“They may not, but I do. We’re not all heartless bureaucrats.” He tipped his glass at her and took another sip of his drink. “Perhaps we can find a mutually beneficial arrangement.”
“I’m not at liberty to work for you.” She tapped her finger on the bottom of the pool.
Warner took a slow sip of brandy, staring at her over the rim. “What I would ask of you is something you are already doing.”
“Go on.”
“These two men you speak of, Nemsky and Korin. They have been nipping at my heels for months trying to get me to give them aid.” He shook his head. “As I said, I am happy with the balance at the moment and I do not wish to see it disrupted. Despite how many times I tell them I am not interested, they persist.”
Nina wondered if her lie detection system had been hacked. “If you give me enough information, I can get them out of your business.”
“Mr. Nemsky had made himself a problem. He has been dealt with, a few years ago. I am sure that there is someone out there that has been using his identity; perhaps this Korin fellow.”
“So Nemsky is already dead?” Nina crossed one arm over her chest. “Internal housekeeping?”
“Ahh, UCF and your euphemisms.” Warner chuckled. “Yes. He was…” He tapped his chin with one finger. “How is it your people say? Sent to Miami?”
eep in the back of a seldom-used section of the starport terminus, Joey walked among rows of credit-operated lockers. Most looked like they had not been touched in years; the dull grey metal doors were caked with decades of dust and gouges. A conversation of whispers in a dead end alcove inhaled to silence as he passed an exchange of illegal chems and wary glances. He did not look at them, watching stamped metal numbers tick by one after the other on plain steel doors.
Eventually he found 013370.
The electronic key had waited exactly where Kelly said it would, behind the old Meridian 7 unit inside a four-inch tall plastic penguin. The door opened with a faint squeak. A pile of little bottles fell out, clattering to the ground in a cacophony of plastic. As the shrine to tiny energy drinks rained onto pale red tiles, a boxy shape emerged, ensconced in dark violet cloth. He took the bundle out of the plastic waterfall. About two feet long, two inches thick, and four inches tall, it felt like a large deck. He brushed his hand over the fabric, sliding it away from the gloss black shell of a Nishihama Corporation Necromancer series deck, Grade 7. Joey clung to the device, brought to the brink of ecstasy twice in as many days by a machine. This deck, as elegant as it was illegal, scared what little color he had away.
Necromancers could kill people.
He did not relish the capacity to employ black ICE, the thrill of having something so illegal while sharing Nina’s bed sucked the strength from his legs. The Nishihama logo thrilled him in another way. They optimized their hardware for breaching and network combat; Nishihama units lacked a bit in defense, but if you could take down an opponent fast enough, that didn’t matter as much. He flopped on the bench between the locker rows and powered the thing up. Joey thrummed his fingers across the top waiting for the self-test to finish while listening to the people two rows over negotiate a sale of Hex.
A little bit of juice remained in its energy cell, enough to create a black holo-panel trimmed in green in the air, bathing the entire area in scintillating emerald fluorescence.
He combed through the system logs; the passwords Kelly provided worked.
Wow… I guess he, ugh, she was serious about giving it up.
References to Wantanabe appeared in various files, enough that would enable Joey to find him. A kid a little younger, maybe eighteen, staggered around the end of the aisle, wiping at his face as if to rid it of crawling things. He did not notice Joey, despite being ten feet away, and stared at invisible creatures darting around. Joey stuffed the Necromancer into the cloth shroud, waited for the user to pass, and sprinted through the Starport. He raced home as fast as his shitty bike would allow.
He did not even take his coat off before swapping the battery pack and flicking the switch.
Japan these days offered a strange paradox of new and old. They were not part of either the ACC or the UCF, though they acted a bit like the former but claimed alliance with the latter. When the corporate war broke out elsewhere, Japan was quietly divided into prefectures owned by various keiretsu. The Japanese State Defense Force broke up and merged with the local corporate entities. Any sense of unified national identity died with the dissolution of the JSDF.
