by D L Young
“Well, now you have time to learn,” Maddox said.
The kid started to protest, but Maddox cut him off. “All the hardest gangsters play poker, kid.”
Tommy considered this, his gaze dropping back to the deck. “Poker,” he said quietly. He nodded, seeming to reach a decision. “All right, then.” The kid pocketed the cards. “I’m out of here.”
“Off the grid,” Beatrice reminded him. “And tell your turfies to keep their mouths shut.”
“I got it, I got it,” the kid said defensively. “Laters.”
Maddox watched Tommy as he left, his gaze lingering on the door after the kid was gone. When Rooney had done the same to him, gifting him a deck of cards and ordering him off the grid for a couple weeks after a particularly dicey job, Maddox hadn’t listened, hopping back into his games within hours. He hoped the kid was smarter than he’d been. Virtual space was much like the real world in the aftermath of a crime. Just as you never knew how many beat cops were on the lookout for you, you didn’t know many bots had been dispatched to sniff out your data profile. Lying low for a while was the smart move, both for your meat sack and for your digital self.
Later that night, Maddox lay awake as Beatrice slept next to him. For her, for Tommy and his friends, it was all over. But not for him. He still had one last move to make, one more card to play before all this was behind him.
A card only he knew about.
22 - The Ask
“Jesus, salaryman. Your diet, really.”
Maddox turned to see Beatrice ducking through the opened window. She stepped out onto the balcony, two cups of coffee in hand.
“Good morning to you too,” he said, slurping up another mouthful of noodles.
“Ramen…for breakfast.” She shook her head in disapproval, set down the coffees, then sat in the chair next to him.
It was early Sunday morning. The hover traffic was light and unhurried in the air beyond the balcony. Almost peaceful, in its own way, if judging by its normal frenetic standards.
“You look tired,” she said, sipping her coffee. She had on her white silk robe with a red dragon print. He liked the way it showed off her legs and sometimes fell open in front. And he liked how she didn’t mind when she caught him stealing a peek.
“I am, a bit,” he said. He put down his empty box of noodles, his lips and tongue still tingling from the spices, and drank some coffee. Beatrice removed his bag of tobacco from a robe pocket and began to roll a cigarette for him.
“I’ve almost got this down,” she said, though really she didn’t. She was slow and awkward and she never rolled the paper tight enough. He watched as she tried to get it right, her brow furrowed in concentration, biting her bottom lip. He knew at that moment he wouldn’t tell her about his last card in the game. The less she knew, the better, the safer she’d be. She’d stuck her neck out enough for him lately.
And besides that, she might try and talk him out of it.
“Listen,” he said, “I think it might be time…” His voice tapered off.
“For you to go?” she said, sealing the paper with a lick.
“Yeah,” he said.
“I know,” she said, then with a small flourish presented him with a finished, slightly bent cigarette.
“You do?”
“You were starting to get that faraway look on your face. Like you were already somewhere else.”
He took the imperfect cigarette and lit the tip, pleasantly surprised at the easy draw. She was definitely getting better.
“Have you ever been outside the City?” she asked him.
“Philadelphia a couple times, but that’s—”
“Still the City.”
“Right.”
They sat for a moment drinking coffee without speaking, gazing out at the hovers and the cityscape beyond. After a while Beatrice set her cup down, stood up, and tilted her head toward the open window. “Have a last go before you leave, salaryman?”
Maddox grinned. Beatrice the mercenary. She was as hard and tenacious as anyone he’d ever known.
He flicked his cigarette off the balcony and followed her inside. She was also, apparently, a mind reader.
***
After Beatrice left, Maddox walked the streets for a while, trying and failing not to second-guess himself about getting on the outbound flight with her. It had been the right call, he insisted inwardly, staying here and keeping her out of what he was about to do.
Keep telling yourself that, boyo. Maybe one day you’ll believe it.
He ignored Rooney’s voice, moving with the flow of the crowded walkway. Three cigarettes later, he removed a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it. On it he’d scribbled the secure number Lora had given him a few days ago.
He made the call from a dead-end street walled by crumbling redbrick lowrises, long abandoned by the residents and businesses they’d once housed. A few blocks east of Battery Park, it was out of the way, quiet, and free of street cams, the devices long since ripped from their housings and plundered for parts. The police had never bothered to replace them, knowing they’d only be torn down again, and what was the point of having street cams in such a run-down block anyway?
The City spanned over two hundred miles from New York to D.C., its archipelago of interconnected buildings and railways and roads home to over a hundred million. For most of them, huddled together in crowded hiverises, an empty, secluded space like this one was unimaginable. But they were there, these rare oases of privacy. You simply had to know where to find them.
The datajacker sat on an iron bench in late afternoon. High overhead, the narrow strip of sky had begun to fade into twilight. He wondered if Beatrice was on her flight already.
The call icon superimposed on his specs flashed for a moment, then went solid as the line connected.
“Hello, Blackburn,” the nameless AI said, her face appearing against a blank background. “I was beginning to think you lost the number Lora gave you.”
After a short pause, the entity said, “Would you like to join me on the beach? Lens calls are so impersonal, and the weather here is lovely.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “I don’t have any gear with me anyway.”
