The Robots of Gotham

by Todd McAulty

  I was a little startled. “Already? You think you know who built it?”

  “I didn’t say that. But I can tell you who didn’t build it.”

  “Please.”

  Rupert held the drone so we could both see inside the broken shell. The piece I’d salvaged was lacking power cells or the motor, either one of which could have been a big clue. But the cognitive core was intact, along with most of the control circuitry for the optics.

  “Look at this,” Rupert said, pointing with his little finger. “There’s a cluster of circuits here that control the rotors.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “These are typically off-the-shelf chips. Manufacturers buy them for pennies and slap them into a design. Can you tell me who made these?”

  I leaned a little closer, peering inside the drone. “No. They’re not stamped with the manufacturer ID. In fact . . . they don’t have any identifying markings.”

  “Exactly. They don’t have any markings because these chips weren’t made by a third party, then sold to whoever built your drone. Almost everything inside this chassis was custom made by the manufacturer, to exact specifications. To be completely honest, I’m not even sure what most of these chips do.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means your drone was not made by humans.”

  I was pretty sure that was the case, but hearing my suspicion confirmed still sent a chill down my spine. I had just gone head-to-head with an assault drone sent by a Sovereign Intelligence—perhaps by the Sentient Cathedral itself. I had crossed paths with an agent of one of the most powerful entities on Earth . . . and very likely had made an enemy in the process. Suddenly all my other problems—Mac, Leon, Hayduk, the pathogen, everything else—seemed small by comparison.

  “Damn,” was all I said.

  “My advice,” said Rupert as he pushed the drone fragment across the table at me, “is to get rid of this. As soon as you can.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  I thanked Rupert for his help, made my excuses for a hasty retreat, and left.

  My next stop was to visit Nguyen, in the basement.

  “You want me to do what?” said Nguyen.

  “This is an obsolete prototype,” I said, handing him the drone fragment. “I’m looking for a secure way to dispose of it. If it’s not too much trouble, I’d like you to throw this in a high-temperature furnace.”

  “All three hotel furnaces are gas,” he said. “They’re totally sealed.”

  “I’m open to suggestions.”

  Nguyen scratched his neck. “I could ask Cy to throw it in the boiler. We fire it up twice a day to provide steam for the laundry. It would incinerate it pretty good.”

  “Perfect.”

  “You need the destruction recorded, for audit purposes?”

  “No,” I said. “But thanks for asking.”

  I left the fragment in Nguyen’s capable hands. Destroying it would eliminate the damning physical evidence of my run-in with the drone, but I was under no illusions that the affair was over. Before I’d turned on the drone jammer, the Godkiller had almost certainly subjected me to a detailed biometric scan. Its machine master knew who I was—or it would soon.

  There was a lethal machine intelligence out there that knew my name. This wasn’t over.

  Not by a long shot.

  It was getting close to eleven—and my meeting with Sergei—so I headed upstairs to the lobby. I checked my messages at the front desk, and it was fortunate I did—I had an urgent message from Halifax. It had come in about forty minutes ago.

  The message was short and very cryptic, but it was clear I needed to contact the Ghost Impulse offices in Halifax as soon as possible.

  “I was told you have a working phone line,” I said to the desk clerk.

  “Yes, sir. It’s available for use by our guests for three hours every day.”

  “Can I make an international call?”

  “I imagine so. However, there is a line.”

  The clerk indicated a short line of people standing a discreet distance from a middle-aged woman. She was pacing in front of the desk and talking animatedly into the receiver of a phone. She clutched the base of the phone in her left hand; from it dangled about forty feet of thin cord, which snaked over the carpet and eventually back up over the counter. It was like a scene out of the 1960s.

  “Thank you,” I said. I joined the line.

  I spent well over half an hour in line. Eleven o’clock came and went, and there was no sign of Sergei. Eventually the elderly gentleman ahead of me gave up on his efforts to reach Salt Lake City and hung up in frustration. I approached the front desk.

  A clerk sauntered up to give me instructions on using the phone. There was a strict eight-minute time limit. International calls were placed through an operator. The charge was outrageous, but I gritted my teeth and had it added to my room. Satisfied, the clerk handed me the phone.

  It took nearly three minutes to patch a connection outside the occupied zone, then place an international call to Halifax. I doubted the clerk would cut me some slack in my eight-minute limit—which meant I had less than five minutes left.

  I eventually reached Leonard and told him we were under a time crunch. He quickly explained the cryptic message I’d received. “We got an order this morning,” he said. “A big order.”

  “That’s terrific,” I said. “University of Texas? If they’re the buyer, I should probably explain the hinky pricing I worked out with them.”

  “It’s international,” he said. “Zimbabwe.”

  “Zimbabwe. Huh.” That was strange. I wasn’t talking to any customers in Africa, and we weren’t set up to do business with any of the usual African resellers yet. “Who is it?”

  “That’s just it—I don’t know. Order came through a broker in Zurich. It’s weird. There’s no payment information or anything, just a directive number and instructions on how to package and deliver the source.”