Now, in 2418, the CEOs of these keiretsu had fully reverted to the ideals of ancient warlords, restoring the concept of nobility, Samurai, and the sensibilities of old ways. The land became a breathing anachronism of incredible high technology clad in once-forgotten ways. Swords, in the modern forms of composite blades, Nano, as well as vibro, saw more use than firearms; nobility pranced around in high tech armor made in the image of things from millennia ago.
The country offered a deck jockey’s best dream and worst nightmare all in one. Anyone willing to risk the danger could make a fortune in corporate espionage, but the risks were high. Even a task as simple as crossing prefecture boundaries unnoticed in the open net was something that would make an average hacker sweat.
Of the two names that Proscion gave him, Imoru Kitsune turned out easier to find. He was the CEO of White Orchid Industries, arguably the most influential corporation in all of Japan. That would be a task; he could not just walk up to the guy and start a chat. The dark cowboy stood in an onyx-walled octagon; a temporary private node of his own creation, a place to hide while reviewing information. Virtual panels opened around him in a sphere of data, presenting unusual facts about Mr. Kitsune. He had been at the helm of White Orchid for ninety-seven years. He behaved like a reclusive hermit and every image Joey could find appeared to be a healthy-looking man in his seventies.
Gotta be a doll.
Brains last a lot longer when they have no biological body to fail out from under them, but the jury was still out about the effect of extended life on sanity. From the look of it, Kitsune handled it well. Nothing about him seemed out of the ordinary or strange. The company sat at the top of its game and he discovered an astounding lack of dirt. No scandals in the past forty years, not even a traffic violation.
Chasing down the CEO of a corporation like that would be tricky, so he went for Wantanabe first. He gesticulated like an orchestra conductor; the contents of the floating screens changed and shimmered, bathing him in flashing white and black. A few dozen matches of ‘Wantanabe, Sho’ came up in the system. A cross check of affiliation with White Orchid narrowed it down to three. One was a financier, one worked in a factory, and one was the lead programmer in the systems development group.
No, that doesn’t stand out… not at all.
The Necromancer felt like going from a moped to a whispercraft; the exhilaration of his reward almost purged the memory of the unpleasant weirdness of watching an old man turn into a nine-year-old girl. Breezing through barriers he would have found impossible with the old Teradyne, he soon located Sho’s address. Somewhere in the back of his mind a megalomaniacal cackle echoed the entire time he pushed the Nishihama board to its limits.
It was about 8:00 p.m. on the west coast, so it would be about 2:00 p.m. in Japan, which would put Mr. Wantanabe at the office. He still worked at White Orchid, and the temptation to get in there was more than he could resist. The network protection went beyond anything he had seen since Mars, their network had a security rating of eight. He could do it, with this deck, but it would be risky.
Risky was fun.
The White Orchid corpnet took on the image of a hundred-story gleaming red and brown pagoda planted in the middle of a perfectly manicured field of grass. White marble statues of warriors ringed the courtyard in front of the entrance, surrounding a large flat octagon bearing the stylized symbol of an orchid. A dozen men in modern samurai armor marched in patrols over the grounds; programs searching for unauthorized users.
After surreptitiously scanning the guards, the dark cowboy changed into one of them. His deck emulated the authentication credentials on the fly as he walked up and put his fingertips on the mirrored door. The surface rippled where his touch met his reflection, allowing the faintest trace of blue light grid to appear through the silver at the peak of the waves. The attempt made him sweat, but the door accepted the false information and permitted him access.
A vast lobby spread out, decorated with simulated rice paper walls and ancient artwork. Empty armor frowned at him from various display cases, and a massive painting of white-leafed Japanese maple trees in a grove covered the ceiling. Tiny flower petals snowed down out of the three dimensional artwork, disappearing inches above a pale hardwood floor. To the left, a miniature waterfall burbled over dark striated stone.
