“What’s ‘interpreter AI’?”
“Like a middleman. The code comes from the stream and the AI converts it into video. This is the only way to see anything through a connection you honestly shouldn’t have access to under any circumstances.”
Chloe watched the symbols rain, waiting. Why did she have access, if she wasn’t supposed to? If she understood Brad correctly, she was about to get a live view of Alexa going about her business right there inside O headquarters. That was hardly possible, let alone permissible. Who had made this connection, and how?
It was the mystery man. The one who turned on Andrew’s Crossbrace panel to speak to you.
Was that it? It almost made sense. The caller had admitted to going behind Alexa’s back once, it made sense that he’d do it again.
“Okay,” Brad said. “I have it. There’s a slight delay because the third-party interpreter needs a few seconds to do its work. There may also be skips in the video as the interpreter buffers to catch up — something that may happen in chunks due to the unstable nature of this questionably authorized connection.”
Chloe nodded at Brad, ready and more eager than she’d have imagined. It didn’t matter how fragmented the video ended up being; she’d take it. She’d followed the trail of breadcrumbs from her mystery caller to that one question:
What is Alexa doing right now?
Almost as soon as she’d asked it, someone had given her a window into Alexa’s privacy. It had to mean something.
Answers to some of her deepest questions were about to be answered.
Right now, was Alexa discussing the company’s plans for Chloe, decades in the making?
Or was Chloe about to drop in on Alexa as she met with her true father?
She found herself recalling Brad’s final words before initiating the illicit data stream.
And Chloe?
Yes, Brad?
I’m sorry.
A chill washed over her.
Before she could weigh the emotion, the code vanished, replaced by a mostly solid hologram. Chloe found herself in the projection’s center as if she were sitting behind a polished wood table in a gray-walled room.
There were people to each side: the Six.
Instead of the projection focusing on Alexa, Chloe found herself looking at Andrew standing in front.
“All I ever wanted,” he said, “was to do my best.”
Chloe looked at Brad. He didn’t quite blend with the streaming hologram and appeared off to one side, his hue slightly bluer than the rest. His form slightly more substantial. He was still sitting and his face was bothered — as if he knew something Chloe didn’t, and wasn’t eager to report it.
“What is this?”
“You wanted to know what Alexa was doing, so I asked. This stream answered.”
Chloe looked to the left — Alexa was indeed in the room, not far from Andrew.
“But what’s going on? Why is Andrew talking to O?”
Brad said nothing.
Andrew resumed. “I didn’t know what I was getting into when you recruited me. I thought it’d just be another acting job. I hope you’ll believe me when I say that I always followed instructions. Maybe I went off the rails at a few places and yeah, maybe I stepped over the line and forgot my place, but I never disobeyed you.”
“I remember an ultimatum or two being offered,” said someone in the room — a woman with sharp features and a sharper voice.
“Only because I felt trapped,” Andrew insisted. “Only because I was desperate.”
“Or because you wanted a bigger piece of the action,” said a man in a cowboy hat: the one known only as Houston.
The hologram glitched. For a moment it vanished, returning in spurts without sound.
“What’s happening?” Chloe asked Brad.
“Just part of what I mentioned. You’re not getting this direct. It’s being sent through the interpreter.”
“So it’s second-hand.”
Brad shook his head. “Interpreted. The pieces that come through are unfiltered — just slightly edited.”
The hologram returned. Andrew was speaking again.
“—point is that you can trust that I’ll do what you say this time, too, as long as I don’t have to worry about anything … you know, going wrong.”
“With Chloe Shaw, you mean,” said a speaker with short-cropped, bright pink hair.
Chloe flinched. Why was she being dragged into this?
“With anything.”
Houston laughed.
“Look, I met her at the cafe, just like you asked. I chatted her up, and I think I did a good job. You say she can read people? That she’s stupid levels of intuitive? Well, she intuited my act just fine. She never knew you’d sent me. She doesn’t know, even now, that I work for O.”
Chloe looked at Brad, who was impassive: he’d seen the raw stream before her and knew its spirit already. Enough to know how much it had to be hurting and to say he was sorry beforehand.
Her soul withered. Her head wanted to hang, her spine longed to collapse. A million-ton weight on her chest was squeezing the air from her lungs.
“Even now — even after all that’s happened — I haven’t told her a goddamn thing,” Andrew continued, his manner righteous. “She told me all about you and I managed to keep a straight face, not letting on that I knew the other side of the story because I was with her on your orders. I had sex with her that first time exactly as Charisma and Benson specified, so their little cameras would get a few good shots. And the time Parker wanted me to be all forceful and angry, to try and compensate for the way she figured things out? Well, I did that, too. Every step of the way, I’ve done as you’ve asked. So what if I got in a little too deep? That only happened because I—”
Again, the hologram blipped out of existence.
“Bring it back!”
“I can only take what the interpreter gives me, Chloe. I’m sorry.”
A tornado of emotions: hurt for sure, a crushing sense of betrayal, anger facing in every direction, broken pride, and oceans full of foolishness.