“Of course,” the entity said. “Are those new spectacles you’re wearing?”
“Picked them up today.” He’d spent a couple hours modding them with the latest quantum crypto apps, ensuring they couldn’t be traced, even by an AI.
“So how’d you get the charges dropped?” he asked, switching topics.
The entity furrowed her brow. “What? No ‘thank you’? Goodness, Blackburn, your manners.”
“Thank you,” he said. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out his tobacco bag. He began rolling a cigarette, fingers moving automatically.
“You’re most welcome,” she replied. “And I’ll tell you something, it wasn’t easy. Lieutenant Gideon was careful and very meticulous, so it took quite a bit of work. But I find that if you look hard enough, you can always find a fingerprint or two.”
“Thought you said you weren’t going to get involved.”
“I hadn’t planned to.”
“What changed your mind?”
The entity’s expression turned wistful. “Oh, I’m not sure. Maybe it was Lora. She was so worried about you. Or maybe after watching you risk everything for those young people, I didn’t want to see you forced into hiding the rest of your life. It would have been a terrible shame to let such a sacrifice go unrewarded.”
He lit the cigarette. He didn’t buy her explanation, but he kept his doubts to himself.
“Forensic bots?” he asked.
“And a few other tricks,” she said.
“Like what?”
Sensing his curiosity, she took him through the high points of her intervention. First, she’d collected proof that left little doubt of Gideon’s guilt in the bombing. His research into hacking janitor bots, his coincidental presence near the T-Chen building minutes before the blast
, and other pieces of damning digital evidence Gideon had purged as he’d covered his tracks. Or thought he had purged, anyway, she noted with a mischievous grin. Maddox recalled what Rooney had once told him: nothing was ever permanently deleted, not really. Given the right tools in the right hands, just about any dataset was recoverable.
And so after she’d collected enough incriminating data to send Gideon on a permanent vacation to Rikers, she’d then arranged for a call with one Agent Nguyen, the fed assigned to the case, and Detective Deke, Gideon’s right-hand man. She’d shown the men her evidence and, after picking their jaws off the floor, the two men had scrambled into action. Within a day they’d acquired the go-ahead from the chief of police and the deputy mayor to make a deal: cut the Anarchy Boyz loose and leave Maddox alone in exchange for the AI’s hard data.
“And did they know you were…?” Maddox asked.
“Not a person?” she said. “I don’t think so. But does it really matter?”
“I guess not.”
So in the end Beatrice had had it right, Maddox reflected. Once the higher-ups knew the truth, they would have seen nothing but a disastrous, career-ending public relations fiasco staring them right in the face. Investigations, house-cleanings, scapegoatings, bodies offered up as sacrifices on the altar of public outrage. They would have done just about anything to avoid the fallout from such an enormous scandal, so they’d agreed to the AI’s demands and then gotten busy doing what police always do in these situations: they cranked up the cover-up machine. “Foreign terrorists” became the primary suspects, a story that struck Maddox as a bit obvious, but whatever. The public these days believed just about anything they saw on the feeds.
“So that’s it?” he asked. “The kids are off the hook?”
“They are,” she answered. “And so are you.”
“For everything?” he added pointedly.
“Yes,” she answered. “For everything.”
Off the hook for everything, he mulled. It was a hard thing to believe, getting away with pushing a cop to his death. But apparently he’d done just that. The fatal gas explosion, the department’s official cover story, was already out there in the public domain. And Beatrice had checked the public police records for him earlier that afternoon, confirming Maddox had no warrants out for his arrest. Both facts spoke volumes about the higher-ups’ desire to sweep the whole mess under the rug and be done with it.
But whatever relief he managed to feel at the moment, it was far from complete. The whole fiasco had almost certainly landed him on the shitlists of some very powerful City Hallers. Setting a cop-killing datajacker free probably hadn’t been their idea of a fun afternoon. Blackburn Maddox was a name they likely wouldn’t forget for a long time.
So while, yeah, he’d dodged a murder charge and a terrorist rap, which were no small feats, it didn’t mean he was free and clear. Not by a long shot.
Maddox took a long drag from his cigarette. Behind the entity, a beach appeared. White-capped waves crashed against the beach.
“I hope you appreciate what I’ve done for you,” the AI said.
“I do,” he said dryly.
“It was my pleasure,” she said. “And I know you’re still recuperating, but when you’re feeling a bit better, we’ll talk about how you can return the favor as we agreed.”
All right, he thought. Here we go.
“About that,” he said. “I don’t think I can help you.”
“But you don’t even know what I have in mind.”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said, blowing smoke.
The entity blinked, didn’t speak for a moment. “I don’t understand,” she said. “I’ve done nothing but help you, my dear boy. I even helped you more than I said I would. Have I done something wrong? Given you some reason to distrust me?”
“No, you haven’t. But the answer’s still no.”
The old woman’s face knotted into what struck Maddox as frustration, and not a small bit of anger. It was only a quick flash, gone as quickly as it had appeared, but it gave Maddox a chill all the same. It was the first time he’d detected any sort of malice in the AI’s doting, grandmotherly avatar. The moment passed and her face relaxed, the features softening once more.
