The Loop

by Wesley Cross

  “Jeez, a fucking ninja,” Leonard yelled and grunted as he pulled out the object lodged in his shoulder. “I’m gonna kill her.”

  Schneider looked in surprise, recognizing the small metallic stick for what it was—a half-round hand file without the wooden handle, its sharp end covered in Leonard’s blood.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’m not fucking all right,” Leonard shouted. “Who the fuck knows what she was using this thing for. I’ll need some antibiotics. I don’t want to end up with some nasty disease.”

  “I’m shocked she caught you by surprise,” he said and pulled his gun out. “We’ll have your wound looked at when we get back. Let’s get these animals out of here first.”

  He pulled a black radio from his belt and pressed the Talk button. “I need you here, guys. There’re some squatters who need to be removed from the premises. Over.”

  Schneider let off the button, waiting for the response, but none came. He flipped the radio over, half expecting to see a dead battery light, but the green LED on the black handle was shining as bright as ever. The hair on the back of his neck stood up, and he dropped into a combat crouch.

  “What the fuck?” Leonard whispered, also getting low and grabbing his handgun with both hands.

  “Check your cell phone,” Schneider told him.

  “No signal. What’s going on?”

  Schneider shook his head, signaling for his partner to shut up. He couldn’t explain it if he had to, but on a primal level, he knew that something more dangerous than a bunch of homeless file-throwing ninjas was stalking them.

  “Take a peek outside,” he whispered to Leonard. “I’ll cover your back.”

  He took a knee, keeping the front yard in the sights of his pistol, and watched as his lieutenant slowly moved toward the half-opened gates. A squeak behind him startled him, and he swung the gun toward the building, only to see the woman reappear in the doorway with two men in tow. It seemed that Tuna had found another entrance and joined them.

  “Stay back,” he commanded. “I will not ask again.”

  To his surprise, the band spread out on the steps and stood there, not trying to approach him, but not running away either. He risked a glance in Leonard’s direction in time to see his partner’s body straighten, as if struck by a sudden paralysis, and fall on his back.

  “Leonard,” he shouted, springing from the knee and sprinting toward the fallen man and then stopping in his tracks as he saw the handle of a screwdriver sticking out of his partner’s left eye. A shadow crossed the gap between the open gates, and Schneider unloaded the entire magazine at the wooden planks, hoping the slugs would get through.

  A man slipped in through the gap and, stepping over Leonard’s body, stopped a few steps away from Schneider.

  “Connelly, you sonuvabitch. I never trusted your treasonous baby face.” He kept the gun pointed at the man. “Who are you working for?”

  “The gun’s empty, Ulf,” the man said calmly. “I’ve never been a fan of you guys carrying one magazine.”

  “That’s okay, asshole.”

  He holstered his weapon and brought up his hands. He had at least fifty pounds on Connelly, and his reach was better. It surely wasn’t going to be the first man Schneider killed with his bare hands. He stepped toward the man in a boxer’s stance, dancing from side to side, looking for an opening. He saw Connelly shift his weight from one foot to another and propelled himself forward, delivering a one-two punch, leading with his left and following with a powerful cross.

  His opponent stepped back, making Schneider’s hand strike the empty air, and then dived under the cross, bringing a crushing roundhouse kick to his left knee.

  Schneider cried out in pain and stumbled back as his broken leg stopped supporting his weight. He tried to hop back, taking the weight off the bad leg, but Connelly closed the gap between them and brought another kick to Schneider’s right knee.

  As Schneider collapsed onto his back, his vision blurring from the pain, he saw Connelly turn around and walk away. A pair of different faces appeared in front of him, blotting out the sun—the homeless twins, with wild hair and long beards. Then came the knives.

  15

  Hong Kong

  It was past ten o’clock at night, but Helen, along with two dozen other programmers and two lab assistants, was still in the office, watching a mouse. It moved around, sniffing at the walls of the cage with its pointed snout, tilting its little head this way and that as if trying to make out the world on the other side. A transparent plastic cage that housed the little rodent sat in the corner of a large empty table. Two small shiny antennas were sticking out of the critter’s head, bouncing around when the mouse moved, and Helen wondered if the animal knew they were there.

  “Quite something, huh?” Tillerson said. He was watching the monitor of his computer that looked almost as if it was connected to a live video feed of the table, but on the screen, the surface of the table was covered in gray blocks, creating an intricate maze.

  “This is what it’ll see?” somebody asked.

  “Right. Once we’re ready, Minerva will take over and create the same maze in his head,” Tillerson pointed at the mouse, “that we see here on the screen. Then we can let Minerva shuffle the blocks back and forth, and if it works, this little fella will follow the exact path mapped out in the virtual world.”

  “Just to play devil’s advocate—some people might argue this could be nothing but a parlor trick,” one of the programmers said. “You could achieve the same result by shocking the mouse when it went the wrong way and stimulating its pleasure sensors when it went where you wanted it to go.”

  “Sure,” Tillerson said, “but that would be barbaric, wouldn’t it? Guys, I want you to see this for what this is—the first time an animal—a mammal, nonetheless—will be inside a virtual world that it couldn’t distinguish from reality. Granted, this is not the same as immersing a human, but we’ll get there eventually. Think about the applications.”

