“Stay seated, please,” Gold said, in a conversational voice. One woman at the tables had started to rise. Gold’s weapon swung towards here. She sat down quickly, whimpering. The others huddled, trying to be small.
“Weapons,” she said to Silver. Silver pocketed her stones and collected them, setting them on the counter. Small, flat machine pistols, identical to the one Gold carried, with harness fittings close to their bodies. She collected their magazines, four to each of them, twenty-five rounds each. She stripped a satchel from one man, found it to contain first aid supplies, but had room for the magazines. She stuffed them into it as she went, fitting it over her own shoulder. She had to turn one man over to retrieve his. He was heavy: a big, blond man. There was a neat red hole in his face, just below his right eye. He looked at her sourly, disapproving of being suddenly dead. She kept his gun, running her fingers over it. It was a copy of a German design, more refined but similar enough to guns she had used in the past. She flicked the safety off, pulled back the firing pin, and locked it down.
Gold rose. “That is six. Do you know how many?” She addressed the hostages. “You all work for New Frontiers, correct?” Some nods around the table.
Gold frowned at them. Silver spoke. “You’re free now. Rescued. But first, tell us how many of them there are.”
A man, balding and owlish behind round spectacles. “Ten, I think.” Gold hissed, eyeing the door. “They are always roaming about. They knew you were coming.”
“Did they say that?” Silver asked, surprised.
He nodded, swallowed. “Two women, they said. Dangerous.” He blinked at her. “They said you would come.”
Silver smiled. “Well, they weren’t wrong.”
“Which one said this?” Gold snapped, clipping in a fresh magazine from the counter.
“He did,” he said, showing the blond giant she had shot in the face.
“He was their leader?” Gold asked. The man nodded nervously. His hands shook.
He swallowed. “Did the talking to us, anyway.”
Gold looked at her. “Let’s go.”
Silver turned to the man. “Shut the door and do not leave until the police arrive. It won’t be safe until then. Got it?”
He blinked rapidly. “You will kill them? They said you were here to take it, to steal it.”
Gold snorted. “It. It’s already stolen.” She pocketed two more magazines. “Let’s go,” she said again, with an edge of finality in her voice.
The blond’s radio crackled, squelched once, twice. Gold looked at her. It did it again. Once, twice.
“Now they know. Come on. Stay with me.” She left.
Silver followed. She shut the door behind her and didn’t look back.
In the corridor, Gold moved swiftly. They came to a junction, a left turn headed deeper into the building. This place was the size of a Walmart or Home Depot, Silver thought, or bigger. She noted the thrum of HVAC systems, deep and powerful. There were servers here, many thousands, she knew. They created a lot of heat, which needed dissipation lest the silicon chips melt. Curious that brains needed cooling, but then so did human brains. Didn’t hair help regulate the brain temperature in humans, or at least it had evolved that way? She thought she had read it did, somewhere. It didn’t seem logical. She blinked her eyes, focusing. Woolgathering at a time like this would get her shot. She checked behind her, didn’t like being in a corridor like this, but they needed to flush the enemy out. Smoke and the others were coming, and the facility needed to be theirs before they got here.
Gold slowed at the intersection, slid silently on her belly and popped her head out at floor level, then back. A shot rang out, and the tile floor chipped, chunks flying out of the wall at the corner. Silver, not thinking, flicked her safety off and leaped, crossing the opening in a bound about three feet high, firing low, twice, knowing that was where the shooter was from the trajectory revealed by his shots, where he had to be. Where he was. She landed on her feet, unhurt, and spun, checking both ahead and behind her, before glancing down at Gold. Gold grinned at her fiercely, then popped her head back in the same spot. Cat and mouse. No shots this time. From down the hall came a groan, heavy breathing.
