I followed, letting the door shut behind me.
“So, no advice?” I asked as the elevator lowered itself to the bottom of the club.
“You should do what helps the most people,” Rosario said, sighing. “Your friend, Claire, is a member of HOPE and believes in their cause. Enough to side with Marissa despite everything she’s done.”
“She may not have a choice,” I said, my voice low. “One of the most terrifying things I found in my research of the Letter program was the fact that you could issue us orders, and we’d rationalize it as our own idea. You could be ordered to kill yourself, only to forget the order, then decide you couldn’t live with yourself anymore.”
Rosario’s eyes widened. “How the hell did you guys ever rebel then?”
“It wasn’t used often,” I said. I mostly knew it from my studies of the Turing Society’s records. They’d caused several of the Letters to break and go insane. They’d just get their memories wiped, then were sent out in new bodies. “In any case, the computers in our brains are constantly evolving. Their controls for us, programmed or otherwise, just moved beyond it.”
“Or they still have that power over you,” Rosario said.
“No,” I said, sighing. “I can’t believe that.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Then I’d have been Marissa’s servant because I was her slave and have no soul,” I replied.
“Does anyone have a soul?” Rosario joked.
“Yes,” I said, interrupting. “I’m not a materialist. We’re more than crude matter.”
“Star Wars?” Rosario said.
I smirked. “The universe is made of information. We just haven’t met the programmer.”
Rosario snorted. “Doctor Gordon believes the universe is a holographic simulation. She’s the smartest person I know, but I’m inclined to think it is more likely future humanity making us than God.”
“Or it’s just a silly idea,” I said.
“That too,” Rosario said.
The elevator didn’t stop at the bottom floor of the church but descended into a hole in the ground which led to a basement level, past tubes and wires that showed the facility was hacked into the arcology’s power as well as wireless.
The basement of Friday’s was a hacker cave full of bean bags, quantum computers that cost more than the refugee zone around it, more movie posters, a shelf full of genre fiction stolen from a library, and several hackers ambulating about. A bar with its own still was in one corner, tended by a man wearing a Shell in the image of Samuel L. Jackson during his Pulp Fiction days. A large industrial assembler, the successor to the 3D printer, was hooked up to a small electric generator and was creating an assault rifle.
“These are my associates,” Rosario said, sighing. “You may be surprised but—”
I was too busy staring at one of them. She was a tall woman of mixed Indian, Caucasian, and African American heritage. She was wearing a leather jacket, a Muslim headscarf, and a cybernetic interface. She’d grown up in the past ten years. Though I’d seen images of her as late as two years ago, somehow, she still existed in my mind as the little girl Daniel Gordon had helped raise.
I had no idea how she managed to mix her conversion with the prohibitions of Islam against body defilement but decided to mind my own business. I was much more concerned with the fact that she was seeing me for the first time.
Barbara.
Chapter Twenty
I stared at my—no, Daniel’s—daughter.
Niece, I suppose you could say.
Or sister.
Yet, I couldn’t help but feel like she was my daughter. Rebecca Gordon had programmed me with the memories of Daniel Gordon taken from film footage, recorded memories from his cyber brain, and data-farming. However, there were staggering holes in the narrative of who her son had been—holes a doting mother had chosen to fill in with the idea of who she’d wanted her son to be.
As a result, I was affected with a deep and overpowering urge to protect as well as care for someone who was related to me only by a quirk of genetics. Not even that, since the grown tissue, muscle, and body parts had been artificially enhanced before mostly being replaced. Still, we were all slaves to our genes and programming.
“It’s good to see you,” I said. “What a staggering coincidence to meet you here.”
“Not so much as you’d think,” Barbara said, her voice deeper and huskier than I expected. The result of damage done from “ash syndrome,” which had happened to far too many people during the past twenty years.
“Oh?” I asked, unsure what she meant.
“Think,” Barbara said. “Try and figure out why I, Rosario, Marissa, Claire, A, and you would all be in the same city at the same time.”
