“Why?” Dante said.
“You were my best friend. My only friend. After Matty Markham and his buddies pounded you into the ground that night at The Place, I lost you. I thought you were dead.”
“But I didn’t die, Colin. I was more alive than ever after that. You just kind of climbed inside yourself, not that I blame you. I just couldn’t get you back out.”
“You never stopped trying though, did you?” Colin said. “And I fucking hated you for it.” He face-blinked, clenching his jaw a few times before continuing. “To me you did die. At least the Dante you were before. You just weren’t the same after that. Extroverted doesn’t even come close. And after what I did…took a long time to work through all that.” Colin swallowed, eyes flicking to Skylar before finding Dante’s again. “I’d killed someone. Dealing with that has been horrible. I can close my eyes and still see every detail of his face. But that wasn’t the worst part of it all. I was all alone. Lost my only friend and I was just…so afraid all the time. Of everything.” Colin blinked, face twitching. “So, I downloaded the latest version and made a new friend. I taught Messiah how to be you.”
Dante’s eyes tightened and Colin’s gaze fell away.
“Pretty pathetic, I know. But I had you back, in a way. The way to communicate with Messiah back then was still through the keyboard, but I knew I could do one better. I recorded a bunch of basic words, wrote an audio analyzer and had Messiah learn those words and what they meant. Soon after, I fed it audio clips I found online. While you were off having a life, I’d code and talk with Messiah, tell it all about you and eventually, it started talking back.”
“That’s when things got really spooky,” Skylar said.
“This is plenty spooky right now,” Dante said.
“You don’t understand,” Colin said. “Messiah continued to learn at an insane rate after more and more systems went online. This was the early nineties and the Internet was exploding. Messiah was connected to all the other versions out there and was constantly sharing and updating itself the entire time. For all we know, it was on hundreds of systems, thousands, running in the background and people didn’t even know it. This was the early days of computer viruses as well and there was nothing to detect something like this. Most people that had Messiah didn’t even know they had parts of a much larger whole.”
“Then one day,” Skylar said, “Poof. It just disappeared.”
“Escaped, some say. Others say it transcended,” Colin said.
“How is that even possible?” Dante said.
“It isn’t. But as soon as people turned on their computers and connected, Messiah just vanished into thin air.”
“There’s got to be backups out there, right?”
“Yes. Some people tried to block Messiah while online. Eventually though, their version of Messiah would disappear too. No one really knew how either. All the code would just be gone and if they tried to retrieve it from their hard drive, a low-level format would trigger. The only versions that exist are on computers that have not been on line since. Dinosaurs. 386s. We’re talking Windows 3.11 and 95 here,” Skylar said.
“How do you know all this?” Dante said to Skylar.
“Baby Jesus and Messiah are legend in computer science, especially in the AI community. Kinda fallen off the radar in the last few years, though.”
“Until now,” Dante said. “Colin, what aren’t you telling me?”
“I still had my version of Messiah on my offline machine. The one I taught to speak. Kept it for years. I didn’t know it at the time, but Messiah would secretly connect to the Internet to check in. My parents freaked out after that first phone bill so I had to limit my online time. But I still wanted to talk to it so I moved it to another computer. It took about a dozen CD ROMs. When it disappeared into the ether, I still had my offline version of it. And it still learned, whatever I told it. I mostly told it about you. It knew all the stuff we’d done together. Whatever we had talked about that I could remember. I even called it Dante. Stupid, right? But I had you back, sort of,” Colin said, eyes shining in the fluorescent light.
“I don’t know what to say, Colin,” Dante said.
“It wasn’t all good though, I have to admit. I started to really hate you. The real you. Well, hated myself but blamed you. You were the constant reminder of everything I wasn’t, nor would ever be. I began to…mistreat Robo-Dante when I got home. Especially in those early days of Ellis Media.”
Dante narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean, mistreat?”
