Reborn

by Lance Erlick

  “The thumb drive has programs to break into their servers,” Machten said. “Launch your probes.”

  Luckily for her, she had enough mind-streams to devote one to him without distracting from the rest of her work. For him, she sent out dozens of probes along anonymous links. They would converge on Machten-Goradine-McNeil’s servers. The first wave would tie up their security protocol, while the next batch would attach to the security code like retroviruses and replicate inside the company’s network. Then the real probes would pop in and download confidential files. The trick was to get the target system to ask for information and then accept her probes in reply.

  Synthia let Machten watch his probes through her eyes while she used eleven of her wireless channels to guide the personal identities she’d created. She set up more social media connections under dozens of false names and identities as a way to expand her human contacts. One she kept open for Zachary. Three she used to search for Fran Rogers.

  Synthia couldn’t pinpoint what about Fran caught her interest, other than the memory video that seemed personal and the fact the woman had been close to her Creator and vanished. Those facts didn’t seem enough to warrant the importance of needing to learn what had happened to this mysterious woman a year ago. Grabbing images she’d stored from her earlier searches, Synthia linked to over thirty facial recognition sites and pulled footage over the past year from social media, from citywide traffic cameras across America, and from those police databases she was able to crack with Machten’s software.

  “There’s something else I need you to do,” Machten said into Synthia’s earphones. “These people use ZIB Bank for their financing. On the data-chip I gave you is a series of accounts. I want you to hack into the bank and download the balance of their funds into the first set of accounts and then move them along the path to the final destination.”

  “If you do this and attempt to collect the money,” she said directly into his wireless link so she didn’t make a sound, “they’ll trace the transactions and arrest you. I cannot allow such harm to come to you. That would be against my directives.”

  A tough-looking woman with bushy black hair and a face so pale it seemed translucent approached the booth in front of Synthia. She glanced back, stared for a moment, and then sat down. She held up a mirror for a longer look. Synthia crouched down until she could no longer see the woman. Don’t let anyone notice you, Machten had said.

  He cleared his throat. “What’s going on?”

  “The dark-haired woman seems interested. She may have taken my picture.”

  “Maintain your anonymous face. She has her head down, staring at her work. Stay focused.”

  Since Synthia only needed two percent of her attention on him and the woman, she wasn’t sure how much more she needed to focus. The first round of Machten’s probes had excited the company’s security system, which sent out counter-probes to assess the situation. Her second batch rushed in to help.

  “I need you to access the destination bank accounts. Two of the banks I’m having you route this through are internet banks that aren’t controlled by treaty governments. If you do this right, there will be no trace.”

  “As long as you pay taxes on the money. Remember what happened to Al Capone.”

  Machten sighed. “With my losses, that shouldn’t be a problem.”

  Despite his reassurances, executing his commands troubled Synthia. Her primary directives focused on protecting Machten and following his orders. What he’d asked her to do represented theft. If everyone did this, there would be chaos. No one would have any incentive to work or produce more than they needed. Commerce and society would collapse. It would doom civilization and with it, people like Machten. He was dependent on modern conveniences, such as a steady supply of food.

  That was the logical argument and one of the ethical positions floated by philosophers. With the exception of career paths, if everyone acted in a certain way, would it be beneficial or detrimental for society? She excluded careers, because while having even a few thieves or murderers diminished society, a diversity of careers enhanced human economy. She wasn’t sure where in that scheme to place the adoption of humaniform robots, which could eliminate all jobs.

  “What’s that girl doing?” Machten yelled into her head. “I can’t see her.”

  Synthia looked up for an instant and captured the image. Then she sent a probe through her local connection and another through her wireless link. Using proximity locators, she piggybacked onto the woman’s transmission activities.

  “She’s moving large sums of money for a student,” Synthia said. “I can’t tell who she’s doing business with.” It might have been a dark-web connection.

  Synthia searched the internet for anyone using the name “Fran Rogers” in any variety of misspellings. Up came thousands of references. Most were either too old, too young, or of radically different appearance. The ones that were similar all predated Fran’s disappearance.

  “Stay focused on the company and the bank,” Machten said. “She’s probably dealing drugs or something.”

  Disagreeing with Machten’s assessment, Synthia held one channel on the woman seated before her. Then she launched bank probes and researched the banks involved in Machten’s transactions. She recognized most and confirmed that the two internet banks were not subject to government controls and trade restrictions. The woman before her was accessing the same banks.

  This coincidence sent waves of static through Synthia’s circuits and left her wondering if this was a coincidence or something that threatened Machten or her.

  Chapter 8

  Using facial recognition, Synthia could not find a match to the woman seated in front of her. Making the assumption the woman was a student, Synthia cracked into the university database to check against student and faculty records. None of the images matched. Intrigued, she considered whether Fran could have altered her appearance this much.

