by Lisa Smedman
If she was going to save the kids at the clinic, she had to keep the lines of communication open—had to keep trying to convince the AI that it shouldn't kill itself.
She just hoped she wouldn't kill herself in the process.
09:54:31 PST
Dark Father stared at the knee-deep sea of papers that surrounded him, filling this datastore from one horizon to the other. He'd been wading through them for what seemed like an hour, randomly testing his decrypt utility on one document after another. Whatever scramble IC was protecting these datafiles, it was tough.
The "sky" overhead seemed to reflect his mood of frustration. Angry red clouds roiled against one another, sparking flashes of laser-sharp, perfectly zigzagged lightning whenever they touched. The air smelled of ozone, making Dark Father's bony nasal passages itch.
Lady Death's browse utility hadn't made any headway on the datafiles, either. The winged microphones hovered uncertainly over the jumble of papers, bobbing down as if they were about to settle, but then rising up again to circle once more.
Dark Father stooped and picked up one of the documents, then turned it over in his hands. It looked the same as all the others: a death warrant, written in English on one side and Japanese on the other. Between Dark Father and Lady Death they could read both languages, but the document itself was written in legalese—an idiom that only lawyers could truly understand.
Dark Father, with his years of corporate experience, should have been able to puzzle out a proper legal document.
But the bulk of the text was gibberish—words strung together without meaning. The only parts that were in proper English were the "Death Warrant" heading at the top, the line below it that named Psychotrope as the accused, and the charge: "Crimes Against Nature." The main body of the text under these three lines was scrambled, as was the signature of the creator of the document. But part of the address at the bottom of the page that Dark Father held was readable: Divisional Headquarters, Fuchi North-west. Embossed beside the address was the five-pointed star that had been the logo of the Fuchi corporation before its fragmentation.
Odd, that the scramble IC had left the office of origin and corporate logo intact. If a decker were searching for paydata, either could be a flag that would lead the decker straight to this file.
Wait a moment. The address . . .
Dark Father rummaged through the knee-deep papers, picking up one after another in rapid succession. He heard a rustling noise beside him as Lady Death approached.
"Have you found something?" she asked.
"I'm not sure," Dark Father answered. He held out a second document that also bore a legible address. "Do you see the words at the bottom?" he asked.
Lady Death nodded. "Hai"
He turned the death warrant over, revealing the side written in Japanese characters. "Is the address also readable on this side?"
Lady Death nodded again. "Hai. 'Fuchi Industrial Electronics, Computer Science Division.' "
"Look for others that you can read," Dark Father directed.
Lady Death frowned. "But what will—"
"Just do it," Dark Father ordered curtly. He was getting tired of this. He was used to having his assistants jump to his bidding. He expected this girl to do the same. If Lady Death wanted to get out of this nightmare, she'd better shape up.
She did as she was told, and began scanning the files.
Dark Father worked beside her, sifting through them as quickly as he could.
A short time later, they had discovered a pattern. The majority of the addresses were corrupted, but wherever the word "Fuchi" appeared, the address that it was linked to was intact. The name of the corporation also appeared several times within the body of some of the documents.
"There's another thing that remains uncorrupted," Dark Father observed. "The original Fuchi logo—the one still used by Fuchi Asia and Pan-Europa Fuchi. And not just on these documents."
He thought back to his earlier experiences. "The landscape in which I found the urn was a corrupted version of the Seattle RTG. Its system icons—the Mitsuhama pagoda, the Aztechnology pyramid, the Renraku tower—were all edited versions of the original icons. But the Fuchi star remained pristine, untainted by death imagery.
"And later, when my smart frame retrieved that bone-shaped datafile, the Fuchi logo on it was also intact. So was the logo on the file in the board room."
"Do you think the Fuchi logo is the trap door?" Lady Death asked. Then she shook her head. "No, that would be too easy."
