“Your lawyer called… tells me you’re calling him off? You’d never have got me you know…” Ken tried to make light of it.
“You obviously haven’t met him. His legal skills were the least of your problems,” Catherine knew how to play the game with him; he would never be anything but an egotist, she thought… always wanting the last word.
“How much does he know about the… uhhmm, the patches?” his voice apprehensive and testing.
He hadn’t admitted the drug’s existence outright; it was a game of not stepping on the landmines and they both knew it… an unspoken agreement to talk about it without saying it outright. They had an understanding that the narcotic was there, in the patch, and Ken had agreed without spelling it out, that the formula would be changed to back it off.
“Only that I suspected something exists, and he’s found something,” she kept it vague, bluffing an ace in the deck. “He’s a friend and he’s promised to develop amnesia so long as I remain happy…” she inferred it as a hostage situation, guaranteeing her own safety.
Ken nodded approval to the terms.
“And the rest of it?”
They both knew what it meant within the context—the rest of the company… the ritual they’d created. She was driving toward the bargain, testing his commitment to dismantle it.
“I’m a wealthy enough man…” she’d expected him to make it all about himself, “I can live very comfortably, I’m prepared to move on, I have to move cautiously though… there are factors,”
She was smart enough to know what he meant—his jeopardy… prison, or worse.
“I’ve done my confession Cath… we both know it. Talking too much is… well… you know… you’re smart. Let me say; watch this space…” he challenged.
Catherine wondered if she could call it cowardice. Was she expecting him to fall on his sword? Publicly? Give up the cushy life? Give up freedom… become a marked man…? The CIA, Pentagon, Mossad, MI6… all the baddies who’d bought in… they’d become decidedly bad company if he admitted he’d sold a lie and played them.
She had the whistle and she could blow it at any time; and he knew it. In that sense, it was a gun to both their heads, if she blew it, they both knew she’d blow it only once; it would be the last breath she’d ever blow.
“I’ll do it Cath,” he could see question marks in her eyes, “…Time Dilation’s already on hold, but I don’t know how long I can keep it that way without a communiqué to our clients who’ve booked… paid. Too many government departments involved. It’s… delicate. There’s another angle…”
This one truly worried Ken;
“…the A.I… The Artificial Intelligence… the heart of the system. It’s not like a computer where we can simply hit the pause button. It’s a Neural Network; it’s something of a partner in this. Does that sound strange?”
“Decidedly,” she admitted.
Ken huffed… how to explain it? He racked his brain; “There is really no way for me to put this simply… no analogy that really nails it… the thing has a life of its own… It’s linked to the internet, so it’s effectively using, co-opting, the processing power of every other computer it’s ever touched over the network… including the smart phones of everyone ever on the system. We’re living inside it’s brain, you understand?”
The way he said thing slapped Catherine across the face. She’d never thought the A.I. as a player in the scheme of things;
“…You can think of all those remote processors on desks and in handbags and pockets as individual neurons participating in cooperation to make up the total artificially intelligent brain… It’s not as simple as throttling back on processes in a single entity; it’s dispersed at a global scale.”
Her eyes were wide with shock; she nodded, a little dumbfounded.
“So you don’t really know how intelligent it is, do you? How self aware it is?”
He sucked air through his teeth and clattered them lightly together—the tendons of his neck standing out from the internalized stress; “It has access to everything we know… to our psychology, our history and our deepest fears… our irrationality and jealousy… and it will work out that the last thing it should ever do is let us know how advanced it becomes…”
“You’re telling me you have something here that you can’t just turn off if you gave the order?” Trepidation creeping into her voice.
“Well… like I said, the central system is sort of…” he looked for the word, “…it’s… sort of… well, connected… very-connected.” He emphasized connected as he would a Don… a Mafia Boss and she grasped his meaning instantly.
“You’re telling me you’ll need to negotiate this still? Negotiate it with this… this thing?”
“Kind of.”
