Guy Haley

by Reality 36

  “That was too close,” he said, picking a spent dart from his bicep. He threw it out of the shattered window. Chloe wept tiny, electronic hiccupping noises.

  Otto damned his earlier caution and attempted to use the MT to warn Richards that he’d been attacked, only to find that it had been cracked and blocked.

  The machine telepathy cipher had been broken twice in a fortnight. That was no coincidence. They were in trouble.

  Otto stood in the forest and looked at the car. The Zephyr rested nose down on the slope, as if paused in the act of kneeling, left-forward fan pod bent underneath it. Its engines were shot and fans chipped to uselessness, deflated matt-black crash balloons tangled round it like a hastily draped funerary shroud. The bodywork was damaged beyond the point of salvage, the airframe out of true. It wouldn’t be taking anyone anywhere ever again. Otto had his near-I run through the machine’s simple brain for information one last time, making sure they’d downloaded everything of use. Maps, that’s all it had to offer. He satisfied himself that was all he needed.

  He retreated a safe distance from the car and turned back to face it. Sitting there, down the slope from him, it presented a sorry sight. Once he’d tossed in one of his two remaining EMP grenades it looked worse. The grenade went in through the shattered driver’s window without touching the sides. A heartbeat later a cerulean flash shorted out every circuit in the vehicle, causing tiny fires to spring up inside. No one would be tracking him off the Zephyr.

  He shouldered the bag he’d found in the boot, in which he had a first-aid kit, a sleeping bag, some climbing gear and a few high-energy food bars. There’d been a jacket too, but that was nowhere near big enough to fit him.

  “Come on,” he said, “we have a long walk ahead of us.”

  “To Veronique?” said Chloe, brightly.

  “To Veronique.”

  He ran. He had seventy miles of rough terrain to cover. Time was running out for Veronique Valdaire.

  Chapter 21

  Karlsson

  “Peter Karlsson,” said the wiki précis as it read itself aloud, “Norwegian expatriate, resident of the USNA for twenty-three years. Until recently employed at the Virtualities Investigation Authority.”

  “Until recently alive, if this case is anything to go by,” said Richards. Karlsson’s Gridsig was still singing out, but that meant nothing. He’d not left his residence-cum-factory in old Detroit for two weeks, a similar period of inactivity to that Qifang had undergone before he had been found dead. As he listened to the wiki, a nimble part of himself plucked Karlsson’s employment history from one of the many dark places on the Grid where classified files were fragged and sent to disappear.

  They didn’t.

  Richards was an expert at reassembling data. Its fragments were as cohesive as grains of sand worn from a rock and spread over a beach, but this was what his father Armin Thor had made him for.

  He began reconstruction while the Grid précis droned on. It had precious little of importance to say and its monotone began to grate on him, so he turned it down and sent it to the back of the sphere of files around him, set the man’s life-site to mainline direct as he tinkered with Karlsson’s VIA employment history. Pictures whose true essences were obscured by repeated replication flickered by, copies of copies of copies, showing a baby, a baby, a boy, an older boy, a man skiing, more children, a smiling woman, landscapes… faster and faster.

  Richards squatted in a black infinity, his office banished into unreality. Around him flew the scraps of Karlsson’s life, pulled from all over the virtual world. Video, audio, stills, CVs, letters, mails, texts, testimonials, chat posts, network entries, health records, license details, game scores, avatars, Heaven Level access codes – all there on the Grid, for the right man to find. Karlsson had worn a soul-capt for several years. This was usually done to prepare for a pimsim, but in Karlsson’s case Richards reckoned it was insurance, recording his time at the VIA. There was a mass of data just from that, more bits of recorded information than were in the whole world only a couple of hundred years ago and still not enough to encompass the entirety of one life; a pitiful testament to the existence of a sentient mind, digital flotsam. Richards was a beachcomber on the shores of the Styx. He pushed the notion away; he felt too close to Lincolnshire Flats when he thought like that.

  He is dead, thought Richards. There was a lack of vitality to the data. It was no longer growing, already suffering the small erosions of the digital world, minute corruptions of copy and transfer, the necrotisation of numbers that would one day render it unreadable, even to him, leaving shards behind as mysterious as wave-worn glass. Karlsson’s Gridsig burned only as a ghost light.

  Karlsson’s life lay before Richards. The receipt for six combat frames floated by, like that in the heiress, followed by more for weaponry and autonomous carriage parts. There was a lot of that over the last few months; and a lot of personal protection equipment, for use online and in the Real. Richards called up plans of Karlsson’s factory. “Wow,” he said, and halted them, bringing them right up in front of him. He ran through them thoroughly. It was a fortress.

  “Who the hell was this guy hiding from?” wondered Richards aloud. He called a drink into existence, drained it in one, and let the glass disintegrate into nothingness. He directed the data to reform according to different search criteria, a conductor of an orchestra of information. He looked for patterns as it danced. Hypotheses came and went, possibilities reeling off each run-through by braids of Richards’ consciousness, all discarded.

