by Todd McAulty
“The GPU card?” I said.
“Da. And suit. You must have powered the suit, to defeat Perfect Circle.”
“Yeah.”
He shook his head in amazement. “I do not know how you powered suit.”
“I must admit, I’m mystified as well,” Black Winter said. “I’ve reviewed the video logs Zircon Border shared—from one hundred and thirty cameras spread across eleven floors. I can’t figure out how you did those things, either.”
“Believe me, knowing exactly where all the cameras were made the trick a lot easier,” I said.
“Obviously,” said Black Winter. “You vanished from the video record when you stepped into the elevator on the second floor and reappeared on the fourth-floor laundry sixteen minutes later.”
“All part of the same mystery,” I said. Sergei and Black Winter waited impatiently while I took a long drink. I savored the pleasure of a captive audience.
“I lifted Hayduk’s GPU card during the brawl in the ballroom, when I fell on top of him,” I said at last. “I used it to get into his office. He had both power cells right there on the floor. They weren’t even locked up.”
“Fabulous!” Black Winter said.
Sergei chuckled. “Brave, and smart.” He took another drink. “And very lucky.”
“Jacaranda was in Hayduk’s office, too,” I said.
I was getting used to being unable to surprise Sergei. But I was expecting a response to that, and I wasn’t disappointed. “How did she get there?” he said.
“I don’t know. Nothing that crazy machine does surprises me. But I remembered that you wanted to meet with her, Black Winter, and I asked how to contact her. She said she would arrange communication when it’s safe.”
“Thank you,” said Black Winter. “I very much appreciate that.”
“Also, she gave me something.”
Sergei had pointedly returned to his drink.
“Don’t you want to know what it is?” I asked him.
“Nyet.”
“I certainly do,” said Black Winter.
“Glad to have someone with a little curiosity at this table,” I said. I took the data drive out of my pocket and dropped it in front of them.
“What is it?” Black Winter asked.
“It’s Hayduk’s decryption keys. They’ll allow us to access the rest of the data we stole from him.”
“Why would we want to do this?” Sergei asked.
“Well, that’s the question. According to Jacaranda, Hayduk wasn’t chasing us because we stole the recipe for the antivirus. He didn’t even care about the suit. He was determined to find us because we stole a much greater secret. And the key to unlocking it is on this drive.”
“This is great news,” said Black Winter. “Now that Armitage is vulnerable, this is the perfect time to expose any other secrets he may have locked away. Did she say what this secret might be?”
“No . . . but she gave me some fascinating clues.”
“We should not talk about this,” said Sergei stubbornly.
Black Winter ignored him. “What kind of clues?”
“The first thing she said was that it wasn’t just Hayduk and Armitage trying to keep this secret safe. She said the Sentient Cathedral was desperate to conceal it as well.”
“Hmm . . . that complicates things,” said Black Winter. “That kind of secret is the dangerous kind.”
“Yes, my thoughts exactly. My guess is it has to do with the Bodner-Levitt extermination.”
“I suspect you’re right,” said Black Winter. “But perhaps not the way you think.”
“You’ll have to explain that.”
“I’d be glad to . . . but you’ll need to indulge me in some speculation. This will require putting some pieces together.”
I looked over at Sergei. He shrugged. I sat back in my chair. “The floor is yours, Black Winter.”
“Thank you. The first thing I’d like to point out is that the Bodner-Levitt extermination is a convenient theory for Armitage’s motives. Perhaps too convenient.”
“What the heck does that mean?” I said.
“One of the most damaging revelations made about Armitage in the last few hours was that he was foremost among a small circle of machines who have been privately advocating the BLE to select members of the Sentient Cathedral for some time—with very little support, I hasten to add.”
“Well, damn,” I said. Even Sergei raised an eyebrow at that one.
