by Guy Haley
"Someone has," said Richards. "The Realm House is administered by the VIA. Why would they be interested in investigating the creation of something that would let people like me blend in? They like us where we are, nice and visible."
"Richards." Choi wagged a finger. His smile broadened. "Your intelligence fails you. Care of the Realms was recently handed over to Gencorp."
"Hey, I've been busy," Richards protested, irritated at being caught out. "Cost cutting, eh?"
"Private firms offer better deals, simple economics. Government agencies suck a state dry, and USNA is poor, has been since the Midnight Dollar Coup. The VIA still provides security, however; the UN would not let them give that up. You really did not know this had happened?"
"Realm stuff rarely comes up in my line of work. They're closed off, and anything untoward that goes down there is VIA business. I keep well clear of it. Asking about them draws too much heat off the agency. They're a pretty touchy bunch, and I am a Five. I don't want them in my business any more than they want me in theirs. They look at me funny, you know what I mean?"
Choi watched the holos of Richards' encounters with the cydroids for a few moments. "These sheaths are hardly perfect, one could argue."
"Why would the VIA sanction their building? It makes less sense if they're imperfect, they're even more likely to get caught out."
"Listen to what is said, Richards. I never said the VIA or Gencorp had built them. To build them is not why they investigate, they investigate such things to anticipate their development. It is a matter of apprehension, they do it simply to know and perhaps in the VIA's case to detect them should someone build them."
"Could it be Gencorp?" Richards considered for a moment. "No, no, I don't buy that, not under the VIA's nose. And why are they trying to kill each other?"
Choi raised his eyebrows in query.
"Long story."
"I am only aware that their theoretical possibility is slightly less theoretical and slightly more possible than most people are aware. But in these times, that is to be expected, things change so quickly, it is as if the world is being pulled out from under our feet every second day," said Choi.
"Interesting times, eh?"
Choi narrowed his eyes. "I do not bandy cliché, Richards. I also do not believe I have told you anything that you have not already discerned for yourself. I have not been offered any such 'cydroids' for sale, either in physical or plan form. All I have are these scraps brought to me by my operation."
"Right, OK, thanks," said Richards. "This destruct mechanism." Richards brought up technical detail on the skeletons and electron scope level views of the cydroid's carbons.
"The weaving is fine, is it not? A good product." Choi leaned in closer to them. "But the better looms will give you such a finish. I see little else unusual about these constructs other than the biological component and these artificial cerebra. This is otherwise a standard combat endoskeleton, self-motivated. This carbon, it is a simple atomic lattice, not neo-diamond or any of the other harder artificial matrices. Tough, but unremarkable, not particularly strong. We have several tens of thousands in the people's liberation army, many of which I procured for the state." He shrugged.
"The self-destruct item," said Richards, pressing his point. Three minutes.
"Again, it is a standard stock item; unusual, but by no means unique. It's relatively new, but it's not been altered from the factory model, if that is what you are asking me. The acid only works on the looser lattices – it won't damage diamond weave, it is far too tough."
"But…?"
Choi clucked his tongue. "It is strange to see such unusually advanced biotechnology married to something like this, that is all. As utile as my product is, I would expect…"
Richards finished his sentence. "That they would have made more of an effort with the internals? Proper diamond weave, or actual grown bone? Me too."
Choi blinked his long, slow blink. "It is remarkable. Off the shelf combat droid skeleton with this organic shell, one so far in advance of the other."
"Is that all you know?"
"That is all."
Richards looked at Tony's round face for a long minute, searching out the lies. The little man held his gaze, his own expression flat and unreadable. Richards could see no evidence of untruthfulness on the surface. He regretted grabbing such a cheap sheath. He'd lied to Choi; the infrareds on it were not sensitive enough to pick out capillary dilation, they were sufficient to monitor the temperature of hot beverages, and that was about all. He felt cheap, cheap in front of Tony Choi. "I am disappointed Tony, I thought if anyone would know of a suspiciously advanced new unit primed for infiltration it would be an amoral criminal bastard like you."
Choi snorted. "I am flattered, but I am only a merchant. I buy and I sell what is available to be bought and to be sold… Perhaps if you would allow me to check my databases, I may be able to track the transaction…" He shrugged; it didn't matter at all to him. "It will take a minute, if the client was a special one, or the chassis changed hands, perhaps longer, if at all," he warned. "I will at least try." He moved over to a panel fronted by a garish fourteenth-century vase. It rotated as he approached, to reveal a flat glass-topped workstation, fully manual. Choi didn't trust anyone, numbers or meat, with his deepest secrets. It was probably connected to the Grid via an unwitting proxy. Somewhere, thought Richards, is a little old lady scratching her head over her band charges. "The catalytic acid destruct system should make it easier to track down. Please, take a seat."
"I'll stay leaning, this thing doesn't do sitting."