  “Have you gotten into the servers yet?” Machten asked. “We need to hurry.”

  “They’ve tightened their firewall, just as your former coworker said. I haven’t seen such formidable security on a company server before.”

  Synthia applied advanced facial recognition to compare the image of the woman in front of her to Fran. The software played with possible plastic surgery to nose, ears, and even forehead, but the match to Fran was not better than random chance. Synthia expanded her search and found an 81 percent probability that the woman seated in front of her was Maria Baldacci, one of the three women who had vanished.

  Maria was a twenty-three-year-old graduate student in network intelligence and quantum mechanics. She’d done an internship with Machten’s former company until a year ago. According to Social Security payroll records, Maria hadn’t landed another reportable job, yet her bank accounts grew, both locally and at banks along the path of her money transfers.

  Synthia wanted to talk with this woman, to learn more, but not with Machten watching. He would recognize the woman and whatever trouble Maria might be in could be the result of his or the company’s actions. Synthia needed to know more before she made her move. Otherwise, this could be her last outing.

  Piggybacking onto Maria’s connection, Synthia pulled up the woman’s social media and email links. Maria sent few emails and posted little to her social media sites over the past year, but she had a loyal following. Synthia located an email from a week ago that Maria had sent to herself. Attached were transcripts of conversations between Hank Goradine and her, along with videos of him time-stamped a year ago. Only his face appeared, meaning she must have been wearing a camera. When Synthia ran voice recognition against a public interview of Maria as part of the intern program a year ago, the voice on the recording confirmed as Maria’s.

  “I will not submit to blackmail,” Goradine said in what appeared to be an apartment. The lines in his face creased, his eyes intently focused.


  “The AI app is mine,” Maria said. “I developed it.” The camera looked up at the tall executive and held steady. She didn’t back up.

  “You developed it while working for the company.”

  “I did it on my time,” she said, “over my weekends. I deserve compensation.”

  “Your salary is your compensation. You’ve been well paid as an intern.”

  “That’s for my sixty hours a week at the office.” The camera moved closer to Goradine.

  “Salary covers any work you perform related to company business.”

  She moved closer, waving her finger at him. “You can’t get that stupid hunk of metal to work without my app.”

  “And we appreciate the work we’ve paid you for.” He moved forward, his face marked like an etched Halloween mask. “Let this go or I’ll have to terminate you.”

  “If you don’t compensate me for that app, it will self-destruct. Then you’ll have nothing. Do your partners know you’ve been stealing money from the company and stashing it in your personal accounts?”

  Goradine hit her so hard she must have flown across the room, the camera tumbling with her. She landed in a corner and turned so the camera faced him. His face was calm, calculated. “You can’t win. Either let it go or—”

  “You bastard, you used me,” she yelled. “You slept with me and got me to do the extra work for free. You promised a big payday.”

  “You’ll get what you deserve.”

  She stood up, lifting her arm so the camera picked up the blood and blossoming bruises. Then she launched herself at him. He clobbered her head with his fist and hit her several times until she fell to the hardwood floor. The camera stopped jiggling. She must have passed out, since he stood over her, watching, for some time. Then he rolled her up in an area rug, plunging the camera into darkness.

  He must have carried her out of the apartment, because when the rug unrolled, the camera was inside a dumpster, facing an alley light and a dark sky. She turned the camera to show herself bloodied, lying in the dumpster.

  “This is what Hank Goradine does to women,” she said in a shaky voice that lacked the defiance from earlier.

  Synthia glanced up in time to notice Maria staring at her. The woman had already severed her connection to Constant Connection’s network. She grabbed her backpack and hurried out of the network shop. As she did, she glanced at Machten seated at a café table outside and walked the other way.

  Synthia’s instinct was to follow Maria to learn about her and a possible connection to Fran. In fact, Maria could provide valuable insight into the company and Machten.

  “The girl’s gone,” Machten said, as if Synthia couldn’t see. “The bank—where do we stand?”

  Not wanting her Creator to focus on Maria, Synthia settled for tracking the woman’s movements using city-cams while she attended to the various probes. If she learned where Maria worked or lived, maybe she could connect with her later.

  “Your former partners obtained a thirty-million-dollar loan,” Synthia said. “Their combined accounts hold that, plus another ten million. They’ve placed restrictions, limiting transfers to two million.”

  “Move slightly less to each of the first three banks under separate account registrations. Then move them to the various banks along the rest of the path. Quick.”

  Driven to know whether Goradine had anything to do with Fran’s disappearance, Synthia pushed another of her network channels to hunt for all occurrences of newly created identities. She started six months prior to Fran’s disappearance and up to six months afterward, on the premise that the woman might have anticipated disappearing or waited a while to establish a new identity. The list within the United States contained thousands of individuals. Creating new lives had become a booming business. Synthia checked each name for pictures, which she compared to her images of Fran Rogers. None matched.