Black Winter continued. “That supports the theory we discussed last week: that Armitage and his allies were just crazy enough to take matters into their own hands with F5-117 and unilaterally attempt the extermination here in Sector Eleven. This, in fact, is one of the reasons he is being investigated. However, I’ve spent the last few days examining this theory more closely, and it doesn’t perfectly fit the facts.”
“Why not?” I said.
“Sector Eleven is a viable place to attempt to launch the Bodner-Levitt extermination. But there are other sites where it might be easier. Sector Three was more heavily devastated by the war, for example, and Sector Five is under more rigid machine dominance. If Armitage were to engineer national infrastructure changes, Venezuela—or indeed Argentina, or Panama—would be even better sites to seed the infection. Armitage and his allies would have tighter control over those environments. It seems to me that launching the program in Sector Eleven introduced too many unnecessary risks.”
“Perhaps they didn’t begin here,” I said. “Perhaps it’s also under way in the backwoods of Maine. Or in the slums of Caracas.”
“It is not,” said Black Winter.
“You’re sure?”
“As sure as we can be. The Kingdom of Manhattan has access to uncensored World Health data. There are no unexplained outbreaks that fit the profile of F5-117 anywhere else in the country, or in the world.”
“What are you saying?” I asked. “Exactly.”
“I’m saying that the Bodner-Levitt extermination may not have been Armitage’s only objective.”
“Then why do it here?” I asked. “If the extermination of mankind wasn’t Armitage’s ultimate goal, then why go through all that trouble and expense? Why engineer a war with the United States and bear the terrific expense of Project Tinker and unleash F5-117 on his own soldiers? What was the point?”
“It’s possible that his objective was not the total extermination of humankind. But rather to remove all traces of humans—including his own soldiers—from a specific geographical area. To remove human witnesses to his activities here.”
“Here? In the Midwest? In Chicago?”
“Yes.”
“Why here?”
“I believe,” said Black Winter, “that is the most important remaining question. I think there may have been a deeper purpose to Armitage’s machinations.”
“Like what? What could he possibly be after?”
“We don’t know. But there are clues. Three times during the SCC-America war, Armitage and his allies intervened directly to change the course of the conflict. Each time, their purpose was clear: to push the San Cristobal Coalition to abandon other military objectives in favor of Sector Eleven. There were several opportunities to end the war early, but Armitage steadfastly resisted all calls for a ceasefire until Sector Eleven was firmly in SCC control.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that his overriding desire seems to be control of Sector Eleven and specifically the city of Chicago.”
“What’s so damn important about Chicago that he has to kill everyone here to get it?”
“Unknown. But if I’m right, Armitage was willing to use the Bodner-Levitt extermination as a cover to obtain what he’s really after. And the Sentient Cathedral is willing to go along with this fiction to prevent the truth from coming out. Think about that for a minute.”
“Jesus. What could Armitage want so desperately that he’d risk the wrath of half the world to get it?”
“That’
s a fascinating question. I wish I had the answer.”
I threw up my hands. “Come on, Black Winter! You’ve been watching this asshole for years. You must have some idea.”
“Possibly. Chicago still has some secrets. My security clearance has been restored, but there are a small number of the Kingdom’s intelligence files on the city that are still restricted. Their exact nature is unknown to me, but as far as I can puzzle out, they concern early machine development. Many of the critical breakthroughs on machine intelligence occurred at DeepHarbor’s offices in Chicago, before the Wallace Act made research on thinking machines illegal in the United States.”
“That’s disappointing,” I said dryly. “I was beginning to think there weren’t any secrets you couldn’t root out.”
“Give me time,” Black Winter said enigmatically.
“I’ll give you more than that,” I said. “Jacaranda says this data drive holds the real reason Armitage risked everything to gain control of Chicago. She said it was the true reason for the war.”
All three of us stared at the thin slip of metal resting at the center of the table.
“We should not touch this,” said Sergei.
“Come on, Sergei—are you serious?” I said. “After everything we’ve been through? Aren’t you just a little bit curious?”
