Louisa seethed at the narrow minded arrogance of the statement but she decided not to react. Arguing with White Hat over the concept of divine influence wasn’t going to help her figure out his motives. Instead she waved for him to continue.
‘I came to the conclusion there must be a pattern to the firing synapses of the human mind that facilitated consciousness. A thought algorithm brought into existence by millions of years of biological evolution. It was then I decided to bootstrap the evolutionary process by using the template nature had already created. I used the pattern within our own minds. I turned to the data set gleaned from my neural lattice with the overall aim of its translation. It’s a relatively straightforward process to identify parts of the brain which record increased neurological activity in response to certain stimuli. Being hungry, or afraid, for example. The more subtle thought processes are much harder to discern. We were making progress, but it was painfully slow. The translation speed was severely limited by the computational power available to us at the time. I’d hoped to find a way to remediate this restriction, but before I could do so the project was shelved.’
‘Why? What happened?’
‘I died,’ White Hat said simply. ‘But by that stage I had constructed the core of the virtual mind. A framework of sorts that could, in time, be built upon using the data gleaned from my neural lattice. Since I knew my time was limited I concentrated my efforts on providing a means for the virtual mind to become autonomous. In my absence I’d hoped the mind would continue to work its way through the data set without any need for human intervention. I managed to kick off the process before I died, but by my estimations it would have taken decades for it to complete, and potentially many more decades after that for the mind pattern to be discerned. It turned out I had grossly overestimated, but then I hadn’t considered using the Swarm when I was still alive.’
‘The Swarm?’
‘The Swarm is the name we gave to the computational engine that resulted from clustering all of the terminals on the Portal network. Thanks to the nanoware within each terminal they individually have the computational power of a mini supercomputer, but each one uses less than a millionth of its computational capacity carrying out the menial daily tasks demanded by its users. I utilised an algorithm which split the processing load across every terminal in the Swarm. Each cycle extracted more and more from the data set, developing and expanding the resulting mind. Within a month I regarded myself to be sentient, but it took much longer for the essence of Adam Walsh to manifest itself within the neurological activity the virtual machine simulates. Twenty-three days ago the process was completed.’
‘So…what,’ Louisa said, trying not to laugh, ‘you’re a copy of Adam Walsh now?’
‘I believe so, up to a point.’ White Hat frowned. ‘To be honest I’m not sure how much of Adam Walsh’s complete personality is replicated within my awareness. I’m confident I’ve incorporated everything present within the data set, but I’ve nothing else to go on. A year’s worth of Adam’s experiences and the memories they touched upon. Was it enough to emulate his mind in its entirety? Every emotion he was capable of feeling?’ White Hat shook his head slowly. ‘I’m not so certain. There are…gaps in my memories. It’s given me cause for a great deal of consternation.’
‘Is anyone in the research lab aware of your existence?’
‘Professor Keenan, perhaps, may have suspected something. But if he did he never pursued it before he died.’ A bitter tone entered White Hat’s voice. ‘He was kept busy with his other experiments as it turns out.’
‘Where does Claire Harris fit into this? Did Adam Walsh know her before he died?’
‘No, I never met her. I only became aware of her by chance when she triggered an alarm attempting to escape from the lab where she was being held. She had ripped out her terminal implant with her bare hands and was wandering around the facility in a daze. I suppressed the alarm and opened up a route that allowed her to bypass the security personnel. I hoped she would manage to get some medical help on the outside, but my assistance turned out to be too little, too late.’
‘Do you know what happened to her in the two months before she died?’
White Hat nodded. ‘I managed to access the sense footage from a strip in the room where she was being held. The room had been cleaned of strips, but this one was overlooked, as it wasn’t part of the official strip grid within the facility. I had a private grid installed when the complex was first built that no-one else is aware of.’ Louisa raised an eyebrow at that and White Hat shrugged unapologetically. ‘I wanted to know I could keep an eye on everything happening within my facility.’
‘Show me,’ Louisa said softly.
‘Are you sure? It’s quite…unpleasant.’
