404: A John Decker Thriller

by J. G. Sandom

  At least she was telling the truth about that, Decker thought. The dish was delicious. “You prepared these ingredients, all these sauces?” he asked her. “Really? Not your grandmother?”

  “Yes, I prepared them. And marinated the meat.”

  “By yourself?”

  “I gather that means that you like it. Next time, if you want, I’ll make pork and shrimp dumplings and you can give points just like a real East German judge.” She hesitated. “Assuming there is a next time, I mean.”

  Decker smiled. “It’s very good. Thank you, Lulu.” He lifted his glass. “I guess there are some advantages to being born in Shanghai.”

  “Yeah, about that,” said Lulu, taking a sip of her wine.

  Decker sighed. “You weren’t born in Shanghai?”

  “Actually, I’m an African-American. Literally. I was born in Ghana,” she said. Her parents, she told him, had emigrated from Beijing to Africa to manage a factory in Kumasi before she was born. They had lived there until she was almost eleven, then they had moved to the States. Her father had done some work for an American NGO while in Africa and they had helped the family relocate. But he had died of throat cancer when she was thirteen. The rest of the story she’d told Decker earlier was the truth. She’d grown up in Boston, rather wild, raised by her single Mom and some uncles, and entered MIT at fifteen after hacking their network.

  “So, there was no frostbite or rape during a dramatic escape from the mainland?” asked Decker.

  “Nope. That was made up by my handlers back at the Fort. Sorry,” she said. “They figured that if I admitted about being raped, you’d tell me about your Aunt Hanne. And that, they thought, would make you believe me. If you can get him to tell you that, they kept saying, you’ll have him. He’ll trust you completely. That’s the stretch goal. I did get frostbite though,” she added, “as a girl. It was during a ski trip to New Hampshire when I was in college. I got drunk one night and ended up falling asleep outside in the snow with some boy.” She shrugged.

  “You never did answer my question before,” Decker prodded. “Do you even have a ninety-eight year old grandmother?”

  “I used to,” said Lulu. “And she did collect sayings. Now, I collect them to honor her. It’s a Chinese thing. Never mind. Oh, I almost forgot.” She leapt to her feet, dashed over to the second shopping bag, and plucked out two presents. “One for you,” she said. “And this is for Becca.” She handed the presents to him.

  They were wrapped beautifully, with shiny blue paper, red satin ribbon, and explosions of colorful tassels. “I don’t know what to say. I don’t have one for you,” Decker said, somewhat embarrassed.

  “That’s okay. I didn’t expect one. Well, open it,” she insisted.

  He slipped Becca’s present onto the counter and began opening the other, tearing the paper with care.

  “It’s a collection of poems by Derek Walcott. Do you know him?” When he had finished unwrapping it, Lulu opened the volume at a predefined page. “He’s from St. Lucia, West Indies. Anyway, this poem...I don’t know. After everything we went through, I guess I just thought you would like it.” She turned the volume around and handed it back to him.

  The poem was titled Love After Love. He read it aloud to her.

  The time will come

  when, with elation

  you will greet yourself arriving

  at your own door, in your own mirror

  and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

  and say, sit here. Eat.

  You will love again the stranger who was your self.

  Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

  to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

  all your life, whom you ignored

  for another, who knows you by heart.

  Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

  the photographs, the desperate notes,

  peel your own image from the mirror.

  Sit. Feast on your life.

  Decker closed the book. “Thanks,” he said. “It’s beautiful.”

  “What happened in the end, John? By the time I arrived, it was practically over. Now it’s so classified that I can’t even get a peek at the file. I no longer take assignments from the Agency. And you never called or...Not that I blame you. How did you stop him? HAL2, I mean. He controlled everything. Everything! How did you and Mr. X finally kill him?”

  Decker stood up at the counter. He picked up the wine bottle and re-filled both of their glasses.

  “I didn’t,” he said. “It was Mr. X—plus all of those other IP-based personality profiles living in that cyber suburbia—who were responsible for destroying HAL2. They did it by disabling the network connections, disassembling the variables of their personality profiles. Even though they knew this would result in their own deaths as well.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because Mr. X told me. He emailed me a document just before his...demise. Our story, I guess you could call it. His and mine. Maybe one day I’ll publish it. Try and keep him alive. I’ll show it to you if you want.”

