by Reality 36
“I thought you’d never guess,” said Richards, flipping his hands out in a magician’s flourish.
“Even in that thing it is obvious.” Choi regained his composure, his face reverting to the bland expression he habitually wore. His English was perfect and spoken truly, unmoderated by intermediary software. His accent was clipped, and the unvoiced consonants common to East Asian languages were barely evident. Once upon a time, it had been fashionable for men with Eurasian ancestry to be educated in British public schools. Once. He was a relic. “No one I know is crazy enough to come in here unannounced, except you.”
“Or clever enough to pull it off,” said Richards.
Choi’s eyes narrowed. “What do you want here?”
“Only information,” said Richards, “about these machines.”
He ran a holo from the android’s built-in entertainment system, highlights of his recent encounters with the cydroids. The system was low-grade, the picture grainy. “Who built them?”
Choi set down his brush on a porcelain dish and regarded his marred work. “You disrespect me, arriving unannounced. More pertinently, you anger the Guangbo, coming and going in through the Firewall as if the sovereign cyberspace of China were a field at the end of your garden, and you have a hole in your hedge.”
“In a manner of speaking, it is and I have,” said Richards. “Come on, aren’t you just the tiniest bit interested? These are near-human sheaths! Nothing like that is supposed to be out there. Choi, they’ve bridged the valley.”
Choi blotted the ink stain on his art as if he had all the time in the world. “Be wary. The Guangbo have been waiting for you. They will be coming. Right now, I think. You have endangered us both. They will lock down your sensing presence and extradite you. You know that, of course, because you are so very intelligent.” He stood, lifting the paper, and stalked around his desk to hang it up to dry against a light panel, where he stood regarding it critically. “You have ruined it.”
“Sorry. Tell me who made these sheaths and why I haven’t seen them before so I can get out of your hair before the authorities arrive.”
“I must disappoint you.”
“What are you saying? Are you telling me, that you, Tony Choi, that you don’t know?”
“Leave.” The man put one hand over the other; the lower hand was gripping his paintbrush hard.
“Tony, these chassis have the mark of one of your manufactories upon them.” He displayed the relevant image. “A little careless, wouldn’t you say?”
“I do not sell illegally, Richards.”
“Come on, Tony.” Richards paced round the room in the android, causing the holos it projected to jump over the walls like acrobats. The machine’s cheaply woven joints squeaked as he went. He stopped by an ancient vase, walked on to the next piece. Art hung from much of the panelling, stood on pedestals, stared out from alcoves, a mix of eastern and western, a rich man’s nicknacks; worth enough to buy a nation, tasteless fripperies for all that. Who the hell had a solid gold wavinggood-luck cat other than Tony Choi? “You know everything there is to know about new tech. If someone’s building it, you’re selling it. Who’s been working on these machines?”
“I said I don’t know.”
Richards turned to look at Choi. “Even this low-rent floor sweeper has decent enough sensors to tell me that you’re lying. You can’t lie to a Five, Tony, not when you’re as bad a liar as you are. And you owe me. That Taipei Freeport bust? I wonder how the interior ministry would look on that.” He walked back across the room to Choi’s desk. Another holo played alongside the looping footage from the boat and morgue, pulled up from Richards’ imagination, Choi in custody, surrounded by uniformed men and sharp implements. What they were doing to him was not nice. “I believe smuggling narcotics up the space elevator is illegal. But I have a somewhat lurid fancy. Perhaps we should ask a policeman?” The sheath’s arms whirred loudly as Richards leaned on the wall by the drying paper. “And how is Mrs Choi anyway? What would she think?”
Choi’s face remained impassive.
Richards pulled up the image of the logo he’d seen at the coroner’s again: Choi Industries’ stamp. “You sold this chassis.”
Choi exhaled loudly, and most of his anger seemed to go with it. “Richards, I sell many such frames.” Choi walked back to his desk, picked up a second cloth folded by the neatly laid out instruments of his art, and wiped his fingers free of ink. A smear of black stained the white, to match that on his perfectly manicured hands. Small hands, rounded with fat, clogged with garish rings, but powerful in their way. “Thousands a year; I have no way of knowing who might purchase them secondhand, or through a front company. That is what you are going to ask me.”
Richards laughed, a rich noise for such cheap plastic. “Right.”
Choi shook his head. “You have much nerve, coming here, implying that you will blackmail me. I paid you well for Taipei. You know what I am, Richards. I have been most useful to you in the past. It is unprofessional to complain.”
“Needs must.”
Choi frowned, shook his head and turned to the holos Richards was playing. “That is Zhang Qifang, is it not? The man, the machine, in the holovideo?”
“Yes.”
“And these you show me, they are machines, you say? Not clones, or flesh-sculpted doubles?”
“That’s right.”
“I assume he is dead.”
“You assume correctly. I am investigating his murder; three of them, possibly four.”
“You should have said first.” He became saddened, as if he had long been expecting the news. “I have heard nothing.”