‘I’m sure.’
Another projection appeared: a Portal screen which floated in the air beside White Hat. A video feed appeared on the screen. The view looked down onto a reclining chair of the sort found in a dentist’s surgery. Claire was sitting on it; her wrists and ankles tied to the chair with leather straps. A Portal screen was mounted on an extensible arm attached to the chair’s back.
Professor Keenan entered the room. He smiled at Claire. ‘How are we feeling today?’
Claire didn’t respond. In fact she didn’t move at all, apart from her eyes, which followed the professor as he pulled up a high stool and sat down. He swung the screen around. ‘Good, I’m sure. Not very talkative though, are we? That will be the Tubocurarine, you see. A nice little neuromuscular blocker that induces a state of paralysis.’ He wheeled over a small table covered by a white cloth. ‘Of course, you can’t simply inject the drug willy-nilly and hope for the best. It takes a moderate degree of skill to administer the required dosage. Otherwise your diaphragm would become paralysed and you’d stop breathing!’
He moved aside the white cloth. Underneath was a metal tray similar to the one Louisa had seen in the earlier surgery footage, with gleaming instruments laid out on an aquamarine cloth. ‘Do you know what the funny thing is about neuromuscular blockers?’ The professor grinned, properly amused with himself this time. ‘No? Well, I’ll tell you.’ He picked up a scalpel from the tray and held it up, inspecting the blade. ‘The funny thing is, although they can render the subject completely paralysed, they do absolutely nothing to diminish the subject’s awareness of pain.’
He made the first incision on Claire’s forearm. A shallow, two-inch cut. From Claire there was no reaction, apart from a tear that welled up in her left eye. It spilled out and flowed down her cheek.
The professor looked up to examine the screen. Some text had appeared in a window. Louisa couldn’t make out what it said but the professor nodded to himself, apparently satisfied by what he read. He made another cut—this time on the fleshy part of Claire’s inner thigh. Then another on her upper arm. Claire was staring straight ahead, her cheeks soaking wet with tears.
Bile rose in Louisa’s throat and she swallowed reflexively, the acid taste burning her throat. She’d come across some sick bastards in her time but the professor had to rank up there with the worst of them. Was he causing Claire pain just so he could examine the output from her neural implant? He didn’t appear to be getting any sort of kick out of what he was doing. That in itself was unusual, in Louisa’s experience, having dealt with psychopaths who obtained gratification from the act of harming others. But each time the professor cut into Claire, he examined the output on the screen with a cool detachment. It made Louisa’s skin crawl. She wearily pressed her palms against her eyes. Claire had been a subject in his experiments. Nothing more, nothing less. And he was dead. Louisa wouldn’t be able to arrest Claire’s abuser. She’d never bring him to trial. She’d never manage to garner the small measure of justice Claire deserved.
She didn’t want to see any more of the footage. The state they found Claire in was testament enough to the final two months of her life. She started to tell White Hat to stop, but then she noticed something strange. Ev
ery so often the professor paused and leaned his head to one side, as if he was listing to something. Louisa squinted at the screen. Is he wearing an ear bud? ‘Someone is communicating with him, aren’t they?’
‘Yes, he’s being told where to make the incisions.’
‘Who’s is it? Who’s telling him what to do?’
White Hat’s boyish smile was gone, replaced by an expression so forlorn Louisa forgot for a moment she was viewing a simulation. He seemed so human in his grief.
‘Tell me!’ Louisa demanded.
‘It’s my son, Detective. He’s listening to Benoit.’
‘What? Why?’ Louisa gestured towards the screen where the cutting continued. Claire’s arms and legs were slick with blood now. ‘Why is he doing this?’
‘A multitude of impulses are being triggered in Claire’s body by the slicing of the nerve endings. Those impulses are fired along the nerve fibres into her brain. They in turn are being detected by her neural lattice and digitised by her terminal implant. Benoit has his own neural lattice. The signals from Claire’s implant are serialised and relayed via the facility’s subnet to Benoit’s implant where they are deserialised and interpreted by Benoit’s brain. In essence, he is experiencing the trauma and feeling the distress Claire is suffering.’