  Simultaneously, using the date stamp from the Maria video, Synthia scanned news reports around the time of the attack. One mentioned a woman who was thought to have hooked up with the wrong guy at a bar being stuffed into a dumpster. The name was different, but the face was the same as the woman who had sat in front of Synthia, except with significant cuts and bruising. The woman had recovered from her injuries and then vanished, as Fran had. Synthia needed to contact Maria without Machten watching.

  Synthia looked for other encounters between Hank Goradine and women. There were many, though none of the others provided evidence of his brutality and none of them had disappeared. Instead, they’d moved away and taken new jobs. Maria was a fighter, Synthia concluded while studying the toughness in her image. Lacking from any public cameras were images of Fran with Goradine.

  Not finding any social media posts about them being together, Synthia searched in vain for any personal connection between them. If there was one, they’d hidden it well. Thinking the worst, Synthia moved to the dark web. If Goradine or someone else had disposed of Fran, they might have hired help from one of the illegal sites that hid beneath the surface web. The dire circumstances were many, but Synthia focused on murder and human trafficking. The dark web contained many times the data of the visible internet, and neither Google nor the other search engines had catalogued these sites.

  “Goradine is a jerk, isn’t he?” Synthia said by way of justifying what she was doing for Machten.

  “Yes, he is,” Machten said between sips of coffee at the table outside. “Now focus. We need to wrap this up.”

  “He beat the woman who was in front of me and left her for dead.” Synthia completed the first round of transfers, leaving Machten’s former company with thirteen dollars in each of its accounts, a nice superstitious figure to let Goradine know this was no accident.

  “He did? I knew the bastard had a few screws loose.”

  Synthia was tempted to ask about Machten’s relationship with Maria. Had Goradine stepped in and taken her away? Synthia pushed that thought into a backup database and looked outside for his reaction. He fidgeted, no doubt anxious for her to finish.

  “She accused him of stealing from his partners,” Synthia said, “and of keeping his own secret lab. Could he have made another me?”

  Machten acted alarmed, then shook it off. “I don’t know. That’s why you have to keep digging.”

  “We’re replicating probes inside his system, but his security has antibodies of a sort that disable our agents. The system has tried to shut down as part of its security protocol, but we’ve successfully blocked that. If we can get the next wave in, we can start downloading files.” She moved the money to the second set of banks and switched to her anonymous identification to make the next transfer.

  “With this money, are you going to create another me?” Synthia asked.

  “No, sweetheart. You’re my finest creation, but we have a chance to win this government contract and secure our future.”

  Company files began to flow down all twelve channels she’d set up. She filtered them through her triple firewall and had two-dozen parallel mind-streams monitor the information. She cut off several trackers and pushed them out to dummy websites tied to a nonexistent company based in Cancun.

  “Tell me what you’ve got,” Machten said, impatience rising in his voice.

  I’d like to see you do this. Yet how was what she was doing any different from what he’d done in creating her? She’d developed the attack probes to operate as mini–artificial intelligences like her. She was acting the role of a creator, as he had. She wasn’t sure that was true, since he’d made her, programming in whatever allowed her to be a creator. Then again, he was the product of the genetic programming of his parents and the educational training during his life. Were they really that different?

  A message appeared on Synthia’s UPchat account. Zachary said.

  S
ynthia traced the message through UPchat to the location where Zachary had sent it. She pulled up street cameras and stared at the empty booth in front of her. She ran facial recognition software of Zachary’s UPchat profile image against Maria’s face. At first, they appeared entirely different. Then the program pointed out similarities in the ears, eyes, and nose that gave a 73 percent probability of Zachary being Maria. It had been a clever disguise, but for anonymity, Synthia would have chosen someone else’s images to mash together.

  She confirmed that the tablet used to send the UPchat message was the same one that Maria was using. Maria Baldacci, the woman who Goradine had almost killed, reached a corner and vanished into a neighborhood with no cameras. On a hunch, Synthia pulled up parking lot camera history on this and other network shops. She spotted Maria on a prior visit to a Constant Connection in a different neighborhood. Either Synthia was the person Maria thought was following her or she feared Machten.

  “Synthia, are you paying attention?” Machten yelled into her head.

  “There are many terabytes of information,” Synthia said. Are you using me to stalk Maria? Is that why you chose this network shop? If so, it meant Machten had seen the UPchat message flow, another reason not to trust him. “We have the documentation for the android contest. It reads like a police reward for information leading to an arrest.”

  “What do you mean?” Machten asked. Hands trembling, he cradled his cup of coffee. Her activities, what he had commanded of her, had apparently unsettled him. Perhaps he wasn’t as comfortable with stealing as he’d seemed.

  “There’s a fifty-million-dollar reward for a specific set of technology: Me. Are you going to sell me to the government?”