51
MSNBC Newsroom
New York
“Three…” the show coordinator said, mouthing, “two, one,” silently and pointing at the MSNBC anchor to tell him that he was live.
“Good morning, this is Charlie Wade of NBC Daily, reporting to you on the latest developments in the Fakegate scandal. We were the ones to break it to you”—he laughed—“we were the ones fooled by what is now known to be a sophisticated form of spoofing attack. Now you can’t know who you’re talking to unless they’re in front of you, but new biometric confirmation technology is being deployed around the world, spurring a round of tech investment.”
Charlie stopped to pretend to read some papers on his desk. It was a rehearsed pause before he went back to reading the teleprompter.
“What a week it’s been folks. DOW goes down two thousand points, then back up two thousand. A real rollercoaster, and it’s not over yet.”
“The news we’re breaking today is that a hacktivist group, the Neo-Luddites, have claimed responsibility for faking the live broadcast of the President of the United States, along with a rash of other human spoofing attacks around the world. According to their statement, the goal was to raise awareness about the dangers of machines replacing humans, but they’ve vowed that these activities will now cease. The CIA and FBI are investigating, but the news was greeted with a wave of relief by business leaders, enough to encourage stock markets to reopen.”
He continued on for another ten minutes, describing gains on the NYSE, and then moved to a story about Senator Russ refuting claims that it was a hacking group, insisting it was the Iranians. His campaign had imploded with a disastrous slide in the polls.
Finishing up, Charlie stared into the camera. “And that’s the kind of day it’s been. I’m Charlie Wade.” He paused, smiling. “But then again, how can you know for sure?” He laughed.
With a nod, the cameraman indicated the live feed was shut off.
The coordinator rolled her eyes at Charlie. “Was that last comment really necessary?”
Charlie chuckled, “What? Don’t like my humor?”
“Doesn’t matter.” The coordinator smiled back. “Soon, you might not be necessary, either.”
▲▼▲
Sheldon reached up and clicked the television off.
“Neo-Luddite hacktivists, you like that?” he laughed, turning to Jake. “Knocked Senator Russ right off his perch this morning. Last night Bluebridge cut all funding to Russ’s campaign, withdrew everything. I got to watch our synthetic Montrose tell Russ the bad news. You should have seen his face.”
Jake tried to laugh, but winced in pain. Covered in a thin white-and-blue sheet, he sat half-upright in the hospital bed. Anna sat at Jake’s feet, with Elle holding her steady.
“Take it easy, boys, Jake’s got some cracked ribs,” Elle said.
“Sorry.” Sheldon wiped his eyes.
“You feeling okay?” Jin asked Jake.
She brought balloons; their silver smiling faces announcing, Happy Birthday, all around the room. They were the only ones she could find. She unwrapped the foil from the top of a champagne bottle.
“I’m fine,” Jake groaned, “a bit of a headache, can’t breathe well, but not bad.”
If there was one thing he was good at, it was hanging on. When he launched into Cormac and shoved him over, Jake managed to hold onto the railing and swing into the stairwell one level below. The impact knocked Jake unconscious, but Cormac fell all the way down ten stories—it killed him, finally stopped the monster.
When Jake woke up in hospital and realized it was over—that they’d won—he hadn’t been filled with elation. Instead, sadness tore at him and he spent the night crying over Sean. A part of him wondered if there was still something of Sean inside of Bluebridge.
On Thursday, Congress had balked at giving a trillion dollar check to the Deputy Chair of the Federal Reserve. They weren’t able to come to a decision, and it left the global markets in free-fall—the turning point of no return, a black swan within a black swan.
Bluebridge’s capitalization algorithms finally calculated that the only way to maintain its investments was to cede control to Jake. Jake made the call with the offer just before Cormac showed up at the Two Bridges apartment.
Bluebridge had no ego, no desire to fight to the death, no reputation to defend. It was doing what it was designed to do, and when Jake’s offer became the most likely scenario for it to maximize its earnings, it gave in to Jake’s terms and gave them access. The machine used statistical inferences based on past events, but it was impossible to project a future when what was happening was unprecedented.