He adopted the rigid stride of the security constructs, moving with inhuman precision through a series of hallways. Workers and executives paid him no mind as he wound his way deeper into the virtual corporate tower. As soon as nothing could see him, he made his way to a disused office. This trip required no heavy infiltration; he had no need to breach into their secure data or take over any cameras or machine control nodes; all he wanted was to find Sho Wantanabe and talk.
After a bit of poking around old email headers, the face of his quarry stared back at him from a hovering pane of light. The man seemed to be in his late fifties; white streaks through his hair above both ears gave him a look of sophistication, and he wore a frown that made him seem perpetually rushed.
“Who are you?” His spoken Japanese became floating English for Joey to read.
Joey’s deck processed his words into Japanese. “It is important that we speak. Proscion suggested that you can help me.”
Sho’s eyebrow rose and he switched to English. “Do not call here again.” The connection terminated.
Joey grumbled. This guy wanted to make it difficult. He pulled up the node map to begin a search when a small white rabbit hopped into the corner of his vision. Critter constructs like that were usually toys made for little kids. Ignoring it, he continued with his search.
The rabbit fixed him with a stare, motionless and eerie. As minutes passed, the unmoving animal grew more and more obnoxious in its oddity. Rudimentary programming controlled Bunny constructs, so basic it could only be termed AI in the loosest sense of the concept. They drifted about at random, acting like rabbits. For one to remain perfectly still was anomalous. He returned its stare and it hopped away one leap and looked back at him with an expectant blink. Joey resumed paying it no mind until its incessant unblinking glare made him look once again. It hopped away and sniffed at him.
“Fine, fine…” He paused the search and followed it.
It led him through a series of hallways, past an area that made Joey understand what a corporate cube farm might have looked like two thousand years ago, complete with a small creek flowing over a bed of stones―right through the office. It stopped by a black hole in the floor and sat up on its hind legs.
“If I come out the other end of that in a blue dress, I am going to murder you.”
The rabbit shook its head to the negative and dove in. He stared at the portal for a minute before his curiosity got the better of him and he leapt. His consciousness smeared into a blur of senses as he felt it dragged a great distance across cyberspace in an instant. Stillness came and lingered for several seconds before he fell out of thin air and landed in a Zen rock garden. He stood up, dusting himself off. Puffs of breath formed in the chill, wafting off to the east.
Sho Wantanabe waited by a tiny wooden bridge over a stream, clad in a blue kimono covered in white orchids and holding two small porcelain vessels trimmed with gold dragons. Wisps of steam curled into the air from each cup. The pattern in the steam over both cups was identical. Wantanabe gestured to a low table and sat on a dark blue pillow fringed with silver. Joey dropped the samurai avatar and used his normal appearance out of respect since this man did the same.
The green tea was a program; the net told his brain that he smelled it, tasted it, and that it was hot. No matter how long he took to drink it, it would remain at the same temperature and the cup remained three quarters full. He stared into the drab liquid, thinking about those old experiments with monkeys and pleasure/reward conditioning. Cyberspace felt a lot like that sometimes. Virtual sex or digital drugs tweaked the right synapses like the monkey pounding the button.
Some people just could not stop pushing it.
Joey bowed deep, about a thirty-degree angle and held it for two seconds. Sho leaned forward about half as far and tilted his head in acknowledgement. Both sipped tea in silence for some time before Wantanabe spoke.
“I do not know why you are here; however, if Proscion sent you then you must have questions that are private.” His English was good, but had a detectable accent. “How is he, by the way?”
“He’s feeling quite young these days.”
“That is good. He was always a bright star.”
“How did you meet?”
Sho set the cup down and placed his hands on his legs. “Some twenty years ago I spent time in your West City, teaching programming and logical design. He was one of my best students.”
Joey eyed his tea, wondering if it would be rude to sip it before Sho went for another. “What made him go back to school?”
“Back?” He cocked his head. “He was a University sophomore, not a post-grad.”