  “Video games,” somebody shouted.

  “Yeah, sure, and that could be a profitable venue. But I want you to think bigger.”

  “Virtual travel,” another person offered.

  “That’s good,” Tillerson said. “Also, profitable. I should’ve brought my business development team here. They ought to be taking notes.”

  Everybody chuckled.

  “However,” he said, raising his hand, “this is what I have in mind. Remember those goofy interactive glasses everybody was obsessed with a few years back? That was a horribly executed idea, but although I hated the execution, the direction in which they were trying to go was solid. Now, imagine if you could implant a chip inside of your head that would project information directly to your brain, bypassing all your other input systems. This could propel us to the next rung of our evolutionary ladder. From Homo Sapiens to Homo Machina, or whatever the fuck the Latin name of it is going to be. My Latin’s rusty, so I’ll let somebody else figure that part out.”

  Or, you could control people remotely or worse—turn them into your slaves, Helen thought. The idea made her shudder. Since her conversation with Mandy in the parking lot of the company’s campus, Helen had been on edge. There wasn’t any solid proof behind Mandy’s words, certainly not enough to go to the authorities. However, the woman had been successful collecting enough bits and pieces of circumstantial evidence to convince Helen to at least try to look into it and make the determination herself.

  “Let’s do it,” Tillerson said, interrupting her train of thought as he pressed a series of keys that gave Minerva control of the mouse. The door of the cage slid upward, and the rodent moved toward the opening, but then stopped and sniffed at the empty air as if unsure of what to do. Some cheers erupted from the group—although open in the real world, the cage was still blocked by a gray brick on the computer screen, and it appeared that the mouse saw the virtual obstacle as well.

  The experiment had worked flawlessly. The mouse had
followed the path Minerva had plotted as if the real walls were blocking its way the entire time. After it had completed a few circles around the table, Tillerson made it go back to the cage, where the critter was rewarded with a snack.

  As lab assistants cleaned the table and took away the mouse, Tillerson said good-byes to everybody and retreated to his office. When the crowd began to disperse, Helen moved toward the exit along with everybody else, but then dived into the woman’s restroom. She locked herself into the last stall and climbed on top of the seat to make sure that nobody could see her. After a few minutes, the building was silent—the only sound coming from outside of the restroom was the barely audible low hum of cooling fans in the server room.

  Her legs started to go numb when she finally heard a door open, and then the faint notes of La Traviata filled the air. After a few seconds, the music stopped, the door slammed, and then she could hear the tapping of someone’s shoes dampened by the soft rug of the corridor. The steps reached the restroom and continued on, getting fainter and fainter until there was silence again.

  Helen stayed in for another ten minutes in case Tillerson had forgotten something in his office and came back to retrieve it. Finally, she made her way out of the stall, peeked out of the restroom door, and, not seeing anybody in the hallway, headed to Tillerson’s office. His door was locked with an electronic ten-digit combination lock, which Helen had recorded on a video during her last covert expedition to the office. Impossible to guess-pick, the lock was vulnerable to a direct hack and the video helped her identify the exact model of the mechanism and find the appropriate malware. She pulled a pair of plastic gloves from her purse and put them on. Then she took out a cell phone with a smart connector attached to it that matched the lock’s input port. She had reprogrammed the phone a few nights ago and tested it on a similar lock she bought in a hardware store.

  The malware worked without a glitch, overriding the lock’s system, and the door opened with a soft click. Helen slipped inside the office and closed the door behind her without turning on the lights.

  She glanced at the meteorite as she walked around the desk and took a seat in front of the dual monitors. She hadn’t been downstairs where the quantum computer was housed since her conversation with Tillerson. Despite the misgivings she now had about the man, and what his company might have been doing, she still found herself enthralled by the possibilities that a machine of such power could represent.

  “Okay,” she whispered to herself, trying to get into the zone. She plugged a thumb drive into the USB port and touched the keyboard, waking up the computer. Then her fingers typed a slew of commands, forcing the system to reboot from the portable drive. She tensed, holding her breath as the computer processed the command. If her stunt with uploading over-the-air malware had failed, instead of installing a backdoor and letting her access the mainframe, Tillerson’s computer would trigger an alarm. A few seconds later, the machine beeped, and Helen let out a sigh of relief—she was in.

  She scrolled through the list of folders, quickly scanning their names, looking for anything out of place.

  “There you are,” Helen said out loud as she caught the name AI files on one of the folders. “Very inconspicuous.”

  She opened it and looked in surprise at the two subfolders in it.

  MINERVA

  CALLISTO

  “Callisto?” She double-clicked on the folder and stared at the pop-up window that asked for a password.

  Helen looked through the directory of tools on her thumb drive and then brought up the pop-up again. She could probably crack it open, she reckoned, but she wasn’t convinced it would be the wisest course of action. At least not for now. After some hesitation, she decided to clone the folder onto her drive. That also had some risks as, depending on how the files were protected, the cloning itself could set off the alarm, but it was still a safer bet.