“It’s being kept quiet. Some of the more, uh, militant elements among my brethren are going to take it badly.”
“He was a brilliant man.” Choi looked at the teapot Richards had delivered, as if debating whether or not it was to blame. After a moment he set down the cloth, poured himself a cup of tea and raised it. “To one of the great minds of our time.”
“If you respect him that much, you’ll help me out.”
Choi nodded.
Encouraged, Richards went on. “This technology, it’s supposed to be fifty years away. This says otherwise. I need to know who is half a century early.”
Choi looked up into Richards’ visual receptors, small gems of glass set close together in the android’s carbon-weave face. “Very well,” he said resignedly. “I will tell you what I know, but it is not much.”
“I would welcome any information.”
“Then you will owe me,” said Choi. “Four days.”
“Three,” said Richards. The timer of Northern Bandit’s was counting quickly down. Five minutes remaining.
“Very well. Three days. I will hold you to it.”
“I am sure you will. Now talk.”
Choi set his cup down. “I am not sure. I have heard… reports. Nothing concrete, nothing certain. There’s some talk coming out of the containment facilities in Nevada, the Reality Realm House, the place they moved the RealWorld hardware to when the UN shut them down.”
“And?”
“Things like this: that they have several high-level AIs working full time as futurists, using the spare capacity of the Realms’ servers freed up by the destruction of four of the Realms for mathematical prognostication.”
“Yeah, k52 is leading them. It’s common knowledge.”
“You will also know then that it’s all supposed to be theoretical. This kind of fully autonomous emulant is one of the areas they have been investigating.” He nodded toward the holo. “Imagining is perhaps the more appropriate word, plotting possible future developments, examining potential new tech, providing probabilities to feed out to the entertainment industry, better to accelerate k52’s ‘Fiction Effect’ by providing inspiration for what is readily achievable, tier-two projects like this. But I had not heard that they had built anything. These machines match some of the descriptions and file blueprints I have, ah” – he shrugged, as if
to shuck off any implication of impropriety – “acquired. They were incomplete, unusable. No one could have constructed the things you have shown me from the information I have.”
“Someone has,” said Richards. “The Realm House is administered by the VIA. Why would they be interested in investigating the creation of something that would let people like me blend in? They like us where we are, nice and visible.”
“Richards.” Choi wagged a finger. His smile broadened. “Your intelligence fails you. Care of the Realms was recently handed over to Gencorp.”
“Hey, I’ve been busy,” Richards protested, irritated at being caught out. “Cost cutting, eh?”
“Private firms offer better deals, simple economics. Government agencies suck a state dry, and USNA is poor, has been since the Midnight Dollar Coup. The VIA still provides security, however; the UN would not let them give that up. You really did not know this had happened?”
“Realm stuff rarely comes up in my line of work. They’re closed off, and anything untoward that goes down there is VIA business. I keep well clear of it. Asking about them draws too much heat off the agency. They’re a pretty touchy bunch, and I am a Five. I don’t want them in my business any more than they want me in theirs. They look at me funny, you know what I mean?”
Choi watched the holos of Richards’ encounters with the cydroids for a few moments. “These sheaths are hardly perfect, one could argue.”
“Why would the VIA sanction their building? It makes less sense if they’re imperfect, they’re even more likely to get caught out.”
“Listen to what is said, Richards. I never said the VIA or Gencorp had built them. To build them is not why they investigate, they investigate such things to anticipate their development. It is a matter of apprehension, they do it simply to know and perhaps in the VIA’s case to detect them should someone build them.”
“Could it be Gencorp?” Richards considered for a moment. “No, no, I don’t buy that, not under the VIA’s nose. And why are they trying to kill each other?”
Choi raised his eyebrows in query.
“Long story.”
“I am only aware that their theoretical possibility is slightly less theoretical and slightly more possible than most people are aware. But in these times, that is to be expected, things change so quickly, it is as if the world is being pulled out from under our feet every second day,” said Choi.
“Interesting times, eh?”
Choi narrowed his eyes. “I do not bandy cliché, Richards. I also do not believe I have told you anything that you have not already discerned for yourself. I have not been offered any such ‘cydroids’ for sale, either in physical or plan form. All I have are these scraps brought to me by my operation.”
“Right, OK, thanks,” said Richards. “This destruct mechanism.” Richards brought up technical detail on the skeletons and electron scope level views of the cydroid’s carbons.
“The weaving is fine, is it not? A good product.” Choi leaned in closer to them. “But the better looms will give you such a finish. I see little else unusual about these constructs other than the biological component and these artificial cerebra. This is otherwise a standard combat endoskeleton, self-motivated. This carbon, it is a simple atomic lattice, not neo-diamond or any of the other harder artificial matrices. Tough, but unremarkable, not particularly strong. We have several tens of thousands in the people’s liberation army, many of which I procured for the state.” He shrugged.
“The self-destruct item,” said Richards, pressing his point. Three minutes.