ONE, she motioned to Gold, who nodded and signed back WOUNDED. Gold held up her hand, three fingers. Silver nodded. Gold counted down, three, two, one, and then they both popped around, training weapons on the far wall where the corridor turned left. A man sat, propped against the wall, blood pooling around him. Silver had gotten him in the neck. She felt bad; he was still alive, but not for long. His eyes were glassy and didn’t register them. She stepped out, and he saw her then, and fumbled for his gun. Gold shot him, once, in the chest, and he lay still.
“Dangerous,” Gold said flatly, looking at her as if she sensed her reluctance for this task. These men were doing their jobs, tasked with this mission, to protect this installation from two crazy women. They hadn’t taken it seriously. Hadn’t known what they were up against. It was sad, really, but there you had it.
“Three more,” Silver said.
“They’ll be moving,” Gold said. “If they’re smart, they’ll stay in motion. Time is on their side.”
Silver nodded. She had the same thought. Backup was coming. And beyond that, there were airborne solutions. She was sure of their calculus, what their thinking would be. If they couldn’t control it, this thing New Frontiers had created, they would allow nobody else to either. There were plans like this. This place could be mined, rigged to explode as the house in San Jose had been. Would be a smart precaution, dealing with an AI. She put the thought out of her mind. It wasn’t mined. New Frontiers were optimistic idiots.
Gold looked at her, a hint of a smile on her face. She reached for the dead man’s walkie, slid down around his neck. Ignoring the blood on it, she held it to her ear. Pushed the TRANSMIT button once, twice. Waited, then again.
“Blue Fire, report,” someone said. Nervous, she thought. She could hear it through the tiny speaker. Young, nervous. Unsure.
Gold keyed the buttons again. Once, twice.
“All units, report. Blue Tree, over.” An older voice.
“Two here,” came across.
“Six, I’m in the parking lot. What’s up?”
“I heard shots inside, I think. Hard to say. I can’t raise the Captain. Three, over.”
“What about Wallace?” No idea who said that, but she thought it was the one called Two, he had a deep, gravelly voice. Silver noticed he didn’t say “over” like the others. Lax. Radio discipline was important. It kept your head a little straighter under pressure, if you forced yourself to commit to the radio as a tool for conveying information, not an extension of your own voice.
“Wallace, report, over. Come on, dammit. Answer. Over. Could be his radio. This place is fucking with them.” Gold arched an eyebrow at this. This many servers in a building made of steel studs and drywall would play hell with low-power radios. She nodded, and then they heard him, coming down the hallway to their left. Heavy boots, pounding on the floor.
Silver dropped into a crouch, weapon raised, finger on the trigger. Gold scooted forward rapidly towards the left-hand jog in the corridor, staying low. He turned the corner, a big man, bearded, chest covered in a harness, carrying a large automatic rifle. He saw Silver first, eyes locking on hers, and then Gold was on him, like a spider, from below.
She sprang at him, legs and arms intertwining with his. It looked effortless, the way she grappled, twisted, and then fell, using his momentum against him, guiding him down in a hard fall she somehow twisted so she was on top of him, and him face down, wind escaping his lungs in a hard grunt against the tile floor. Gold squirmed tight against him, her black hair flying, arms and legs seeking purchase. There were a few moments of struggle as he resisted her, knowing what she was doing. She had his neck then, and Silver stepped forward.
“Wait,” she said, as the door at the end of the hall opened, and another man came through. He was black, tall,
head shaved very close. She shot him three times, instantly, not thinking, just knowing that if she didn’t, it meant death or capture for them. He went down, blood spraying the wall behind him. She kept the gun trained on him for a few seconds more, listening to Gold struggle with the one on the ground. But he was dead.
Gold’s man was very much alive. He was struggling against her choke hold. “Stop,” she said to Gold in Nahuatl. Gold looked at her, eyes blazing, teeth pulled back in a terrible grin.
“Why?” she said, in English. So he could hear, naturally. She was awful when she was like this, in her element, doing murder.
“We need information,” she said. “Don’t do it.”
“No,” Gold said, “we don’t.” And she heaved, arching her back with the effort. He looked up at Silver, eyes bulging in panic, as he realized what Gold was doing. Breaking his neck. Gold rolled right. There was a loud crunch.