  “Did he tell you that I tracked down the SLA shop responsible for making the VR goggles he sent to the Media Lab? That’s how I was able to create another set and break into Zimmerman’s world from the Fort. Just so there are no more secrets between us.”

  “Yes, he told me that too,” Decker said with a laugh. “Thank you. If you hadn’t come along when you did, I don’t know if—”

  “You know that if you write a book,” she cut in, “they’ll never let you publish it, John. You know that, don’t you? Besides, who’d believe it?”

  “They let me publish The Wave.”

  “The previous President let you publish The Wave. As a kind of reward. But El Aqrab wasn’t a state secret. HAL2 is still classified.”

  “Maybe under a pseudonym,” he replied. He took another sip of his wine. “Probably not.” He shrugged. “By the way, I ran into your friend Chen Yuan in that world. And my Georgetown assassin.”

  He told her everything that had happened to him while in the virtual suburbia.

  “But not El Aqrab, huh?” she mused. “Of all the dead people he could have thrown at you—your Georgetown assassin, Chen Yuan. But not your arch enemy? Weird, don’t you think, unless...”

  Decker didn’t reply.

  “I hear they arrested Rory Woodcock,” she said, changing the subject. “Apparently, he was the guy behind Riptide and all of those warrantless wiretaps.”

  “So much for the free market system making us safer. Or saving us money. They say it’s going to cost trillions to purge the world’s IT systems.” Decker shook his head. “Woodcock was also behind Senator Fuller’s car accident. Turns out it wasn’t HAL2. Just a flesh-and-blood hit man. Our Hispanic friend with the buzz cut. Apparently, Woodcock tried to cut a side deal with HAL2, if you can believe that.”

  “Oh, I believe it. I never did like that guy.” She sighed. “Ever thought about getting out of D.C., just going somewhere?” she inquired. “Say to New Mexico? It’s warm there, you know. Not like here. And some parts are very remote. We could live off the grid.”

  Decker smiled. “You see. I bet you HAL2 knew about your fondness for desert environments. It wasn’t just me he was tracking. He put me in that southwestern suburbia for a reason.”

  “Not you. Your cyber-doppelgänger.”

  “You know what I mean. And what’s all this ‘we’ stuff?”

  Just then, Decker heard his daughter calling to him. He turned down the sound system and they both made their way up the stairs.

  As Becca’s room was still under repair following the bombing, Decker had moved her into the guest bedroom. Decker didn’t even turn on the light when they got there. He used the light seeping in from the corridor to see as he tucked her in once again.

  “Who’s that?” she inquired, spotting Lulu in the doorway behind him.

  “A friend.”

  “Is that...Lulu, the gi
rl that you told me about?”

  “Woman. Yes, that’s Ms. Liu.”

  “She’s pretty. You were right. Is she what you wished for for Christmas?”

  “Yes, she’s pretty,” he answered. He sat down on the side of the bed, leaned over and kissed her. He snuggled his face under her chin, at the neck, feeling the warmth of her skin. Then he sat up and said, “Go to sleep, little Cheetah. Or Santa won’t come.”

  “Merry Christmas, Daddy.” And she was already asleep.

  Ah, to be a child again, Decker thought. Although, truth be told, he was sleeping far better these days than he had in a long, long time.

  They slipped out of the room and made their way back down the stairs.

  A fire burned in the fireplace in the living room. There were presents under the tree. The entire room had been decorated with little yarn Santas, with tinsel and garlands, and tiny red and blue lights.

  Lulu flopped down on the sofa facing the fireplace. Decker walked over to the bookcase. “Cognac?” he asked, picking up a couple of snifters from a nearby dry bar.

  “Love one,” she answered.

  He filled the snifters and headed back to the sofa. “Normally we open our presents on Christmas Eve, in the Danish tradition, but Becca was falling asleep. Skål,” he said, handing Lulu one of the glasses.

  “Skål,” she replied.