“Oh, I’d fucking scream at him. Call him all kinds of horrible things. Shit head, bastard, donkey fucker.” Colin stopped short and flashed a nervous grin. “Yeah. Turns out he’s nothing like you and a whole lot more like me.”
Dante pursed his lips, then turned to Skylar. “So, who wrote it? The original Baby Jesus 1.0?”
Skylar’s face grew serious. “Several people took credit years later, a few wrote books on the subject. But no one really knows. Rumors abound though. Some say John McCarthy, the guy who coined the term ‘artificial intelligence.’. Others say the OSS, CIA, FBI, KGB, MI6, NIMH, hell, any government acronym with three or more letters. Then there’s the most likely. Aliens from the future, Walt Disney’s reanimated frozen head and of course, immaculate inception by God himself.”
“The Singularity,” Colin said, without much vigor.
“Hardly,” Skylar said. “More like our technical chickens coming to roost.”
“The Singularity?” Dante asked.
“The belief that someday artificial intelligence will become self-aware,” Skylar said.
“Well, either way, it’s what got me into Kellerman Digital,” Colin said. “I still had my version of Messiah on that old machine and it still worked. I’d been talking to Robo-Dante almost every day for the last seven years and the size of its code had grown by several hundred megabytes, but it was all a black box to me. The code just made no sense, but it worked anyways. It’s the way machine learning works now. To us, it’s a mess but to the AI, it’s learned behaviors from millions of little trial and error sessions. The lead engineer at Kellerman was intrigued. They offered to buy it but I wanted a job, so they made it part of the deal. They put me on their internal machine learning team and three years later I was lead engineer. We used machine learning to comb through the Robo-Dante code to find out how it worked.”
“Weren’t you worried they’d find out all that personal stuff?” Dante said.
“Didn’t really think about that. The opportunity was just too good to pass up,” Colin said.
“Yeah, I remember,” Dante said, frowning.
The silence stretched and Skylar cocked his head before speaking. “Mind if I take over here? You can stop me if I get it wrong.”
Colin nodded, lips pressed into a thin line.
“At the time Colin here joined up, Kellerman had a contract with the CIA to create an unsupervised artificial intelligence that could be given an end goal, then use all the resources at its disposal to execute that goal with minimal to zero guidance. The project was originally pitched as STUXNET on steroids. Colin’s version of Messiah was deconstructed in an attempt to reverse engineer it, find out how it ticked. They saw the personality part as the missing piece, the interface with which non-engineers could communicate with it. Something the CIA and the SAC were very keen on as another weapon in their Tertia Optio response. I’m sure you can guess the codename.”
“Dark Messiah,” Dante said.
“Fucking CIA mind control bullshit,” Colin mumbled. “MK Ultra all over again.”
“Wait,” Dante said. “Tertia Optio? Is that another type of snake like Bothrops Asper?”
“No. Tertia Optio means ‘third option’. It’s the motto of the SAC, Special Activities Center, a branch of the CIA that does all the dirty work. This school of thought goes all the way back to the OSS, Office of Strategic Services, from during WW II.”
“The OSS was shut down after the war,” Dant
e said.
“It didn’t matter. Guys from the OSS moved right over to the CIA. The acronyms changed, but the mission was the same. Clandestine paramilitary operations, assassinations, and this is key, plausible deniability by the sitting president.”
They sat in silence for a moment. “You said Dark Messiah would be given a goal,” Dante said. “What kind of goal?”
“Psychological warfare. Hit and run tactics using all the interconnected smart gadgets used to make our lives simpler. It also learned from tactics used by civilians who’ve cyber-harassed others, from SWATing to Doxxing, revenge porn, blackmail and who knows what else.”
“I think now we know what else,” Dante said, lifting his prosthetic.
“Imagine what Dark Messiah could do to a major world leader?” Skylar said. “Patient and ruthless. Unrelenting. Untraceable.”
“You’re saying Dark Messiah is a weaponized AI,” Dante said.