  “The source code?” I said. “We’re not selling our source code to anyone.”

  “Well, I wasn’t sure what you had negotiated. Look, I checked on the broker in Zurich, and they’re legit—”

  That cold thrill was back, running down my spine. “Leonard, can you give me the directive number?”

  “Yeah, sure. YOW-dash-five-five—”

  I swore loudly. Heads turned in the lobby to stare at me, including the couple with three young children who were waiting patiently behind me for the phone.

  I picked up the telephone and stalked away from the front desk, pulling as much cord with me as I could. It slithered over the desk and dropped to the ground behind me in great ropey spirals as I walked over to a big leather chair.

  “I need you to confirm that directive begins with Y-O-W,” I told Leonard.

  He did, and I swore again. The young mother glared at me, and I dropped into a leather chair, facing away from the front desk.

  “What’s the problem?” asked Leonard.

  “The problem is that’s not a purchase order. A YOW directive can only be issued by one source. If your Zurich broker is legit, then we’re being told to hand over the keys to our business to a Sovereign Intelligence somewhere in Africa.”

  “A Sovereign Intelligence wants to buy our product?”

  “Not buy, Lenny. It’s instructing us to give it everything.”

  “Barry, with the source code to our product . . . They could copy everything. They could put us out of business.”

  “I know what it can do, Leonard.”

  There was a pause as he digested all of this. “Well,” he said at last, “there’s no law saying we have to obey this directive—”

  “Leonard, you don’t ignore a directive from a Sovereign Intelligence. This thing is an extragovernmental body. With a private drone army.”

  “How do you know? You don’t even know which Intelligence it is.”

  But I did know. It was almost certainly the same one that had sent the Godkiller into the tunnel
s under Chicago on behalf of the Sentient Cathedral. Our relationship had just entered a new phase. I wasn’t sure if this was the first step in its retaliation, part of an open campaign to destroy me, or merely the exploratory phase—the opening move of a master manipulator sniffing out his opponent.

  It didn’t really matter either way. “I don’t need to know which one. They all have private armies. Some are just a lot more dangerous than others.”

  “We could appeal to the Helsinki Trustees, through an agent in Ottawa. They could issue a public reprimand.”

  “That would take months, if we get an answer at all. We don’t have that long to respond.”

  “We can’t just give it our source code. Not without payment, or some kind of license agreement—”

  “Yes we can,” I said. “And we will. We don’t have a choice.”

  “What if we transfer all copies of the source to you,” Leonard said suddenly. “Inside the continental United States. This directive would have no legal status in the US, right?”

  “Lenny,” I said quietly, “we’ve gone beyond the definition of legal at this point. These things do whatever they want.”

  “Not in the US,” he said firmly. “Artificial intelligence is still illegal in the States, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. And there’s a reason this country is occupied by armies from four different nations. Now package up the code. And send it.”

  Across the lobby I saw Sergei get out of the elevator. He caught my eye and tried to signal me, but I ignored him, fixing my gaze on the rug five feet ahead.

  “I don’t like it any more than you do,” I said. “Just make it happen.”

  Leonard and I were sorting out the details when a polished pair of boots appeared in my field of vision. I looked up. Sergei.

  “Shut up your phone,” he said.

  “I’m busy, Sergei.”

  The Russian unrolled a vivid blue screen on the coffee table before me. “Now,” he said.

  I finished with Leonard and hung up. “You have terrible timing, my friend,” I said. A six-year-old girl appeared at my shoulder, staring at me disapprovingly. I handed her the phone without a word, and she marched back to where her family waited by the front desk.

  Sergei was glancing overhead suspiciously. I knew what he was looking for. “It’s okay,” I said. “We’re sitting in one of the few spots in the lobby where the cameras are blind. Zircon Border showed me the best places to have private conversations.”

  Sergei nodded. Then he tapped the screen in several places. Bright yellow text flowed in tight columns. He dexterously manipulated the text until he’d highlighted a block of words.

  My brain was still spinning with the ugly ramifications of what Leonard had just told me. I needed time to think this through, develop some kind of defensive strategy. Simultaneously, I was weighing the long-shot odds of a legal strategy and wondering how I might find an expert on global intellectual property law on very short notice.

  And despite all that, I still found myself distracted by the very cool gadget Sergei was playing with.

  “That’s a really sexy display,” I admitted. “How can I get one?”

  “Read,” said Sergei.

  “I’m really very tired, Sergei.”

  He thrust the screen across the table. “Read.”

  “What is it?”

  “It is confidential military directive. Issued this morning by Venezuelan high command.”

  “Confidential military—what? Should you be flashing this thing around?” I glanced around self-consciously, but we were alone. Or as alone as you could reasonably expect, in the lobby of a hotel at lunchtime.

  “No.”

  I tried to focus on the screen. “Will you get in trouble for sharing this?”

  “Da.”

  I sighed. “A lot of trouble?”

  “Da.”

  “Uh-huh. Will I get in trouble just for reading this?”

  “Da.”

  “How much trouble?”

  “Less than me. You will only be shot.”

  I nodded. “Figured.”