Like mother, like daughter, it seemed.
“Did you know about this?” Chloe demanded.
“No. I’m just finding out now.”
Now she was crying. Angry, unauthorized tears cut hot lines down her cheeks. Chloe didn’t even know what she was feeling. Was it loss? Or unadorned fury?
“Do you swear?”
“Yes, Chloe. I told you: I work for you. My allegiances are to you.”
“But O … they gave you to me!”
“They gave you the canvas. My intelligence was free to evolve as your guide to The Beam.”
Chloe glared.
“It’s true, Chloe. If there are sides, I’m on yours. O’s connection has tried repeatedly to access your state, whereabouts, and activities, but while you are in my presence I have blocked that access. There was a probing quality to it. A sense that they wanted to know more than what you were having for dinner.”
“And when Andrew came over?”
“O was blind to your encounters here.”
“But it doesn’t matter, does it? Because Andrew was here, and he’s been spying on me all along.”
Chloe held her temper, clenching her fists. Anger mingled with intense pain to sharpen every edge. She didn’t just want to make things right; she wanted to lash out. She didn’t just want retribution; she wanted destruction. She was a tigress, eager to slash and kill all that threatened to harm her — or that already had.
“Was any of it real?” she asked: a pathetic question whose answer Brad couldn’t possibly know.
“I don’t know, Chloe.”
“But they sent him to me. They sent him to pretend to love me. To fuck me while they watched. They …”
She tried to continue, found herself too inarticulate, able only to half-scream. Then she found her words again and went on, thinking out loud, fury boiling like a live volcano.
“What did they
want, Brad? Was this just another piece of their sick game?”
“I don’t know.”
“Look deep. Dive into some of those restricted files you won’t tell me about. This trumps everything, Brad. Tell me. Tell me what they’ve been up to … following me and watching me … and my mother … for sixty fucking years!”
The room blipped back to life. The mood of the seven holographics had subtly changed, suggesting that while the stream had been interrupted, the Six and Andrew had argued their way to some sort of an understanding.
“—can promise is that I’ll try,” Andrew said.
“Do better than try,” Parker said.
“I can’t control how Chloe responds,” Andrew said. “I can only control my part.”
“Then control it aggressively,” Alexa said.
“Like I promised, all I can do is try.”
The room mumbled. Apparently, they’d fought this sort of thing out before, and a promise to try was the best they could do.
“What will your story be?” asked the pink haired woman. “It needs to be good if she’s to believe you.”
“Not to be an ass,” Andrew said, “but I’ve always been able to make her believe me.”
Chloe gripped the coffee table, unaware that her hands had been on it, her nails digging light scratches into the surface.
“What are you going to tell her?” Alexa asked.
“I haven’t thought it through yet. But I will.”
“It needs to explain why you’ve been so strange. It even needs to explain why you dressed up when you headed out today. You should have seen how she reacted after you left. She was dumbfounded by the way you tripped all over yourself with your shitty non-explanations.” Alexa scoffed. “Great acting, indeed.”
Parker snapped his fingers. “I know. Tell her someone died.”
“Someone died?”
Parker sat up straighter. “It’s perfect. Someone was sick, or in trouble. Then they died. Maybe they even committed suicide.” He shifted, gaining inspiration. “Yes. This is great. It was something personal. You yourself were distraught, Andrew. She’ll understand. You were confused; you kept to yourself. She won’t blame you for keeping secrets if someone you cared about passed.”
“And today was the funeral,” Alexa said. “Hence the suit.”
Parker pointed. “That’s right. You had to pay your respects. Play this right and it might help you out. She’ll sympathize. She won’t be angry that you kept it from her; she’ll think it’s sweet, the way you were holding in your personal pain.”
“To protect her,” Charisma added.
“Exactly.” Parker turned to Andrew. “This is great. Not only does it all work, it might make things better.”
“How is this different from what we’ve been doing with him?” Olivia asked. “How is this a change of direction?”
“It acknowledges Andrew’s goals with her,” Parker said, “rather than only our own.”
“What goals?” Houston chortled. “He’s already had her ass in pretty much every way possible.”
The severe looking woman gave Houston an annoyed glance and kept speaking to Parker. “But the arrangement is exactly the same.”
“But it’s not,” Parker said, taking control. “In the past, we’ve ordered and he’s done. Now we can step out of the way.”
Alexa said, “And let Andrew do whatever he wants with her.”
The severe woman crossed her arms and sat back, clearly unsatisfied with the answer.
Andrew frowned, confused. He was shaking his head.
“What, Andrew?” Alexa asked. “Small incidents aside, you’ve done a great job of pretending you actually like her. She even believes it, heart and soul.”
“I—” Andrew began.
“But now you look unclear about the plan,” Alexa interrupted. “Is it that you don’t think she’ll buy it? That you’ve been worried about someone who died, and that’s why you’ve been so weird?”
“It’s just that—”
“Let me put it this way,” Alexa said. “Do you think you can convince her? If you really put your best, most Shakespearean chops into it, do you believe you can convince Chloe that this has all just been one big misunderstanding?”