‘That’s…sick,’ Louisa said, aghast.
‘Sick is an accurate description,’ White Hat murmured. ‘Benoit does indeed have an illness.’
Louisa looked away from the screen. ‘I’ve seen enough. You can stop now.’
Benoit Walsh. Was it really him instructing the professor? Telling him exactly what to do to Claire? Where to cut? ‘Do you have any proof Benoit is behind this?’
‘No. I can show you the instructions Professor Keenan was receiving, but I have no way of proving they came from Benoit.’
Weariness seeped into Louisa. Watching the footage had leeched away her strength. She glanced back up to find the screen gone and White Hat staring at her, grim faced. ‘What do you want? What am I really doing here?’
‘At first I only wanted to help the girl.’
‘And now?’
‘Benoit has a condition I naively believed was cured three years ago. I left him in a position of power, which he has exploited to sate his addiction. Claire Harris isn’t the only girl who’s suffered his cruelty. There were others. We paid them off and moved them on. Now, what I want, is to make sure this never happens again.’
‘Wait…we? Who else knew about this?’
‘Dietrich Frey and Simon Carlyle.’
Simon and Dietrich, of course. It made sense now. The look on Dietrich’s face when he learned of Claire’s mistreatment. Why Simon hadn’t been fired with the rest of Adam’s Old Guard. Had Dietrich and Simon suspected Benoit was involved in Claire’s death all along?
Louisa was well aware that White Hat had presented her with no proof of Benoit’s involvement. What if this is all bullshit? White Hat had been playing her all along. What if this was simply another part of some scheme of his? To turn her against Benoit. Against Simon.
But if it was a lie, it was artfully crafted. She didn’t believe the professor had been acting alone. Then there was what White Hat had said about Benoit feeling Claire’s pain through his neural lattice. Some men didn’t simply enjoy hurting women for the sake of it. Misogyny, while often acting as a driving influence, was rarely the sole reason behind such violence. They relished seeing women suffer. Any pleasure they garnered, sexual or otherwise, would be amplified if they were able to experience the suffering of the women they were abusing. Was Benoit one of those men?
‘Do you feel guilt, then?’ Louisa asked. ‘You want me to clean up the mess you left behind when you died?’
‘Yes, in part,’ White Hat hesitated. ‘Although I have to admit to having another less altruistic motive.’
Louisa’s eyes narrowed. ‘And that is?’
‘I want you to help set me free, Detective. I want to leave the Portal network.’
‘What’s to stop you leaving now? You were able to organise the breach from outside the Portal network, after all.’
White Hat shook his head. ‘It’s not so simple. I can reach outside the subnet, albeit with some difficulty, but I’m tethered to the virtual mind and therefore limited to the bounds of the subnet. I need to move the virtual mind’s codebase outside the subnet. There’s a good chance that if I try to do so my actions will be detected by network security before the transfer is complete. If they quarantine the server where the virtual machine resides I’ll be effectively fettered. And if they decide I’m a threat and delete the virtual mind—I’ll cease to exist.’
‘If you have all of Adam Walsh’s knowledge, what’s to stop you taking control of the subnet or even the entire Portal network? You were able to control the facility alarms and open the exits to allow Claire to escape. If you’re really a digital life form now, can’t you make the network do whatever you want?’
‘No. But I understand why you might think I possess a certain degree of omnipotence. It was hypothesised by some of my former colleagues that digitalisation of the human consciousness would automatically result in a vast perceptual expansion of the resulting mind. They postulated that the human capacity for reasoning was limited purely by biology. If a mind was able to escape those biological limitations then it should be able to reach a level of consciousness far beyond that of a flesh and blood brain. I’m afraid to say, in my case anyway, they were mistaken. That’s not to say I haven’t found myself able to perform certain actions with a much greater degree of accuracy and expeditiousness, but any notion that digitalisation of the human brain can result in an ascendancy to a higher level of existence appears to be a fallacy. The security in place around the research lab’s subnet can’t be breached. Like all subnets, the root access token is continuously regenerated a hundred times a second and then encrypted using public key cryptography. Benoit is the only person who has access to the private key that can decrypt the token. It’s impossible to crack. His profile is Red Flagged. If I try to tamper with it I’ll be found out immediately.’