"Lean then."
"Next time I'm going more upmarket. I was in something of a hurry." Richards had a thought. "Hey, you're not stalling for time, are you, Choi? You're not trying to sell me out here, are you?"
"Why would I do that?" Choi said mildly, tapping at the workstation's glass table top, moving documents round on it, pinching those that interested him from there and lifting them into the air, where they hung as holographs. "Would you mind?" he said, indicating the still active holo.
"Yeah, sure." Richards remoted the data over to Choi's machine. Choi's fingers worked faster, moving icon to icon, initiating a search.
"I know the value of things," Choi said, "You are much more valuable to me at liberty than you are in the gracious care of our glorious Dynasty of the People."
"Good, because I sealed your mainframe off from the Grid. There's a blind copy running as cover. Nothing you've been trying to send to the authorities has made it out."
Choi looked up momentarily, mildly insulted. "If I have been trying to contact the authorities."
"If." Richards' borrowed beaklike head moved to one side, listening to something Choi could not hear. "So you wouldn't know about the AI snatch squad sat outside your virtual real estate then?" There were several high-end code-breakers in the Grid. Richards cursed inwardly. They'd appeared out of nowhere. They swam back and forth, long trails of information stretching back into the churn of the Grid connecting them to their handlers, waiting as something big and nasty hammered away at Richards' fake mainframe. The codebreakers left themselves open, trying to tempt Richards to commit more of himself to cracking them and reading their secrets, to see if, maybe, high end AIs had survived the pogroms and hid behind information streams instead of men, enthralled to the state. It was tempting, but that was the idea. He wasn't that naive.
"I…" began Choi. He stopped, sipped his tea from the thimble-like cup, its ceramics patterned with tiny cracks that suggested an age greater than gunpowder. "Of course. Why should I lie? You are right to an extent, I did know that they were coming. I had hoped we would be done before they arrived. They are getting faster." He placed the cup down on the top of his workstation. "There is a discrete system here, in this room, fitted by the interior ministry. It bypasses the main Grid, a direct pipe. They were summoned a few moments after you arrived by patterns evident in our conversation." He glanced at the waving-good-luck cat meaning
fully. Not so lucky for me, thought Richards. "It was not my decision. I said you should not have come."
"You have sold me out."
"If you wish to look at it in that way, that is your prerogative. Non-compliance was… inadvisable. As you say, needs must as the devil drives."
"You said you did not bandy cliché."
Choi shrugged again.
"You could have warned me. I'm minded to kick your ass. I could, you know, even in this." Richards steeled himself. They'd got through the first few layers of armour he'd laid into the building's cyber-structure; he was a whisker away from being directly attacked. The shield he had up round the mainframe prevented the Chinese entities hooking him, but any second now they'd start causing him genuine inconvenience.
Choi took another deliberate sip of his tea. "Of course. I am only a man, Richards." There was a banging at the door, then rustling, then a high-pitched whine, then shouting, then nothing. Choi's eyes flicked over to the door. "They knew you were here from the first moment you penetrated the wall. They are very keen to, ah, entertain you. To deny your presence here would cause me much trouble; as it is I will have to suffer several long hours of questioning because I personally did not alert the authorities."
"I bet you tried."
"Your false mainframe was effective. What did you expect? But I have helped you."
"It cost me, as I remember."
"Nevertheless, you have caused me a great deal of inconvenience. It is only because Qifang is involved that I have spoken to you. Without him I would have left you high and dry, but in this instance I could argue national honour is at stake. And the news will be of interest to the PDG."
"Why, thanks." Choi had done his best, fair enough, but Richards was in no mood to be generous. "You are one shit of a mercenary."
"Do not scorn me, I have done you more than one service today. You are valuable to me, Richards, true. I am more valuable to myself, I'm sure you understand." He pursed his lips, light from the desktop playing over his face as he ran through a year's worth of accounting in half a second. "We could have arranged a more convenient… a safer" – he stressed the word, – "venue to meet, but that is not your way, and if they catch you, then you must live with it yourself."
"I won't forget this." Richards said it harshly for the benefit of the waving cat. Tony Choi would know he meant differently. Or not, it didn't really matter.
"I did tell you that you were crazy to come here," said Choi mildly.
A dull crump of a concussion charge, and the door blew in. Choi tutted at the damage. He flicked a fragment of antique wood from his sleeve, and turned back to his workstation. The false shell Richards had erected round Choi's systems collapsed under a storm of attack code, vanishing like a mirage to reveal the real item, dumb and panicking like a frightened horse, shrieking with alarms. The angry presences in the Grid outside surged in triumphantly and immediately assailed Richards.
"Richards," said Choi, not looking up, as idly as a man passing the time at a bus stop.
Richards heard him through a storm of Grid noise. "What?" he shouted. Trying to hear his own voice over the rush of hostile numbers was near impossible.
