by M M Buckner
But the genie wasn’t in the box anymore. No fist could hurt it now. Dominic stepped across the thick, silent carpet and hefted the gray box in his palm. It felt light. He studied the embossed trademark, Z for ZahlenBank. This box was merely packaging. Richter had designed his Neural Profile to live inside the Ark, the bank’s huge data-warehouse. But surprise, Richter’s NP didn’t follow orders.
Seventy hours after Richter’s death, the NP migrated beyond the Ark and dispersed itself throughout the Net, then hotlinked into the bank’s surveillance web and started learning. An archive copy of the world wasn’t good enough. It wanted the original. Now it leeched power and computational time from countless processors around the northern hemisphere, and it seemed to be everywhere at once, watching and listening to everyone. When it named itself ZahlenBank’s chairman, the directors were too stunned to object. Its omniscience had them terrorized. But the digital genie was incomplete. Dominic realized it needed a set of arms and legs to “do the physical stuff.”
He shivered with muscle tension as he set the box gently back on its pedestal. “If you’re such a megagenius, why can’t you find the Benthica on your own?”
“It’s not that simple!” The NP sounded offended. “I’m running my best defogger code, but their signal loops back on itself more times than a tax shelter. The protes are using damned slick tech. How did they get it, I’d like to know. And why aren’t they dead?”
Dominic wondered that himself. The miners hadn’t received supplies for almost three weeks. Maybe they’d stashed food aboard, but as of five days ago, they should have run out of fuel. Without fuel, they couldn’t synthesize air and water from the ocean fluids. Their life support should have failed yesterday at noon. Those miners shouldn’t be alive, much less broadcasting a signal that even ZahlenBank couldn’t trace.
“Team up with me, son. We’ll settle this mess, then everything’ll be back to normal.”
Dominic ran a finger inside his collar. “Send a robot. I’m nobody’s errand boy.”
“As for the rewards,” the NP continued as if it hadn’t heard, “you get everything. What do I need with money? You already have my penthouse, my race cars, all my stuff. You’re one of the ten richest men in the world. But you could lose it, son, if we don’t handle this Benthica situation.”
“Very altruistic. Not a single reward for you?” Dominic massaged the knotted muscles in his neck. “Not, for instance, total control of the bank?”
“You’ve turned cynical, Dominic. I’m chairman, but you’re still president. You need ZahlenBank as much as I do. You’re a deal maker, and the bank lets you do the one thing you love.”
The NP’s exact imitation of his father’s tone made Dominic want to kick the desk over. But he held every muscle still. That was his own voice, too, the voice he shared with Richter. And it echoed his thoughts. He couldn’t deny that he loved doing deals. That was the work his father had taught him, and once it had engaged his whole mind. Lately, though, some of the negotiations troubled him, and he’d argued with Richter. Words had been spoken that he could never take back now. His eyes felt hot, and he turned away.
The small Net node on his wrist was still glowing, and its tiny luminous icons floated a few centimeters above his forearm. On impulse, he jabbed his cybernail through the holographic matrix and opened a map. A pale blue disk hovered over the back of his hand. The Arctic Ocean. Shimmering purples, blue and aquamarines indicated varying depths, and precise red stars identified factory ships, seafarms, weather stations and floating cities, their positions tracked in real time through the Net. Where had the Benthica gone to ground? Dominic imagined the rusty old crawler lurking under a rock.
One more time, he found the ship’s last known location and touched the spot with his cybernail. The map sector enlarged and offered a menu of data links. Dominic chose several. The submarine had been creeping along the continental shelf off northern Canada, mining common ores from placer deposits. It was exactly the sort of losing operation that drove its former owner Nord.Com into bankruptcy.
Elsa said the miners had lived on that vessel for four generations. They’d produced quite an extended family. Infants. Old people. That’s why no other Com wanted those labor contracts. Too many expensive dependents. What were those protes thinking of, to invite empty-handed runaways to join their small ship? How did their minds work, Dominic wondered. For the twentieth time, he replayed their continuous-loop broadcast. Female voice. Net English with a mongrel American accent.
