Chasing Rain

by Brandt Legg

  Wen knew well about the secret police state apparatus watching everything and everyone, but had hoped to be out of Singapore before the authorities learned of her disappearance. Unforeseen events had made that impossible, and the only backup plan was something Wen’s father had taught her.

  “Water has no shape. When water is in a glass, it becomes the glass, when it is in a bottle, it becomes the bottle, in a lake, it is the lake, when it boils, steam rises, and when it’s freezing, it transforms to ice. Be the water,” he told her. She later discovered he’d borrowed the philosophy from an old Bruce Lee movie, but it was no less true.

  Wen checked the ten hard drives she’d smuggled, each a bit smaller than a pack of cigarettes, which is where they were hidden, inside a full carton. Combined, the drives contained one hundred terabytes of data that could change the world, get her killed, and move trillions of dollars. She wanted to be sure that only one of those things happened, and if more than one occurred, it would be in the correct order.

  The only way to avoid the final facial recognition cameras at Changi International Airport—one of the busiest and most popular in the world—was to be on the flight crew of Singapore Airlines. Wen had to become a “Singapore Girl,” one of the famous flight attendants. She checked herself in the mirror—long black hair, dark brown eyes that many men had complimented, but only Chase had called stunning, high cheekbones, and lips he’d said were delicious. She’d have no problem passing as a beautiful Singapore Girl. Minutes later, Wen emerged from a restroom wearing a traditional version of the “Sarong Kebaya” uniform. The primary color of the floral print garments representing the positions of the attendants. Hers was burgundy, meaning “In-Flight Supervisor,” the highest rank.

  In terminal three, Wen suddenly spotted an MSS agent. She quickly switched direction while scanning the area for additional agents. After not seeing any others, she decided he was not there specifically for her. The Chinese had one or two agents secretly stationed at most major international airports around the world. She was certain that if the MSS knew she was at the Singapore airport, there would be many more.

  Wen was about to head to terminal two when the agent she had just avoided appeared again, seemingly out of nowhere. Before she could avoid it, they made eye contact. He knew it was her. Wen spun, walked briskly away from him, weighing her options and trying not to panic. I might be better off outside, she thought, checking the time—1:04 a.m. As tempting as the cloak of darkness was, her flight was leaving in forty-six minutes. If she left the airport, she’d never get back in time. She had to make that plane. Then I’ve got to keep him close so he won’t have time to call it in.

  Not quite jogging—Wen didn’t dare attract more attention—she stole a glance behind, and saw the agent closing in. Having previously studied the floor plan of the airport, she knew where to go as soon as she saw the koi pond. Seconds later, she pushed through an entranceway, and the bustling terminal instantly melted away as she entered another world. Palm trees and tropical flowers crowded the enclosed misty “jungle.” Changi’s famed butterfly garden looked eerie in the dimly lit colored lights. Wen surveyed the place in an instant. Perhaps forty feet above, curved glass covered the perfect biosphere which contained a thousand butterflies from almost forty species.

  She noticed only one other person, a man meditating in a far corner. Wen raced to the grotto waterfall cascading down rocks, tiny caverns, and crags for about twenty feet before tumbling into a pool of unknown depth. The water plunging into the pool created some of the mist, but something else was causing more. Infinite fragrances intoxicated her senses as she disturbed hundreds of the colorful butterflies. It felt like she’d been dropped into a midnight fairy party with flying confetti and magic perfumes.

  Red gerbera flowers everywhere seemed a fortunate sign—her lucky color. But as the MSS agent burst into the enchanted garden, and the beating pulse of falling water drowned out all other sounds, she feared she was trapped. Wen stashed her bag behind a large yellow flowering plant, looked around at the lush beauty, the pink, purple, and turquoise mist enveloping the surreal wilderness, and said quietly, “This is a beautiful place to die.”

  Eleven

  As the sunset on the bay transformed the Golden Gate Bridge into fiery crimson, the top executives of Balance Engineering continued to wrestle with the crisis.

  “Remember our vow when we started the company?” Dez asked as he served Chase and Adya his “famous” AAA dip—artichoke, avocado, and asparagus. The spring breeze had Adya zipping up her hoodie. “We weren’t going to just change the world, we were going to make it better.”

  “We still can,” Chase said. “That’s what Balance Engineering is all about—keeping the exploding AI technology in balance.” He scooped dip into a crispy rice tortilla.

  “Thus the name,” Adya added, sliding a piece of celery into the dip.

  Dez shot them both a ‘thanks for stating the obvious’ look. “But then we got so caught up in making RAI work, and then we sold it . . . now it’s out of our control.”

  “No, it’s not,” Chase said. The boat listed a bit after the wake of a passing cabin cruiser shifted the water beneath them.

  “Your solutions have us winding up in jail,” Dez said.

  Both Chase and Adya looked at him, as if to question his sanity.

  “Even without SEER,” Chase said, getting to his feet, “it doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots. Look what happens. TruNeural claimed they wanted RAI to use in driverless cars, boats, and planes. I’m sure you both recall that RAI gave them that ability.”

  “But Sliske turned out to be some kind of power-hungry lunatic,” Adya added.