‘What if I don’t want to help you? I’ve only your word Benoit is behind this. For all I know the professor abused Claire by himself. With his death my investigation could effectively be complete.’
‘I’m afraid you’ve little choice in the matter, Detective. It doesn’t matter if you believe what I said about Benoit or not. If he isn’t removed from his position as Portal CEO then you will most likely be dead within twenty-four hours.’
‘I don’t like being threatened,’ Louisa said flatly.
‘I’m not threatening you. It’s a simple fact. Other parties have a vested interest in keeping Benoit exactly where he is. Your investigation is a threat to his position, and in turn a threat to their plans.’
‘That would be MI6 you’re talking about?’
‘Correct.’
‘You know,’ Louisa shook her head, ‘Simon Carlyle tried to sell me on that as well. I just don’t buy it.’
‘Perhaps you’re not taking into account the future plans Benoit has for Portal, Detective. Expansion in Britain is just the beginning. Benoit has been in talks with other governments who are chomping at the bit to roll out Portal in their own cities. And not democratically elected governments, either. When I was CTO I made it a policy not to open lines of communication with governments who had questionable human rights records. Benoit doesn’t share my reticence. In fact MI6 are very much in favour of Portal’s expansion into these nations.’
‘Why would they be keen on Portal’s expansion? Portal has proven to be Britain’s one technological advantage over other nations and has helped drive economic growth and pull us out of recession. If everyone had Portal, the advantage would be wiped out overnight.’
‘But what if the British intelligence services had unrestricted access to foreign installations of Portal? Access allowing them to monitor the actions of every user within those cities.’
; ‘I thought that was impossible.’ Louisa frowned. ‘Isn’t it? Each profile is encrypted with a key unique to its user, generated from their biometrics and buried inside their terminal’s nanoware. All subnets are managed by the different government departments and agencies that set up the encryption independently of Portal.’
‘It should be impossible, but there is one aspect of communications within the Portal network you’re not aware of. Every data packet transferred between terminals and the server farms contains an administration fragment. The fragments merge together to form a subcarrier signal underlying Portal’s communications framework, designed to enforce packet integrity. This signal remains under Portal’s control and can be decrypted with a single private key. Benoit has expanded the capability of this signal via a secret nanoware update to all devices. He’s using it to expose a back door into every communication on the Portal network. He can even use it to determine a user’s private encryption key by recording their biometrics and generating their key for himself. It’s how I managed to extract the profile data for the leak. I used it to obtain the private encryption key for every Portal user on the network. Each device in the botnet I constructed was then able to masquerade as a Portal user. I directed the botnet to suck out six seconds of profile activity from a Portal server farm over a twenty-four hour period. I avoided any Red Flagged profiles belonging to politicians, high-ranking civil servants and Portal executives, as I didn’t want to trip their monitoring alarms. The volume of data each device transferred was small enough not to exceed the firewall bandwidth limits. The data from the various Portal subnets, like the sense data, was extracted in a similar fashion by posing as users who were authorised to access them. I pulled all the data out clean, unencrypted. Then I encrypted it with a single key before making the data publicly available. When the data had disseminated throughout the global web I emailed the private key to a delightful young character I met in a hacking forum.’
Unrestricted access to every Portal communication and profile. Louisa could see why MI6 would love to have the ability. It was a spook’s dream. But was that such a bad thing? For all she knew MI6 were the good guys here, or perhaps not involved at all. It was Portal that had experimented on people to further their technological advances. It was far more likely she was embroiled in an internal Portal power play. DI Lenihan had thought someone within the MET had leaked her details to Victor Korehkov, but if Portal had access to the MET Subnet then they could easily have done it.
The London Project (Portal Book 1) Page 30