We the workers of the submarine Pressure of Light hereby dissolve all contracts with the Coms and assume independent status. Out of respect for everyone on the Net, we’re broadcasting our reasons. First, we believe all human beings evolved from the same gene pool, and second, all of us are born with the same rights to move around as free agents and make our own choices. So as of today, we declare ourselves free from Com protection. We’re writing a new contract to protect ourselves, and we invite anyone anywhere in the world to join us.
Dominic mused aloud, “They’ve renamed their ship the Pressure of Light. It sounds mystical.”
“Sounds like bullshit,” the NP growled. “Scuzzin’ miners should be dead by now. That broadcast will work on prote minds like a drug. We’ve talked about this before.”
“I’ve never talked to you about anything,” Dominic said evenly.
“Krishna Christ, the Orgs are gonna split ZahlenBank in little pieces if we don’t take their deal. They’ve got us nailed against the wall.”
Dominic didn’t answer. He studied the map. The Orgs’ demand for secrecy raised his suspicions, partly because they wouldn’t give him time to think about it. They insisted that he leave at dawn the next day. He was supposed to meet their covert agent, a Major Qi Raoshu, on a remote beach in West Spitzbergen. The only thing missing was the cloak-and-dagger. He wasn’t about to accept a deal with so little information, especially from the bank’s most determined adversary. He tapped his cybernail to enlarge a holographic cross section of Canada’s continental shelf.
At that moment, a light glimmered in his peripheral vision. He glanced up to see a man-sized hologram projecting from the gray box. The glow resolved into an image of his father, Richter Jedes, as handsome and fit as he appeared the morning before his racing accident. The image resembled Dominic so closely, he might have been gazing into a bright flickery mirror.
“Son, the last thing I want is to put you at risk. You’re my whole life.” The hologram smiled with affection and lifted its arms for an embrace. That was too much.
Dominic lurched toward the desk. He seized the gray box and hurled it against the window. The hologram sizzled and vanished, but the box merely bounced across the carpet and landed under a chair.
“I guess that was a little premature on my part,” the NP said. “Forgive me, son. I won’t do that again till you’re ready.”
“Blast you to hell! I’m not your son!”
In blind fury, Dominic charged out of the office and slammed into Ulla Mannheim, the bank’s chief cashier. Ulla fell against the wall. Hastily, Dominic apologized and helped her recover her balance. Then he smoothed his hair and headed at a calmer pace toward the elevator, but Richter’s voice followed him. The NP spoke through Dominic’s own wrist node.
“Focus, Dominic. We set a bad precedent freeing those protes. We have to fix it. To protect ZahlenBank.”
“To protect your power, you mean.” Dominic spoke into his wrist node in a low, dangerous whisper. “You can never replace my father. I’ll never play flunky to a digital brain.”
With short, thick, surprisingly nimble fingers, Dominic unstrapped the node from his wrist, flung it to the floor and crushed it with his heel. Ulla Mannheim stared in shock. Several people poked their heads out of office doors, and a small audience gathered in the corridor. Dominic glimpsed Karel Folger and Klas Lorn. The NP transferred its voice to the office security system, and its words echoed through the halls.
“We want the same th
ing. To save ZahlenBank.”
Dominic stepped into the elevator and commanded the doors to close. The NP continued speaking through the elevator’s intercom. “You can’t escape me. If you let ZahlenBank fail, you have nothing else. Believe me, son, I know.”
Dominic punched the ID pad and muttered, “Lobby level.”
“We can protect each other,” the NP went on. “We can keep it all. Money’s the immaculate computation of—”
“Shut up!” Dominic tugged the intercom off its bracket and slammed it against the wall. When the door slid open, a warm breeze wafted in from, the lobby, and Dominic caught the unmistakable scent of protes. Acrid sweat and cheap deodorant, junk food and bad teeth. The concessionaires were out in full force, trading their unsanctioned goods in the ZahlenBank lobby. Their heat fogged the air.
“Son, don’t you wanna hear my plan?” the voice echoed from the overhead P.A. system.