“Of course I could. But—”
“But what?”
All eyes on Andrew. The room was quiet, and Andrew clearly felt the pressure for his answer.
“It’s more lies,” he said.
“And?”
The room waited. Alexa had her hand up and open; a gesture of preparing to accept it.
“I—” Andrew began again.
The hologram vanished. Chloe turned to Brad, his head shaking.
“Our temporary permissions have been revoked. That’s all there is.”
Chloe barely heard him. Her heart was full of murder.
Murder for Andrew, who had betrayed her.
Murder for O, who had set her up.
Murder for Alexa, who had been snooping in Chloe’s life forty years before her conception.
Everything around her was losing focus.
“Chloe?” Brad asked, seeing her far-off face. “Are you all right?”
The clock ticked.
Chloe blinked. Looked down. Opened her clenched hands, then stood straight, the room seeming to slowly revolve while she anchored its center.
“No,” she said.
CHAPTER NINE
Parker left the room first, escorting Andrew from the building with stern words and the promise of an agreement if Andrew played along this time … but no forgiveness if he didn’t.
They were followed by Houston, then Olivia. Benson and Charisma headed out together a few minutes later, after tying up a lingering vidstream-business question with Alexa.
Then finally Alexa found herself alone in the emptied conference room, the door ajar as if inviting her to go as well.
Five minutes later, a manicured hand appeared on the doorframe, followed by a head with a short, well-behaved haircut. The face that charmed a thousand psychological test subjects into bizarre sexual experiments.
Parker peeked into the room, scoping its emptiness in a way that was nothing short of guilty. “Are you alone?”
“No. Houston is hiding behind that bamboo.” She pointed. The single stalk with its two buds at the top was as thick around as a pair of fingers. An acre would barely conceal the man’s girth.
“Should we go somewhere else?” he said, ignoring the sarcasm.
“It’s fine. Just shut the door.”
“If anyone calls for either of us …”
“It’s fine, Parker. Even if they knew for sure that we were meeting without them again, we can always lie. You’re good at that, right?” She didn’t add the other thing that made her so sure they could keep deceiving the other four board members: that Panel-level Beam access gave her network permissions and abilities that even Parker’s level of access couldn’t imagine.
Parker closed the door. The room was quiet.
“Why did you ping me to come back?”
“As everyone started to file out,” Alexa said, metering her words, wishing again that she had a mental vault to keep her stories straight, “Sarah put up an alert in my corneal display.”
“Your Beam porter? Why didn’t she appear as a hologram?”
“Privacy, for one. I had DND on for the meeting. But mainly for discretion.”
“Discretion about what?”
Alexa paused. Thought. Then she simply said, “Chloe left her apartment.”
“So what?”
“She moved out from under the blind spot her avatar’s been using to block her activities from us. Right past the nano cluster we placed at her building’s front door.”
Parker’s expression dropped. The cluster measured all sorts of biometric and visible data points, but it was only worth mentioning when those metrics moved away from normal. Alexa wouldn’t be mentioning it if there wasn’t something wrong; a report that the cluster m
easured Chloe as normal was like a fire alarm ringing to tell occupants that there wasn’t a fire.
“And?”
“Her blood pressure was way up. Her Galvanic skin responses were all kinds of off-kilter. The flash scan indicated extreme tension in her neck, shoulders, and upper back. And her fists. I looked at the images, Parker. Her fists were clenched so tightly, her fingertips had turned white.”
“She’s stressed.”
Alexa shook her head. “Once out of the blind spot, the cluster hijacked a location ping from her handheld.”
“What about it?”
“She checked traffic.”
“Okay …”
“Between her building and Andrew’s.”
Parker’s who cares expression finally fell.
“I used our Quark access to check her mobile for outgoing calls. She tried to call Andrew. Twice. But both times, she only let the connection try for around ten or fifteen seconds. Then she killed it, as if changing her mind, and ran a Crossbrace search.”
“That still doesn’t mean—”
“His name plus the word ‘actor.’”
Parker paled.
“The second time, she searched for his name plus ‘O.’ Then she did a search with his name and my name, together. Then yours, Parker.”
“Maybe it’s a coincidence.”
“I asked Sarah to run a diagnostic on our internal systems, here at O. Turns out there was a tunnel connection, quite well hidden, active today between 3:06 and 3:24.”
Parker’s eyes went to one of the room’s digital displays to check the time, but Alexa spared him the effort.
“During the meeting we just had. Sarah couldn’t tell which system had connected to ours, but she could tell me which part of town it came from. Which city block.”
“Shit,” Parker said.
“Shit is right.”
“We need to tell the others. They need to know there’s a shitstorm coming. Forget about what Andrew tries to do now; we’ll lose her for sure.”
“I know,” Alexa said. “That’s actually why I called you back. I need you to tell them. The tunneled connection used the protocol we installed to watch this room covertly when Houston brought in those sponsor connections, so we could know what he was up to. Today’s hacker exploited that weakness. See the problem?”
The Braverman Experiment Page 6