  “You want to read it,” Sergei said flatly.

  “You’re telling me I want to read this, even though reading it means I might get shot.”

  “Da.”

  Man, they never covered this in my bullshit MBA program. I gave up and read the highlighted text on Sergei’s screen.

  Sergei sat down in the chair next to me. He was full of nervous energy, and looked like he might bounce back to his feet at any moment.

  “I’m not sure I understand what I’m reading,” I said after a while. “This sounds like—what? A high-level alert? Some kind of redeployment?”

  “It is regimental-level mobilization,” he said. “Reoccupation orders for entire northern sector. New orders for reinforcements to Sector Eleven—three regiments, from Mexico.”

  “Three regiments,” I said, trying to remember how many soldiers that was. “That sounds like a lot.”

  “Over two thousand men and women.”

  That cold prickly sensation on my spine was back. “Why, Sergei?”

  Sergei had clearly been waiting for this question. This was, apparently, the question.

  “In response to rearmament of Union rebels and American forces in Missouri and southern Illinois. In response to growing support for closer military ties between America and Union Syndicate. In response to victorious reemergence of insurgency in previously pacified territories.”

  “Reemergence of insurgency in previously pacified . . . Do they mean us?”

  He leaned forward and tapped the screen twice. The text vanished and was replaced by a panorama of video feeds—maybe twenty or more. I saw logos for every major American news service and social media channel.

  All the feeds showed the same subject. Me, standing on the roof of the Sturgeon Building in downtown Chicago with an American flag. Me in the American combat suit, standing in front of an Orbit Pebble. Me, breaking into Columbia College.

  “No,” Sergei said calmly. “They mean you.”

  XXVIII

  Thursday, March 18th, 2083

  Posted 4:40 pm by Barry Simcoe

  CanadaNET1 Encrypted, Sponsored by Carlisle Security.

  Nothing protects your personal privacy like your own fleet of mini drones.

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  Comments are CLOSED

  Sergei and I spent the next half hour plotting and arguing. First, we got out of the hotel—no sense pushing our luck by holding that conversation in the middle of the lobby, blind spot or no blind spot.

  We walked around Lower Wacker, with reassuring concrete overhead, away from flying eyes and ears. Even there, we spoke in hushed whispers, heads down and shoulders hunched.

  “So this is what Perez’s briefing was about?” I said.

  “Da.”

  “What the hell happened?”

  “Colonel Perez shared image of unknown soldier in combat suit in basement of college with American media.”

  “That’s right . . . Van de Velde told me about it. He was hoping to get a lead, find somebody who might tip him off to my identity.”

  “This is not what happened. American media became very interested in mystery soldier who has repeatedly humiliated AGRT. They searched for additional images—and found them.”

  “Where?”

  “Venezuelan news services operating drones in Chicago. AGRT soldiers with body cameras. Independent agencies. A surprising number of sources were willing to sell footage.”

  I recalled the panorama of video feeds Sergei had brought up on screen just before we left the hotel. Images of me, usually in the combat suit. On the roof of the Sturgeon, taken from at least three different angles. Several on the street outside the Sturgeon Building as I faced off against Standing Mars. In the basement of Columbia College. And at least one in the tunnels under the city, of me standing in front of the Orbit Pebble—with my mask still on, thank God—that must have been shot by one
of Van de Velde’s men.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. “The jammer was active when virtually all of these images were taken. How did all the camera drones spot me?”

  “Bad luck,” Sergei said. “This is incidental footage. Drones were not pointing camera at you. Jammer prevents you from being identified by drones. It does not make you invisible to human observers.”

  I understood that from our search for Sergei using Black Winter’s drone footage yesterday. But I couldn’t help being annoyed that so many damn drones had managed to catch me on camera, however briefly, when they couldn’t even see me.

  “I’m not even wearing the combat suit in the footage on the roof of the Sturgeon Building,” I complained. “How does the American press connect all that activity back to one guy? Even the AGRT didn’t know I was responsible for all of it.”

  “They did not. That is part of issue. Both Union and American press have portrayed this as the work of a cell of brave resistance fighters in Chicago. A team that sabotaged nerve center of Venezuelan Military Intelligence, planted American flag on Sturgeon Building, and cleverly led AGRT soldiers into ambush by Orbit Pebble under the city.”

  “Jesus.” This was the first time the activities of the American terrorist at the Field Museum and the Sturgeon Building had been publicly connected to the man in the combat suit. I wasn’t looking forward to Van de Velde’s reaction when she saw the full scope of my criminal activities.

  “Yes. Very much Jesus.”

  I rubbed my chin. “This is going to blow over. There’s no story here, just a few videos and a whole lot of conjecture. That ‘brave cell of fighters’ nonsense won’t play for long—there’s nothing to support that theory.”

  “Nothing except American combat suit. It is legendary piece of hardware, given only to elite soldiers for very special missions.”

  I winced. “Of course.”

  “This mysterious group of fighters has totally captivated American public. According to Colonel Hayduk, it has become most popular topic of discussion in personal and private media channels in America.”