Heads turned. Protes in the lobby glanced up at the speakers. “We can’t talk here,” Dominic hissed.
The NP spoke at full volume. “Look around you, Dominic! Are these the people you want running our world?”
“Quiet! Of course not. We can’t discuss this in front of them.”
The ambient crowd noise was rising, and Dominic saw people pointing at the speakers. He strode across the lobby with his head down. Of course we don’t want these slackers running the world, he thought, pressing with distaste through the warm, fusty mob of prote bodies. Someone stepped on his shoe and scuffed the genuine leather. He cursed under his breath. These people had no conception of the value of things. They couldn’t even grasp basic facts—like market order.
Dominic might have questioned some bank policies, but he still believed firmly in his father’s creed of stable markets. The markets fed everyone. Especially now, with Earth’s population stretching resources to the limit, mere was no margin for unrest. He also knew that only an enlightened class of executives, evolved through genetic breeding and groomed by education, could keep order in such an intricate, panicky marketplace. If the markets crashed, the result might be a global die-off.
As if reading Dominic’s thoughts, the NP roared over the public speakers, “Without our management, protes will die.”
“Fry bread, sir? Hot salty fry bread?” a man shouted in Dominic’s face.
The hawker’s breath stank of tooth decay, and Dominic trembled with fury. He gripped his fists to his sides and had to call up all his will to keep from shoving the man away. The markets feed everyone, he recited to himself. After a moment, he exhaled and moved on.
Outside the lobby, he summoned his aircar with a word. Protes milled up and down ZahlenBank’s granite steps, flaunting their soiled uniforms and greasy hair and sullen, shifty eyes. What had possessed him to free two thousand of these ill-bred clods? He must have been dozing when he suggested that spin-off.
An adolescent boy bumped against him on the steps, and Dominic reeled back. One of the boy’s eyes was missing, and the skin covering the sunken socket was smooth and unblemished, the color of cream. The sight disturbed Dominic strangely.
“Sorry, sir. Most sorry.” The boy spoke with a low-class twang.
Dominic quickly looked away from the boy’s face. As the herd of protes shuffled around him, he held very still and watched his aircar glide to a stop at the curb. The door sprang open, and he descended the steps, working his jaw back and forth, twisting his full lips out of shape. He knew his father was right, he’d fucked up. No, not his father. The NP. Whatever. Dominic ground his teeth. He’d grown careless. He would never measure up to his father’s ideal. He might as well quit and let the NP have it all. Losing his position now could hardly make him feel worse.
On the last step, he pivoted to gaze at the monolithic façade of ZahlenBank headquarters. “Good-bye to nothing,” he muttered under his breath. The dark granite edifice rose like a massive tombstone, eight hundred meters into the air. Its highest level brushed the underside of the clear dome that shielded Trondheim from the poisonous summer sky, and above the dome, obscured by smog, the needlelike executive spire pierced the very heavens.
Dominic found himself beating the car’s roof with his fist. No, he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t walk away. Too much was at stake. His screwup had put ZahlenBank at risk. After his father spent nearly three centuries building it, Dominic couldn’t let it fall. He had a duty to save it. He was an executive, born and bred.
A chime sounded the change of shift, and the noise level rose. Up and down the street, protected employees erupted from office doors, and a river of pedestrians divided around Dominic and his car. Bodies bumped against him, and thousands of plastic boots slapped the pavement with a noise like thunder. The air stank of perspiration. Dominic took out a scented handkerchief to cover his nose.
Looking up at the highest corner window, he made his decision. I’ll fix my mistake, whatever I have to do. After that, I’ll quit.
“Son, you’re too bright to refuse my help.” The NP’s voice echoed through the financial district in a tone of fatherly pride. “Are we partners?”
Dominic sealed himself inside the clean quiet seclusion of his car and answered with a single nod.
CHAPTER 3
* * *
ARBITRAGE
TWENTY hours later, Dominic waited on a dead brown beach on the shore of the Arctic Ocean. Tepid surf lapped at the sand in a meringue of dingy foam. The summer sun never set here, but at this early hour, only a thin light filtered through the smog. Frayed scraps of plastic littered the sand, and a soot-gray drizzle fell. I’m not trained for this, he kept repeating to himself. I’m a banker.