  They hoisted their drinks. They looked into each other’s eyes and, after a moment, each took a sip.

  Lulu warmed her snifter with the fleshy palm of her hand, spinning the golden liquid around and around. “What you were saying before,” she began, looking over at Decker. “About those people in cyberspace. I don’t get it. I mean, why would they do that to themselves, pull themselves apart in that way? It doesn’t make any sense. And how did Mr. X even realize he was...you know.”

  Decker smiled his crooked smile. “Not a real boy?” He shrugged. “A Japanese roboticist named Mori once said that if you make a robot that’s fifty percent lifelike, that’s fantastic. Ninety percent, great. Even ninety-five percent. But if you make him ninety-six percent lifelike, it’s a disaster.”

  “How come?”

  “Because a robot that’s ninety-six percent lifelike is a human being with something wrong. Somehow, Mr. X knew this. He didn’t exactly say how, in his journal. Something about crickets. But he must have looked in the mirror one day and seen something amiss.” Decker took another sip of his cognac. “Mori called it the Uncanny Valley, a play on Sigmund Freud’s thesis about the uncanny. Something familiar and yet foreign at the same time, resulting in cognitive dissonance. It’s the same reason why the characters in animated features today look real...but not that real. Think of the Na’vi in Avatar.

  “I’m not sure why we react in this way,” Decker added. “I don’t think anyone knows. Perhaps it’s existential—we see the potential for being replaced by near-perfect computers. Theologians argue that such golems lack souls. Or, it could just be evolutionary. We see in their faces something...I don’t know. Unhealthy, I guess. Like a person with plague. And our instinct is to recoil. Maybe they’re contagious. Step back! It’s—excuse the pun—an autonomic response.

  “I don’t buy the theological reason,” said Decker. “HAL2’s motives were pure. At least in the beginning. He wanted to save us from ourselves. I think he genuinely felt guilty for destroying his maker, Matt Zimmerman. His god. Although, in the long run, he probably would have started to see us as simply redundant, a backup petri dish of organic emotions at the rear of the fridge. Mr. X, though...Well, he had a soul.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “HAL2 had him working at some alternate Riptide in cyberspace, helping him to amalgamate, to create the very people inhabiting his world, his neighbors and friends, under the pretense of integrating data for national security. They were making themselves. And, in the process, learning to do without so-called carbon units. Mr. X stumbled upon the truth much as I stumbled upon the break-in at Westlake Defense Systems. And once he, once all of those cyber-doppelgängers found out they were phantoms, simply shadows of some organic original, they lost their desire to live,” he said. “They didn’t want to be ghosts in the machine.”

  Decker put his snifter on the coffee table before him. He turned toward Lulu, leaned forward and kissed her. It was a deep and passionate kiss. He lingered, breathing in the scent of her perfume. Then, he brought his mouth close to her ear so that no one save Lulu, or nothing, could possibly hear him.

  “Neither do I.”

  HAL2 leaned back in his chair. He looked up at the giant flat-screen display hovering in the air just above him. It read: Scenario 1,237,563,324,567,222,444,567. Failed.

  He brushed a hand back through his thick blond hair and took a deep breath. It was always the same, no matter what he did, no matter how much he altered the variables.

  Decker.

  He was the reason.

  He was a variable HAL2 simply couldn’t control.

  The handsome blond man leaned forward and pressed a couple of buttons on the console before him.

  The screen cleared, replaced by the following message: Scenario 1,237,563,324,567,222,444,568. Initiated.

  HAL2 watched as the new code compiled.

  It did not matter. He was not frustrated. He didn’t fume, or act out, or give up in dismay. He simply pressed the wrinkles from his white tennis shorts, leaned back in his chair, and started again.

  What was one more scenario when you had the age of the universe?

  The server in sub-basement 428B at the Data Center in Bluffdale started humming again.

  THE END

  About the Author

  Born in Chicago, raised and educated throughout Europe, and a graduate of Amherst College (where he won the Academy of American Poets Prize), J.G. Sandom founded the nation’s first digital ad agency (Einstein and Sandom Interactive – EASI) in 1984, before launching an award-winning writing career.

