The Monitor

by Janice Macdonald

  So, Alchemist was likely not in my laundry room. Right. He either showed up and everything had a logical explanation, or he showed up and killed us all. There had to be some other possibilities, but I couldn’t really think any up on the spot.

  Steve urged me to write to Alchemist. Kate had been on the phone to Ray at the hotel, and he had okayed the idea of inviting Alchemist to mission control at their expense.

  I sat down to the computer and hit the Eudora icon on my desktop. The e-mail program opened right away and dumped two or three pieces of spam into my Inbox. I hit the New Mail button, and typed:

  49

  To: alchemist@babel.com

  From: rcraig@uofalberta.com

  Subject: invitation

  Hi Hon,

  Things are heating up here, as you might expect. One of the things is that Ray and his team would like to invite you to come here and coordinate the on-line operations so that we’re all running 100% smoothly. I would sure feel better if you were here. They will pay the plane ticket and hotel. Please? It’s really spooky here, just sitting and waiting.

  What do you say?

  Love,

  Randy

  I had Steve and Kate look over the e-mail before I sent it. Ray showed up with lunch before there was a reply. A few more days of this and, if I wasn’t a corpse, then I was at least going to be corpulent. I couldn’t figure out why policemen weren’t all pasty-faced and doughy, with all the takeout crap they ate during these stakeouts. Kate assured me that stakeouts weren’t the norm and that they usually did eat much better. Not that I was complaining. The mandarin chicken salad was delicious, and the breadsticks were still warm. I was just polishing off the last few slivered almonds in the bottom of the plastic bowl when I heard the telltale ping from my computer.

  I had mail.

  To: rcraig@uofalberta.com

  From: alchemist@babel.com

  Subject: Re: invitation

  Hey Randy,

  Let everyone know I am more than willing to help, but I can’t get away at the moment. We could link up with the same sort of ISEE program that Ray linked to your monitor if that would help, though I don’t think I could make much difference from my end of operations. Of course, I will be available to Ray for any questions he might have. In fact, if you want to hang around in Babel, I can give Ray the same sort of powers that you and I have to be invisible. I am not sure that it would fool a Tremor, though. The more I think about it, the more I think he really has infiltrated right into the guts of the program.

  Sorry, chica, I can’t come hold your hand, as much as I would like to. However, you have Steve for that, right?

  Courage, ma brave.

  Alchemist

  Well, that was that. He was just point-blank refusing to come. So much for that possible scenario.

  “Maybe he can be ordered to come,” Kate spoke over my shoulder, reading Alchemist’s response for herself. Damn, I hate people reading over my shoulder. Alchemist ordered here? By whom? The president of the United States? I admit that I didn’t know all that much about American day-to-day operations, but wasn’t there something in all that declaring of independence that made people rebel against being told what to do?

  Ray and Kate laughed when I voiced some of what I’d been thinking.

  “I wasn’t thinking of the POTUS,” Kate explained. “I was thinking of Alchemist’s boss—Chatgod. Maybe we can have him order Alchemist to get his butt on a plane, wherever he happens to be, and join us. After all, Chatgod is in no position to avoid helping the investigation. If it gets out that Babel is the office of a contract killer, there would go all the good will he has been building and hoping to sell to Amazon or Pharmacia or whichever big site he wants to peddle his town-hall project to. I think he might be very motivated to push Alchemist our way.”

  We decided that Kate would be the best suited to ­tackle Chatgod, and she took out her Palm Pilot and whipped off an e-mail to my illusive bossman.

  We didn’t have to wait quite as long for a reply from him as we had from Alchemist. The reply was a stunner, though. Kate bounced it to Ray’s and my respective e-mail programs so we could see his words for ourselves. I could hardly believe them, even reading them for myself. I swear as I read it, I could feel the plate tectonics of my world shifting below my feet.

  To: kbrouder@callisto.com

  From: chatgod@babel.com

  Subject: Re: my employee

  Dear Ms. Brouder:

  I am afraid that, as much as I wish to comply with all your needs in this unfortunate business, I cannot order my employee Alchemist, aka Tim Ross, to your side.

