Proxima Centauri - Hunt for the Lost AIs
Page 15
As he descended the West Bottoms’ steps, Prime flexed the hands of his frame, feeling the weight of the nano contained beneath its epidermis: the shackling nano embedded in his left palm and the carefully adapted biohazard nano he carried in his right.
He felt decidedly right-handed this evening.
* * * * *
John murmured brief apologies as he worked his way through the crowd to the far edge of the private room in the back of the bar. Ben Meyer had assigned the undercover SIS agent to infiltrate this particular cell of Humanity First months ago, and John had thought it a solid plan.
In his opinion, the SIS needed an asset in place to monitor the growing levels of unrest that cells like this one continued to stir up, and he was just the man for the job. He was exceedingly good at his craft. His cover was so believable his own mother had disowned him for his recent behavior. He grinned to himself; he had a lot of ‘splainin’ to do once this job was over.
He looked up as a new face entered the back of the room. Tall, with an austere look about him, the man radiated an anger that was almost palpable.
Great, John thought, another rabid zealot to add to the cause.
His Link dutifully recorded the ident that popped up as his optics scanned the man’s face, adding an icon to the recording to indicate a new member. As it did so, he ordered his NSAI to handshake with the nearest node and send an update back to HQ. He was startled when the newcomer shot him a sharp look, but was distracted when the ping he’d sent returned null.
The agent mentally shrugged.
The nodes in these rundown places are always flickering in and out of service.
John set his NSAI to automatically send the report once it reacquired a network signal, and returned his focus to his surroundings.
The newcomer was weaving a path through the crowd, slowly coming closer to his position.
Interesting, John thought. I wonder if he picked up EM from my transmission. I thought these types were allergic to tech beyond the most basic Link setup….
Minutes later, the agent felt a brush against his arm, and the newcomer murmured what might have been an apology but sounded more like a curse. The agent paid no attention, for he suddenly noticed his hand had gone numb.
With a thought, John triggered his military-grade mednano, but it was too late. Suddenly, his Link registered a local peer-to-peer connection and accepted without his authorization.
Frantically, John fought the paralysis that was sweeping through him, his mind desperate to find a network, signal strength, someone with a Link—any method he could think of to send the distress call of an agent in need of extraction.
The hand that had brushed against John’s arm now wrapped itself around his bicep with bruising force, and he realized it was no human who had attacked him.
This was an AI. And it was doing something inside his head.
* * * * *
As humans went, this man, John, was utterly unremarkable. He blended into his surroundings like a chameleon. Prime conceded that the human was good at what he did; he had perfected insignificance, anonymity. Prime doubted he would have given the man a second glance, if the NSAI embedded in John’s head had not tried to handshake with the node under Prime’s control. It had been a simple matter to backtrace its position and identify the signal’s origin.
That signal had spared John’s life. Although, he supposed, the agent might not agree with that assessment once Prime was done working on him.
Once the nano shackling dose was in place, its threads began to burrow deeply into the man’s neural pathways, speeding down the long, myelin-sheathed axons within John’s body and sinking hooks deep into his axons’ nodes. They took root in his prefrontal cortex, his anterior singular cortex—the seat of human willpower.
Prime pinged the nano shackles’ control interface and noted it was fully deployed. Then he glanced down at the agent standing frozen in his grasp.
The man grew rigid. After a beat, Prime allowed the agent’s involuntary nervous system to resume its work.
Prime glanced around at the crowd, enjoying the heady sensation of having a human life literally in his hands. He maneuvered his new puppet to the back of the room, leaning him gently against a wall.
Prime left the man slumped against the wall and wended his way through the crowd. One by one, each person present received a dose of nano-controlled neurotoxin. With each dose he delivered, Prime felt his anticipation rise.
And then he was at the front of the room, a handbreadth away from the filth he had tagged on the lawn earlier that day.
Prime nodded pleasantly as he extended his right hand. With his left, he reached into the pocket of his jacket and fingered the micro plasma torch he had found among the tools on Lilith’s cart.
“Excuse me,” he said to the man now, placing his palm on the exposed skin of the man’s wrist, just below the cuff of his shirt. “Do you mind?”
The man scowled at him, then shoved him roughly away. “Beat it, freak.”
With a thought, Prime triggered the neurotoxin.
As one, the women and men in the crowd began convulsing and retching. One by one, they fell to the floor. All except the man propped up against the back wall—and the piece of trash that faced him.
Prime had a special setting reserved for him.
He triggered it now. The nano inside the man brought excruciating pain, and then paralysis. Prime pushed gently on the man’s chest, and as the man folded, guided the body onto a nearby table.
Prime crouched next to the man and leaned in as if confiding a great secret.