"I have a name. Peter Karlsson. It was he who bought the chassis, from me directly. I am sorry for the delay. Go and speak to him, he should know something. Goodbye, Richards."
Richards grinned inside. Tony always came through. "See you soon, Tony." Then, for the cat's benefit: "Fuck Chairman Mao."
Masked troopers stormed into the room, bulky with power assist armour. Guns at the ready, they circled Richards' sheath and trained their weapons upon it.
Northern Bandit's downloads ceased. The connection was cut, the sheath sagged, Richards was gone. There were a lot of people pointing guns at an inert and offensively cheap android. All around Tower Thirty-six, the Grid space of the People's Republic of Greater China roiled with fury.
Outside the Great Firewall, Richards woke up in a field surrounded by curious cartoon rabbits as big as groundcars. He stood up, and his fake tour group swirled to nothing. He made sure the dragons were watching and flicked a V at the wall. He hoped the PD government would not go hard on Tony. Richards would never trust Tony, but he'd need him again. In truth, the People's Dynasty probably felt the same way. Richards decided not to visit him in his office for a while.
He went home.
Richards secure-piped himself back to the office in the Wellington Arcology – a little under the speed of light when you took all the trickle and shunt into account – and remanifested himself in his fake office overlooking his fake version of ancient Chicago. He rubbed at his neck. His head felt off, splitting himself like that, and the sudden disconnection had left him disoriented. He needed a drink and a think.
First he attended to the chip fragments from Otto and Valdaire's Grid. He'd had a bunch of tailored near-I reassembling the fragments for the last three days, and they pestered him as clerks banging on the half-glass door, yammering that they were finally done. He took the results as paper from an eager, code-generated office junior, and slumped into his chair. The chip was incomplete, but quantum traces in the reconstruction suggested Qifang had fashioned a key, one that mimicked permissions from two separate sources. As the v-jack cases at UCLA needed three signatories for opening, that was pretty straightforward. Richards had been right.
Valdaire's trail was harder to crack. He shut his eyes and concentrated on his diffuse parts. Many of his scales had been killed, others had turned up nothing. Some, there were always some, had hit home. She'd fabricated a wide-band Grid cheater, a self-replicating machine devil, a sophisticated variant of those favoured by the Nigerian gangs, cyclically employing false IDs and actively screwing with security software. Its coding was illegal, really illegal, high-end criminal stuff empowered with cracked military cyberwarfare capsids, doubtless of Valdaire's devising. It was so illegal, in fact, that he informed Hughie by way of the million-layer EuPol bureaucracy that he had it in his possession.
He didn't trust Hughie not to use it against him when it suited him if he kept it quiet.
Coding like that took care and deliberation. There was no way she could have knocked it up before going on the run. Like deactivating the Six at UCLA, she'd cooked that up earlier. Intention for the v-jack robbery, or insurance? Hard to say. It was slippery as hell, and the virtualities he constructed to replicate and crack it imploded one after another, murdered by the reproduced virus. Frustrated, he persisted.
Version 13,078 gave him a valid simulation of her blocker, self-hate protocols deactivated. From it he estimated a spread of likely anchor points it would use to plug into the Grid, and the residual code patterns it would leave on the skin of the virtual world. There was no finding Valdaire, but she'd not been able to bring herself to kill her PA.
Chloe had copied herself off the net, fragging her main iteration and back-up in the process, copying her core programming into Valdaire's phone. She'd been careful, arguably more careful than Valdaire, but it was impossible for something like Chloe to sever all her ties with the machine world. Even weak AI needed some part of herself free floating in Grid space to unfold her and think. That's ultimately how the scales had found her. She had been expecting the tail, had spread herself thin, and was disorienting the scales with a barrage of locational information, spinning out some nasty programme of Valdaire's. Otto's adjutant couldn't tell where Chloe was on the Grid or the Real, but with the help of Richards' scales, it did narrow the phone's location down to a corner of Colorado.
Valdaire should have destroyed Chloe. He tagged her with a couple of scales. Finding her precise location would be down to Otto now; there was no more he could do from here.
It was a serious piece of forensic reconstruction. He was pleased with it.
Outside, ancient Chicago rained its rain and tooted its antique groundcar horns.
He decanted a glass of single malt that had no counterpart in the Real. He called Otto, but got no answer. Genie interce
pted the call and gave Richards a non-verbal interjection that told him Otto had gone off-Grid. Richards congratulated her on her task management via the same method. For an experson, she was learning quickly.
Never mind, Richards had made preparations for that. Otto liked to work unobserved. Richards left the codes and reconstruction data for Otto in one of the many anonymous info-drop sites they used, and sat back, dirty shoes on the scuffed leather of his desk. He took a sip of his drink.
"Ah," he said, happily.
Real or not, Richards liked his whisky.