He felt claustrophobic and vaguely ridiculous in the full Kevlax surface suit he wore to seal out the toxic atmosphere. Elsa had helped him put it on. The suit belonged to his father. It was a high-performance sports model, silky and light, but Dominic wasn’t used to the way the helmet faceplate limited his view. He rarely wore surfsuits. He didn’t own one. Every breath of recycled air roared in his helmet like a wind.
Major Qi Raoshu was late, blast the man’s soul. Dominic had never liked the surface. Too much space and no people. It made him edgy. He turned in slow circles, watching the misty horizon that was way too distant.
“Status?” the NP asked. The digital genie had been checking in every few minutes, sounding as nervous as Dominic felt.
“Still nothing,” Dominic whispered.
He hated the NP’s imitation of his father’s voice—his own voice. Each word stung him like a tongue of flame, and he ached to shut off his earplug. But he couldn’t deny the value of the NP’s data. The genie gave him instant access to the Ark, with its almost limitless archives of data. Whenever he asked, the NP fed him market news and information about the Benthica. Dominic had memorized the submarine’s layout, and he would recognize the Net link on sight—an upright black box on a squat swiveling base, crowned by a silver disk two meters in diameter, tilted toward the heavens. As soon as he boarded the submarine, he had to find that link and disable it. Once the broadcast died, bank guards would extract him and arrest the miners. One quick in-and-out action. Two or three hours max.
“The vulnerable point’s at the base,” the NP said. “Destroy the electronics—”
“And the broadcast dies. I know.” As he watched the beach, he changed the direction of his turns to keep from getting dizzy.
“Don’t let the Orgs intimidate you,” the NP said. “They’re puny logic machines built by engineers, whereas you have me on your side. I’m patterned after one of the shrewdest and most inventive personalities in recent times.”
“And unlike you,” Dominic added, “Orgs have to obey the law.”
He fiddled with his helmet controls and replayed the Orgs’ email on his heads-up display. He’d practically memorized their instructions. They wanted him to sneak aboard the crawler, incognito, and make a deal. No substitutes, only Dominic Jedes could do it He doubted his bargaining skills were the real reason. Maybe t
he Orgs wanted payback.
Their email said Major Qi Raoshu had been working undercover for several years, living with protes and making contacts. The major would use these contacts to find the submarine, then act as guide. Dominic’s role was to negotiate. Right. He had no intention of wasting time with that. He would head straight for the Net link. For the hundredth time, he wondered why the Orgs didn’t just board the ship with their own police. The whole scheme filled him with suspicion.
“You’re breathing too hard, son. Settle down,” said the NP. “We’ve got you covered from every angle. Believe me, I’m not about to lose you.”
Right, I’m your flesh flunky, he thought bitterly, spreading his gloved hands. He looked at his short, thick fingers, too short for a man of his height. He had his father’s hands. His father’s face. Even the way his hair curled at the crown came from his father. Now he clenched his jaw and held his body still, a talent his father had never learned.
“Someone’s coming,” the NP said. “To your left at eight o’clock.”
Dominic spun quickly and staggered in the unfamiliar surfsuit. Far down the beach, a dark, lanky figure walked toward him. He glanced nervously up at the sky. Half a score of ZahlenBank satellites were watching by metavision.
“Don’t worry, boy. I’m here.”
He picked up his briefcase and trudged along the high-tide line to meet the major. In the briefcase, he carried antiviral tabs and a small fortune in cash cards—enough to buy anything or anyone he needed. He also carried three hyperwave Net nodes—on his wrist, in his ear, and in his briefcase. Unlike conventional nodes, which required Net links to relay their signals, these hyperwave nodes fixed directly on overhead satellites. They could transmit even through solid steel and hundreds of meters of water. For added safety, a transponder chip was concealed under the skin of his left buttock. And with every step, his boots sank in the oozy sand.