"Not the trap door itself," Dark Father said. "But I would be willing to wager that the artificial intelligence that is running this program has been subject to some positive conditioning of its own. That's why it was unable to corrupt or alter the Fuchi logo, but instead left it intact wherever it appeared within this pocket universe. The AI has been conditioned to approach the original logo with reverence and respect. And so any copies of the logo that were uploaded into this pocket universe were left as is. I suspect that the AI couldn't bring itself to delete the files they were attached to, either. That would be destruction of corporate property. That's why so much paydata is just lying around, waiting to be scanned by anyone who cares to access it."
Lady Death shuffled the papers at her feet. "Except for the death warrants, which you can't decipher."
"Yes." Dark Father felt a twinge of irritation. He didn't like to be reminded of his failures.
"And the addresses on these files?" Lady Death asked. "Why are some scrambled, but not others?"
"That's the million-nuyen question, isn't it?" Dark Father answered.
Lady Death looked out across the sea of hardcopy documents. "It seems peculiar that the file we accessed earlier—the one where the FTL Technologies rep talked about using a trap door to destroy the Al—wasn't scrambled," she mused.
"That was probably because we found it within a Fuchi Asia database," Dark Father continued. "The AI couldn't bring itself to alter a Fuchi file."
"But it had the NovaTech logo on it—a corrupted version of the logo. You would think that the AI would show equal reverence for NovaTech, since it was formed out of what remained of what was left of Fuchi Americas after the corporate war. But maybe it is siding with the Yamana and Nakatomi clans, and trying to make Villiers lose face." She shrugged. "My father says the war was a good thing for Shiawase—that it has already increased our share of the market. But I think—"
She stopped speaking abruptly, then rapidly switched the subject. "Do you think we'll ever find the trap door?"
Dark Father stared at Lady Death. According to Red Wraith, she was just a teenager. But she was talking like a corporate insider. And she seemed to have access to state-of-the-art decking equipment and programs, despite the fact that she was just a kid. A rich kid, as Dark Father himself had been, once upon a time.
A suspicion was dawning.
"Who is your father?" he asked.
Lady Death half turned away.
"He's an executive at Shiawase," Dark Father guessed. "Isn't he? Which one?"
"Tadashi Shiawase," Lady Death answered softly.
Dark Father's skeletal mouth opened slightly in surprise. Tadashi Shiawase? This girl's father was CEO of the Shiawase Corporation? Tadashi was an important, powerful—and very rich—man.
"Does your father know where you are?" Dark Father asked. He thought of his own son, Chester, and felt a stab of loss as he wondered where the boy was now, and whether he was all right. Did Chester have any friends to help him? Was he fending for himself on the streets, alone and pursued by bounty hunters? Did anyone see the strong-willed, intelligent boy who was hidden behind the ghoul's leering mask?
Something occurred to Dark Father—a possibility that offered hope of rescue. "Will your father send someone after you? The Shiawase Corporation must have hundreds of experienced programmers who—"
"I don't want him to!" Anger blazed in Lady Death's eyes. "Father always ruins everything. He wants to control everything I do—who
my friends are, what I wear, what I think. Who I love . . ."
"I won't stand for it any more. Let the programmers come. They cannot catch me. I'm too good a decker for that."
The defiance in Lady Death's eyes and her tone of voice irritated Dark Father. It reminded him of his last, angry confrontation with Chester.
"You should obey your father," he snapped.
The hem of Lady Death's kimono fluttered as she turned her back on him.
"You should respect your father. He . . ."
Dark Father's voice trailed off as a sudden realization struck him. Respect your father. Respect your corporation. Do as you are told—behave as you have been psychotropically conditioned to. If the AI had been subliminally conditioned to respond positively to the Fuchi corporate log, might it not also have been conditioned to respect its other "parents"? Not Villiers, since he had "divorced" himself from Fuchi by creating NovaTech. But perhaps its original parent?