  Karlsson had known Qifang well. The correspondence between them was voluminous and lively, though there were strands of consistent disagreement. Camera feeds of them together showed men comfortable in each other’s company, though they were wary of others when they had met. They were secretive as they could be, but nobody got away without ever being recorded. They were careful to keep their conversation to bland topics. Maybe there was a code to it, but they were probably making small talk to cover over shortrange data transfers direct from Karlsson’s mentaug to Qifang’s phone. If they did that right, they could discuss what they liked in perfect privacy. They were up to something.

  Richards listened to a streetcam recording of them speak, and started to doubt that Karlsson had any part in Qifang’s death. The portrait of the man forming in his mind was of a nut, mistrustful of the numbers’ growing influence on human affairs. But his history spoke of defiance against higher authority, a growing fear of the AIs’ influence and the pervasiveness of the Grid, not of the homicide of a man he respected, a man he was trying to sway to his point of view.

  Richards was methodical. His main attention was on the data rebuild of the VIA files, his second tier awarenesses running through a chronological examination of the information as his highest functions pulled the fragged files back together. The general information thinned toward the end, petering out about nine months before Karlsson lost his job with the VIA. The life-site posts ceased first, and his finances and other dealings became increasingly heavily encrypted. From June 19th his personal messages stopped. Fragments that Richards scales retrieved indicated they’d been fragged five or six times over, probably by Karlsson himself, because the remains of these files were so minute as to be no better than nothing at all.

  Around the same time, Karlsson began to use increasingly esoteric code forms that were beyond Richards’ capability to decipher, even where he could reconstitute them, and if they were beyond him, they were beyond anybody. About nine weeks ago, the man’s life ran out. Soul-capt data ended. It was as if he’d died, only he hadn’t. The wipe became complete six weeks later. Not a trace remained on the Grid. Karlsson had ceased to be alive in the modern sense a day after Qifang’s death.

  “Now that,” said Richards, “is quite something.” And then he stopped, because if someone went to all that trouble to hide their dealings, they’d make sure to be informed if someone were trying to uncover them.

  Richards checked the digita
l wall round Karlsson’s home to see if he’d probed too deeply. It remained unruffled, no sign of datastreams out hunting for him. He let it be and went to the older material.

  The VIA had fired Karlsson because he’d been holding back on them, Richards deduced. The encryption the VIA employed was supposed to be second to none, but it was clearly second to that which Karlsson had. There was more to encoding data than making it unreadable, like the quantum fractal system Otto’s MT worked off. Karlsson’s work ran into self-aware informational packages, predictive ciphers that assessed their own vulnerability, updated themselves accordingly and launched counter strikes at those who attempted to decode them, corrupting code-reading programmes’ ability to think and spreading this inefficiency to others. In a similar vein were the automatically generating false data seeds that reacted to their observers, showing them utterly convincing material that happened to be entirely untrue. This was what the VIA had needed counters to, vital in their work of policing the most powerful minds on the planet. On a scale of one to ten, Richards rated Otto’s military MT a seven to break; time-consuming, but not impossible. Cracking the VIA was a nine. What Karlsson had defending his own interests was easily a twelve.

  He was too dangerous to live, thought Richards, but far too dangerous to kill, so the VIA’d fired him instead, on the mutual understanding that he’d not blow the secrets of the agency wide open if he wanted to stay alive. It was an effective threat; dead was still dead, even a pimsim was only a copy, and, for a man like Karlsson, the thought of becoming a number was probably tantamount to treachery.

  The reconstruction of Karlsson’s file was completed shortly after 9pm. Richards had it open after only five more hours of fiddling. What he found inside bore out his suspicions.

  “…want to help safeguard the future of mankind.” Karlsson, speaking in his initial job interview. Audio and vitals only, no video, the only piece of non-text data in his official file, incomplete.

  “Why?” asked a nameless interrogator. “What do you mean?”

  “Because we as a species… benefit from the machines,” replied Karlsson. “But they could also supplant us. I would rather that not happen. If…” Static for three seconds. Clarity returned.

  “Explain,” asked another voice.

  “Explain?” Karlsson laughed. “What is there to explain? All life exists to promote its own survival. A fish crawled from the sea a billion years ago, and I sit here. When I get to the afterlife I don’t want to have to say to that fish, ‘Sorry, we blew it, we’re done. Flesh is dead.’ If it comes to that, I want to be able to tell that fish that I tried.”

  Funny, thought Richards. For a Norwegian.

  The interview panel did not laugh.

  “The AIs are no different. It is in the nature of life to evolve and compete. They are on a collision course with mankind. They will out-compete us. They already are,” said Karlsson.

  “You do not see the machines then, as a continuation, an evolution of ourselves?” said the first voice. “One could argue that they are the next stage in our evolution.”

  “Some argue that, and I do not agree with them. A child carries part of its parents forwards when they are gone, in its genes and in its memes. The machines may carry our mental stamp, but they are not us, they never will be. They are not alive in the same way we are.”

  “So you deny them their rights? They are not equal as sentients?”