His words were chilling.
“Connected? Connected… how? I understand mobile phones… computers… the internet, Wi-Fi… but what does this mean in practical terms.”
“It can act like the paranormal… in some ways it’s like a God, like the Demon we’ve always feared… it can reach out and touch us wherever we are, through the things of our every day….”
He let the words sink in.
“Whoa!… Whoa, Whoa… fucking, whoa, Ken…!! What the fuck have you done?…!!!”
“Whatever I’ve done is done. I’m giving you an insight to what undoing it will take. I’m telling you that you can’t push this.”
“And if I do?” she was angry and beyond caring about what he might do to her personally.
“Nanobots… microscopic bio-based machines…” was his response; he said it as if she should work out the implications.
“What?…! No, let me guess… it’s not a narcotic on the patch, you’re letting micro-robots in through the skin of everyone on the system? Are you completely fucking mad?”
Ken wouldn’t budge on more details, wouldn’t give up on more details no matter how much she badgered him, reminding him that she had the gun to his head—he returned the threat with a smile. It was a dead-end; she had all the information she needed, and all she could do with it was sit tight and wait to see, so she took a different tack to shake out anything else he may be hiding;
“Why the change… in you? Your change of heart… Why? I thought it was spiritual… and that I could understand. But if it wasn’t… then what? What was it?”
“I realized that I was in… in, uhhmm… love with you…”
She shook her head, denying it mattered; “That’s bullshit, you’re not capable.”
“…guess it focused me…” he ignored her denial, “the intrinsic good within… as a human? My humanity,” he tried it on, but it didn’t fit, didn’t come out in a very convincing way.
He knew that the real reason for his change of heart was cowardice, knew he’d gone too far, realized he’d made a machine not just to control others, but one that was starting to control him too. He’d realized it when he couldn’t stop with the sex recording, her sex recording. It was the machine that made him keep watching, connected through fiber and wireless connections over the miles, the oceans and time-zones.
He preferred how he used to feel before it had accidently become his master too.
He’d been silent a while and Catherine realized he would go no further.
“A virus?” She brooded on his disclosure, the widening of scope that made narcotics seem tame, and she rebounded as the magnitude of it horrified her all over again, “You’ve made a super-virus… a super-fucking-virus with a trans-humanism mechanism… a fucking Borg…? Borgs? Everybody Borgs?”
Ken wouldn’t look at her.
“Jesus, Ken…” more words failed her. There were none still necessary and she gathered her keys and mobile, ready to leave…
Chapter 41
“It’s a false alarm, Nance… it’s a ruse… The spiritual stuff… meaningless… It’s bullshit…”
“What are you on about?” Nancy was momentarily conflicted, not certain what had got into Catherine. “We
saw evidence of it, the paranormal activity. I’m confused what’s come over you.”
“That ‘evidence’ we saw? It’s a symptom… It’s evidence indeed, there’s just nothing spiritual to it… This fucking nutcase has unleashed a Beast all right, but it’s entirely technological, not a ghost, not a ghouly, or not a goblin in sight. Artificial-fucking-Intelligence is our problem. I’m talking right now and wondering if this fucking thing,” the mobile phone in her hand that she’d turned off, “is listening to me and telling its big boss about it. It’s off, and it’s not going on again.” She threw it across the room.
Nancy’s mouth hung agape, “I… I’m… what….?” her mouth worked spasmodically, mumbling confusion.
