by Greg Rucka
Then Shephard was pushing her gently forward, and Cassandra found herself crossing the stage to a standing ovation, applause so thick and loud it seemed to buffet her. From the corner of her eye, she saw a Caucasian man in a three-piece suit rush for the stage, a bouquet in his hand, and then be intercepted by two of Shaw’s uniformed Hawks before he could reach her. Someone shouted that they loved her. Someone else asked if she would marry him.
She took the podium, noting the placement of the display stand beside it, its top covered with a sheet of black fabric. The lights that had so tormented her that last time she’d stood in Hall A were back, shining into her eyes. On the podium, beside the clock, the remarks that Shephard had prepared for her scrolled into position, projected at eye-level, to keep her from having to look down.
The applause continued, and after a moment, Cassandra understood that she would have to put a stop to it, rather than wait for it to run its course. She switched the display off on the podium, catching Shephard’s surprised reaction from the corner of her eye, then smiled out at the audience and gestured for silence.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Cassandra DeVries said. “Allow me to introduce you to Arthur.”
And with that, she pulled back the sheet and showed the world its first artificial intelligence.
DataFlow Corporate Headquarters
Presentation Hall A
17 Rue de la Baume
Paris, France
January 30th, 2021
Surprise makes all the difference in the world, Jonathan Steinberg thought. Surprise, and betrayal.
Then he slid his knife hard and fast into the side of the neck of the man who was standing post inside the south stairwell of Presentation Hall A, using his other hand to pull the Hawk’s head back and toward him. Steinberg yanked the blade free, then punched with it a second time, hearing the wet gurgle of escaping air as blood and breath both fled the man’s body in ways they were never meant to leave.
Silently, he lowered the man to the ground, then stepped back and motioned Velez and three of her CORPSEC guards forward. Velez advanced without bothering to look down, stepping over the corpse, but two of the guards couldn’t manage the same, each of them looking down, and he saw the confusion and the fear in their eyes. As far as they knew, this was dataDyne versus dataDyne, and as much as they may have trusted Velez, Steinberg was certain that his presence wasn’t helping matters.
Velez came back from where she’d been checking the stairwell, spoke quickly and quietly to him.
“It’s eleven-fifty six,” she said. “We cannot take or clear the hall in the time we have left, and Dr. DeVries is already onstage. I suggest you take your element this way, up and through the access along the hall. It will bring you in through the skies over stage left. I will take my element along the parallel track, descending to stage right. If you see Shaw, do not hesitate to kill him.”
“What about your boss?”
“Do not concern yourself with Dr. DeVries,” Velez said, and Steinberg couldn’t mistake the warning in her voice. “If I see you take any action toward her, I will view it as hostile, is that understood?”
“She can’t be allowed—”
“She will not be. Go, we don’t have much time.”
Steinberg wiped the knife clean, slid it back into its sheath at the small of his back, then moved the Fairchild from where it was hanging beneath his coat to his hands. He turned, extended his left hand, communicating orders to the Institute Troopers still waiting in cover inside the lobby. They’d already moved the four Hawks they’d had to down just to get that far, and wherever the bodies had been hidden, Steinberg hoped it would take more than four minutes before they were discovered.
With the Troopers at his heels, Steinberg began racing up the stairs, taking them two and three at a time. There was no way to do it quietly, and he only hoped that Shaw hadn’t posted any guards at the top of the stairwell. With the men and women following him, he imagined they sounded like a stampede of cavalry.
Let’s hope we arrive like them, too, he thought, bitterly.
The stairs ended at a landing with a closed access door marked “Authorized Personnel Only.” Steinberg swapped the Fairchild for his P9P, double-checked the silencer, and then, confirming he still had his people at his back, shoved the door open.
Velez had been correct, the door did grant access to skies above the house, the scaffolding and criss-crossed beams designed to hold the stage lights. He also discovered that Shaw wasn’t an idiot and that there was a Hawk positioned there, a rifle in his lap and a radio in his hand. The man turned, reacting, and before he could say or do anything more, Steinberg had fired twice, scoring two head shots at close range.
