Alexa felt a rush of energy, realizing she’d moved into the driver’s seat. She’d called Noah knowing only that this “Agile Four signature” bullshit was somehow a part of O’s Beam beta, but the way in which it was “a part” was apparently wrong. Now Noah could wait. He would bow to Alexa and wait until she was damn good and finished to learn what he wanted to know.
She interrupted him, stopping him dead.
“Tell me about the ‘problem’ with those nanos, Noah. Tell me why you stopped making them.”
He exhaled, then nodded. “Quark is always developing new lines. Our R&D is a lot like yours. Some of our projects can be handled quickly whereas others sprawl and take forever to roll out. They just need whatever time they require to marinate.”
Alexa nodded for him to continue. Crossbrace was the most famous of Quark’s “long time to marinate” projects. It had gone ridiculously over budget in time and resources — yet had solidified the company’s place in history once it finally went live.
“The Agile Fours were tricky. We wanted them to reason. That meant they had to rely on the kind of distributed processing that modern nanos use today. They had to think in a cluster, seeing as no individual nanobot could think anything at all. It was a tough nut to crack. For a while, I gave up. They moved to our back burner, with only a few scientists poking them every so often.”
“Okay,” Alexa said.
“We didn’t realize until later that when Nicolai Costa entered the country and his passenger data infected the NAU’s network, it pollinated in unexpected ways. We were still using the old Internet back then, so there were times when we thought my fears might have been groundless.”
“But they weren’t?”
Noah shook his head. “It spread like a virus, but the sinister thing was the way it disturbed nothing and therefore was mostly under the radar. Or at least that’s how it seemed. But then a few years later, some of Quark’s long-frustrated projects began to experience miraculous, unexplained breakthroughs, finding solutions from nowhere. The Agile Fours were one of them.”
“The pollination that you and Iggy were so worried about at that Panel meeting made your nanos start working? That sounds like a good thing.”
“Problem was, we couldn’t control it. I wanted to imprint on the network, rather than letting Costa be its primary influence. We didn’t realize his pollination was the reason for our ‘sudden miraculous advances’ until 2038, after our intuitive little nanos — which were, in fact, suddenly very intuitive — had been on the market for two years as a sex aid.”
“But then you realized that the ‘pollution’ had been the spark to light them, and pulled the injectors off-market?”
“Yes. The impact was small. They hadn’t yet gone to full rollout. We were only marketing Agile Fours to the ultra-rich, same as your top-end spa toys. We knew who’d bought them and followed up. The nanos themselves were infected, but they couldn’t cause much damage on their own. Users flushed them from their systems as cells replaced themselves. Within a few years, none of the buyers had any evidence of nanos still in their systems. Even if we missed a few, so what? They were a problem in that they carried polluted AI, but they were otherwise harmless and always died off on their own.”
“I guess Clive saved an injector,” Alexa said. “You pulled them off the market in 2038, but he used his sometime after that.”
“That sounds like Clive,” Noah said, nodding. “I don’t think I’m telling you anything you don’t already know from your business, but Clive’s tastes were so borderline that the products he liked best were often pulled for safety reasons. So he hoarded. I’m not surprised that he hoarded Agile Four injectors.”
“What did they do?” Alexa asked. “The nanos, I mean.”
“Exactly what the marketing brochure promised. They vibrated all the best places. They attached to nerves and soothed inhibitions. According to our sales team, they ‘learned what your lover wanted most — the purest, most defined yearning within them — and became that thing.’”
“How?”
“It’s all biochemistry. I can make whatever you need available.” Suddenly Noah was all conciliatory, perfectly helpful. “It stimulated the release of some hormones, suppressed the release of others. I’m not a chemist.”
“Could they build tissue?”
“Yes. Not to be crude, but they had a way of making dicks bigger. They multiplied nerve endings in erogenous zones. They physically grew the clitoris and G-spot. When injected by both people in a pair, the bots in one body used FI to converse with bots in the other, and take the other’s preferences into account. Assuming a woman was okay with it per her brain activity, it would make her tits bigger if that’s what the guy’s brain activity showed he wanted most. Things like that.”
“How is that possible?”
“Building bodies is microcellular construction, ultimately no different from making a building with raw materials. People eat; bodies build structures with those nutrients. The nanos just helped the process along.”
“I mean, ‘How is it possible for nanobots to know what someone wants most?’”
Noah shrugged. “Intuition. Like I said, AI didn’t used to be able to do such things, but back then — thanks to some rogue pollination that’s caused more harm than good — it learned.”
Alexa bit her lip, eyes slightly closed. Again, he hadn’t actually answered the question. “If I didn’t know better, Noah, I’d think you didn’t understand Quark’s own science.”
“Intuition is an even trickier emergent property than straight intelligence. I won’t lie; there’s an element of magic. Evolution has always occurred in fits and starts. One day there’s nothing; then there’s a spark and an entire species leaps at once. We don’t fully understand it; even the best of us don’t. In many ways, The Beam thinks for itself. Quark’s job with AI has always been to harness and nurture mentality’s emergent properties, but only something else — something you and your spirituality might actually be more equipped to describe than I am — can actually create them.”