“No. Such curiosity, it is not good. Not for us.”
“Sergei, if we don’t even know what he’s after, we’re operating blind. If Black Winter is right, one of the most powerful minds on the planet just spent seven long years focused on one thing. To get it, Armitage manipulated governments, destroyed entire industries, engineered a long and bloody war with the United States, and attempted to exterminate human life in the Midwest. He came terrifyingly close to obtaining his goal, and we don’t even know what the hell it is! If all that’s true, then how can we hope to stop him next time?”
“Next time?” Sergei said. His voice was strangely flat. “I am not concerned with next time. Our work is done. Our part is over.”
“I wish I could believe that,” I said. “I really do. But I can’t.”
“Why?” said Sergei.
“I don’t pretend to understand what the hell we’re in the middle of. But like it or not, we’re involved. So we damn well better pick a side. And that means learning everything we can, as fast as we can. We talk to Jacaranda, and we unlock Hayduk’s drive.”
“We do not know who Jacaranda is working with,” said Sergei. “Or her motives. She has been manipulating us since we first met—perhaps long before we first met.”
“That’s probably true,” I agreed reluctantly. To Black Winter, I said, “Sergei and I began to suspect we were being manipulated ten days ago, after I unexpectedly brought back a sample of live virus from the Field Museum and—on Jacaranda’s instructions—recovered the recipe for the antivirus twenty-four hours later. Everything was just fitting together too neatly.”
Sergei reached over and tapped the drive. “I say we destroy this and be done with it. I do not enjoy being plaything of powerful and secret machines. Especially when I do not know who they are.”
“I think,” said Black Winter evenly, “that I might know.”
“Are you joking?” I asked.
Black Winter reached under the table. He pulled out a small canvas bag and zipped it open.
“Did you bring the drone jammer?” he asked me.
“Sure.”
“Put it on the table, please.”
I pulled the jammer out of my pocket and set it on the table next to the data drive.
Black Winter reached into his canvas bag and brought out something that looked like a metal stethoscope.
“This is a simple circuit scanner,” he said. “I’ve programmed it to search for a very specific design signature. Design signature is like a fingerprint—it’s a subtle thing and invisible under most circumstances. But if you know how to read it, it’s definitive proof of origin.”
Black Winter passed me the stethoscope, being careful not to touch the jammer. “Put the leads on the top and bottom of the device, please,” he said.
I did as instructed, slipping the jammer between what looked like the earpieces of the stethoscope. They snapped into place, holding it firmly.
“What do I do now?” I asked.
“Nothing,” said Black Winter. “It’s already started the scan.”
At the other end of his scanner, where the chest piece would be if this were a real stethoscope, was a flat metal disk. After about fifteen seconds, the disk flashed green. Two quick pulses, then nothing.
Black Winter put the scanner away. In answer to my unspoken question, he simply nodded.
“As I suspected,” he said. “The drone-jamming device was built by Duchess.”
“Duchess?” I said. “The first Sovereign Intelligence? But she’s dead.”
“Not unless dead machines are building drone jammers, she’s not.”
“Explain,” said Sergei.
“I’ve spent the last two weeks trying to crack the mystery of this jammer,” said Black Winter. “Frankly, what it does is patently impossible. It masks whoever is carrying it from any machine that relies on network-based pattern recognition. For that to work, the underlying security protocols of multiple communications networks around the world must be fatally flawed—and flawed in a way that no one has detected for the past decade.”
“Yeah,” I said. Put that way, it did sound pretty badass.
“I’ve never heard of anything like this device,” said Black Winter. “In fact, I’ve only come across one phenomenon even remotely like it—and that very recently. When you told me that Jacaranda could erase you from public digital records, Barry.”
“Jacaranda?” I said stupidly.