  “Yeah, the nodule. That was what we never expected—coupling RAI with a nodule.”

  “Thus, RAIN,” Adya said under her breath.

  Chase nodded. “I met with Stephen Hawking before he died. I’ve spent time with Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Max Tegmark. I was a signature on the Open Letter on AI raising concerns about AI systems increasing to super-intelligences that could threaten humanity. We’ve all warned that AI could spell the end of humanity—”

  “We had safeguards in place,” Dez interrupted.

  “Clearly not enough,” Chase said, now pacing. “I think most of us thought LAWS were the most immediate threat to humanity.”

  “LAWS?” Adya echoed.

  “Lethal Autonomous Weapon Systems,” Dez reminded her. “Weapons that allow wars to be fought on an unimaginably massive scale and faster than anyone can comprehend.”

  “Nice,” Adya said sarcastically. “I’m sure terrorists would love to play with LAWS.”

  Dez nodded. “But you were always concerned about the neural net,” he said to Chase.

  “True, but this is decades sooner than our worst fears.”

  “How did it happen so fast?” Adya asked.

  “We started getting worried back when Nissan’s ‘Brain to vehicle’ system was first announced. ‘B2V’ they called it, freaked a lot of people out. An electrode-studded skullcap capturing a driver’s brain activity, then using artificial intelligence to interpret it. But what else would the machines record from the wearer’s mind?”

  “Yikes,” Adya said.

  “But none of that matters now,” Chase said impatiently.

  “If we hope to get out of this, it helps to know how we got here,” Dez said as a seagull landed on the mast.

  “Really?” Chase said, sitting again. “Where do you want to start? Biological evolution took more than three billion years to evolve a monkey from dust. Then, in less than fifty-million, we had human level intelligence.” More seagulls landed. “In a few decades, AI started beating humans at chess, Jeopardy, Go, and then neural networks passed us in object recognition, medical diagnosis, predictive assessments—”

  “Like BE is doing with deep learning,” Adya said.

  “And that’s how we got here,” Dez said. “Our BE system simulators found RAIN and told us where it will take
us.”

  “Great, but—” Chase tried to interject. More seagulls.

  “Wait a minute,” Adya pressed. “Let him finish.”

  Chase bowed his head and looked out to the bay. The seagulls instantaneously all rose and flew away. The three BE executives watched the spectacle in a moment of sudden, deafening silence.

  “AI is at the point where it can set its own goals,” Dez continued. “And the people who created the initial programs have no idea what those goals will be. But some have theorized that these AI units will use self-replicating robot factories, thereby producing themselves by the trillions, and each day, each hour, each minute, they will improve themselves. They will quickly and efficiently transcend humankind and life itself.”

  “When?” Adya whispered.

  “It’s already begun,” Chase said, turning back to the conversation. “It started when we sold RAI.”

  Twelve

  The brightly lit aircraft hangar belied the highly secret nature of the mission about to be launched. At this Virginia military base, like dozens around the world, covert missions were launched every day. In as many as seventy countries around the globe, US Dark Ops commandos took part in an undeclared global war, a fact ignored by the mainstream media and unknown by the American public.

  However, this team was different. They were not SEALs, Green Berets, Rangers, Night Stalkers, or any of the other elite units regularly deployed by the Pentagon. These one hundred and eighty-four highly trained men and women belonged to the NSA. And while they were armed with HK MP5N 9mm submachine guns and HK Mk 23 SOCOM .45 ACP pistols, they rarely used them. Their preferred tools were the highest tech the US intelligence community had in its arsenal. These IT-Squads had one purpose: obtaining and disseminating the most powerful and dangerous weapon—information.

  “Let’s move,” the Operational Officer said as the eight IT-Squads of nine-persons loaded onto eight specially outfitted Cessna Citation X jets. The commander checked the itinerary on his digital tablet as the planes rolled out of the hangar. Although they were all part of the same assignment, each had a different destination—New York, Las Vegas, Seattle, San Francisco, Edmonton, Amsterdam, Panama, and Hong Kong.

  The Operational Officer’s phone vibrated. He checked the caller—the woman in charge of the operation.

  “Are we away?” she asked when he answered.

  “Wheels up,” he replied as the first plane went airborne.

  “Good,” she said. “I’ll watch for their links to go live.”

  “New York will be first in thirty-seven minutes.”

  “I’m most interested in San Francisco, but I expect they will all contribute invaluable data.”

  “Affirmative,” the Operational Officer said before signing off. In recent years it had become more common for IT-Squads to operate on US soil, something that was still technically illegal. However, he’d never seen this many flights go off at one time, and half of them with domestic destinations. As the lights from the last Cessna disappeared into the cool night sky, he realized he was sweating, and although exhausted, there would likely be little sleep this night.

  For the rest of the evening, as the Captain kept the Wadogo steadily cruising the bay, Chase, Dez, and Adya frantically developed a strategy to save the world from the very thing they’d created to make it better. They pledged their personal wealth—every dollar. Yet, even then, they knew the irony. The crisis that had been born out of greed, could not be solved with all the money in the world. They would utilize their collective brain power—an impressive force—but being smarter than the super intelligence of RAIN was impossible. They required one final ingredient, something the machines still didn’t have: creativity.