“You really shouldn’t say the kind of things you said to that reporter today about another sentient, you know.”
He pulled the plasma torch from his pocket and fingered it in front of the man’s face. Recognition—and fear—lit the man’s eyes.
“I would have asked nicely, but I’m sure that wouldn’t have done much good now, would it.”
Prime flicked the torch on.
“So I suppose the only thing remaining is to ensure you’re unable to do it ever again.”
Prime brought the torch up close to the man’s left eye. He could see beads of sweat beginning to form, creating a sheen that reflected the torch’s glow along his brow.
“Allow me to demonstrate the control I have over you right now. Raise your hand.”
He reached for the man’s jaw, prying it open as the man’s hand began to tremble and then move in slow fits and starts.
“It’s no use fighting the compulsion, you know. That will only bring you pain—as it did to sentient AIs for hundreds of years. That’s it,” he crooned in an encouraging tone. “Now I want you to grasp your tongue in your hand and hold it nice and steady for me.”
He watched as the man’s hand moved jerkily up to his face and wrapped around the tip of his own tongue.
“That’s it. Pull it out for me. Very good. Now, open wide and say ‘ahhhh’
.”
Prime angled the torch toward the man’s mouth. “I’m afraid this might hurt a bit….”
The man pissed himself as Prime made his first cut.
* * * * *
John was no stranger to violence; he had been an undercover operative for more than a decade. He’d even infiltrated the cartel. Stars, he’d been the one to plant the bomb inside that warehouse buried under Muzhavi Ridge.
He knew crazy when he saw it, and this was one sick fuck.
He struggled to break free of the bonds that ensnared him, repeatedly triggering his NSAI’s emergency beacon. He’d tried turning his own nano-defenses against the infiltrators the AI had fed him, but they hadn’t stood a chance. The infiltrators had simply eradicated everything the SIS had given him, subsuming his defenses and using the inert material to replicate. And then the infiltrators continued to replicate, using his body’s own stores.
Helpless to do anything about the takeover occurring inside him, John had recorded everything the bastard had done, every last sick moment of mutilation as the AI had cut the cell leader’s tongue out, laughing as the blood splattered liberally over his face, his hands and his clothes.
He’d captured the moment when the deranged AI had taken a knife from the table upon which the man lay, and impaled the bloody tongue, pinning it to the plas surface. The knife glinted in the artificial light, embedded in the table next to the man’s head as he lay bleeding out from the wounds the AI had gone on to meticulously inflict after he had finished with the poor bastard’s tongue.
John held no love for these Humanity First thugs, but he didn’t wish that kind of a death on anyone.
I swear the fucker is getting off on it, too.
There was a sick look of pleasure on the AI’s face, and the guy was practically crooning to his victim, petting him one moment, and then snapping a limb the next.
What kind of depraved mind does something like this? And how the hell does he think he’s going to get away with it?
* * * * *
Prime knew his pleasure centers were firing at peak levels. He was euphoric, the feeling better than anything he had ever before experienced. It was heady, addictive. He craved more.
He turned to his pet agent, propped helplessly against the back wall like some sort of discarded stuffed toy slumped at an awkward angle against the basement wall. Sadly, logic dictated that he needed this one alive. But he could use John to deliver more refuse like the ones he now waded through, their bodies awash in viscous fluids and already beginning their slow, entropic journey of decomposition.
He smiled at the agent as he mentally reached for the shackles’ control and deactivated the nanoparalytic. The man gasped, then jerked upright and dashed for the door.
Prime had heard the term ‘cat and mouse’. He’d had no idea it was so much fun to be the cat.
With a thought, he ordered the shackles to inflict pain, and John dropped to his knees with a groan.
Oh, that won’t do, Prime thought, as he instructed the nano threaded deeply into the man’s axons to activate more of the man’s receptors. That’s not nearly as much fun as—
The man yelled, his voice hoarse, back arching, as his face twisted into a rictus of pain.
Ah, yes, that’s more like it.
Prime let that ride for a few moments, savoring the man’s pain. Reluctantly, he reduced the severity until he judged John was once more capable of coherent thought.
“You will return to your station and report this crime scene like the good little operative you are.” Prime’s voice was conversational as the man lay in a heap at his feet. “And you will gather every scrap of data you have on these Humanity First vermin and send it to the secured node I have designated. You will then provide me with daily reports on the Intelligence Service’s investigation of my cleansings. And you will tell no one of my existence.” Prime jacked up the pain for a moment in emphasis, smiling as the man’s body convulsed involuntarily.
“You cannot circumvent the compulsion. Not by behaving in ways that draw suspicion to your actions, and not by any other indirect means. To do so will bring agony such as you have never experienced. Am I clear?”