“What? That would make him like forty or so now.”
Sho had more tea. “That seems correct.”
Joey felt less awkward about the strange request that had been made of him. Who knows what it could do to a man’s sanity to look seventy at forty.
“So, enough pleasantry. Why have you come?”
Joey took in a breath. “Proscion said that Imoru Kitsune is somehow connected to something going on back in the UCF.”
Wantanabe’s eyes narrowed. After a measured pause, he leaned forward. “A few years ago, I led a team assigned the task of creating an AI that exactly replicated a specific individual.”
Joey tried not to slurp tea.
“To perfectly recreate a person was a daunting task. After many dismal failures, I realized it would take many years to produce a convincing copy. We did not have that much time. An idea struck me that I now regret.” Sho inhaled the fragrance of his non-tea before another sip. “Have you ever heard of the shinigami?”
“It’s something in Japanese mythology I think.”
Wantanabe closed his eyes. “The shinigami are spirits that help the dead find their place in the next world. Some in the west describe it as the grim reaper, though the concept of the grim reaper is of a single entity. The shinigami are many.” He waved his arm to the side.
“You made a digital grim reaper?” Joey raised an eyebrow.
“No, not in that sense. We made an AI that would go out into cyberspace with a specific target in mind. It could sift through billions of terabytes of information from surveillance cameras, holovid conversations, or online transactions. Any time a person touched the net and left anything recorded, it would find it and use it. Shinigami would evaluate their mannerisms, their speech patterns and study the people around them, factoring it all to construct the final product.”
Joey’s blood ran cold. “You made an AI that writes other AIs?”
Sho’s eyes sparkled. “Yes, I know your UCF considers it illegal and dangerous, but it was the only way to accomplish what we needed in the time we had. Shinigami can bring people back from the dead, in a manner of speaking.”
“Imoru is an AI.” Joey’s eyes widened. Ninety-seven years as the head of the company now made sense, more so given his hermetic nature. “He will run the company forever.”
Sho smiled. “Indeed. Advertising this fact would not be healthy for you. Kitsune-sensei was not prepared to lose control of his legacy. We had to make Shinigami before he died.”
“So why is your grim reaper body
surfing on the West Coast?” Joey went to sip his tea, but hesitated. Despite knowing it would be, it surprised him to find it still full.
Mr. Wantanabe laughed. “Shortly after it gave us Kitsune, it ran off. We lost contact with him when he ducked into the ACC, out of our reach.”
“You don’t know what happened after it got over there?”
“Alas, we do not. I have not made an AI since; I have learned that when you make them as advanced as Shinigami, you cannot control them. Perhaps there is some wisdom in your UCF law.”
“Why would it make an AI of my dad?” Joey leaned back. “Or of a dead cop?” He explained about New Hope and all the people seeing their loved ones via electronic means. He thought about Mitch; now it made perfect sense why Christina had not returned.
“He is practicing. It would be my theory that Shinigami is studying human emotional response by creating scenarios to see how people react. It wants to learn and grow, to understand what defines humanity’s need to love and to hate; to explore sadness, fear, desperation, and perhaps even happiness.”
Joey blinked. “You almost sound proud of it.”
“In a way.” Sho glanced at the raked sand as if searching for meaning in the pattern. “While I accept that what we released into the world is dangerous, he is like my son.”
“Did you put in any kind of back door or anything we can use to shut it down?”
Dr. Wantanabe did not answer right away. His gaze fell to the table with his hands on his knees. His entire presence radiated the grim determination of a Samurai about to commit seppuku. He studied the pattern of wispy steam rising from the tea, blinking at the point when the animation looped. Joey remained still, glancing at the red-painted bridge when the sound of the stream filled his senses; interrupted only by the occasional splash of a koi feeding.
Ones and zeros eat ones and zeros.
After a long pause, Wantanabe broke the silence. “Yes. I have uploaded a soft that should put him into an inactive state.”
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