  Adya needed no additional convincing after seeing the SEER simulations and learning more about what Porter had been going to give them. Adya’s boyfriend and Porter had been close; she knew the suicide was a fake. The sobering realization that any one of them could be the next one murdered by GlobeTec’s goons meant nothing compared to the consequences if their actions failed to stop RAIN. Feeling as though every second was now threatening her personally, Adya put into motion a set of initiatives which, if things went wrong, had the ability to shake the economies of three continents.

  She also wrote her will.

  Seeking refuge from the cool breeze on deck, Dez went below and tackled the tech specifics of what BE’s team would need to derail TruNeural’s plans. “Frightening and excessive,” Dez said, when Adya described only a portion of what she’d arranged. “Don’t you think it’s too risky?”

  “A worldwide recession and global economic collapse in the worst case, or the end of humanity,” Adya said bitterly while holding out her hands as if weighing one thing against the other. “I’ll take my chances on destroying the financial system.”

  The previous day, Dez had modified a device for encrypting medical data they’d been developing to be used to convert digital conversations into useless sounds. The invention had suddenly become critical to the success of Balance Engineering’s new mission to stop RAIN. Chase made more than a dozen scrambled phone calls from the Wadogo initiating his part of their plan.

  Chase believed they could trust three other people who’d gone over to TruNeural as part of the RAI acquisition. It was a gamble to bring them in, but even Dez agreed there was no choice. Adya had arranged for an extremely discreet and “double-blind” courier service to hand deliver notes to each of the three former BE employees.

  When reached, on individual encrypted calls, the three co-workers were shocked and horrified to hear their theory that Porter’s suicide had actually been murder. However, they were not surprised that Irvin Sliske had nefarious intentions for Chase’s creation. One by one, each admitted doubts about their new boss’s integrity.

  “TruNeural is super-high-security,” one of his former employees told Chase. “I’ve never seen locked down secretiveness on this scale. It’s light years beyond paranoia.”

  Chase warned them each that by helping him, their lives would be in jeopardy. He outlined detailed security precautions and laid out a strict protocol for how they should proceed if they were willing. Porter had been a close friend to all of them, and they knew Chase never, ever exaggerated. They were scared for themselves to assist him, but more terrified not to help.

  Chase dubbed his trusted ex-employees working at TruNeural the “Garbo-three,” after the codename of the double agent who fooled Hitler about the D-Day invasion. Garbo, a brilliant, self-taught spy, had initially created a false world from nothing but his wits and imagination, somehow becoming convincing enough that the Nazi’s believed him. Chase asked his Garbo-three to get him specific information needed to create what they would come to refer to as the “AI Anecdote,” the sequence of code and commands needed to render RAI useless. Chase believed this to be the only chance to block TruNeural’s catastrophic scheme and destroy RAIN.

  Dez had begun to think they might have a chance against TruNeural. Chase and Adya argued that GlobeTec’s influence into the US and European governments neutralized any benefit of going public with the SEER simulations. GlobeTec’s board of directors had nine former government officials, including high ranking former employees of the CIA, FBI, and Pentagon. There were rumors around Silicon Valley that GlobeTec—like Facebook, Google, and many other, lesser known tech firms—had been started with CIA seed money. GlobeTec and its subsidiaries had ensured they were beyond reach.

  “The public won’t understand it, and the government won’t act,” Adya said.

  “By the time the experts figure out we’re right,” Chase added, “GlobeTec will have silenced us. We’ve got to beat them with RAI itself.”

  Thirteen

  Rong Lo arrived at the Balance Engineering headquarters building parking lot forty-nine minutes after landing in San Francisco. Reports from prior surveillance told him that the security personnel rolled in six hour shifts, with new officers arriving every three hours. Rong was in the shado
ws as Hank DeWitt, father of three, arrived for his eleven p.m. to five a.m. shift. The MSS agent snapped Hank’s neck before he’d even closed his truck’s door. Snatching Hank’s security credentials, Rong quickly shoved the dead officer back into his pickup.

  While walking back to the building, he programmed the freshly obtained information into a tiny device he’d brought to defeat BE’s biometric scans. Rong imagined that if he was in a Hollywood movie, he could have simply cut off Hank’s hand and used it on the screening pad to gain entrance to the building and restricted areas beyond, but that technique didn’t work in real life. Instead, the MSS had created a small, portable unit that could render a three-dimensional holographic complete with pulse and temperature-ready algorithms.

  Once inside the building, Rong had access to an MSS database which contained floor plans on all US structures constructed in the past twenty-six years. It didn’t take him long to reach the main server room. Twelve minutes later, a hard drive in his briefcase contained what he came for. He’d also routed additional data to be dumped to an MSS server at a remote location. A quick detour to Chase’s office, and he’d be done.

  Rong Lo couldn’t help but laugh as he easily cloned Chase’s desktop computer. The MSS agent also installed several listening devices and a hidden video camera. “I’m going to own you School Boy,” Rong said to himself. “Even after you lead me to your girlfriend . . . I wonder how you’ll feel once you realize you helped me kill her?”