Alexa took a moment. She’d never heard Noah talk this way. He usually spoke like a man who believed himself to be God. He created Crossbrace; he created The Beam; he was the reason all the fairies earned their wings. For the first time, she wondered if it was fine that Noah was leaving this planet, despite all those who saw him as the most visionary man in history. He hadn’t actually mastered the crucible of creation. He’d simply broken in to play with it, and see what might happen.
“You’re worried because whatever these Agile Four nanos created, it’s something you can’t comprehend.”
“That’s overstating a little,” Noah said.
“It’s not. You understand Crossbrace and at least the beginnings of The Beam. You’ve changed the world, Noah. Most people would say you’ve improved it. But I’m sitting here across from you now, and I can’t help but wonder if maybe you’ve unleashed a plague.”
Condescension crossed Noah’s sharp features. He’d been a handsome man once — more handsome, so the world seemed to feel, for all his arrogance. In Noah’s realm, he was a dictator. A tyrant of sorts.
“Stop being melodramatic, Alexa.”
“What did your experiment create, Noah? I know more than you do right now, but I still don’t understand.”
“Then explain it to me. Explain your anomaly and we’ll figure it out together.”
Alexa felt a creeping, prickling feeling up the back of her neck. She’d always made her own way through life, and plenty of strong men had called her an ice-cold bitch. She didn’t obey rules; she scorned anything at all that might hold her back from what she knew was right. But she’d never worked for purely selfish reasons and she’d never served what remotely felt like evil. Alexa’s actions had benefitted her immensely, but in the end, Alexa’s cause had always been greater.
But right now, Noah didn’t feel like part of that cause. He was too anxious, too eager. Too selfishly obsessed with tak
ing the next step whether it was right to or not. Handing him Chloe Shaw would be like waiting for Ground Zero to clear before dropping a bomb.
Alexa stood, gathering her things from the floor beside her chair. “Thank you for seeing me, Noah.”
Noah looked surprised. “But we’re not finished.”
“I think we are.”
“You can’t just go. You need to tell me what you know about this odd thing I see on your beta. You can’t root it out, Alexa. You need Quark’s help.”
“I think I’m fine.”
He stared her down from his death bed, seeing her resolute expression.
“I can take it, you know. We control your connection to The Beam. We can cut it off. We can co-opt whatever we need, with or without your permission.”
He was bluffing. Noah thought the anomaly related to Agile Four was some sort of out-of-control AI, but if Alexa was remotely understanding the situation, the “anomaly” would be much harder to contain than simply cutting O’s access. The anomaly wouldn’t be partitioned off and stored on a drive. The anomaly was in her apartment, pacing wood floors with O’s training in her head.
“Go ahead.”
“Alexa. Be reasonable.”
“I’m being reasonable, Noah. You said it yourself: my spirituality is more equipped to know what I’ve found than all of your cyberneticists.”
His face hardened. Alexa was halfway to the door, and Noah was far too sick to stop her. The only person between Alexa and the street was the man up front, Stephen York — who, if the rumors were true, might be the silent and increasingly resentful partner Noah refused to acknowledge.
“I hate to sound like a cliché, Alexa, but you’re meddling with things you don’t understand.”
Alexa reached the exit to Noah’s bedroom. She set her hand on the latch and turned to face him one final time.
“No, Noah. I’m meddling with things you don’t understand.”
The door closed, and Alexa turned to face her increasingly uncertain future.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Alexa paced.
Her apartment felt too quiet. It had all afternoon, ever since she’d returned from her appointment with Noah. All the way back to the heart of DZ, Alexa felt watched. Quark had built the network; it watched all the doors and held all the keys.
She kept waiting for the police to knock on her door, alerted by an anonymous Crossbrace tip, waiting for criminals to surround her with weapons drawn.
But nothing happened.
Nobody came.
Alexa dared to dream that what Panel whispered behind Noah’s back was true: that as he lay dying, Quark’s machinery had begun to turn against its leader. Everyone knew that Noah had run his company with an iron fist in the later years, that he was as hated inside Quark as he was beloved outside it. All signs pointed to a successor being named; all rumors implied that Noah was only half The Beam’s genius and that he’d taken all the credit for another’s work — likely that of the quiet partner Stephen York.
Perhaps the king no longer held his scepter. Maybe Noah and York were finishing The Beam in isolation, powerful only in the sectors they programmed but impotent beyond them.
Maybe Noah was a furious child, frustrated and spitting but unable to actually do anything.
But Alexa, as she paced her too-quiet apartment, couldn’t help but feel that she’d spit in God’s eye.
“Canvas. Turn on some music.”
Sarah’s voice: “Any particular music, Miss?”
“Something loud. Block out all this silence.”
Hidden speakers came to sudden life, full of bass, blaring Bartók loud enough to rattle the empty water glasses Alexa had set on the marble counter. But with the silence banished, she didn’t feel calmer.
A buzz at the door.
“Sarah — too loud!”
“I’m sorry, Miss?” Sarah’s disembodied voice projected. They were speak-shouting like friends conversing in an obnoxious club.
