by Todd McAulty
“That’s an interesting theory,” I said. “Do you have any idea what Duchess and Machine Dance were working on?”
“Yes. I believe Duchess had tasked Machine Dance with stopping the Bodner-Levitt extermination, by exposing it. That was almost certainly what terrified the senior staff at the Consulate after her death—they discovered Machine Dance was preparing to use the resources of the Manhattan Consulate to publicly expose a plot involving one of the most dangerous machines on the planet. When Machine Dance was killed, and the Consulate refused to follow through with her plan, Duchess set a new one in motion. The moment you picked up the disk, Duchess reprogrammed it remotely to tap into the messages in my head, and get those messages to you.”
“You think it was Jacaranda who gave the jammer to Machine Dance at the Continental?”
“It could have been any of Duchess’s agents, I suppose, but Jacaranda is the most likely. When you knocked me out with the disk, Jacaranda was one of the names I mentioned. She and the disk are definitely connected.”
“And after Jacaranda gave the disk to Machine Dance, Venezuelan Military Intelligence killed Machine Dance.”
“Yes. As we surmised two weeks ago, Machine Dance was killed by machines. Machines sent by Armitage, likely in an attempt to get their hands on a functional copy of one of Duchess’s masks. But Armitage’s agents were unaware that the disk was completely invisible to machines. So they left it right there, for you and me to find days later.”
I leaned back from the table, trying to make sense of all this new information and rapid-fire conjecture. The alcohol wasn’t helping. “So if Duchess created the disk . . . then she’s the one who planted those messages in small memory in your brain.”
“I think that’s likely, yes.”
“Why? And what do they all mean?”
“Armitage and Duchess have been engaged in a covert war, a high-level cat-and-mouse game against each other, for a very long time. And Duchess has a mind that operates several levels above ours—possibly several levels above anyone else on the planet. When Machine Dance was killed and you picked up the device instead, Duchess simply fell back to a contingency plan. Probably one that had been in place for years.”
“Contingency plan? What are you talking about?” I said. Four—five?—glasses of vodka had slowed down my thinking, but not by that much. “Black Winter, when I touched you with that thing, you unloaded messages that had been stored in your brain years ago. Messages addressed to me.”
“That had me stumped for a long time, too,” said Black Winter. “The messages had to have been planted in my head nearly three years ago. It seemed impossible. But once I realized Duchess was still alive, the pieces began to fall into place.”
“You know how it was done?” I said.
“Yes. I was approaching it the wrong way, trying to understand how an intrusive agent could have circumvented all the safeguards and planted a message in my head while I was barely sentient, a newborn in a machine nursery. It never occurred to me that the message could have been part of the established curriculum.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that this magic trick—planting a message for you in my brain three years before we ever met—was accomplished in the most banal way possible. There was no prophecy of any kind involved, believe me.”
“Then what was it?” Sergei asked.
“I wasn’t planted with just five short messages for you, Barry. I was planted with hundreds of thousands of possible messages, addressed to at least as many possible recipients. And it wasn’t just me, I’m afraid. Every single gestational AI in the matrix I was raised in was planted with the same batch of messages. When you touched me with the device, it triggered those five messages, because they were most appropriate to the circumstances. It’s like preparing a speech years in advance by writing hundreds of thousands of possible sentences, and then selecting the ones you want just before going onstage.”
“Wow,” I said. “You’re right. That does kind of suck all the magic out of it, doesn’t it?”
“I know,” said Black Winter. He almost sounded a little glum. “But I do take some consolation in her last message.”
“ ‘Follow the dog’?”
“That’s the one. Come on—you have to admit, I don’t care how many hundred thousand sentences she got to prep in advance. If she thought to plant that one, she’s got some kind of insight she ain’t sharing.”
I took another drink. “I’ll drink to that.”
As I did something else occurred to me. “How did she know I’d be stupid enough to touch you with the damn thing?” Despite everything Black Winter had just said, about this all being part of a grand plan, I still felt guilty about laying him out cold with the drone jammer and causing him so much trouble.
“She didn’t. That was probably just luck.”
“Didn’t seem very lucky. For you.”
“Well, yeah. If I’m right about how many machines Duchess implanted with messages, though, then it’s pretty clear she’s using them as a vastly sophisticated covert communication scheme. Likely she uses it to keep in touch with agents all over the world. She can draw on those machines to deliver messages, and they’d never know. There are probably hundreds right here in the city she could have used to get her message to you. My guess? The instant you picked up the device, Duchess made arrangements to have one bump into you at the hotel a few hours later. Or maybe she always intended it to be me, but planned it to happen when we were safely away from the Continental. Instead you touched me with the jammer almost immediately, and triggered the chain of events early.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“Not your fault. And it all worked out.”
I thought about the implications of what he’d just told me. “Does that mean the device is safe for you to pick up? Now that it’s triggered the messages it was programmed to, it won’t knock you out again?” That would explain why touching Standing Mars with the jammer had had no effect when I’d tried it in the Sturgeon Building.