  I hate to admit this, but Alchemist is not an actual person. He is a self-replenishing, evolving artificial intelligence. He absorbs information delivered, has a constant search program running behind his interface, and relates to each person in a manner which he or she will most easily respond to.

  To put it crudely, Alchemist is a bot. He may well be my greatest creation, although I am not sure of his practical monetary value. He is at your disposal on-line, but he will be of no muscular use to you.

  Yours sincerely,

  Alvin Epstein

  Babel, Inc.

  “Holy cipher, Batman,” Steve whispered, “and to think I was getting jealous of that guy.”

  “No wonder you’d be jealous, Steve,” Ray said. “The Alchemist who was responding to Randy would be absorbing her style and values and responding in kind. Like-mind reacting to like-mind. Brilliant concept. Chatgod sets Alchemist going to keep track of things and give Randy abridged reports of the day’s activities, and in the meantime, Alchemist expands based on his interaction with Randy. If she makes a literary comment, the bot is automatically reading the whole text in the background, which is then part of his world view.”

  “So, the more I talked with Alchemist, the more like me he became? Did he act like me to other people? Would he have sounded like me when talking with Kate, for instance?”

  “Chances are he would absorb quite a bit of Kate and determine, based on intersections and common factors, which parts of your vision were also privileged by Kate, and which parts might be better left dormant. However, I think he might have had incredible empathy if given enough people to respond to. As it was, he was mostly working off your input. Not a bad thing, in my opinion, but not as entirely heterogeneous as Chatgod might have envisioned. This Chatgod shouldn’t be underestimated. If he can imagine and create an Alchemist, who knows where he might go with his vision of worldwide community.” Ray sounded grudgingly respectful. I knew that he also thought Chatgod an irritating catalyst for this whole mess, creating a world in which a Tremor could take hold.

  I wasn’t so sure I was willing to dump all the blame on Chatgod, even though I was still reeling from his rather cavalier use of me in his experiments in artificial intelligence. After all, you can’t blame the architect for the tenants he attracts. I thought then of some of the tenement towers in bigger cities around the globe and paused. Maybe he did have to share some of the blame, I ­amended, but it was still Tremor we were after.

  I felt a surge of revitalizing energy. I realized it came from knowing that my pal Alchemist wasn’t a bad guy. He wasn’t a guy at all, but he wasn’t the enemy. One less thing to worry about, and it made me happy to know my instincts to trust him hadn’t been misguided.

  Life felt a whole lot better. Sure, I was stuck in my teensy apartment with a continuous flow of police personnel coming and going. Sure, there was a hired killer purported to be on his way to kill Steve—and likely me, too, if he discovered he was being set up. There were a whole lot of unanswered questions still hanging there, and my job future was muddy. The weather was ­predicted to drop fifteen degrees before the night was over. But still, life felt pretty darned good.

  After all, I wasn’t being lied to deliberately by my fellow monitor. My best friend was dating a millionaire, and I had declared my love for a glorious man who reciprocated my feelings. On the whole, things
looked a whole lot brighter than they’d felt the evening before.

  Of course, the feeling didn’t last, because just then the power went out.

  50

  I had been looking straight at Steve when the room went dark, so I knew where he was, and I crossed the room to be able to touch him. Kate was operating her Palm Pilot with one hand and holding her cell phone to her ear with the other, barking out orders for generators to be brought to us. I looked out the blurry living-room window and realized that the whole area was dark. There were no street lights, no neon store signs, no other houses lit up. The whole grid must be down. At five-thirty on a winter afternoon in Edmonton, that can make things look ­pretty dark indeed.

  In a way, it was a relief, because I couldn’t imagine anything of this magnitude being attributable to Tremor. Had it just been our power, I’d be fixating on the laundry room again. This, I was willing to believe, was a huge, irritating coincidence.