  “No, of course not,” said Karlsson haughtily, as if his interlocutor was an idiot. He must have been a hit at office parties, thought Richards. “They are, if anything, superior. That is what scares me. It scares a lot of other people too, that’s why the machines need protecting as much from us as we do from them. To co-exist is…”

  The file broke up into buzzsaw roars, then skipped. Richards scrabbled at the data fragments, but could not rebuild much more of the interview that interested him, although he did discover that the VIA healthcare package was good. The text he managed OK, but that was formulaic; standard employment clauses, the deal between the agency and Karlsson when he’d departed, nothing enlightening.

  Whatever Karlsson had been up to since he’d been fired was cloaked in secrecy. There were his marching orders, then nothing. The logs of others that had come to see him had been stripped, or altered. There were a handful of streetcam footage files, a few more from free-roaming spy-eye cameras that had escaped his attention, but not many. Zhang Qifang was on several. One five-second video sequence in particular: Qifang entering Karlsson’s castle, made a blob by Karlsson’s countermeasures, round the time he was presumed to have died.

  “That’s interesting,” murmured Richards. “Very interesting.”

  He worked on for several more hours, accelerating his conscious processes so he subjectively experienced a week of time. He found nothing else. Karlsson had been thorough.

  He slowed his mind down, and brought the office back. He walked across the room as it materialised about him and plopped down into his chair, whisky and cigars appearing on his desk as it rippled into being. Outside, Chicago teemed with life. A whole world existed on the other side of the dusty window glass. Richards wondered where it all went when he wasn’t there. He sometimes wondered the same about the Real.

  He had to get more on Karlsson, dead or alive.

  In his mind’s eye he constructed a world within a world, and brought up a three-dimensional representation of Karlsson’s Detroit lair. He looked over the fortress factory, superimposed his reconstruction over realtime footage in the Real. The place was crawling with aggressive drones, its exterior studded with not-so-hidden weaponry. There was no way in without tripping its formidable security systems, not Gridside.

  Karlsson had been frightened of the machines. It was against them he’d set his most formidable defences.

  The plans were deliberately incomplete, and out of date. They probably had a low-grade intelligence embedded in them, ready to alert the real fortress to practised penetrations. The building’s systems would be aware he was looking at the plans right now. He checked the systems again, going as close as he dared. The whole thing was EM screened; there was not a chance he’d get anything other than the highest strength databeam through without it being chopped in two, but there were other, more old fashioned ways. Richards walked to his office door and turned up his collar. Time to get tough.

  He activated the Three running Richards & Klein, Inc, Security Consultants’ commsat, and had it reposition itself in a geostationary orbit over the Great Lakes. He told the Three to keep a low profile. Then he told it again, because Threes sometimes drifted off. Once he was happy the thing had understood his instructions, he stepped out of the office door, and into Richards & Klein, Inc, Security Consultants’ New York garage.

  In a rat with a microchip mind perched on a pile of dissolving concrete, Richards watched Karlsson’s fortress from a safe distance. The street was half-submerged and deserted, but then all the streets here were half-submerged and deserted. Karlsson had fetched himself up in the dead heart of Detroit’s old industrial port district, a warren of decaying factories, tottering warehouses and unidentifiable iron constructions washed deep red by the rain. Further upriver on the old Canada side, the waterfront gleamed with luxury low-rise, but not here. The ground, honeycombed with salt mines, was not stable enough to support the weight of arcologies, not desirable enough to go upmarket when Canada had joined USNA, so the shoreline remained a skeletal maze of concrete and foamcrete, a three-dimensional warren standing in grim waters, the remnants of earlier attempts at redevelopment undone by the financial crash of 2052 complicating its nineteenth- and twentieth-century layout. Older port buildings slumped tiredly into the lake, the sturdier constructions boxy islands overhung with plant life. Away from the water, trees grew freely in the middle of the street. The sidewalks were thick with grass. Only those at the margins of society lived here, sharing their ruinous home with returning wildlife. Upper Detroit–Windsor was a moderately prosperous, modern city
, but large parts, poisoned by two centuries of heavy industry, had been abandoned to the rising lakes, a true industrial wasteland left by way of remembrance. Obsolescence of centralised mass production had left the Detroit Metro area one of the poorest in the USNA. The population here was half what it had been a century and a half before.

  It was a good hiding place.

  Karlsson’s abode was an old port warehouse made of prefabricated concrete slabs whose chemical make-up had been altered to render it resistant to the acid waters round its base. According to the plans, these were supplemented internally by a modern foamcrete coat sprayed 1.3 metres thick. Heavy buttresses had been thrown up its side, atop which unconcealed near-I weaponry scanned the surrounding wasteland. The original roof had been replaced with more reinforced foamcrete, grassed over and allowed to run wild. This roof meadow was studded with dishes, field projectors and energy generation equipment of solar, magnetic interference and wind-driven varieties. A heavy chainlink fence and flatribbon defined a generous perimeter. Small drones darted about the air, and combat sheaths patrolled the shallow lagoon around the building.

  Karlsson was making very little effort to blend in.