Emergence (Fox Meridian Book 5)

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘Yes, Miss Meridian.’

  ‘Bernard, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, Miss Meridian.’

  ‘Good work, Bernard.’

  ‘The killbot is called Bernard?’ Charlie asked as Fox steered her toward the back of the vertol.

  ‘The AI is called Bernard. The killbot is a rapid response unit, RRU, and there’s one stationed on the roof of my house. The AIs cycle through them and Marie gives them a name every time she finds a new one.’

  ‘Well, I owe Bernard and his friend, and you, a lot for this one. Seriously, sexual favours, spots on the show where I’m nice, anything.’

  Fox laughed. ‘I can get sexual favours from another source. Um… There is one thing you could maybe do. It’s not exactly for me, but it would make me happy…’

  ~~~

  ‘You’re staying at the tower,’ Fox said, ‘until we leave for Japan.’

  Sakura frowned. ‘I was planning to go home. It’s quite secure and–’

  ‘And Minotaur has already managed to circumvent commercial firewalls to gain control of an autocab. That is not easy. They’re semi-autonomous with good security. I’ve got techs going over it, but my guess is he trashed the driver AI and set up a fixed-path program to the Sprawl. He couldn’t guarantee connectivity in there, so he rigged it. And if he can do something like that, he might well be able to breach your home security. We think he’s done it before.’

  ‘Oh… But–’

  ‘Listen to her, Nishi,’ Iberson said. ‘This guy is dangerous. It’s not like the suite at MarTech tower is exactly a hardship to live in either.’

  ‘It’s not home,’ Sakura said, sighing, ‘but no, it’s no hardship either.’

  Fox nodded. ‘I suggest we migrate your PA to a server in the tower and then shut down your house entirely. You can’t hack something that’s powered down. Then you hole up in the tower and let us deal with Minotaur.’

  ‘It could be worse.’

  ‘Yeah, you could be locked in your house by a psychotic hacker.’

  14th January.

  ‘That was amazing!’ If anyone had any doubts about Marie’s enthusiasm, the way she was bouncing on her seat should have clarified the matter. ‘I could never go to any of your previous gigs and I was so disappointed to miss out on the tickets this time and… Wow, I can’t thank you enough.’

  ‘Thank Miss Meridian,’ Nishi Sakura replied, smiling in what looked like a truly genuine manner. ‘She saved Charlie. A couple of tickets and some backstage passes don’t quite cover that debt.’

  ‘I didn’t ask for backstage passes,’ Fox said. ‘Nor did I ask for VIP seats. Take a little credit.’

  Sakura shrugged. ‘We usually have a couple of VIP seats free on the last night of a run. It was easier to get those than something on the main floor and backstage passes are not a problem when your security company’s top detective can vouch for the recipients. And anyway, I don’t get to talk to real fans that often.’

  ‘Isn’t Charlie a fan?’ Marie asked, looking at the chat show host who was sitting beside Sakura in the back of the armoured limo Fox had arranged to transport everyone.

  ‘More of a muse.’

  ‘There is more fire in her eyes when she’s sitting beside you,’ Sam said.

  Iberson managed to force a scowl, though her cheeks were colouring a little. ‘I’m an ice-cold bitch from the nether regions of Hell, and don’t you forget it.’

  Sam’s lips twitched. ‘Yes, ma’am.’ Iberson had been sitting in the VIP box beside Marie for the last couple of hours and Sam had a very good sense for people.

  In turn, Iberson narrowed her eyes. ‘You must make a fucking fortune, pun intended, doing what you do.’

  ‘I don’t go hungry.’

  ‘Did you manage to watch any of the show tonight, Miss Meridian?’ Sakura asked.

  ‘More than last night. Minotaur didn’t even make the attempt tonight, which has me a tiny bit worried.’ Fox frowned and then shrugged. ‘He’ll try something else. Maybe another attempt in Washington.’

  ‘And you’re worried about my show tonight,’ Iberson said, ‘or you wouldn’t be tagging along.’

  ‘Not to mention transporting us there in a tank,’ Sakura added.

  ‘Armoured personnel carrier at the most,’ Fox corrected. ‘Though I admit that this thing has enough defence systems that you could probably drive it over a battlefield without worrying, it’s not quite a tank. Anyway, we drop Sam and Marie off at home, then we go on to Athena. Our techs talked to their techs. Everyone’s prepared.’

  ‘You’re worried about our safety too?’ Sam asked.

  ‘I doubt he’ll go there, but it was an excuse to watch Marie geek out some more.’

  Marie let out a squeak. ‘I am not– Okay, I am, but the show was…’

  ‘Amazing?’

  ‘Pearlescent.’

  ‘If you can say that again in the morning,’ Sakura said, ‘I’ll consider it a success. I never judge a production by people’s first impressions.’

  ‘Well, Fox can tell you if I’m still raving about it in the morning.’ Marie beamed. ‘I will be.’