“Turn it down!”
But Sarah repeated that she wasn’t understanding, and that was some shit because of course Sarah understood fine, just like she knew goddamn well by now that the way to calm Alexa and alleviate the anxiety of silence wasn’t to blare the soundtrack to doom.
Alexa’s mind flashed to something Noah had said: In many ways, The Beam thinks for itself.
The buzz repeated. It wasn’t the same alert as came from the lobby; it was the one that came when a party she’d admitted to the building arrived at her door. The Beam was supposed to control all of that; Alexa didn’t need to be in the loop for Sarah to let someone in — and then to allow their entry to the apartment provided Alexa was ready to receive them.
But now someone was here. Someone she hadn’t known about, who hadn’t requested entry at the lobby or had managed to get it without her knowing.
“Sarah!”
Across the polished floor, the door opened.
Parker Barnes. He shrunk at the sound’s attack, plugging his ears.
“Sarah, goddammit!”
The music stopped like a throat being slit.
Parker straightened tentatively, then unplugged his ears. His fingertip earplugs stayed at the sides of his head for several seconds, eyes darting around as if awaiting assault.
Sarah’s holographic form appeared between them. She had her hair up, as usual, hands primly clasped. In her polite, clipped English accent she said, “Welcome, Mr. Barnes. Can I get you something to drink?”
Parker looked at Alexa, still not entirely upright. His eyes seemed to ask Alexa if he wanted anything to drink in this madhouse.
“Nothing, thanks,” he finally said.
“We’d like some privacy, Sarah,” Alexa said, finally finding her voice.
“Certainly.”
Sarah vanished.
“How do you know she actually leaves you alone when you do that?”
Alexa went to the wall, moved a framed photograph aside, and pulled an old-fashioned switch. In a digital age, the switch struck her as satisfyingly solid. You couldn’t trust touchscreen buttons to do what this switch did.
“Because that,” she said, indicating the switch, “physically breaks the room’s connection to Crossbrace and The Beam.”
“Did you forget that you asked me to come? Is that why you were having a million-decibel concert in here?”
“No. It’s just been a strange day. Please. Sit.”
He studied her face. “You okay?”
Alexa sat opposite Parker in a plush tan chair. “No, honestly. This is quickly becoming more than I can handle. I need your help on this.”
“You made the call? You went to see him?”
Alexa nodded.
But it was as if Parker had to speak the words to believe them. “Noah Fucking West?”
“You say that like a swear.”
“It’s just hard to get my head around. Noah’s image is the default Crossbrace guide on every enabled surface. The idea that you actually stood in front of him—”
“It would really help if you’d refrain from fanboying on this one, Parker.”
He closed his eyes, opened them, then, “So?”
And Alexa told him. She gave Parker every nuance of the meeting that she could recall, down to her walking out with her biggest secret, leaving the NAU’s most powerful icon frustrated and angry. Parker swallowed hard at that, but to his credit, he didn’t question Alexa’s choice or chastise her for it.
“He doesn’t know,” was all he said.
“Which part?”
“That he’s Chloe’s father.”
Alexa shook her head. “Not unless he goes back through his own archives and figures it out. But I actually don’t think that’s possible. Caspian told me that the Wild East hack wasn’t entirely innocuous. It hijacked Quark’s data, then fed a worm back to obscure the original. It was archival, but I guess they thought they could hold it for ransom at some point. Turns out it was archival enough that Quark didn’t notic
e their old data was corrupted.”
“But if he goes back to look now?”
“Caspian and his cronies tell me he’ll find nothing.”
“What if he contacts the Wild East guys? Pays their ransom to recover the original data, so he can look through it like you and Caspian did?”
“Caspian assures me they’re loyal enough not to broker without him. He seems certain.”
“But The Beam — you told me Sarah knew before you knew; she just wouldn’t tell you.”
“It’s complicated, Parker. I can barely keep it straight. As of right now, I don’t believe even Noah can find what we know unless Caspian or I tell him.”
Parker nodded. He had the look of a man who was uneasy about what was happening but was deciding to trust someone who claimed to know better.
“You’re sure this is the right move? To keep something like this from Noah West?”
“No. I’m not sure at all. But my gut agrees, and right now that’s all I have. I’m out on a limb here. We both are.”
Parker nodded again. “I still don’t see how it happened. And how the hell he couldn’t know he has a daughter. If he and Nicole Shaw …” Parker trailed off, silently asking for help.
“Noah never met Nicole as far as I know,” Alexa said.
“And the nanobots?”
“I’m piecing this together, but I feel confident in my guesses,” Alexa said. “According to what I told you before, about what our walled-off AI pulled from the Quark logs around the time Nicole got pregnant, Clive was the reason for all of this.”
“You said Clive wasn’t Chloe’s father.”
“Correct. Clive was the vector, not the genetic father. He spread the nanobots like a mosquito spreads malaria.”
“I don’t understand.”
“According to the logs, Clive used Quark’s Agile Four nanobots as a sex aid with Nicole. Then the nanos did what they’re supposed to do: they got inside each of their bodies, then went about the work of giving each of them what they wanted.”
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