“Again, it is a standard stock item; unusual, but by no means unique. It’s relatively new, but it’s not been altered from the factory model, if that is what you are asking me. The acid only works on the looser lattices – it won’t damage diamond weave, it is far too tough.”
“But…?”
Choi clucked his tongue. “It is strange to see such unusually advanced biotechnology married to something like this, that is all. As utile as my product is, I would expect…”
Richards finished his sentence. “That they would have made more of an effort with the internals? Proper diamond weave, or actual grown bone? Me too.”
Choi blinked his long, slow blink. “It is remarkable. Off the shelf combat droid skeleton with this organic shell, one so far in advance of the other.”
“Is that all you know?”
“That is all.”
Richards looked at Tony’s round face for a long minute, searching out the lies. The little man held his gaze, his own expression flat and unreadable. Richards could see no evidence of untruthfulness on the surface. He regretted grabbing such a cheap sheath. He’d lied to Choi; the infrareds on it were not sensitive enough to pick out capillary dilation, they were sufficient to monitor the temperature of hot beverages, and that was about all. He felt cheap, cheap in front of Tony Choi. “I am disappointed Tony, I thought if anyone would know of a suspiciously advanced new unit primed for infiltration it would be an amoral criminal bastard like you.”
Choi snorted. “I am flattered, but I am only a merchant. I buy and I sell what is available to be bought and to be sold… Perhaps if you would allow me to check my databases, I may be able to track the transaction…” He shrugged; it didn’t matter at all to him. “It will take a minute, if the client was a special one, or the chassis changed hands, perhaps longer, if at all,” he warned. “I will at least try.” He moved over to a panel fronted by a garish fourteenth-century vase. It rotated as he approached, to reveal a flat glass-topped workstation, fully manual. Choi didn’t trust anyone, numbers or meat, with his deepest secrets. It was probably connected to the Grid via an unwitting proxy. Somewhere, thought Richards, is a little old lady scratching her head over her band charges. “The catalytic acid destruct system should make it easier to track down. Please, take a seat.”
“I’ll stay leaning, this thing doesn’t do sitting.”
“Lean then.”
“Next time I’m going more upmarket. I was in something of a hurry.” Richards had a thought. “Hey, you’re not stalling for time, are you, Choi? You’re not trying to sell me out here, are you?”
“Why would I do that?” Choi said mildly, tapping at the workstation’s glass table top, moving documents round on it, pinching those that interested him from there and lifting them into the air, where they hung as holographs. “Would you mind?” he said, indicating the still active holo.
“Yeah, sure.” Richards remoted the data over to Choi’s machine. Choi’s fingers worked faster, moving icon to icon, initiating a search.
“I know the value of things,” Choi said, “You are much more valuable to me at liberty than you are in the gracious care of our glorious Dynasty of the People.”
“Good, because I sealed your mainframe off from the Grid. There’s a blind copy running as cover. Nothing you’ve been trying to send to the authorities has made it out.”
Choi looked up momentarily, mildly insulted. “If I have been trying to contact the authorities.”
“If.” Richards’ borrowed beaklike head moved to one side, listening to something Choi could not hear. “So you wouldn’t know about the AI snatch squad sat outside your virtual real estate then?” There were several high-end code-breakers in the Grid. Richards cursed inwardly. They’d appeared out of nowhere. They swam back and forth, long trails of information stretching back into the churn of the Grid connecting them to their handlers, waiting as something big and nasty hammered away at Richards’ fake mainframe. The codebreakers left themselves open, trying to tempt Richards to commit more of himself to cracking them and reading their secrets, to see if, maybe, high end AIs had survived the pogroms and hid behind information streams instead of men, enthralled to the state. It was tempting, but that was the idea. He wasn’t that naive.
“I…” began Choi. He stopped, sipped his tea from the thimble-like cup, its ceramics patterned with tiny cracks that suggested an age greater than gunpowder. “Of course. Why should I lie? You a
re right to an extent, I did know that they were coming. I had hoped we would be done before they arrived. They are getting faster.” He placed the cup down on the top of his workstation. “There is a discrete system here, in this room, fitted by the interior ministry. It bypasses the main Grid, a direct pipe. They were summoned a few moments after you arrived by patterns evident in our conversation.” He glanced at the waving-good-luck cat meaningfully. Not so lucky for me, thought Richards. “It was not my decision. I said you should not have come.”
“You have sold me out.”
“If you wish to look at it in that way, that is your prerogative. Non-compliance was… inadvisable. As you say, needs must as the devil drives.”
“You said you did not bandy cliché.”
Choi shrugged again.
“You could have warned me. I’m minded to kick your ass. I could, you know, even in this.” Richards steeled himself. They’d got through the first few layers of armour he’d laid into the building’s cyber-structure; he was a whisker away from being directly attacked. The shield he had up round the mainframe prevented the Chinese entities hooking him, but any second now they’d start causing him genuine inconvenience.