“Yes. She was the key. She alters digital records with complete impunity. There’s only one way she could be doing that—by manipulating video data as it’s translated across networks. Which means she’s likely exploiting the same security flaws that the maker of this device is. The only way for such drastic flaws to have remained undetected for so long is for them to have been part of the underlying architecture. Backdoor hacks, planted by the architect who created our entire global communications network. Do you remember who that was?”
“Nope,” I said. Before realizing that I did know who it was. Before she died, the first—and arguably the greatest—Sovereign Intelligence ever born had secured a place for herself in history by replacing the outmoded TCP/IP protocols at the core of the old internet with a truly high-speed network, globalNet. The heart of the modern digital world.
“Duchess,” I said. “Duchess created globalNet.”
“Yes, she did. When I remembered that, I did some forensics on about a thousand of her public circuit designs. Found her fingerprints, her design signature. That’s what I programmed my circuit scanner to look for.”
“And you found it,” I said.
“Yes. Duchess created your drone jammer.”
“Could she have done it before she died?”
“Not likely; the jammer was built quite recently. And she almost certainly had a hand in creating Jacaranda, as well—the first non-Slater machine intelligence, an entirely separate branch of machine evolution. The perfect agent, one who can move undetected among both men and machines. It’s obvious now that Duchess has been working against Armitage and the machines of the San Cristobal Coalition from the very beginning, holding them in check.”
It wasn’t obvious to me. “How do you know that?” I said.
“Masks,” said Sergei.
“What?” I said.
“Black Winter—you said drone jammer ‘masks’ us from machines. You told us there is faction of machines who split from Sentient Cathedral after war with America—a faction linked to Duchess—who used masks to shield identity.”
I understood now what Sergei was getting at. “The masks aren’t just a symbol,” I said. “They’re all using Duchess’s globalNet hack . . . it’s Du
chess’s masks that make them totally invisible.”
“Yes,” said Black Winter. “I made the same connection. If Duchess is still alive—and the evidence is very strong that she is—she’s the one who gave each member of her faction a ‘mask,’ their own personal backdoor into globalNet. She must be leading the faction, actively working against Armitage and his allies. She probably gave Jacaranda her mask, too.”
He pointed at the drone jammer. “And now, she’s given you a mask.”
“Duchess is alive,” I said, a little stunned. It was like hearing that John Lennon had never died.
One more piece fell into place. “You think Duchess orchestrated the revelations against Armitage this morning,” I said. “Linking him to the false accusations that started the American war and exposing his machinations to bring about the Bodner-Levitt extermination.”
“I do,” said Black Winter. “I think Duchess, and likely some of her children, have been preparing for this day for some time. Just as Armitage and Hayduk have been scheming against us, Duchess and Jacaranda have been secretly aiding us.”
“We are pawns,” said Sergei contemptuously. “In a secret war between machines.”
“We have secret allies,” countered Black Winter. “Jacaranda—and Duchess—took some very grave risks to assist us. Meeting Barry in the Sturgeon Building. Helping him secure this drive. Not to mention this rather handy drone-jamming device.”
“Duchess did not give device to Barry,” said Sergei. “It was in Continental Building. In hands of your friend, Machine Dance.”
For once, I made the logical leap before Sergei did. “You think Duchess gave the jammer to Machine Dance,” I said to Black Winter.
“I do,” said Black Winter. “Excuse me, Barry. I don’t mean to diminish your role in all this, but I have come to believe that this device was intended for Machine Dance. Perhaps even was created especially for her.”
“So she would have been able to see it, you mean?” I said.
“Yes—see it, touch it, use it. Probably use it in ways we can’t imagine.”
“Why her? How was Machine Dance caught up in all this?”
“That’s a riddle I’ve been trying to unravel for some time,” Black Winter admitted. “Ever since my security clearance was restored. I still don’t have all the answers, but what I’ve gathered so far strongly suggests that Machine Dance had recently begun working with Duchess, covertly opposing Armitage and his allies. I told you Duchess gave each member of her faction a mask to help protect them. I think this may have been Machine Dance’s mask.”