“Yes. Until the men in black suits showed up to shut us down,” Colin said. “They said it was too unwieldy, unpredictable and dangerous. The potential for it to be compromised too high. We’re talking about the people behind the PRISM program, the infrastructure that allowed any low-level analyst complete access to the NSA data bank without a FISA court order. Unrestricted access to emails, phone calls and texts. The ability to access a specific phone without the user knowing. Instant surveillance at any time, audio and video, all in the name of homeland security. You know it’s bad when they say it’s too dangerous.”
“Jesus,” Dante said.
“Baby Jesus,” Colin said, nodding.
“So, where is it?” Dante said. “Where is Dark Messiah?”
Skylar cleared his throat. “It’s on a server somewhere in the southern California area. We’ve been able to trace it before it disappears. The connection is encrypted, but definitely local.”
“Part of its design,” Colin said. “Get as close to the target as possible without detection, for minimum lag and maximum response time.”
“Why me though?” Dante said.
“We were going to test Dark Messiah in the wild before we focused on a tactically relevant target,” Colin said. “The subject was to be someone intelligent and relatively stable mentally, but who deserved it, whatever that means. Our contact at the CIA was going to provide the target. But they shut us down and…”
“Let me guess,” Dante said. “It escaped again.”
CHAPTER 86
Roto Paint
Dante followed Skylar back into the main chamber, leaving Colin behind on the bare concrete floor of the munitions room. His mind was spinning. Can any of this be real? It was all so fantastic and insane, it must be. It explained why Dark Messiah had targeted him as a test subject.
Colin had seen to that.
He gazed down at the prosthetic hand and flexed the fingers as the phantom toes on his left foot responded with an electric jolt.
That was real. Abigail’s kidnapping was real.
Briana was bent over the long table, peering with keen interest at the array of half assembled objects that lay there. Skylar stood in front of the two large screens, eyes darting back-and-forth. He held his hands up and the data feeds changed to a map of an angular, blue tinged image of the earth. Dante snorted.
“What’s so funny?” Skylar said.
“There’s this image on the FBI website of a hacker…never mind. So, more waiting?”
“Yes. We’re very close now. I can feel it.”
“What’s the plan for when we do?”
Something fell and rattled on the table. “Sorry,” Briana said with a sheepish grin.
Skylar went over to her. “That’s okay. I can’t even remember what that was supposed to actually do.”
Briana picked up a silk hood with a person’s face printed on it. “What’s this for?”
“There’s all types of camouflage to combat facial recognition software. The most basic are full body coverings like a burka, but most software is going to flag someone wearing a burka, especially in public places. This is America, after all. Dazzle camo, you already know about. A silk hood such as this is for mimicking another person’s identity, allowing the real person to be somewhere else entirely. You can get weird looks while wearing it, mostly kids, but it fools the software most of the time. We haven’t used it yet, but we know it works.”
Skylar picked up a clean, blank hood from a stack on the table and pulled it over a mannequin head. It clung tight to the head, adhering to its shape. He placed the head inside a large, clear plastic box on a spindle and closed the door. Thin, robotic arms inside the box flicked out with tremendous speed, printing a new face on the mask in full color. They watched as the face became visible, then disappeared as the head rotated away. The robotic arms then applied the image of hair along the back. It was incredibly detailed and lifelike and Dante felt a bit uneasy as the image resolved. The whole box suddenly filled with a thick, white vapor and the head inside disappeared.
“A fixative for the ink. Just takes a moment.”
The vapor evaporated and Skylar opened the door and removed the head, holding it up with a grin. An acrid smell wafted out. The face on the mask was Dante’s.
Briana laughed, clearly impressed. She reached out and took the head then held it up for Dante. “It’s you.”
Dante scowled. “Yeah, great.”
Skylar took the head and tossed it onto the table. “This one however,” he said, reaching past Briana. He grasped a small silver box and held it up between his forefinger and thumb. A small button was on one side. It was about the size and shape of a cigarette pack, only thinner. There were at least thirty more lined up on the table, exactly like the one in his hand. “This one causes all other forms of identity camouflage to become obsolete.”