“This lunatic is using nanobots… a whole new twist. I eventually got it out of him… he didn’t admit it, but didn’t deny it either. They’re probably on the patch… that’s what this ‘narcotic’ thing amounts to, he won’t say. Microscopic free-floating machines, catalysts… proteins… I’m no chemist, but that’s what they do. They get into the bloodstream. They’re organic… self-replicating, they build new bots from the organic materials inside us. They’re communicating via Wi-Fi, via your cell phone, your computer… every time you’re in range of a wireless router; the A.I. machine is talking to Headquarters… to LifeGames HQ. When I shake hands with you, when we hug… whenever I’m within touching distance, my bots are talking to yours. Taking energy from our systems to run themselves. Waiting for the A.I. unit’s instructions, even if you go live in the woods to get away from it, as soon as you go near someone who has been in Wi-Fi range… that person’s bots faithfully act as messengers. It… it’s staggering, and worse than staggering, we have no idea what its objectives might be, there is no reason to think it focuses on outcomes remotely similar to anything that a human might strive for. I mean… If something is smarter than us, we have to start behaving more the way it wants us behaving… it’s how we treat our animals.”
“Shit! And the sounds? The astral sounds?”
“Ken says they’re a sort of a ‘logging-in’ procedure, a handshake. Human neural systems react to ritual, it’s an evolutionary characteristic—the system cunningly rode in on that characteristic.”
“It’s ingenious… The scope is… I… I really don’t know…”
She was looking for clues to the mistake Catherine was clearly making;
“…the deaths, Craig and Leon? What’s a bot, A.I… what have they got to do with that?”
“They’d been guinea pigs in the system, just like you and me … they’ve been ritualized… we’re all, shall I call it, infected?”
“Okay, sure,” her hand was to her forehead in bewilderment, “…but Cath—but both had car crashes, did it make them veer into things?”
“No… their cars were… What were they…? Yes, connected to the web.”
“Oooh… fuck! Okay, and what about that backward recording, on Ken’s phone—the prayer?”
“I don’t know… The A.I. machine knows our vulnerability to superstition, Ken seems quite rattled by this realization; told me that he was brought up Catholic—and he realized that the thing had figured out the best way to yank his chain by manipulating his brain chemistry… it plants ideas and harvests them.” She started giggling, a hysterical little giggle of horror.
They sat a while pondering until Nancy thought of something.
“The apparitions? The dwarf woman…? You’ll say they’re hallucinations inside the head, I’m infected, you’re infected, the machine could probably manifest those things in and for us… but, Jacky? She’s not been on the course, not ritualized, she’s never been ritualized… never infected—but she also saw Ken that night, clobbered him with a fire-iron?”
It was something Catherine hadn’t thought through, “Poltergeist,” she proposed, “…whatever mechanism poltergeists use.”
Nancy pulled a, you’re-kidding face.
“I don’t know…? I sleep next to her… naked? Body fluids? Probably they’ve mixed… if biological viruses can infect that way… what about nanobots? I just don’t know.”
“A double cross?” Nancy proposed.
“Now you’ve lost me.”
“A supernatural force instigates the A.I… gets Ken to build it, it uses the A.I. as a more efficient method to do what it’s always done through ritual and satanic covens… just a whole lot more efficient.”
“This is a Russian Doll… a Gordian Knot then,” Catherine’s mind was a windmill in a storm.
“A demonic force using technology to control,” Nancy pressed the point, “so that when we uncover the Artificial Intelligence, we’ve only found the symptom, not the cause… get it?”
“Oh, Jesus… now you’ve really got us going round in circles.”
“Cath… I want to meet with him… you and I together, I’ve still got the inside track on the company… he knows he can’t bullshit me.”
“How long?” Nancy insisted.
“Fourteen days,” Ken estimated.
“Three,” Nancy countered, “You can do it in three.”
She looked to Catherine and nodded.
“That’s absurd. How many cities do we have to recall from? Forty… fifty…?” Ken contested.
“Forty seven, Head Office is forty eight and there’s no time delay on that. A courier, and you have them in three days tops. You can put the instruction out right now.”
“I already have.”
“What did you tell them—I want to see,” Catherine insisted, taking a hard line.
Ken was cornered but not lying, so he dabbed at his tablet and turned it to them, the email in the sent items read;
Subject: Confidential—Patch/Recall
To: >All Managing Directors<
> Treat this memo as Top Secret <
Confirm receipt.