  She copied it into her thumb drive and opened the MINERVA folder. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t contain the source code for the AI, but instead had a long list of subfolders containing research notes, presentation videos, and logs. Helen copied the folder—there could be some useful information there that she wouldn’t be able to find on the spot.

  It was time to get going, she decided. She didn’t want to push her luck. Her hand moved to the thumb drive, ready to take it out of the machine, when one of the folders littering the home screen of Edmund’s computer caught her eye.

  TLR SCHEMATICS

  Puzzled, she opened it to see a single PDF file titled PROPOSAL.

  “Whoa,” she said as she looked at the three-dimensional sketch of the building Wisemann and Vonn, an architectural firm, had apparently submitted it to TLR Inc., for consideration for its new Hong Kong location.

  She copied the file onto her drive. Most of TLR’s employees were only aware of one floor of the building. Helen, along with a few others, had known about the sub-floor that housed the mighty quantum machine. But as she looked at the 3D drawing—TLR had a few more levels of secrecy she wasn’t aware of until now. Two more, to be exact.

  16

  Bolivia

  Mike Connelly put on the headphones, blocking out the low hum of the Cessna 206 engine, and pretended to admire the tropical lowlands east of the Andes Mountains below. They had landed at Viru Viru International Airport, ten miles from the Santa Cruz de la Sierra city center, about an hour ago. Then they were driven to a private landing strip, where Connelly and Tim Wallace, VP of sales and Guardian Manufacturing’s unofficial ambassador to the Flores cartel, boarded the Cessna.

  As Connelly watched the pilot and two cartel enforcers join them, he thought it wasn’t a surprise that the plane was so popular with drug traffickers. The single prop had double side doors, which undoubtedly helped with quick off-loading, and while officially it required a thousand-yard runway for landing and takeoff, in a pinch it could use a strip as short as four hundred yards.

  “Beautiful, right?” Wallace shouted to him, pointing at the greenery below. The man’s plain face with closely set brown eyes was covered in a sheen of perspiration despite the climate-controlled air inside the airplane.

  Connelly gave him a tight smile and shook his head ever so slightly, signaling the man to stay quiet. Showing nervousness was the worst negotiating tactic when dealing with the likes of Diego Flores. Of course, while doing business with the self-proclaimed Prince of Cocaine, there was plenty to be nervous about. The thirty-two-year-old son of a shoemaker, Flores had been able to unite splintered parts of the former Santa Cruz cartel in the short span of five years. His ruthless reputation and the lavish lifestyle of his inner circle allowed him to recruit members of Colombian and Mexican cartels. There was even a rumor that most of the former members of the feared Comando Vermelho who had fled the favelas of Brazil to escape the Federal Police ended up on Flores’s payroll.

  “It’s a beautiful country,” Wallace said to the two enforcers sitting in front of them. The two men didn’t even acknowledge his presence as they remained facing forward.

  “Senores,” the pilot’s voice came over the headset. “We will be landing in about five minutes.”

  The plane tilted to the right as they made a final approach. The green sheet of the jungle below was now dotted with buildings and crisscrossed by roads. It seemed that the Flores cartel had built an entire city in the middle of the rainforest.

  The little plane touched down on the short runway and taxied to the small building, where Connelly spotted two Suzuki SUVs and three men. Two of them, brandishing AK-47 rifles, looked like ordinary enforcers. The third—to Connelly’s surprise—was Diego Flores himself.

  “Welcome, my American friends,” he said, shaking their hands. “Welcome to Bolivia.”

  The man who called himself the Prince of Cocaine didn’t fit the stereotype of a drug cartel boss, Connelly observed. There was no handlebar mustache, ugly scars, or scary tattoos. Instead, he was clean-shaven, dressed in a simple white Italian cotton shirt and Brooks Broth
ers beige shorts, and looked more like a successful actor or a businessman on vacation than a murdering drug trafficker.

  “Thank you for having us,” Wallace said, pushing Connelly aside. “It’s an honor to meet you.”

  As Wallace made small talk with Flores, Connelly kept an eye on the guards. The irony of the situation was that this was probably going to be the best time to take out Flores. At the moment, there were only four soldiers and a pilot guarding their boss. While they were close to his compound, the immediate vicinity of the landing strip was deserted. If he struck now, he could get rid of the guards, kill the Prince of Cocaine, and there still would be enough time for him to escape before the reinforcements would arrive. Unfortunately, that plan would make further employment at Guardian Manufacturing impossible and Connelly intended to keep his cover for as long as he could.

  “Grab my bags and hurry up,” Wallace commanded as he and the Bolivians started loading into the cars.

  Connelly nodded and walked back to the plane to get the man’s bags. Of course, I could kill Wallace and still keep the cover, he thought, not without temptation.

  “To be honest, I was surprised when your people approached me for the first time,” Flores said as they boarded the SUV and started to the compound. “My interactions with Americans until now were limited to your very persistent enforcement agencies.”

  “Your business acumen is well-known,” Wallace said, “and considering where we are at the moment, I think we could benefit from this partnership. You have the product, and we have, well, everything else. Distribution channels, logistics operations where your product could travel with our ships that get little or no oversight as they enter American ports.”