“So what happened exactly?” Jake asked. “How did you get the markets to re-open so quickly?”
“On Thursday night I rolled up all Bluebridge’s off-balance sheet companies,” Wutang said, “accumulated their global accounts, and we made an offer to the Fed on Friday morning. We injected $40 billion into the balance sheets of Commerce and TransBank.”
“That got the markets to re-open,” Jin added, “and averted global financial meltdown, but there’s still a long way to go.”
“But it worked,” Sheldon said. “You played chicken using the global economy, and it blinked first.”
“Nothing else Bluebridge could do to save its global investment portfolio,” Wutang added. “When we got access, Sheldon re-initialized the system and ripped it apart.”
“And me, Elle, Eamon—all the charges have been dropped?” Jake asked, still not quite believing it.
“You’re all as clean as the pope,” Sheldon laughed. “The icing on the cake was when your friend, Sheriff Ralston, refused to press charges.”
Jake was working together with Ralston to take down Cormac. The night when Ralston confronted Jake outside his father’s house, they’d talked. Ralston had agreed to help him. In the end, Jake knew exactly when Cormac was about to burst through the door. A calculated gamble, and Jake had been wearing a bulletproof vest.
“Joey Barbara and the mafia and Yakuza all made their money back when we swung the markets back and forth. There’s nobody on our backs anymore.”
“And last night I set up a global trust fund,” Jin said. “Henry Montrose is donating his fifty billion dollar estate to charity.” She popped the cork off a bottle of champagne. “We’ll make the announcement on Monday.”
“So that’s it?” Jake asked. Could they really get away with this?
Sheldon handed him a glass of champagne. “Not quite. The feds have a good idea of what happened. They’re not that stupid. We’re going to have to expose the Bluebridge AI system, explain that it had a part in it.”
“This is more of a controlled crash landing,” Wutang explained. “We gotta hire a few hundred people to flesh out the ranks, start filling all those empty cubicles. We’re still using some of the automated system features of Bluebridge, but it’s a total mess. A lot of shareholders will be screaming bloody murder when the next report is published.”
“We can blame it all on Montrose and Viegas.” Jin took a sip from her champagne. “Another spectacular Wall Street meltdown. The investors will scream for their heads, and we’ll fire them. The week after that, Montrose and Viegas are going to have an unfortunate yachting accident off Chile. Suicide? Guilt for what they did? We’ll pile all the blame on them.”
“Which is where it belongs.” Wutang held up his glass and toasted everyone.
“What about these digital corporations that Bluebridge unleashed? The Assassin Market?” Jake asked. “Did you shut them down?”
Sheldon shook his head. “Autonomous corporations are like an invasive new life form in the digital ecosystem. Bluebridge was a shareholder in thousands, and we used that connection point to try and throttle them, but they’ve mutated, spawned.”
“So you can’t stop them from operating?”
“Not possible to take back,” Sheldon replied. “The same way we’ve surpassed the Turing threshold. Congr
ess is busy enacting new legislation to try and contain it all, but that’s like sticking your finger in a dam that’s already burst.”
Elle turned to Jake, holding a tablet in her hand. “Hey, you want to talk to someone?” She handed it to him.
Dean’s face was in a video window, smiling. “Jake, buddy, how you doing?”
“Been better,” Jake grunted. “Give me a few days. And you?”
“We’re cleaning up. A big mess up here.”
Jake pulled the glass of champagne from his lips. “I’m so sorry about Daniels.” He’d apologized before, but he didn’t think he’d ever stop. Here they were celebrating, and one of the Mohawks had died two nights before. And in the process of their victory, Kahnawake had become a war zone of burnt-out buildings and barricades.
“Don’t be sorry, Jake.” Dean’s face became stern. “We lost one of ours, but it was a good fight, for the right reasons. Everyone here knows the real story now, even if—officially—it’s a rumor. Our people are proud.” He looked over his shoulder at the technicians behind him, who were smiling at Jake. “We’re a proud nation.”