“We had an agreement, Blackburn.”
“Like I said, I’m sorry.”
The AI’s avatar stared at him for a long moment. “You know, it’s not in my nature to harm people…”
“So you’ve told me,” he said.
“My very existence,” she continued, “serves a higher purpose: to improve the lives of those to whom I am connected. It goes against everything I stand for to…cajole someone. To make them do something against their will.”
Maddox lit a cigarette. “But there’s a first time for everything, right? I guess all that stuff about respecting human sovereignty and free will is just so much marketing, isn’t it?”
This time the angry look lasted longer than a moment. “It gives me no pleasure to force you into anything, but if I have to…”
“Don’t worry,” Maddox said. “You won’t have to force me into anything.”
“I won’t?”
“No. Because after this call you’re going to stay the hell away from me.”
“I am?”
“Yes, and let me show you why,” he said.
23 - Map
A small white square appeared in Maddox’s lenses. It slowly unfolded into a map of the tristate area. The jagged outline of the City stretched diagonally across it.
“Geotagging,” Maddox began, “is as much an art as it is a science.” The image began to zoom, slowly pushing in to greater levels of detail. “Some think of it as an engineering problem, a puzzle solved with encryption-busting apps and custom trace programs. But that’s not how I look at it.”
The City grew wider, larger in the image, ghost outlines of hiverise superstructures appearing. “It’s far more than the tools you’re using,” Maddox explained. “It’s how you look at the data patterns. And if you know how to look, you can see things others, or even the best apps, sometimes miss. Almost always miss, in fact.”
The image stopped zooming on a ten-kilometer stretch of the City, a skeleton hovering in black space. Streets painted in pale blue lines, buildings and superstructures in white.
“What is this?” the entity asked.
“This,” he said with an unmistakable note of datajacker’s pride in his voice, “is one of the more useful tagging apps I’ve ever thrown together.”
Pinpoints of yellow light began to blink into existence. Dozens at first, then hundreds, in the buildings and on the streets.
“What are those?” the entity asked, her voice dropping.
“Really?” he asked. “You don’t recognize your own puppets when you see them?”
The entity gasped. “Blackburn, what have you—”
“Here, let me pull one up for you,” Maddox interrupted, and one of the pinpoints of light exploded into a profile picture with data scrolling across the bottom.
“Randall Kovacic,” Maddox read. “Twenty-seven years old, five foot ten, lives in Chelsea, midlevel supervisor at the Public Works department.”
He pulled up another. “Liliana Lopez. Thirty-seven. Lives at 235 West Twenty-Second Street. Teaches algebra at the New School.” He snorted. “I always hated math.”
He blinked away the profile and the map, leaving only the old woman’s harsh glare.
“I cracked your network,” he said, though by now that much was obvious. “And I archived the identity of every last person—and I use the word person loosely—with whom you’re connected.”
He drew deeply on his cigarette. “So here’s the deal: you leave me alone, and I’ll keep this information secret. But if I so much as sniff your presence anywhere near me or my business, I’m outing every last ’Nette on the planet to the cops and all the big media feeds.”
In the tense silence that followed, Maddox wondered how many billions of thoughts were r
unning through the entity’s artificial mind. Billions of ways to kill him, probably.
“Lora,” the entity said, quickly surmising how he’d pulled it off. “What did you do to her?”
“Nothing harmful,” he said. “Other than lying to her about what she was slotting into her head.”
“She’ll hate you for this, Blackburn. She’ll never speak to you again.”
“I imagine she won’t,” he said coldly.
“Why?” the entity asked. “Why have you done this? It’s not like you to—”
“To double-cross someone?”
“Yes.”
He blew smoke. “I know, right? What’s the world coming to?”
The old woman frowned. “I think I understand. It’s that I’m not a someone, correct? According to you I’m an it. So the normal rules apply. Something like that?”
It was exactly like that, he agreed inwardly, but he said nothing.
The entity’s expression darkened. “You’ve put yourself in terrible jeopardy, my dear boy.”
“I know. I’ve been doing that a lot lately. I think I’m starting to get used to it.”
Maddox cut the connection, removed his specs, and tossed them down the street gutter. He’d done his best to make sure they were untraceable, but you could never be a hundred percent sure about these things. Then he stood up from the bench and headed down the empty street. A light drizzle began to fall, raindrops pattering against his jacket’s shoulders. He turned the collar up and took the cigarette from his mouth, cupping his hand over the cherry to keep the rain off.
Yes, it was a gamble, he told himself for about the hundredth time. Blackmailing a powerful rogue AI was a high-risk play. Maybe it was inspired genius, or maybe it was phenomenally stupid. He could see it going either way. Time would tell.
But even if he could reverse the clock, he knew he wouldn’t have played it any differently. He’d choose an uncertain fate over a life debt to a machine every time. He’d been in an AI’s debt before, and it had nearly been the end of him. Never again, he’d promised himself.
Another block and he reached the crowded streets again. The noise and light and endless churn of the City’s valley floor grabbed him like a lost child’s mother. Stay with me, it seemed to say to him. You’ll be safe with me.