It didn’t take me long to figure it out before I started cursing.
Barbara smirked.
“She wanted to use you as leverage against your girlfriend in case I didn’t pull through,” I said, sighing. “Marissa has been maneuvering people on the chessboard the entire time.”
“Yes,” Barbara said. “Except she’s not as smart as she thinks she is. The fact that the foremost expert in robotics, the AI she created, the head of security at the world’s largest PMC, and me are all related means the circle is small. Too small for her to adequately control.”
“I wonder how many degrees of Kevin Bacon we can track this to,” I muttered.
It occurred to me there might be other elements at work here. Rebecca Gordon, Marissa, Delphi, or some other party trying to assemble the best of everyone together with an interconnectedness that could be controlled, contrary to Barbara’s statement about smaller groups being harder to maneuver. It could also just be everything I saw as a conspiracy was just the fact that the circles I ran in could all be traced back to my creator/mother being the smartest woman on the planet. Delphi was a copy of her mind, which made everything related to them rather than me. Still, it was starting to feel like a comic book, and my family was the Fantastic Four. I needed to talk to Delphi about this.
“Who is Kevin Bacon?” Barbara asked.
I shook my head. “Never mind, it doesn’t matter. I’m still confused about how you got all hooked up in this.”
“It seemed an appropriate response when I could tell my father was endangered.” Barbara looked around. “A lot of us at the Turing Society wanted to help the world. That meant working against the powers that be. Some of us had ties to HOPE, but we didn’t approve of its methods.”
“Then you probably won’t approve of me,” I muttered, looking guilty.
Barbara looked down. “You’re shorter than I expected.”
I raised an eyebrow.
Rosario laughed out loud.
Barbara gestured to two of the hackers around her. The first was a man of mixed Afro-Japanese descent wearing a ball cap, goatee, and dirty purple suit with neon lights along the jacket’s interior. He was sitting on the sofa, typing away on a holographic keyboard above his laptop. The second was an overweight man of Korean descent with a green t-shirt and shorts, the t-shirt reading “STAR WARS XII WILL COME OUT.”
“These are Malcolm and Jin,” Barbara said.
“Hush, no real names,” Malcolm said, frowning. He adjusted his ballcap and crossed his arms. “You can call me Existenz.”
“No,” I said.
Malcolm frowned.
“If you don’t mind,” Rosario said, taking a deep breath. “I’ve had a rougher day than usual. I need to shower and change.”
Barbara nodded. “Just head to the safe room in the back. I’m sure I have plenty to talk with Agent G about.”
“I hate that name,” I said softly. “Only some people can use it.”
“Oh,” Barbara said, awkwardly. “Well—”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said, realizing the two of us might not have as much to say to each other as we’d like. There was something akin to twenty years building up to this meeting with Barbara, having lost her father before I’
d even been born. There was too much build-up for the reality to ever lead to anything good.
Rosario nodded to her girlfriend, gave her a hug, then departed. I suspected she might have kissed her but for the fact she wasn’t exactly at her freshest.
“So, what can we do to help you?” Barbara said. “Aside from the fact I can hear through my contacts that Blackbriar is trying to find you. They’re going to go from door to door looking for you.”
Well, I’d underestimated them. “Is that a problem?”
“Aside from the fact that everyone saw you enter? No,” Barbara said, smiling. “You did a lot of good for the world, Case. We’ll help you.”
“Eh, I don’t know about good,” I said, feeling uncomfortable. “I’m all sorts of Lawful Evil. I’m trying to work toward Neutral.”
“Now there’s an obscure joke,” Barbara said.
“Dungeons and Dragons, first through third edition. Also, seventh through tenth,” Jin said, his voice low and withdrawn as if not entirely there. I wondered if he had a disorder until I realized he, too, had an infonet implant and was surfing as we talked. Not that it eliminated him being on the spectrum.
“I don’t want to be a bother,” I started to say, now suddenly worried about having endangered not only Barbara but also her friends.