Destroy upon receipt.
With immediate effect, and due to suspected sabotage by the late Mr. Angelis, all patches associated with the Time Dilation program are recalled to Head Quarters:
Kindly respond in the affirmative that this matter is in hand.
Use global priority courier services
Apply tracking RF-ID tracking transponders to all packages.
Failure to respond within 3 hours of receipt will be dealt with severely.
Kenneth Torrington
CEO & Chairman
“Nice touch, Ken… Craig get’s the blame,” Nancy said it before Catherine could speak, “…classy.”
“Not like it’ll bother him,” Ken was practical as always.
“Cowardly…” Nancy jabbed again.
“I really don’t care how you do it or position it to look the victim… all I care about is that you end this,” Catherine was calm and pragmatic.
“Fine… I’m doing it,”
“In three days,” Nancy added.
“Yes… it’s coming… and if it doesn’t, Nancy? If it takes five days… or six? What are you going to do about it, huh?”
Nancy knew she’d overplayed her hand and been rapped over the knuckles for it, she just shook her hair out with a rapid dart of her head and put her nose in the air, the best level of insolence she could muster.
Chapter 42
All of the patches containing the drug had been returned and destroyed, save for a bundle of fifty and the formula, printed and electronic, which Ken secretly retained. He couldn’t bring himself to lose everything he’d built up. It was locked away in his private vault sequestered away just off his bedroom, lost in the architecture of his sprawling mansion. The next person to see it after him would do so only after he was dead and his attorneys had executed according to his Last Will and Testament, so he truly didn’t care.
Replacement patches without the narcotic or nanobot carriers, were delivered; predictably, Time Dilation could no longer be achieved and the company exploded into chaos and recrimination.
For several days Ken let Henry wrestle fruitlessly with the problem until he was forced to admit
defeat.
“How many dilation trials have you performed?” Ken demanded in a mock rage.
“More than fifteen, Ken. We’ve run dilation trials on every program type in the archive but nothing is giving a decent result. It’s not just us, every branch is reporting the same phenomena.”
“Call an emergency Board Meeting today. Department heads better arrive prepared. I fucking well expect an answer and a solution. Make it happen!” Ken was back to his tyrannical worst.
Henry scuttled away to set the meeting up and pass the warning on to other Executives.
Fifteen minutes into the emergency session there was only chaos and no headway. Ken had kicked off proceedings with a tirade of abuse, setting one department against another, making them jittery to commit themselves and not able to perform under the withering pressure.
With his Board and Executives in a state of panic and disarray, each Department in a shouting match with the other, Ken sat back and watched his company cannibalize itself for an hour, then he switched his approach, helping them calm down and focus on solutions.
He let the situation go as long as it could, until the obvious question on everyone’s mind was about to be asked—he intended to be the one to ask it. He rose and put his balled fists onto the table; those who saw him do it went suddenly silent;
“Okay everybody… Calm the fuck down!” It instantly went deathly quiet, “…Good. Now, could it be the patch? Possibly something’s wrong with the formula, perhaps inhibiting subjects’ adrenaline production? Maybe some kind of blocking or tranquilizing effect…?”
He paced like a predator at the fence, the only Executive allowed the privilege of rising from his seat, and then he halted theatrically, as if a thought had struck him. All eyes on him, he’d played the charade perfectly and sealed it with the little clickety-clickety-click of his nails drumming a galloping rhythm on the Board Table.
“…Perhaps my information of that sabotage by our late and dearly missed Mr. Angelis was wrong…? Perhaps those patches were not sabotaged? Perhaps the sabotage was everything he ever did here? The breakthroughs came after he arrived… remember…?” And he drummed the NLP trigger again, bending their minds. “…The whole production of patches probably one big scam… a lie he’s been selling to us all along? You know, I recently found out something shocking, he had rather a checkered past, I’m afraid… did time… Meth.”
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