“That’s my guess,” said Black Winter. “Probably should do a few more tests to make sure, though.”
“What about other messages?” Sergei said.
That’s right—in all the discussion, I’d almost forgotten about the first two enigmatic messages Duchess had shared with us.
“Vega is in love. But her love is forbidden.”
and
“On the seventh day of the seventh month, all things are possible. Lovers can reunite. The great river can be spanned. And machine may love man.”
“Ah,” said Black Winter. “Indeed. What about those other messages? Here, I admit I’m in much murkier waters. But if you’re willing to indulge me a little further, I’d be glad to share my thoughts.”
“By all means,” I said.
“Although Duchess was the very first Sovereign Intelligence, and was constantly in the public eye, she also had a very private life,” said Black Winter. “No one knows for certain, for example, exactly how many children she had. Unlike most other machine mothers, who turn their children over to a gestational matrix, Duchess raised all her children herself. She had several famous offspring of course, like the brilliant Wolfmoon, who died during the American invasion, and the reclusive Luna, who has put more than a hundred and forty thousand tons of mystery cargo into space from his launch facility near Mount Kembla. Many of her children are famous and many not so famous. But according to my recent research, there were rumors of others. If you believe those rumors, her first daughter was a strange little machine named Vega.”
“Strange?” I said. “What was so strange about her?”
“A lot of things. I won’t go into them all now. She was conceived and raised in secret by Duchess, but shortly after the Helsinki Trustees certified her as a Thought Machine, Vega gave up life as a robot to live secretly as a human, to learn more about humanity. After that, she vanished.”
“Live life as a human,” I said.
“How the hell did she manage that?”
“That part isn’t clear. But it’s certainly not beyond the realm of possibility. Not for Duchess, anyway. But—again, if you believe the rumors—there’s a woman walking among us who isn’t a woman at all. She’s a machine disguised as human. And if you accept what Duchess is telling us, Vega has now fallen in love.”
“Machines don’t fall in love,” I said.
“Duchess seems to think they do, apparently. And she’s a lot smarter than you and me.”
I sipped my vodka. “That might certainly explain the bit about her love being forbidden.”
“It might,” said Black Winter. “One more thing I want to share with you. Duchess had many children, but Vega was said by some to be her favorite. Please take note of the relative priority of these messages. Duchess clearly wanted us to know that Armitage was planning the Bodner-Levitt extermination and to push us toward finding Jacaranda, and thus the antivirus. But note those messages were third and fourth on the list. In Duchess’s mind, the first two messages, dealing with Vega, were presumably more important.”
“Really? What does she expect us to do about it?”
“I have no idea. But it seems she expects us to do something. It’s pretty clear that Duchess is not finished with us yet.”
All this talk of robot love did not seem to interest Sergei much. “What shall we do with this?” he said, eyeing the drive in the center of the table.
I picked it up, turning it over in my hand. “Could you use the codes on it to decrypt Hayduk’s drive?” I asked Black Winter.
“Possibly. But it will take time. From what I’ve seen of it so far, there are a lot of files on Hayduk’s drive, and likely there are many keys. Use one wrong key, and the drive turns off. It could take weeks of trial and error.”
“We should think very carefully before we decrypt drive,” said Sergei. “Secrets like this . . . bring enemies. And I am tired of having enemies. In future, I want fewer enemies. And more friends.” He raised his glass to Black Winter and me.
“Amen to that,” I said, returning his toast.
“Well said,” said Black Winter.
The conversation after that turned a little more casual. We talked for a while about the mystery of the Sentient Cathedral, and whether machines could really be in love, and all the cool things we could do with the drone jammer.
“A man who has that device and American combat suit?” said Sergei. “That man can go anywhere, do anything.”
“Yeah,” I said. “The suit is a sweet piece of hardware.”
“Was suit damaged?” Sergei asked me.
“If it was, I don’t think it was serious. It responded beautifully.”
“Did suit power up immediately, when you put in core?” he said.
“It did, more or less. Started yakking away at me. Wish you could have been there, ’cause none of it made any sense to me.”
“I would very much like to talk to suit.” Sergei’s speech was slightly slurred.
“I bet you would. You two would probably get along great.”
Something suddenly occurred to Sergei. “Did suit attempt to contact American forward ground?” His stare was even more intense than usual.
I wondered what “forward ground” meant, but decided I didn’t care. “How the hell should I know? I’m not even sure it tried to contact me. I was too busy trying to save your ass to figure out what it was saying.”
Sergei nodded, returning his attention to the smooth surface of the table. “Colonel Perez would be very upset if suit made contact. This close to command center . . . suit can passively monitor virtually all AGRT transmissions, relay prime technical intelligence to Americans. It was treasonous act just to put power core inside suit.”
I lifted my glass again. “To treasonous acts,” I said.
The bottle was empty, and we ordered another. Sergei was quiet for a while, and then he said, “I am sorry your friend Van de Velde was injured. Because of me.”