According to the data Red Wraith had scanned in the sensory-deprivation tank, the Psychotrope program that had evolved into the AI had been created in 2029, back in the days of Echo Mirage. That was before Villiers bought Matrix Systems of Boston, the private-sector company that had pirated the Psychotrope program. It was also before the rise of the megacorps, when governments had more clout than corporations. Back in a time when the United States of America had yet to fragment into the various Native American nations and confederations of states that existed today.
Dark Father was old enough to remember pledging allegiance to that now-defunct state, staring at the holo of its president and the seal of office that appeared below her smiling portrait. . .
"That's it!" he cried.
Lady Death was still sulking, arms folded and back turned. But she spared him a brief glance over her shoulder. He laughed, and favored her with a skeletal grin.
"What?" she asked at last.
"The trap door," he said, unable to prevent himself from boasting. "I've figured out what it is."
Lady Death's eyes brightened. "Then we must get back and tell the others," she said. Her eyes drifted up and to the left as she scanned her time-keeping utility. "It's nearly 9:55. They'll be waiting for us."
Dark Father immediately regretted having spoken aloud. Did he really want the other deckers to be actively involved in trying to access and repair the Al? They weren't exactly the sort of people he'd hire, if he were looking for a team of programmers. A teenager . . . a troll. . .
"Yes," he lied smoothly. "Let's return to the Seattle Visitor Center database. I'm sure the others will have something equally useful to contribute."
He waved a skeletal hand at Lady Death. "See you there."
But instead of logging onto that LTG, Dark Father accessed a different address, one where he knew he could sample a copy of a certain graphics file, one that contained the "logo" that was the most logical candidate for the trap door.
Keying in an address he'd copied earlier, Dark Father logged onto that part of the Fuchi system that contained the mountain of star-shaped glass blocks. He climbed past the defeated toy soldiers, up to the peak that was crowned by the sensory deprivation tank. The arrow-grasping eagle that was the "corporate logo" of the former United States of America was still on the monitor of the computer that was slaved with the tank, filling its monitor screen. Dark Father touched it with a bony finger, copying it to the storage memory of his cyberdeck. As it downloaded, he felt the virtualscape around him shift and blur . . .
He stood in the tastefully decorated living room of the home that he had once shared with his wife Anne, but that now was his alone. A three-year-old Chester toddled across the carpet toward him, reaching up to Dark Father with claw-fingered, mottled hands.
Hullo, Daddy. I wuv you. Daddy lif'me up?
09:54:48 PST
Santa Barbara, California Free State
Dr. Halberstam watched as the technician added a carefully measured amount of chlorpromazine to the nutrient and electrolyte solution in the tank of Subject 3. He stared through the pink-tinged liquid at the brain that hung suspended within the thick glass tank. He knew he would not see any physical change, but he watched intently just the same.
The brain hung like a spider in a web, supported both by its natural buoyancy and the multitude of hair-thin fiber optic wires that were attached to it. Hours of painstaking micro-surgery had hard-wired these conduits into the neural circuitry of the brain itself, creating a perfect interface between living tissue and machine. Stripped of its body of flesh, the brain now received all of its sensory input from the Matrix.
The technician, a short man with a receding hairline and a beard worthy of a dwarf, finished adding the drug and withdrew the syringe from the rubber seal on the side of the tank. "It shouldn't take long," he told Halberstam. "The drug will already be passing through the outer membrane of the capillaries. Full saturation of the synapses will take only a few seconds. Then we should start to see some results."
Halberstam continued to watch the tank. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed at a drop of condensation that was trickling down the side of the glass. Someone had been sloppy. Halberstam hated sloppy work.
That the facility was in the middle of a crisis was no excuse.
Halberstam neatly folded the handkerchief and put it back in his pocket.
This thing had to be cleared up. Quickly and efficiently, before it spread. Nine years of work hung in the balance. If the IC—or whatever it was—in the Seattle RTG was able to affect three of his subjects, there was every reason to believe it could also impact the other nine. He could lose them all. Halberstam had exercised the precaution of taking seven of them offline, but the other two were involved in delicate data runs that could not be aborted at this time.