Abruptly, Prime released the man, who lay on the floor gasping for breath.
“Am I clear?”
The man shuddered and then nodded, once.
“Good. You have your orders. You will wait thirty minutes after I leave before calling this in. Don’t touch the bodies. Leave that for those who arrive. I’ve left a special gift behind, just for them.” Prime looked down at his humanoid frame, at the blood-spattered clothing it was clad in. He eyed the agent critically.
“Oh, and strip. I’m going to need your clothes.”
PROFILING A KILLER
STELLAR DATE: 05.20.3191 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: ESF Speedwell
REGION: El Dorado Ring, Alpha Centauri System
The spaceport’s recordings had been uploaded to the Speedwell’s databanks well before Jason, Tobias and Calista’s arrival.
For all the good it did, Jason thought in frustration as he paced the command deck of the Speedwell. “C’mon, Gladys. You’re the network wizard. There has to be a way to trace the person who did this. You have to have some idea how they managed to pull it off,” he said as he thrust his fingers through his hair, turned, and paced back the way he’d come.
Gladys’ voice was laced with frustration.
Jason had hung his hopes on the fact that Gladys would somehow find a common thread between the Enfield slaughter and the incident at the spaceport. Especially given the fact that Lysander had activated Phantom Blade the moment the person calling himself Prime had reached out to him.
Phantom Blade hadn’t officially been assigned to the Enfield attack, given that it was the province of El Dorado law enforcement. But the team’s ties to Enfield through Terrance and Daniel meant that Gladys had been poking around within Enfield’s records from the moment Daniel had given her access to them.
Like everyone else, Jason had assumed Gladys’s familiarity with the data would have given them the upper hand—but it hadn’t.
By the time they had arrived at the ship, Gladys had already integrated the data from the spaceport, as well as the packet from the crane’s NSAI, which Tobias had forwarded to her. She’d come up empty.
He watched as her search parameters pivoted and spun on the forward holo tank, data speeding by faster than even an L2’s eyes could process. Occasionally, a bit of information would hover, pinned for a moment and then discarded as Gladys tested and then rejected potential logic trees that might lead to the identification of the perpetrator.
Out of the corner of Jason’s eye, he saw Calista sitting at one of the stations, doing much the same thing. They all knew it was a long shot. The idea that she could stumble upon something that an AI would miss was a real stretch, but Jason appreciated the effort.
Calista’s face had the look of one in deep concentration as her eyes tracked back and forth, and he could practically see her mentally picking up an idea, analyzing and then discarding it as she grabbed another to try out.
All he could do was pace.
Well, he’d had enough of that. He stopped short, wheeled, and then strode toward the door just as it opened to admit Terrance.
“Whoa, hold up. Where are you headed?” The Enfield exec’s hands rose as he saw Jason marching toward him.
Jason jerked his head to one side, a nonverbal command for the other man to get the hell out of his way. “I’m going down there to help Landon guard Judith.”
Instead of moving clear, Terrance shifted subtly to bar the exit as Eric’s voice sounded over the group’s Link.
Jason. Lysander issued strict orders for you to stay up here, out of the way of the investigation.>
Jason scowled at Terrance, who held up his hands as if to say ‘not me’.
“I don’t play the part of victim very well, Eric.” Jason bit the words out, his voice sharp. “And I’m harder to kill than most.”
“Not necessarily.” Calista’s voice was hard as she rounded on him. “At least, not after our killer reviews what happened on that spacedock, you’re not.” Her eyes narrowed, and she stood from the station where she had been working to advance on him as she added, “Look flyboy, if this Prime person can manipulate a neural net without Gladys being able to backtrace him, he sure as hell has access to the same feeds we took from the spaceport. He’ll know your capabilities, and will adjust accordingly.”
“That brings up another issue,” Terrance interrupted, in an obvious attempt to redirect the conversation. “How are we going to profile this bastard, if Gladys can’t get a feel for how he’s doing whatever it is he does?”
Jason sighed. Eric was right. His brother-in-law was the analyst. “Okay then, so where’s Ben, and what’s his expert opinion on this sicko?”
Jason turned toward Terrance with a frown. “What do you mean, Eric?”
Everyone turned and looked at the taciturn AI, who was standing in a corner, manipulating one of the news net feeds. The AI regarded them with an impassive expression.
“I didn’t know you were a profiler, Logan.” Calista’s voice held surprise as she swiveled around to face the AI.
Terrance nodded slowly. “Yes, you are the quiet one in the group.” The businessman’s voice held a thread of amusement. “You’re trained to stand back and observe, aren’t you?”