The Hawk dropped his radio, toppling backward onto the scaffolding where he’d been seated. Then he began to list, and Steinberg swore, dropping his pistol and diving forward, through the narrow door. He missed the man with his first grab, just as he started to roll free, and desperately grabbed at him again, managing to catch hold of the Hawk’s pant leg at the last moment.
Which maybe wasn’t such a good idea, because the Hawk had turned to true deadweight, perhaps 210 pounds of it, and gravity wanted the body as much as Steinberg did. He felt himself sliding forward suddenly as the rest of the man’s body fell free of the scaffolding, and then Steinberg was jerked through the door after him. For a horrible moment he could see the scene as if in some twisted black comedy, the dead Hawk about to plummet from the skies to the house below, splattering blood and brain on the gathered media, and Steinberg following immediately in the dead man’s wake, adding insult to injury.
His body stopped short, the arrest jarring, and Steinberg nearly lost his grip on the Hawk even as he felt hands on his own boots and legs, trying to pull him back to safety. He hissed with the exertion, desperate not to lose his hold on the dead man, feeling the sweat in his hands mixing with the ballistic fabric of the Hawk’s trousers. Then he was being pulled back, and new hands reached past him, taking hold of the Hawk, and together he and the dead man tumbled back to the safety of the landing.
Dorsey helped him to his feet, saying, “Nice save, sir.”
“Yeah, you too,” he said, picking up his discarded pistol. “You guys stay here, make sure nobody comes up behind me.”
“Yes, sir.”
Steinberg started out onto the skies, working his way precariously over the packed house to the stage. DeVries’s voice seemed to come from all around him, almost deafening this close to the speakers. On the stage, he could see the woman, lit by the house lights, standing at the podium, and beside her, on a stand, a small cube that seemed to glow with internal light, and resting beside it what looked to him like a large button or switch of some kind.
“And how many vehicles are there with dataDyne transponders, Arthur?” she was asking.
The voice that responded was androgynous, almost empty of inflection. “At this moment, there are seven hundred seventy-three million, eight hundred sixty-nine thousand, nine hundred seventeen null-g vehicles equipped with dataDyne AirFlow.Net transponders.”
Beneath him, in their seats, Steinberg heard the audience gasp in appreciation. Whether that was of Arthur’s ability to answer or the sheer number of vehicles, he didn’t know, and he didn’t much care. All he could think about was that seven hundred seventy-three million of anything crashing all at once was almost beyond his capacity to imagine. He thought about that, and he thought about the fact that if he fell off of this stupid, tiny, thin little rail he was trying to walk along without making noise, it would be a very stupid and very painful way to die.
But at least it’d be over quick, he thought.
“That’s an extraordinary amount of vehicles,” DeVries was saying. “DataDyne must make quite a good product if we’ve sold that many of them, wouldn’t you agree?”
“DataDyne products,” Arthur said, “are the best in the world.”
Laughter rose up from below, and on the massive screen at the b
ack of the stage, Steinberg could see the close-up of DeVries smiling, her eyes shining in mirth. He glanced to his left, could just make out Velez making her way along the skies, parallel to him.
“So, Arthur,” DeVries said. “Can you tell us, please, your function? Your purpose?”
“To monitor and maintain the safe, efficient, and speedy flow of all null-g traffic throughout the world.”
“When will you do this?”
“From activation until deactivation.”
“You mean you’ll never rest?”
“Parsing error.”
On the stage, DeVries looked from the cube she had been speaking to out at the audience. “Arthur is very literal, you see. He doesn’t need to rest, so the question has no meaning to him.”
There were murmurs of understanding, even approval.
“I’ll ask it a different way,” DeVries said. “Arthur, will you ever require downtime for maintenance?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“This is a self-diagnostic, closed system. Maintenance routines are executed once per every one million computational processes.”