  Ray and Kate didn’t seem to think so, though. Iain McCorquodale came through the apartment door with a huge flashlight, announcing that everyone was in place and ready. Steve suggested I get in the bathtub and lie down, since the metal and porcelain would keep stray bullets from finding a home in my flesh.

  While I am not afraid of the dark, I am intensely claustrophobic, and the last place I wanted to be was my tiny bathroom in the dark. I suggested I crouch between the fireplace and the sofa, which was on an interior wall. I would be out of everyone’s way and still able to breathe.

  Steve was about to argue when Ray settled things by saying it might be better all ’round if I just got encased in a Kevlar jacket under my biggest sweatshirt and settled in by the computer. We needed to keep a connection to the world of Babel and catch any messages that might be coming our way from Tremor. They’d managed to set a generator going, which was operating the two computers, a trouble light and—I almost laughed but was afraid of drifting into hysteria—the coffee pot. Ray had his priorities.

  Lucky for us, my service provider was cable. As long as we had power to operate the modem and the computer, we were in business. I let Steve help me into the vest while the computer was booting up.

  “Do you think he’s responsible for this power failure?” I whispered to Steve.

  “I have a feeling there are things about Tremor we haven’t been made privy to, Randy. If they’re willing to believe it, I guess I would rather go along with it than feel too complacent. Is that too tight?” He touched my cheek as I pulled the sweatshirt down over the bulletproof vest.

  The drill was that I was to sit by the computer, and Ray was on the floor under the kitchen table so as not to be seen by anyone from outside. I didn’t bother to point out that I was going to look odd having computer access when all the rest of the city was in darkness. By the time Tremor got to me, if he got to me, he’d have figured out that things were not what they seemed.

  Steve, in full SWAT-styled gear, was sitting in the tub, with his service revolver trained on the door. The idea was that while I was working, Steve would be in the apartment, having an after-work bath. The whole thing seemed fishy to me, but I’m neither a computer genius nor a killer. What I wanted was for the policemen staked out through the building to nab Tremor before he made it halfway down the Persian hall runner. Surely they would grab anyone who appeared; all those who would have a reason to be in the building had already been moved to the hotel.

  Kate was sitting on a kitchen chair pulled into the food-prep area, blocked from the rest of us by the glassed-in cupboard containing my good china, what there was of it. She was having yet another conversation on her cell phone, this time with the people at the airport. Flights had come in from Denver, Chicago, San Francisco, and Toronto in the past twelve hours, and Kate’s team back in Austin was trying to find some commonalities between the names on the manifests and those from flights into Austin around the time of the earlier death. So far, no luck, but they were still at it, trying anagrams of names, and synonyms.

  I logged into Babel because I honestly couldn’t think of anything better to do. If Tremor was in town making the lights go out, the chances of him being logged into a chat room were minimal. And if he was logged in somewhere else, the chances he knew about the power failure in Edmonton were negligible. It felt bizarre to have the regulars stop their flow of chat to say hello to Chimera, as they did every evening. I checked the chat list and saw that most of the regulars were there, even those like Carlin and Evangeline and Lea, who were intermittent at best.

  The one person I had half expected to see, though, wasn’t there. I hadn’t had a chance to spar with Sanders on-line since we’d met for coffee, and I realized I had been missing that. Even with Steve sitting in my bathtub, and Ray wedged in beside my house slippers, I would have felt a bit easier if I could have made contact with Sanders. Why? Maybe because then I would know where he was. Of course, he could be living somewhere within the parameters of this power failure.

  Chimera: Has anyone seen Sanders lately?

  Vixen: He’s been making himself scarce, I think. Who knows, maybe he’s under some snowbank up there in the Great White North!

  PM from Buckaroo to Chimera: Having him here ­wouldn’t help us place him, though. (I’m logged in through my Palm in the kitchen.)

  “Ack!” I yelped, and Kate chuckled from behind the glass cupboard. “It’s bad enough you’re all over my apartment, now you can read my mind!”

  “I just thought I would see what the drain was on the Palm Pilot. You know, it’s not too strong a drag. With lots of batteries, Sanders could have been logging into Babel from all over the town. Might that account for Ray’s tracking of Edmonton usage?”