Chapter Forty-Four
They had let Gold out hours earlier, with instructions for them to drive up to the data center in three hours to rendezvous with them. Smoke sat motionless in the driver’s seat of the minivan. Jessica had moved up to the front seat, and she eyed him warily. He sat very still, thinking.
At first, he thought of the conditions for success of this mission. These were easy, he thought. One, they would capture or gain control over the AI that was in the data center. Or they would not and die or get caught. If killed, well, that was sad, but he had known it was a risk, and his problems would be over, in that case. His equanimity surprised him at this thought, but on unpacking it, on taking that thought out and looking it over in his mind, inspecting it from all angles, he realized it was probably something he’d grown familiar with for quite some time. Since Brasilia, really, since they had snatched him back from what the Center had ruled as an unproductive expense of resources. Of him, of him as the resource they were conserving. He’d been okay with dying ever since then, he realized. Let them kill him. What did it matter? The Center would do what the Center would do, he had realized, regardless of his wishes.
Capture, he feared more than dying, since no cell could hold him past the Center’s next scheduled Recall of him. They would snatch him back out of whatever cell he was in, and that would be that. He’d begin another chapter of his mission, or a new mission, or they would recycle him. He doubted they would punish him, but they might write him off as a bad job, an asset gone wrong, or broken, or sub-optimally functional, and cull him. Worst case was they would give him yet another mission on yet another World. It was this he mostly feared. More servitude.
Silver and Gold, if captured, would face much more scrutiny than he would. They would present a puzzle to the authorities here, which would be interesting to watch unfold. But again, he hardly cared, if he was being honest with himself. And here, in this car, he was trying hard to be honest with himself. Things were concluding, coming to a head, as they said here, so honesty, at least internal honesty, some honest dealing with his own secret thoughts and emotions was in order.
Silver and Gold were dangerous adversaries. If someone removed them from the board, from his mission scenario, well then, so much the better. He didn’t trust them beyond what he needed to, and he was certain they were wary of him. Gold was scornful of him, and of the Center. She was the dangerous one, he deemed, the one with the most potential to damage his mission. So, if he got the chance he would need to deal with her himself. Silver was a follower, he thought. An information gatherer, less of an actor, per se, than Gold. That was his ranking, then. The others, Jessica and Miguel, were little more than bystanders.
“Penny for your thoughts,” Jessica said at length.
“I’m sorry,” Smoke said, absently. “I was thinking.” Thinking about our chances, and about betrayal, and ordering my allies and enemies in threat priority order.
“Silver told me your story,” Jessica said. “I’ve never met anyone from another planet before, and I would love to interview you about yourself, get your story.”
“You are a journalist, correct? A chronicler?” Smoke said. Talking with her would at least pass the time. They had time, still, for talking.
“Chronicler?” she laughed. It had a pretty sound, he thought. “I guess I am,” she said. “Is that okay? I’d be the first journalist to interview an extraterrestrial. Kind of a feather in my cap, so to speak.”
“You think we’re getting through this?” Smoke said. “Optimistic, aren’t you?”
She shrugged in the darkness. “Maybe, but it’s all we’ve got, no? All any of us have.”
He sighed. It would do no harm to talk to her. “Shoot,” he said. “Ask your hard-hitting questions. No softballs.” He looked at her. “That’s the phrase, right?”
“One of them,” she said, he could hear the smile in her voice. “I promise, no softballs.” She paused. “Okay, let’s start with your home World. Talus, it’s called?”
“Yes, that’s an English word, also meaning a kind of rock, shale, I think. But in our language those sounds mean center. The middle of everything.”
“This is also the name of the AI you work for, right? The Center?” She didn’t have a pad or anything to write on, but he could hear in the cadence of her voice, her operating as if she did.
“Yes, the Center is a machine intelligence I work for.” Enslaved by, was a better phrase, but it would only upset her, so best to leave that out.