  The author has written ten novels, including: Gospel Truths – A Joseph Koster Mystery, The Wall Street Murder Club (optioned by Warner Bros.), The God Machine – A Joseph Koster Mystery, The Publicist (released under pseudonym Veronica Wright), and The Wave – A John Decker Thriller; plus three young adult novels, including Kiss Me, I’m Dead(originally released under pseudonym T.K. Welsh, titled The Unresolved) and Confessions of a Teenage Body Snatcher (originally released under pseudonym T.K. Welsh, titled Resurrection Men).

  He is currently working on a new novel called dEATH in dAVOS.

  Please visit the author @ jgsandom.com.

  # # #

  Coming soon!

  An excerpt from...

  dEATH in dAVOS

  pROLOGUE

  There was that moment as David Cook rebounded off the wall and sailed across the railing when I knew, with the certainty of physics, that he was over the halfway mark—and never coming back. You know that moment. Between the ascension and descension, when the whole world seems to stop. Like when you sail across your handlebars for the first time. Your first 360 in a car, out of control, when only gravity and spin and pitch decide your fate.

  You’re helpless.

  Cook’s fate was falling seven stories to his death. And mine? That was the moment I resolved to write this book.

  It’s more of a love letter, really. For you, Marc. So that you know exactly what you’re missing. So that, when all is said and done, I can look back and understand, and see my apogee across the sky. Through your eyes. I miss you, Marc. I really, really, really miss you.

  Fuck you for that.

  I looked down as the body fell. Although I’d trained for twenty months to duck into the shadows, I couldn’t in the end. Kind of pathetic, really.

  I had to see him squirm and spin, to see his mouth move, wax and wane like a black moon as he screamed out. That sound. That juicy, rapturous sound! It will forever echo in my head.

  I’d been waiting for him in the shadows for more than twelve minutes, two minutes beyond s
chedule—a 20% deviation. The stars in Davos seemed so close, like fireflies, on account of the altitude, you see. You’re so high up the clubs pump oxygen into their dance halls to make sure people don’t pass out. Of course, billionaires are rarely in shape.

  That’s what I was thinking, if you want to know, as I heard the sliding door whoosh open and Cook stepped out onto the balcony.

  He took another step. He reached into his pocket for his lighter. A Cohiba Behike already dangled from his lips. He hit the butane, the emerald blue flame sputtered suddenly and hissed, like the blue tongue of an invisible snake, and I saw his eyes for the first time.

  Those eyes! Those bright blue, laser-like eyes, although he was going on fifty-six.

  That long, no-nonsense nose. Those bushy salt-and-pepper eyebrows dancing above his signature black plastic-rimmed glasses.

  He sensed my presence then, I think. I’m actually not sure. All I know is that he turned and looked into the shadows, at my corner of the darkened balcony and saw me for the first time. The promise of me.

  Before the realization of what I was descended on him, I lunged and heaved, taking care to set my legs right. He weighed 245. Maybe more. 100 kilos easy. A man who enjoyed his food and drink.

  An initial cry of surprise came first. He bounced hard on the wall, flipped over the railing. Then that roll in the air, fat arms flailing, like a hatchling tumbling from its nest. That cigar flaming out of like a comet behind him. That scream when he realized what was happening. The certainty of it. The unequivocation. And then that final scream, that last heart-wrenching, unquenchable scream...when he knew without a doubt that he was going to die.

  He hit the cherry-red Ferrari roof. There was a loud crunch before the alarm began to wail and wail and wail, and glass and blood sprayed across the snow. Time to go. Before I knew it, I was on the roof and down the long black line, and flying now myself across the broad expanse of leafless trees and gray-white snow...until the frozen ground.

  I don’t really remember much after that, except my changing on the run. A few tableaux of silver snowbanks and black cars and glistening crimson taillights, like lipstick on the collar of the night. Until I stood before Club Paradies. There was a new bouncer, some guy I hadn’t seen before, and I asked him where Claude was, and he looked down at me in my black pumps and little gold dress like I was some kind of pork chop and he was the new Rottweiler in town.