“And Mr. Montrose just made a hundred million dollar donation for a new technical college,” added Jin. “In Peace Keeper Daniels’s name.”
“He would have liked that.” Dean smiled at his technicians and then back at Jake. “Listen, I’ve got a lot to do on this end.”
“Yeah, go ahead,” Jake replied.
Dean nodded. “We’ll talk soon, Jake.”
OCTOBER 13th
Sunday
52
Upper West Side
New York City
“Daddy, Daddy, it’s time to go!” Anna squealed.
“Okay,” Jake laughed, “I’m coming. Why don’t you go outside and wait?” He frowned. He didn’t want to let his little girl out of his sight again. “Actually, why don’t you wait on the couch? I’ll go grab some stuff from my bedroom.”
Anna nodded and pulled her backpack off before taking a seat on the couch. “Hurry, Dad. Everyone else is ready.”
Jake smiled at his daughter, holding up one finger. “Just a sec.”
Anna seemed fine, despite her ordeal. When she went down to the front lobby that day at the Super 8, a woman had been waiting for her. The machine—impersonating Jake—told her over the phone that she should go with the nice lady. They took a car ride, and the nice lady brought her to a room in the giant pyramid. Gave her toys and a TV, lots of junk food. Came in and said hello every couple of hours, told her to smile for the camera.
Whenever Anna got grumpy and cried, Jake’s face would appear on the TV screen. He’d tell her that he and Mommy were busy, but they would be there soon.
They still didn’t know who the mystery woman was, but Anna had described her to Jake. They had access to a lot of resources. They would find her, and Ralston said he’d bring her in when they did.
Jake hurried down the hallway. He’d packed quickly for this trip, so quickly he’d forgotten his shorts. When he stepped into his bedroom, he stopped for a moment to look around. They’d only been in this apartment for a few months, but he was going to miss it. Even so, it was the right thing.
They still didn’t know what had become of Montrose, but even if he appeared out of the woodwork, Jin and Sheldon had reprogrammed all of his bio-identification records. He had no surviving family and few friends. If he showed up claiming he was Henry Montrose, he’d be ignored as another crazy. Anyway, Montrose was reviled now, the latest Wall Street scoundrel responsible for wrecking the economy.
Sheldon revealed to the world that an artificial intelligence had run amok in Bluebridge, without getting into the specifics of what happened with Viegas or Montrose. There was no putting this genie back into the bottle. Somewhere out there, another Bluebridge was lurking, and the world needed to get prepared.
They’d avoided total global financial collapse, but the reverberations weren’t controllable. The US economy had slid back into recession, and other countries had been hit much worse. It was a steep price, and Jake and Jin were doing their best to funnel Bluebridge capital into ailing national banks.
Reaching into his bedside drawer, Jake fished out some shorts and laid them on the bed, laughing out loud to himself.
“What’s so funny?” Anna squealed, running into the room.
“Nothing, baby, I’ll tell you later.” Now, not only did Jake and his friends run one of the largest financial companies in the world, they also had a controlling interest in two of Manhattan’s biggest banks after the bail out.
Bluebridge was still a total mess. Jin was in the middle of hiring financial analysts and a senior administrative staff. To the outside world it might seem suspicious, but then hedge funds did odd things all the time and were extremely secretive. They probably figured it was part of the bloodletting and restructuring program that had been instituted in the wake of firing the two founders.
Congress still fumed about ‘Fakegate,’ the CIA and NSA trying to hunt down whomever had been responsible for spoofing the President on live television. It was a serious crime, certainly a matter of national security, but at least it had opened everyone’s eyes to the damage that the technology could wreak. Sheldon had made large donations to several prominent Congressmen to smooth down ruffled feathers. In time, the storm would pass and a new scandal would take the media’s attention.
Was it worth it?
Jake smiled at Anna.