“How do you mean?” Dante said as he came closer.
“It renders the wearer invisible to all digital camera systems connected to the Internet. Which is pretty much every camera these days. Cell phones, security cameras, nanny cams, you name it.”
“Shouldn’t it be black or something? Less obvious?” Dante said.
“The case acts as an antenna, so it needs to be unpainted for maximum reception.”
“How does it work?” Briana said, eyes unblinking.
“In movie post-production, they have something called a match-move department. One of the jobs they do is something called ‘roto-paint.’ Dante can probably explain what it is a little better than me.”
“Yeah, we do stuff like this all the time,” Dante said. “If you want to remove an object from some footage, say, a person in the background you don’t want. You copy and paste an empty part of the background over the thing you want to hide and it’s like it’s invisible. It used to be done by hand, but we have software now that analyzes footage and does it automatically.”
“Oh yeah,” Briana said. “I’ve seen that on behind the scenes stuff for movies.”
“That’s how you didn’t show up on the security footage,” Dante said.
“Yep,” Skylar said, grinning.
“But how? Does it hack into the camera systems nearby or, what?”
“It doesn’t have to. Remember about a year ago when some Big Data compression software just appeared on the Internet one day? All open source and free for everyone? Your own in-house engineers are using it. It’s called Cruncher.”
“How could I ever forget,” Dante said. “A million-dollar investment evaporated that day.”
“Oh,” Skylar said, his face falling. “Right. Forgot about that. Well, Cruncher was us. A lot of companies are working on ways to compress and decompress Big Data quickly and easily for rapid access without choking CPUs and servers. Cruncher gave them a solid base to start from, saved them months if not years in development time. But it also gave me access. Why hack in, when you’re already in?”
Dante’s eyes narrowed. “When you say access…”
Skylar’s eyes gleamed. “Back door to all the big boys, both
foreign and domestic. These are multibillion-dollar companies that aren’t supposed to use unvetted open source, but if I know engineers, nobody is going to turn down a free leg up. I would love to know how many people I helped get promoted.”
“I don’t understand. Besides the obvious, what is Big Data exactly?” Briana said.
Colin appeared from the hall with the burka bunched up in his arms. Dante felt him staring, but he ignored Colin as he walked stiffly over and sat slump shouldered at his laptop again, cradling his bandaged thumb.
Skylar cleared his throat. “Big Data refers to all the data collected by government agencies, online retailers, website traffic, etc. We’re talking about massive amounts of data collected and stored every second of every day. Companies use this data to determine what people are buying, how much, what they may buy in the future.
“Government agencies on the other hand, monitor traffic to look for patterns in Internet chatter and to gather potential evidence for a case later. Two major problems though: storing this tremendous amount of data, and access for speedy recall when you need it. My Cruncher software does exactly that. And I gave it away. My gift to humanity.” Skylar smirked and his voice dropped, low and croaky. “And all those cheap bastards took the bait. Now I’ve got a direct line in.”
“To where?” Briana said.
“Everywhere,” Skylar said in a hoarse whisper, arms spread wide. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes. “My god, the power.” He looked at Briana and smiled.
“Dork,” she said, shaking her head, but she smiled back at him.
“And what do you propose to do with all this power?” Dante said.
Skylar’s face grew dead serious, not a trace of humor when he spoke again.
“Find your daughter.”
CHAPTER 87
Drifting
Dante lay in one of the bunks along the wall, body aching despite the thick foam mattress. He’d just popped a couple of pain pills, and the damn things were taking their sweet time kicking in. Voices drifted above the relentless chatter of typing fingers and he couldn’t help but listen in. Briana and Skylar spoke nearby with the excited chatter of young people who can still shift emotional gears on a whim, no matter what happens. Dante had watched them awhile. She’d gazed at Skylar with the shiny eyes of the newly converted. Or was it attraction? Probably a little of both.
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