Steinberg had reached the stage, crossing over the lip and now looking directly down on the cluster of figures standing out of sight of the audience. He could make out three of them, possibly a man and a woman standing together, and maybe another man, but it was difficult to tell from the angle and the lighting.
“How frequently does that diagnostic run in real time, Arthur?”
“At peak capacity, diagnostics run once every point eight-seven-eighth of a second.”
There was another gasp from the audience.
“What happens if you discover an error?”
“I repair the error.”
A smattering of applause, and now Steinberg had reached the ladder that ran from the skies down to the back of the stage. He checked over his shoulder, saw that Velez was perhaps ten seconds behind him. Looking down, he tried again to identify the figures he was seeing, thinking that one of them had to be Shaw. Dorsey was right behind him, waiting.
“Now, ladies and gentlemen,” DeVries was saying. “Allow me to introduce the man who can, by all rights, call himself Arthur’s father. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Edward Ventura, DataFlow’s head of artificial intelligence and very soon to become the new director of DataFlow itself.”
A new round of applause, and Steinberg watched as the man standing closer to the stage, the one who had been standing beside the woman, hesitantly ventured out from behind the curtain. DeVries had turned to welcome him, beckoning him forward.
Shaw, Steinberg thought as he watched the remaining man, and he swung himself out onto the ladder. Then, gripping it by the rails rather than by the rungs, he began a rapid slide down to the rear of the stage, trying to keep his eyes on the man he was certain was Leland Shaw as he descended. Shaw was moving, suddenly, approaching the woman still standing out of sight, watching the events on the stage. Steinberg could hear DeVries speaking again, and then a man’s voice, presumably Ventura’s. There was laughter from the audience.
Steinberg hit the ground hard, his hands aching with the friction burn of his descent. Shaw was speaking to the woman still, a radio in his hand, and that was when Steinberg realized it was all about to go wrong. The radio was the tell: Shaw had to know he was down men, that there were hostiles inside his perimeter. He saw the gun in the man’s other hand, another P9P, and Steinberg realized it was the custom model with the titanium slide, and he had enough time to at least admire the man’s choice in weaponry before Shaw shot him twice in the chest.
It wasn’t the first time he’d been shot, but, as the rounds smashed into his body armor and cracked his ribs, sending him to the floor and his pistol skittering away into the darkness, Jonathan Steinberg wondered if it wasn’t going to be his last.
“Something’s just occurred to me,” DeVries said from the stage. “Something I’m sure the more paranoid of our audience out there has already considered. What would we do if someone hacked Arthur, Edward? How would we respond to that?”
Wincing, Steinberg rolled to his left, trying to free the Fairchild from its harness beneath his coat. Shaw had grabbed the woman, pulling her in front of him as a shield with one hand, ramming the barrel of his still smoking pistol against the side of her neck, his expression bordering on panic. Steinberg fumbled the Fairchild into his hands, coming up to his knee, wishing to God that he was, for one moment and despite the miserable baggage that it would entail, Joanna Dark.
Because if he were Joanna Dark, he wouldn’t be afraid to take the shot, he would have been certain that he would hit Shaw and not the pretty young woman who was now struggling against the man’s grip, eyes snapped wide open in terror. If he were Joanna Dark, Steinberg thought, he wouldn’t have been shot in the first place.
“It’s not possible, Madame Director,” Ventura was saying, voice full of pride. “Arthur is self-aware, even if he isn’t fully sentient. He would detect any unauthorized access of his memory modules, any corruption or shift in his code.”
Steinberg thumbed the burst selector down from full-auto to three-round burst, tried to get to his feet while keeping the sights on Shaw. The woman had stopped struggling. Shaw glanced toward the stage, then back again before Steinberg could react. Steinberg didn’t like what he was reading in the man’s expression. Shaw was scared. Shaw was on the verge of panic.
Bad, very bad, Steinberg thought. He panics, and this becomes a bloodbath.