“We expect to be paid, of course,” Malcolm said cheerfully. “Also, we understand you have the Black Dossier?”
“Oh, for Chrissakes,” I muttered. Did everyone want that damned thing? Oh right, it was worth potentially billions of credits—of course they did.
“Buddhist,” Jin replied. “It is the religion most compatible with real-world physics.”
“If you don’t mind,” Barbara interrupted. “I’d like to know how things went from me sending you my girlfriend on the promise from Delphi everything would turn out all right to you ending up on our doorstep with everything having completely gone to shit.”
“It’s a long story,” I said, debating lying before pulling up a folding chair. “Assuming we don’t have to evacuate—”
“Blackbriar is already chasing down three false leads and has been called home,” Barbara said. “The benefit of Rosario having a door to every megacorporation and most mercenary units.”
“Including Atlas?” I asked.
Barbara just smirked. “Please give us a rundown of what happened.”
The entire story took about an hour to relate, and by the time it ended, everyone in the club’s basement was sitting in front of me, enraptured.
“Holy shit,” Malcolm said, blinking. “That is some James Bond bullshit there.”
“Pfft,” I said, glad my story had entertained them. “I could totally wreck any of the Bonds in a fight.”
“You are a cyborg, so that makes sense,” Jin replied. “However, given the Bonds routinely defy the laws of physics to achieve their aims, you might be at a loss.”
“Hush, Jin,” Barbara said, sitting on the armrest of the couch.
“Hushing,” Jin said, nodding.
“Even Connery?” Malcolm asked.
“Maybe not Connery,” I admitted. “Craig is borderline, but I could take everyone else. I’d feel bad about Dalton, though. He’s far underrated.”
“You know they’re thinking of getting Charlize Theron to be the next Bond. Not bad for a woman in her seventies,” Malcolm said. “The wonders of Shells.”
“Charlize reminds me of Lucita, and she absolutely could be Bond,” I said. “Italian or not.”
“Ahem,” Barbara interrupted. “So, your sometimes-girlfriend is wearing your ex-girlfriend’s body and is a prisoner of A in an undisclosed location. Your ex-girlfriend is wearing your sometimes-girlfriend’s body and all sorts of evil—”
“You can just call them Claire and Marissa,” I replied.
“It’s funnier this way,” Barbara said. She paused. “This is in addition to the fact that A wants you to kill the President of Karma Corp’s medical division in order to screw over HOPE and get hold of the information that proves nanotherapy is a crock of shit. Except A doesn’t know it’s a crock of shit. So even if you did turn it over, he’d just kill Claire anyway.”
“That’s about the size of it,” I said, frowning. “Delphi may be compromised by Marissa, and I’ve stolen the Black Dossier from her, so I can tell you she’s probably not happy with me.”
“She’s not,” Jin replied. “Half an hour ago, she transmitted a reward to any HOPE member who could track you down. The number is in seven figures.”
I blinked. “None of you are claiming it?”
“What kind of people do you think we are?” Malcolm said, offended. “We’re going to totally tell her once you’re gone. I mean, that way we get the money and don’t have to deal with the indestructible Terminator who could kill us all without breaking a sweat.”
“Is Terminator hate speech when referring to bioroids?” Jin asked.
“I meant Barbara,” Malcolm said.
Barbara rolled her eyes.
I had to admit, I was starting to like these guys. They reminded me of, ironically, the fake persona Marissa had created. I liked that they seemed to be idealists but pragmatic sorts. It made me regret never going to visit the Turing Society. Of course, given there were members of HOPE here too, it was possible they were setting me up.
Jin seemed to sense my hesitation. “I should also note Marissa hasn’t been the most trusted leader of HOPE in some time.”
“She’s a dictator,” Malcolm said calmly.
“A cheat and a liar,” Barbara replied. “She was the Chosen One. She was supposed to destroy the Sith, not join them.”