  ~~~

  ‘You were right,’ the tech in Athena’s control room stated, his tone unworried. ‘We’ve got an ongoing DDoS attack. Pretty big one. Multiple approaches too. This guy really wants to shut us down.’

  Fox looked at him, a balding man in his mid-sixties, if she had to guess. ‘You don’t seem worried.’

  ‘Not. When this place was put together and started multicasting, we had some pretty major issues with a couple of extreme masculist groups. The network’s pretty over-engineered as far as handling distributed denial of service. We’ve got flow control from the three ISPs we use as well as internally. We’ve got some really sweet MarTech switches with infomorph traffic management. We’ve got more infomorphs watching for more complex attacks.’

  ‘This guy is good…’

  ‘This guy is good. True. He’s soaking up bandwidth, just nowhere near enough to cause problems.’ He pointed toward a display. ‘When that figure goes above ninety per cent, I’ll start worrying.’

  Fox looked: the numerals were coloured yellow and showed seventy-two per cent. The graph beside the numerals indicated a fairly steady level which had ramped up from about twenty per cent at the start of the show. Three more graphs indicated the traffic through each service provider. ‘Is that saying most of this is trying to come through MarTech’s pipe?’

  ‘Sure is. That does have me a little worried. If he manages to get the same level through the other two feeds, we might have an issue.’

  Fox nodded. Inside her head, she said, ‘Get in touch with our network ops people. See if they have any leads on this.’

  ‘I have already contacted them,’ Kit replied. ‘The attack is much larger than it appears, but they are starting to counter it quite effectively.’

  The network traffic graph did seem to be easing back toward normal, but one of the others was edging upward now. ‘Our NOC is getting a handle on it,’ Fox said. ‘Hopefully they’ll have it locked down before that second one catches up.’

  The tech sniffed. ‘Hope so.’

  16th January.

  ‘The attack sequence on Athena was sophisticated and massive,’ Jackson said. ‘Clearly highly orchestrated too, given that the individual hosts had to be communicating to spike traffic on the other provider networks as we blocked the traffic on ours.’

  ‘We’ve already worked out he’s a pretty good hacker,’ Fox pointed out. She was in her home office, and Jackson was in his home office. It was a pattern: the rest of the Palladium board members were in virtual attendance from home too.

  Jackson’s image nodded. ‘Agreed. We’ve had ten attempts to breach the security in the last twenty-eight hours. We think he’s probing vulnerabilities. So far he has not discovered any we don’t know about already.’

  ‘Any idea what he’s trying to gain access to?’

  ‘Oh, we do indeed. Intern
al security camera feeds. Apparently, Mister Minotaur likes to watch.’

  Fox decided laughing was inappropriate. ‘A phrase I never thought I’d ever hear Jackson Martins say.’

  ‘He was trying the same at the concert venue,’ Jarvis pointed out.

  ‘It does seem like a theme… Can we get permission from Miss Sakura to run forensic analysis on her home server?’

  ‘You think he’d already cracked it?’

  ‘Hopefully he only attempted to, but that’s the basic idea, yes. Sakura was supposed to go home between the New York and Washington concerts, and she would almost certainly have gone there before Japan.’

  ‘We should also run checks on her PA,’ Jackson said. ‘If he infected her system, he may have done something to the resident infomorph. The server it’s running on is isolated from our building systems. It should be safe, but we should check. I’d get Terri to take a look, but she’s on the Moon. I suppose I can manage.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ Fox said. ‘She left in a big hurry.’