“What’s your mission? Here on Earth, I mean.” She laughed. “It sounds so melodramatic, putting it like that, but what is it you’ve come for?”
“I’m here to find the first AI that your civilization builds.” He chuckled. “At least, I hope it is the first. Be doing a poor job if I missed the first one.”
“You almost did,” Miguel piped up from the back seat. “I proposed these same optimizations two years ago, but they deferred them until recently.”
“These are the multiplexed synaptic connections? That style of architecture?” Smoke said, over his shoulder.
“That, and other things. Some specialized memory units, optimized for a certain conditional logic. They base these on quantum computing effects, very cool stuff.”
“Wait.” Smoke held up his hand. “You didn’t mention quantum architecture before.”
“Oh, you mean when you invaded my home and kidnapped me? Then?” Miguel mocked him. “Or maybe when your house blew up and those two crazy bitches killed all your soldiers. Maybe I should have mentioned it then.” He laughed. “Q comp is all through that thing.”
“The hardware overhang will be large, then,” Smoke said aloud.
“Oh yeah, it will give the software a lot of overhead. Room to expand,” Miguel said. “That was the idea, anyway. My idea,” he finished proudly.
“What does that mean?” Jessica asked. “Like, it will be smarter, right?”
“Overhang, or overhead,” Smoke explained, “is the initial excess capacity a system has, which subsequent versions of software can take advantage of without changing the hardware. Think of it as room for improvement.”
“Except this baby can improve itself. That’s what we designed it to do. Recursively recreate itself. Up to the limit of its hardware.”
“How will it know its limits?” Jessica asked.
“We gave it a map, kind of. Like metadata about what its hardware could theoretically do, so it knows. It’s designed to know that kind of stuff.” Miguel was smug, in his element.
“This may be more of an advanced system than we had expected,” Smoke said.
“You sound concerned,” Jessica noted. “You weren’t expecting this?”
“Quantum computing architectures are new here, but not where I come from. It’s a mature theory at the root of the Center’s understanding of machine intelligence. Early AI are classical, but we expect them to bootstrap their way into quantum computing architectures. Just not immediately. I don’t think we expected that the original designs would be quantum.”
“Well, they are. At least some
parts of it are,” Miguel said. “That stuff is spooky. I don’t really grok it, and I work with it.”
“That too is what the Center believes. Human minds are supposed to understand it well enough to use it, or at least use it beyond basic novelty applications.” He sighed. “That’s the theory, anyway.”
“It sounds like we might be in for a surprise, then,” Jessica ventured.
“We are, regardless,” Smoke said. “I wish you would have told me,” he directed back at Miguel.
“I told Gold, or whatever her name is. She had lots of questions about it, seemed to know a lot about AI and computers.”
Smoke swiveled around to look at him. “You told Gold? About the quantum technology in the AI?” His voice had a hitch in it, as if his throat was constricting.
“Sure, she asked.” Jessica could feel him shrugging. “You never did.”
Smoke turned around and was silent a while. Jessica wondered if he was struggling to control himself. “He has been spending a lot of time with her,” Jessica said to him, her voice low. “This may be why she was so interested in him.”
“Fuck you, lady,” Miguel retorted, from the back seat. “You don’t know me.”
“Hey, just saying,” Jessica snapped. “I’m sure she wanted you for your good looks, Miguel.”
As they bickered, Smoke’s mind raced. Smoke had noticed Gold dallying with Miguel, but hadn’t suspected she was pumping him for information and, well, pumping him. It was a blind spot, he had, he realized, with these two, with Gold and Silver.
They were not like other humans. They were crafty in the sense that only long life, living in the shadows of civilization, serving ancient, brooding godlike intelligences could provide. He felt like he ought to have suspected her, but he’d classified Gold as a crazy loose cannon since he first encountered her. It rankled that she might have been playing that role to deceive him. That she had fooled him. The Center would think him a fool. He was a fool. Masks.
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