For him, the answer was yes.
He would have burned down the entire world to get his baby girl back. And he almost had.
Had he risked his daughter’s life? Used her as a gambling chip? He didn’t think so. It would have been a fatal mistake to exhibit weakness to a psychopath, to Bluebridge. If he’d acted differently, he might have never gotten her back. There was no way he would have gotten his family back, or his life. It was the only way.
But was it worth it for the world?
That was still an open question. After all, Bluebridge had generated record profits for everyone involved, injected lifeblood into the global economy. But of course there was a price to the profits.
A human price.
The autonomous corporations weren’t something that Sheldon or Jin could control, even with Bluebridge at their disposal, autonomous corporations were a new digital beast that weren’t going away.
When the story about the Neo-Luddites hacktivists came out, Senator Russ had continued to rant and rave about Iran, but after Bluebridge cut all funding to his campaign, it was over. The elections were still around the corner, but it had turned into a landslide for the opposition, bringing the country back from the brink of war.
Jake fiddled with his Silver Eagle coin in his pocket. He pulled it out to inspect the dent in its center for the hundredth time.
They still weren’t sure what had happened to Sean or Shen Shi. It had to be Assassin Market hits, but they’d tracked down the driver of the bus that struck Sean, and the driver was clean. No new information yet regarding Shen Shi, but Jin was on it. Chen had been working for the Chinese Security Ministry—their version of the CIA—but digging deeper created as many new questions as got answered.
They did manage to figure out that Sean was about to burst into the Bank of England’s Assembly meeting, probably to divulge what he knew about Bluebridge—like Yamamoto had tried to do. Jake had arranged a huge party for Sean, a belated wake, and they’d danced and drank until dawn.
Shorts in hand, Jake grabbed Anna and tickled her. “Okay, let’s go!”
Anna squealed with glee and ran into the hallway. They walked together through the front door, locking it behind them.
Movers would be coming next week to clean it out. Jake opened the front door of the apartment building, bright sunshine spilling onto them.
Chase Rockwell had been arrested on money laundering charges and was on his way into custody. But he’d be out. No banker ever stayed in jail for long.
“Come on, Jakey, what’s t
aking so long?” Eamon called out. He waved Jake over to the minivan parked in front of their apartment.
The sliding door of the van was open and Elle waved at him from the passenger seat. “Yeah, come on!”
Jake let go of Anna’s hand and she ran over to Uncle Eamon, jumping into his arms. Jake’s mother was in the back of the minivan, her expression vacant, but when Anna jumped out of Eamon’s arms and into the back to kiss Grandma, a smile spread across her face.
They were moving down to Virginia Beach, like Elle always wanted. They were all going to drive down there together.
Jake was staying on the Bluebridge Board of Directors. These kids needed a steady hand. Wutang and Jin had moved in together—in an apartment in Midtown—in love like two puppies. But Jake didn’t have to stay in New York to help out. Jin and Wutang and Sheldon were better equipped to ride that horse, and he’d had enough of the city.
He finally knew who’d inherited Sean’s estate. Jake. And Jake used it to buy the hotel-restaurant in Virginia Beach.
Sean would have liked that, too.
Jake convinced his Mom to come down and live with them, and Eamon had said he’d tend bar at the restaurant and help with renovations. The only one missing was Jake’s father.
Jin had transferred a few hundred thousand into Conor’s bank account, for his help. Of course, Conor complained it was too little, but Jake knew it was the kind of score his old man had always dreamed of.
His dad said he wasn’t coming south, and this relieved Jake—but he had a feeling Conor would be drawn down to them anyway, circling in their orbit. Jake was happy to let him do it in his own time, see if his feelings toward his father could heal.
All his life, his father had been searching for that big score, and whether Jake realized it or not, he’d been doing the same thing. Jake reached the minivan and looked inside—at Anna in Elle’s arms, his mother, his brother—and realized that this was his dream. Not money, but having a family, packed together like this in a minivan, about to embark on an adventure together.
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