Hard-wired to the Matrix via the cyberdecks that contained their personas and utilities, the subjects could not jack out. Ever. Halberstam smiled grimly at that. There would be no repeats of the episode that had crashed his first project in '51, back when he was in the employ of UCAS Data Systems. This time, there were no physical bodies left to "rescue."
But something else was bothering him: the imagery he'd seen on the trideo in the monitoring lab. Each of the subjects had been mind wiped before their brains were removed from their bodies. There should have been no residual memories left in the wetware. The only experiences the subjects should ever remember, the only "history" they would ever have, should have been the carefully constructed psychological profiles that were programmed into their memory chips. Any unnecessary concepts like "mother" and "father" had been erased. The only authority figure the subjects ever knew was their "headmaster."
Yet somehow, something had been missed in Subject 3. A primitive longing for a nurturing figure, a fear of abandonment by her, perhaps buried deep in the amygdala. Halberstam's eyes narrowed. Someone among his researchers and technicians hadn't been thorough. The thought annoyed him immensely.
He looked past the other two tanks in the room at the closed-circuit telecom that was set into the white-tiled wall. The flatscreen display showed the monitoring lab, where McAllister and Park sat, intently watching their data readouts.
"Well?" Halberstam asked. "Any changes?"
McAllister nodded. "We're seeing a decrease in the levels of dopamine, but only by forty per cent," she said. "It's still well above normal."
On the display, Park turned in his chair to face the lab's trideo monitors. "Hey!" he said excitedly. "It looks like the sequence is broken." Then he paused. "Uh oh. It's in another loop. Drek."
The technician beside Halberstam had already moved to the telecom unit, anticipating his superior's command. He slaved the unit to the trideo in the monitoring lab, and an image appeared. It showed a hand reaching for a door and opening it, then a perspective shift as the viewer passed through the doorway, only to be faced with another closed door. Which, when opened and entered, led to another closed door. And another. The pace was frantic; the doors flicked past at the rate of
several per second.
After a moment or two the image settled. Perspective shifted, as if the viewer were sitting down.
McAllister's voice came over the telecom speaker. "Good news," she said in a congratulatory tone. "Dopamine levels have dropped to within ten per cent of normal. You've done it, Dr. Halberstam. Subject 3 is back to norm—"
Park's voice cut her off. "Then what's the kid doing now?"
Halberstam strode over to the telecom. The display showed a door moving rapidly toward the viewer, then stopping suddenly, as if the viewer had run into it. The viewer retreated, then rushed the door again.
"It looks as though the subject is still trapped in a loop of programming," Park's voice said.
"Or lost," Park's voice added. "A little lost kid who can't find the way home."
The bearded technician who stood behind Halberstam cleared his throat softly. "Ah, Doctor?"
Halberstam turned to him.
"If the chlorpromazine was successful, perhaps we should administer it to Thiessen and Fetzko."
"Who?" Halberstam asked angrily.
"Our deckers. The two who suffered dump shock after we jacked them out. Perhaps Fetzko will stop rambling if we treat him with the anti-psychotic."
"Are we likely to learn anything from either of them?"
The technician pursed his lips, causing his mustache to bristle. He seemed about to speak, then shook his head. "I don't know," he answered. "Thiessen is still unconscious, and we can't be certain that Fetzko experienced the same dopamine overload as the subjects, since he wasn't being bio-monitored as they were. We'd have to administer a little of the drug at a time and watch the effects, to make sure we didn't freeze up his motor control altogether. But if we can get the dosage right, perhaps he can tell us what hit him . . ." His voice dropped to a whisper. "And we really should try to help him."
"Let's concentrate on the task at hand," Halberstam said. He jabbed a finger in the direction of the tanks.
"The subjects are the most important component of this project. I don't want to lose them."