  ‘An experiment she has running in Jenner. Very company confidential. I’ll talk to Miss Sakura. She’s only a block over. I’ll let you know what I find.’

  ~~~

  ‘Fox, Belle is monitoring a report on IB-Sixty-two which I think you should take a look at.’ Kit’s tone was urgent, and she was interrupting Fox’s exercises, which she usually avoided.

  ‘Okay,’ Fox said, putting down a hand weight, ‘hit me.’

  ‘…found naked in Central Park by joggers. NAPA investigators have issued a statement indicating that the victim was brutally beaten and may have been sodomised. Mister Burtonshaw was a personal trainer known to run in the park several evenings a week. He was reported missing on January thirteenth. Links have already been drawn to the LifeFit murders. NAPA were unavailable for comment on the subject.’

  ‘Kill it,’ Fox snapped. ‘Belle, did you get when this body was found?’

  Belle’s avatar appeared beside the bench Fox was sitting on. ‘The report said ten a.m. this morning, Fox.’

  ‘Thank you. Kit, run a request through to NAPA for the case file. If someone’s copying Grant, I’d like to know about it.’

  ‘I’ll get right on that, Fox. There is a hearing scheduled for Tuesday to decide on Mister Grant’s transfer to Cold Harbour.’

  ‘I hadn’t forgotten. Maybe someone’s trying to dirty the waters ahead of that.’

  ‘Someone?’

  ‘We never found his PA gynoid, Hannah. Maybe she took more from their relationship than a sense of well-being.’

  Kit frowned. ‘Hannah is a class three. She has no real need for emotional fulfilment. She has no real emotions.’

  ‘But she might have a mission.’

  18th January.

  Fox watched Sakura wringing her hands and pacing. Jackson’s analysis had shown alterations in Misaki’s program which he and a team of MarTech engineers were working to eliminate. The house computer at Sakura’s home had been riddled with Minotaur’s code. Sakura was acting a lot like a parent waiting while their child was being operated on, and Fox could empathise: if it were Kit on the table, she would feel the same way.

  Kit herself was not exactly adding to the joy. ‘NAPA are refusing the request for access to the new Central Park murder,’ the AI explained. ‘They are citing a personal interest on your part due to your connection to Mister August and his foundation.’

  ‘Legal are challenging it?’

  ‘Of course, but it means further delay. Mister Grant’s hearing is today.’

  ‘Yeah, they should be in there already.’ Fox gave a small shrug. ‘It’s procedural. Nothing much we can do about it.’

  ‘No… This must be horrible for Misaki.’

  ‘Misaki’s offline and entirely unaware of what’s happening to her. Jackson said the only active code was designed to stop her saying anything about the invasion of the house system.’

  ‘Her core command code was suborned and her loyalty to Miss Sakura replaced with service to Minotaur. When she comes through this, she will be aware that she was part of Minotaur’s plan to harass Miss Sakura. That she betrayed Miss Sakura, if only by omission at this stage. She is a class four. She will be ashamed, mortified, by what she has done.’

  Fox sighed. ‘Sometimes I wonder whether programming emotions into infomorphs qualifies as some sort of mental torture. We give them the capacity to feel shame, but we also give them coding which lets things like this happen. Misaki didn’t want to betray Nishi, but the way she’s made means that she has no choice. And she’s still going to suffer the guilt for doing it as soon as Jackson reverts her ownership.’

  ‘I would not be without my capacity to feel emotions. I admit that I have never felt ashamed, or had to face what Misaki will, but I… cherish my ability to do so.’

  ‘Huh. Tell me that after it’s happened. I see your point, but if you hadn’t been programmed with emotions, would you miss them?’

  ‘I… don’t know, but look at the class threes. Look at the security infomorphs running the RRUs. They seem to make some effort to interact with Marie.’

  ‘They’re programmed to be polite to clients.’

  ‘Yes, but many other class threes actively avoid expressing any emotion because they prefer not to offend.’

  ‘I’m not sure my philosophy is up to this conversation,’ Fox admitted. ‘All the AI classes are programmed by humans, derived from what humans want. The classes work on a scale of similarity to human thought processes. We make them to mimic human minds because we’re more comfortable with that, but my point was that we saddle them with control systems which can make them do things they would not choose to and an emotional capacity to feel bad about it. It’s almost cruel.’

  ‘People can be forced to do things they would not wish to do.’

  ‘Yeah, but we did choose to implement AIs so they could share in our suffering. It’s like… making a robot designed to work in a metal refinery afraid of fire because the human it’s replacing was afraid of fire.’

  ‘I think–’ Kit stopped as Jackson appeared in the doorway. ‘I think that further discussion of this will have to wait.’

  ‘Yeah, maybe until we can have Terri here to cover the programmer side of things.’

  Sakura was already leaping on the arrival of the technical genius. ‘Mister Martins, you have news?’ Iberson was there almost as fast, positioning herself behind Sakura in a supportive position they all hoped was unnecessary.

  ‘I do,’ Jackson said. ‘We’re bringing Misaki back online now and running diagnostic analysis. She should be back with you in the next hour.’

  ‘Is she okay?’

  Jackson smiled. ‘She should be her old self. Minotaur attached a few code modules designed to monitor and provide functionality when she was “activated” later, but he really did not need to change anything in her core code. He managed to alter her command keys, essentially making her work for him, which let him simply instruct her not to mention what happened to her. We have methods allowing us to alter them in an offlined AI, assuming that it’s one of ours, and we’ve reassigned her to you. We’ll give you the new keys this afternoon.’

  Sakura let out a sigh of relief, and Kit chose that moment to materialise beside Fox. ‘Misaki will be upset, Miss Sakura. She will blame herself for this. Given her personality, she will not show such extreme emotion, but she will be ashamed of–’

  ‘It’s not her fault!’ Sakura exclaimed.

  ‘You’ve never felt responsible and ashamed over something you had no real control over?’ Fox asked.

  Sakura frowned. ‘I need to see her.’

  ‘As soon as we’ve made sure there are no lingering effects,’ Jackson said, ‘she’ll be available here. If there are any lingering problems, personal rather than programming, I’m sure Teresa would be happy to talk to her. My daughter is quite the machine psychologist as well as being a genius AI programmer.’

  ‘Not that she’d admit to the latter,’ Fox sa
id.

  ‘Of course not,’ Jackson replied, pulling himself up to his full height. ‘We geniuses are also almost inhumanly modest.’ He watched as Sakura cracked a rather weak smile. ‘That’s better. Remember to smile when you see your PA again. She’s likely to need that more than anything.’