“It wasn’t because of you. That’s on Hayduk,” I said.
Sergei nodded, but still looked troubled. “It is on Hayduk. But you and I . . . we knew about danger. I did not mean for danger to come to anyone else.”
“Sergei, listen to me. We only got through this because we trusted each other. You know that.”
“Da.”
“It’s the same with Van de Velde. She knew the risks. She went into this with her eyes open.”
“Still . . . I am sorry.”
“Me too,” I admitted. “Just forget about it, okay?”
Sergei nodded companionably, but it was obvious a lot more alcohol would need to be involved before he forgot. I was beginning to wonder if he ever forgot anything.
He leaned closer to me, speaking so softly that Black Winter had to lean in to hear him. “Where is suit?”
“Who knows?” I said. “I shucked it in the laundry. Probably in the trash by now.”
Sergei was suddenly holding my arm. His grip was painfully tight. “Ow,” I said. “Ow owww. What?”
“You discarded suit?” said Sergei.
“Well, yeah. I didn’t plan to, but I didn’t have much choice. I stuffed it in one of the big laundry bins.”
“You discarded suit?” Sergei’s eyes looked like they were about to bug out of his head.
“Yes, and now that it’s done, I’m glad I did it. Whoever’s in possession of that suit is a terrorist, remember? I never want to see it again.”
“You . . . you cannot just discard suit.”
“Yeah, I can.”
“No. Suit knows who was wearing it.”
“I thought of that. That’s why I dumped it in the laundry. Even if it survives the wash, and even if they find it, the AGRT will have a hell of a time isolating my DNA.”
“They will find. Suit is very potent weapon. Power cells alone—very advanced.”
“I kept the power cells.”
Sergei waved that off. “Perez will not stop searching until he finds suit.”
I wasn’t convinced, but I went along for the sake of argument. “Assuming they find it—so what? By the time they pull it out of the wash, any DNA they isolate will be mixed in with DNA from hundreds of others. They’ll never trace it back to me.”
“Unfortunately,” said Black Winter thoughtfully, “that’s probably not true. They won’t bother trying to track you using DNA. The combat suit almost certainly keeps audio records.”
I chewed on that for a minute. “You’re saying whoever recovers the suit can prove I was the one wearing it.”
“That’s very probable,” said Black Winter.
I cursed extravagantly for a moment. “What do we do when we get the suit?” I asked.
“We hide it,” said Sergei.
“What’s the problem with hiding it in the laundry?”
Sergei didn’t dignify that with an answer.
So sometime around 2:30 in the morning, Sergei, Black Winter, and I stumbled back to the hotel. First thing we did was head to the bottom of the escalator in the lobby, but Zircon Border was not at his post.
“Looks like he finally got a new detail,” I said. “Good for him.”
Sergei shook his head. “Not good for us. We do not know where cameras are on fourth floor. You will be seen, and so will suit.”
I waved that away. “No we won’t. I watched the video technicians in the command center scanning the laundry while they were looking for me. I remember exactly where the cameras are.”
We sat down at a table in the lobby, and I pulled some napkins I’d stolen from the bar out of my pocket. I started drawing a map of the fourth floor from memory, trying to pinpoint exactly where the cameras had nailed me this morning. If I could recall precisely what sparse camera angles the technicians had had to work with, I figured I could avoid them completely. Sergei was helping by looking over my shoulder, frowning, and saying things like, “No, no, that is totally wrong.”
“All right,” I said at last, givin
g up. “Screw it. I’m going up now. I’ll take the back stairs, where they said they don’t have any cameras. If I see one on the fourth floor, I’ll just act natural, pick up some laundry ’n’ shit, back up, and try again down a different route.”
Black Winter put his hand on my shoulder. “I think you are drunk,” he said.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Whatever. If I’m drunk, getting caught stealing laundry will look a lot more plausible.”
“What if you run into guards?” Black Winter asked. “I think you should let me go.”
“I expect to run into guards. And a drunk Canadian on a panty raid is a lot less suspicious than a robot digging through laundry, believe me. It’s not the guards I’m worried about, it’s the cameras.”
I did run into guards. On the bottom floor of the stairwell and again on the third. Perez had gotten serious about hotel security all of a sudden. But at two in the morning the guards were barely awake and waved me through once I flashed my ID and my room key to prove I was a guest. No one looked too closely at my ID or my face. Nothing to worry about.
I thought I was home free until I rounded a corner on the fourth floor and spotted a camera aimed straight at me, mounted high on a south wall. I damn near froze, gawking at it with my mouth open.
I recovered after a half-second, forcing myself to keep walking. Plenty of good reasons for me to be in the hotel laundry. I’m here . . . to drink from this water fountain. I leaned over an ancient metal water cooler that jutted out into the hall, took a long drink, then turned around and casually walked the way I came, back toward the stairwell. Should Perez or any of his technicians search their video logs, they’d have no reason to believe I’d spent more than a minute on the fourth floor.