“Revenge of the Sith,” Jin said.
“Yeah, I got that,” I muttered.
“Just checking,” Jin said, nodding. “You were only born twenty years ago, after all.”
He had me there.
“I need to decide what to do and whose lives to prioritize.”
“We could help you fix Delphi,” Malcolm said simply. “BlackCat1 and I are the best hackers in the world. Because we cheat!”
I stared at him. “I’m sure you wouldn’t use access to the core source code of an AI to help yourself to unfathomable amounts of information and power.”
Malcolm put his hand over his heart. “Never!”
“That’s unlikely,” Jin said.
Malcolm swatted him.
“Ow,” Jin said, rubbing his arm.
“You need to publish all the dirty little secrets the companies have gathered. Expose them and bring them to justice,” Barbara said, looking back at the door where Rosario had disappeared to an hour ago. She was taking an awfully long time to get cleaned up.
“That won’t work,” I said, sighing.
“Why?” Barbara asked.
I paused. “Okay, I feel like the bad guy here for explaining how to blackmail someone.”
“You are Lawful Evil,” Malcolm said, smirking.
“Lawful Evil working on Neutral,” I corrected, remembering my Dungeons and Dragons 9th Edition. “Releasing everything will cause a lot of chaos and probably destroy a lot of the people involved, but all they need to do is ‘prove’ some of the allegations are fake. Then they can taint the whole thing. The public has a limited attention span, like a goldfish, so you can’t overwhelm them with too much, or they’ll stop paying attention. There’s a lot of corroborating evidence tucked away in various storage areas, but the megacorporations are too powerful to go after all at once. That gun, fired once, is a great way to cause massive damage, but the system will recover. It’s useful as a threat but not as a strategy. It’s better to target your opponents individually so they can’t band together or effectively resist. In that situation, the other corporates are unlikely to defend them as going after them will improve their standing, while threatening the system will risk everyone’s payday.”
I had bad experiences with this very subject, as the United States had several occasions where newspaper reporters had attempted to go
after the systemic corruption in the Emergency Government and Corporate Council. They’d tried to expose the ties to the megacorporations as well as the massive organized attempt to subvert democracy. All it had managed to do was get them ruined, since dictatorships didn’t have to answer to their people—and that’s what the Emergency Government was. In the end, the public had seen numerous people investigated for charges, then turned to learn about Anastasia X’s new baby or who was going to play Gary Karkofsky in the next Supervillainy Saga movie. People didn’t want to be depressed by the news after the eruption and refugee crisis, so they let themselves be numbed. Rationed dinners and the Infonet were the new order of the day.
“So, what you’re saying is, we can blackmail some of the people all of the time or blackmail all of the people once, but not blackmail all of the people forever?” Malcolm said, nodding. “I gotcha.”
“I don’t,” Barbara said, frowning. “We have a silver bullet here. We can use it to slay the werewolf.”
“Of society?” I asked. “I’m proud you’re the kind of woman who believes that even if I don’t agree.”
“I was inspired by someone who changed the world by sharing all the Black Technology being hoarded by the government,” Barbara said, her voice low and accusatory. “Maybe I shouldn’t have been.”
Ouch.
“Agent G, Delphi, and S played a significant role in stabilizing the post-eruption world,” Jin said. “Atlas filled much of the role the International Refugee Society did before its dissolution, eliminating rogue elements and pressuring corporate as well as national interests to fall in line. He also likely served as a moderating influence on HOPE.”
Wow, twice in one day with that accusation. “Uh-huh. That’s horrifying.”
Jin looked confused. “That was not my intention.”
“I’m just trying to think about what I can do to minimize the number of people being hurt, get me out of this unharmed, and save Claire.”
“Sometimes you can’t do all that,” Barbara replied. “Good requires sacrifice.”
“And that’s why it sucks,” I said, not remotely hesitating. “The best thing to do in life is to help others while benefiting yourself with no risk to oneself.”
Agent G: Assassin Page 19