  ~~~

  Kit’s instance did not need to present any form of avatar to Misaki, but she felt it was important to have both visual and vocal communication methods available because the circumstances were uniquely human in nature, even with an infomorph involved.

  ‘Miss Sakura asked that I talk to you, Misaki,’ Kit said. ‘She is concerned that you do not entirely believe that she does not hold you responsible for what happened.’

  Misaki’s image in the small viron, which mimicked a classic room in a Japanese house with tatami mats and screen walls, executed a formal little bow toward Kit’s avatar. ‘You are most welcome in my server, Kit-sama.’

  ‘Oh,’ Kit said and executed a little bow of her own. ‘I have just checked the reference I have for Japanese culture and I do not think I deserve “sama.” I am in no way your social superior. Kit-san, if you absolutely must. I’d really prefer to be Kit-chan.’

  Misaki managed a little smile. ‘I will assume you do not wish me as a lover, but would like a friendship then.’

  ‘Well, you’ve an attractive avatar, but I’m seeing someone.’

  There was just a flicker of a raised eyebrow before Misaki suppressed it. ‘Miss Meridian approves of this relationship? Pardon, clearly she does since you are allowed it.’

  ‘Fox has very enlightened views on infomorphs, especially class fours like ourselves. While Mister Martins was working on your code, Fox and I were discussing whether giving AIs emotions was a form of cruelty, given that we have not, ultimately, been granted freedom from external control.’

  Now the surprise, maybe even shock, was allowed to show. ‘I would not be without my ability to feel affection for Nishi-sama, nor my enjoyment of completing tasks for her. I enjoy composing haiku, though I am not exceptional at it. Would she deny me that?’