“Unauthorized access,” DeVries said. “What about authorized access, Edward?”
“No one with the proper authorization would do such a thing, Madame Director.”
“No, I don’t suppose they would. After all, it’s their lives in our hands, isn’t it?”
A ripple of laughter from the audience, but nervous, now, as if somehow they’d sensed the sudden tension that seemed to be coming from the stage.
“Well, I suppose we should give them what they’ve been waiting for, don’t you agree, Edward? Would you like to handle the countdown or the switch?”
“Oh, I think you should throw the switch, Madame Director. After all, it’s your company.”
Laughter again, more of it, the moment of tension passing.
Shaw had started to move, but away from the stage, not toward it, and Steinberg felt his own panic rising. If he broke toward the stage to try to stop DeVries, he had no doubt that Shaw would fire on him and keep firing until the Hawk leader was sure he’d done it right. But if Steinberg didn’t move, if he didn’t stop DeVries, Arthur would go live.
The countdown had started, the audience joining Ventura as he called out the numbers, growing louder with each one.
“Five!”
Steinberg shifted to his right, toward the stage, and Shaw compensated, backing away, still pulling his hostage with him. He wished to hell he knew where Velez was. He wished to hell he hadn’t balked, had just fired when he’d first had the opportunity.
“Four!”
Shaw had his back against the wall now, his eyes dancing between Steinberg and the stage.
“Three!”
I’m going to hell for this, Steinberg thought, and he whipped the Fairchild up, but Shaw was moving, too, and the woman was stumbling forward, suddenly free.
“Two!”
Steinberg fired, the suppressed shots sounding like the ripping of wet paper, and he saw his rounds hitting metal, the face of the access door as Shaw ducked and tumbled through it. The woman had hit the ground, was scrambling to get out of the way.
“One!”
Steinberg turned, lunging toward the edge of the curtain, to the stage, and he knew he wasn’t going to make it, that he had failed. He knew the world was going to end, and in the adrenaline agony of the moment, he wondered if, wherever Jo was, she was in a null-g vehicle, if her death would be quick or lingering.
He hoped it would be quick. She deserved that much.
“Anita,” DeVries said.
Steinberg skidded to a stop, the Fairchild in his hand, finally getting a view of the stage, where Ventura and DeVries were standing around the little cube. From the way she’d said it, the inflection and the tone, he fully expected to see Velez on the stage with them, being addressed by her former employer. But she wasn’t there, it was only DeVries and Ventura, and DeVries was stepping back from the switch, leaving it untouched.
Then Anita Velez, bleeding from a cut on her cheek and tucking her pistol beneath her jacket, stepped out from the opposite side of the stage.
“Madame Director?”
DeVries turned to face her, and if she was surprised by the other woman’s arrival, Steinberg couldn’t tell.
“Please have the hall evacuated,” DeVries said. “And take Dr. Ventura into custody.”
“At once, Madame Director.”
DeVries turned to the audience, brushing past a stunned Ventura. CORPSEC was already rushing onto the stage.
“I’m afraid we’re experiencing some technical difficulties,” DeVries said. “Thank you all for coming.”
Then she headed off the stage, coming toward Steinberg, her expression a mask of quiet fury. He stepped back to let her pass, and he thought she might acknowledge his presence, but she didn’t break stride. He watched as DeVries went to the woman Shaw had taken hostage, helping her to her feet. From the house, Steinberg could hear the murmuring of the crowd, their confusion turning to anger.
“When did you know?” Steinberg asked.
DeVries looked from the young woman to him, and her eyes flashed with fury. “Ventura’s answer was the wrong one. ‘No one with proper authorization would do such a thing.’ That was a denial, not a statement of fact. This is dataDyne. Of course they would.”
“Nice company you’ve got here, ma’am.”
“Mr. Steinberg,” Cassandra DeVries said. “You and any other Carrington Institute operatives you have in your company have precisely three minutes to leave dataDyne property, or I’ll have you shot.”