctor’s financial records and professional career.

  “Dr. Kalani, what is your relationship with MacroComputing?”

  A sheen of sweat broke out on Kalani’s forehead. He went to close the connection, but Mouse jammed his attempt. “You’re not going anywhere. Not until you explain yourself.”

  He wiped the sweat from his head, grimaced. “It’s nothing to do with Ari and the others.”

  “Then why so scared?”

  “The fact you know about them, I’m assuming you have hacked my financial records.” Kalani looked nervously behind him in the darkened room and lowered his voice. “So, therefore, you’ll likely understand that I’ve been accepting a little…consultancy on the side.”

  “What exactly have you been consulting with them about?” Mouse ran a search on MacroComputing. He’d heard of them, but they weren’t a big player to the best of his knowledge.

  Kalani hesitated, looked away again.

  “I can send your records to the boys and girls in Fraud. Or you can tell me exactly what you know and avoid a rather unpleasant situation.”

  The doctor thought for a second, opened his mouth, then closed it again, fidgeted some more before finally saying, “AI information systems, okay? I was tipping them off on what my students were doing in their research. In return, they guaranteed them all jobs in their new department. And they did just that. In fact, a couple of the kids are working there right now, and are perfectly safe. Sure, I took some money for a bit of information, but I was only looking out for those kids, making sure their incredible talent and groundbreaking research went to an ethical company.”

  “Unlike Metion, you mean?”

  Now his face screwed up with disgust. “Yes! Like Metion. You know they tried to poach my students before they had even graduated? They had agents follow them all around the various networks, and even to their ho
mes to try and get them to agree to work with them.”

  “Why didn’t you tell that to the agents on this case?”

  “Why do you think? If they, like you, snooped into my records, they’d find a connection and assume I was involved. I have a family to look out for. Hell, I have myself to look out for. It’s a dangerous time.”

  Mouse thought about this for a second and decided to give him a little info in return to keep the conversation going. He recorded the entire conversation on his PR. “Her last known location, as far as we can tell from her data trail, was with a man involved with Metion. Everything after that was deleted. I’d say it’s a high chance they had something to do with her disappearance—and the rest of the missing kids. Don’t you?”

  “Possibly. I don’t know. I can’t do anything. I don’t have anywhere near the influence to approach them. Isn’t that your job?”

  Mouse laughed, said, “You think the Agency has the power to just waltz in somewhere like Metion? I don’t think you fully understand the dynamics of law enforcement these days, Dr. Kalani. Now tell me, who was it who hired Ariadne at this MacroComputing? Give me a contact and help me find her.”

  Kalani closed his eyes and shook his head, “They’ll kill me if they find out.”

  “Tell me anyway, and maybe you won’t have Ariadne and the others’ deaths on your conscious as well. And maybe I won’t have you exposed and locked up in some dingy third-level clink.”

  “Okay, but you have to keep me out of this…it can’t come from me.”

  “I promise,” Mouse said, feeling that building tension as he was getting closer to a break.

  “He might already be dead, but the man you need is…”

  Chapter Seven

  Angelos Pagakis: A headhunter for MacroComputing and the one responsible for hiring Ariadne and the four other kids taken by Metion. Dr. Kalani gave Mouse an address. But it wouldn’t be easy, not in the slightest. His last known place of residence was down in level three. Mouse had only been down there once, and still had the scars on his back to show for it. Vermin ran the place: mostly ex-Russian military generals.