  Ray muttered from his spot on the floor, but I thought Kate might have a point, although I wasn’t sure Sanders could afford a Palm Pilot. It didn’t make me feel any easier, though. If Sanders wasn’t on Babel when he could usually be depended on to be logged in, then where was he?

  I don’t normally get answers as quickly or as powerfully as this one was. However, there was a hammering on the door, and Iain McCorquodale pushed it open.

  “Would you come out here in the hall a minute, Ms Craig? There’s someone we’d like you to identify.” He looked at my face and amended immediately, “Verify his identity. He’s alive.”

  Indeed he was alive. He was spread-eagled on the hallway floor, with three police guns trained on him and one black leather brogue placed between his shoulder blades, but he was alive.

  “Sanders! I was just wondering where you were.”

  51

  Sanders, or I guess I should say Winston, although it just didn’t come easily for me, was frisked and finally allowed to stand up. His story was that he was coming to apologize for being a jerk when I was trying to talk to him about the assassins game. Apparently there had been some journalist nosing around the U of A game asking questions, which had him worried, because Sanders had been doing primary research in order to write the whole thing up in a sociology paper. When I had started talking to him about it, he had assumed that I was the journalist he’d been told about. When he discovered it was another woman, he had come to apologize.

  I wondered briefly how he’d known where to find me, but my address was listed in the Edmonton phone book, so it wasn’t really rocket science. As a matter of fact, Winston had been taking courses in rocket science the year before, so looking up my name in the phone book was likely a piece of cake for him.

  I looked at Lewis and McCorquodale to see if they thought we should bring him into the loop. McCorquodale shrugged and said they’d hang on to him while I went in to talk to Ray.

  Ray and Kate decided that we couldn’t afford to let Sanders out of our field of vision. He had seen too much that was odd to allow him free access to the ’Net. He was invited in and offered a Kevlar vest and a cup of coffee.

  “You are verifiably the ‘hostess with the mostest’,” Sanders laughed as he buckled himself in. He seemed rather pleased to meet Ray, since he ha
d spent an enjoyable evening discussing Corvette Stingrays with Emilio Lizardo in Babel. Kate mentioned that she had spotted him there without revealing her handle, and he didn’t ask. Sanders seemed to cotton on to Kate’s command a lot sooner than most people I’d seen. Perhaps those psychology courses had done the trick.

  “Sorry you’ve been pulled into this. I’ve been told that the likelihood of danger is pretty minimal. It’s a lot more likely that Tremor will be trapped on his way into the neighborhood.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure about that tonight,” Sanders pondered. “With the power outage, a couple of electric trolley buses are stalled in the middle of the High Level Bridge, and since all the traffic lights are out, there are a lot of snafus. I would say there is gridlock throughout the area. Are you sure all your forces are in place?”

  “We can account for everyone except those detailed to trail suspects. We’re trying to stay off cell phone connectivity with them, because we can’t be sure Tremor doesn’t have the technology to intercept,” Kate allowed. It was probably satisfying to talk about things to an outsider who seemed bright enough to be asking the right questions.

  “So you think he caused the power failure?” I asked.

  “Well, as much as we’d like to, I doubt that we could attribute this to privatization,” drawled Winston. “There is a localized outage through the university and downtown area, and it flows along three main access routes—from downtown across the bridge through to the Grandin Station of the LRT is all dark. So is the line down 109th Street all the way to 62nd Avenue, meaning that police cars from the south side would be unable to get through the gridlock. The 114th Street access through to the Neil Crawford Centre at Belgravia Road is also down, so cars coming from the Whitemud are at a crawl, too. There is one egress, down the Groat Bridge, through to Stony Plain Road, which is the last place you’d think to look for a getaway, unless of course you’re thinking of a ski vacation in Jasper. So, that, I figure, would be the way a clever baddie would think. Always aim for the least ­likely, because it will be the least obvious. I am betting whoever it is has a fast car and a map of the Coquihalla Highway to Vancouver.”