Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief

by Alexander Jablokov

  But Muriel had known. She had hired him almost out of his hospital bed and given him a new life.

  Muriel Inglis had made her money the old-fashioned way: she divorced it. Actually, that was unfair, Bernal thought. She’d divorced two, but the last husband, Tommy, had died of a heart attack on the golf course before their divorce actually became final. There was a plaque to him in the clubhouse.

  At any rate, in her late fifties, Muriel had found herself with an astounding amount of money and some odd ideas of how best to spend it. She already had an Italianate mansion in the nice section of the town she had grown up in, her daughter was grown and out of the house, and she’d made her requisite donations to the art museum and local artistic hip-hop troupe. Some women might just have bought another house or gotten a lot of cosmetic work done.

  Instead, Muriel funded lunatic projects that would have been unable to get money any other way: urban reforestations and wild animal reintroductions in depopulating rust belt cities, negative sculptures carved into the bedrock surrounding defunct ICBM silos, the reintroduction of nomadic cultures to the Maghreb, and intelligent planetary probes, like the one Madeline Ungaro was working on right here in Cheriton.

  Because of Bernal’s history, Muriel had kept him largely away from Ungaro and her Al-based exploration vehicle. At first, that had been fine with him. It had the same aura of dramatic uselessness as her other projects, but seemed much more specialized and constrained. It was the only one that couldn’t be easily put on a tourist brochure. Bernal didn’t do much more with Ungaro than manage financing disbursements, pay the lease on the lab, and make sure all the paperwork was in order. But recently, as he realized that he had created an entirely new life for himself, the interests of his old one seemed to reassert themselves, and he began to wonder if there really was a functional AI growing in a warehouse on the outskirts of Cheriton.

  Now that Muriel had asked to meet him there, he wondered what Muriel hadn’t been telling him about that particular project.

  4

  Bernal pounded on the featureless metal door, hearing the thump sound through Ungaro’s lab. He’d already given up on the doorbell. A red LED blinked in the black rectangle of a card reader next to the loading dock door. Muriel might have had the card to open it, but Bernal had no idea where he’d look for it.

  The marked parking spot in front was empty. He didn’t see any sign of the Mercedes Muriel had stolen, either.

  Ungaro’s lab was at the end of a brick warehouse converted to light industrial and inventory uses, divided into units, each with a loading dock and an office door. It included a blacksmith and an office-supply distributor. Bernal walked across the parking lot, looking around for a concealed place Muriel might have put her car the previous night.

  The rear end of a newer office building poked out of the scrub woods. Where there were office buildings, there were parking lots. He trotted down a rough track between adolescent trees, hopped a mucky stream, and

  stepped over the crisp asphalt rim of the other parking lot.

  At this hour of the morning, there were few cars in the lot. Again, no Mercedes. But a police car had pulled up next to a Dumpster and was taking a report from a young guy who stared sadly at a dent in his car door, not looking up.

  “Why were you parked here?” the cop asked.

  “What? Look at this!”

  “I see it, sir. This isn’t a residential lot.”

  “I told you. There was a party. I live over at the McClintock Apartments. Some bozo, last night, was having this humongous party. Filled the parking lot. And some of the grass too. I got home, couldn’t find a spot. So I parked here.”

  “It’s marked ‘no overnight parking.’ ”

  “I know. Jeez, I know.”

  The cop looked over at the Dumpster. “Looks like something hit it. Pretty hard. Shoved it right over into your car.”

  “Yeah. So what are you going to say?”

  “Say? I’m not giving you a ticket.”

  “Thanks.”

  “But you had a fender bender with a Dumpster. I’ll just write that up. No vehicle, no evidence. This’ll be between you and your insurance company.”

  “I’ve talked to them before.”

  “Good. You know the drill, then.”

  The world looked full of troubles this morning. Bernal was about to head back to Muriel’s, to reconsider and regroup, when he looked past the dented Dumpster and noticed something.

  _______

  From this angle, he got a view of the back of the warehouse. Whoever had been responsible for the adaptive reuse of the old warehouse had bermed and stabilized the building’s rear. The berm was planted with decent sod. A few of the tenants had fenced their back areas for additional storage, but Ungaro, at the end, had not.

  A black angled line led up through the grass to the rear of Ungaro’s lab. Something had torn the grass out in a wide strip, exposing earth.

  He looked down. A shopping cart lay on its side in the dark water. The stream curved along the warehouse’s rear, where it managed to hold on to a bit of its old flood-plain after everything else had been torn away. Opposite the warehouse, backyards pushed stockade fences against the willow trees. The patch of scrub woods, reeds, and weeds existed as a tiny wilderness behind the world that faced the roads.

  Bernal slid down the slope. The mud was slippery and stank. Each stick and reed wore a garland of soggy grass, souvenir of recent spring floods. He stepped on the cart, which wobbled but didn’t sink any further, and made it safely across the stream.

  Something had come through here. And recently. Weeds had been pressed down, their broken leaves not yet wilted. Reeds had been torn away and lay in clumps in the slow-flowing water. The mud was too soft for footprints to remain clear, but it did look like they were deep and there were a lot of them, as if two or more people had hauled something heavy through here. Had whoever it was smashed into that Dumpster? He looked back. It lined up. That hadn’t been caused by anyone carrying anything. It had been done by something heavy, a vehicle, moving pretty fast.

  The rear door of Ungaro’s lab, painted metal over thick wood, was scored with bright new scratches. It hung open, revealing darkness beyond.

  Bernal pushed it open and stepped in. “Madeline? Madeline Ungaro?” Then, more quietly, “Muriel?”

  A combination padlock meant for the door hung on a wall hook. Bernal’s guess was that the door was normally locked. But last night it had not been.

  Light streamed in through windows overhead, illuminating high fiberboard shelves loaded with motors and joints. Junction boxes hung from the shelves, strapped-up masses of PVC conduit dangling like drying laundry.

  A couple of chunks of crumpled gold foil, something that might once have held and protected some piece of delicate equipment, lay on a shelf. Each shelf was neatly labeled: “Proprioceptive joint indicator.” “Visual/Tactile signal mixer.” “40 & 60 watt bulbs.” A bucket, a mop, and other cleaning equipment lay on the floor by the door, along with a shattered fluorescent tube and a transparent garbage bag filled with empty Diet Coke cans.

  He looked carefully, so he perceived it, but he also took pictures, as backup. If it came down to a question of how many Coke cans had been in the bag this particular morning, he didn’t want to rely on his unaided memory.

  There were fresh scrapes along the battered and stained concrete floor, along with mud and weeds, still wet. He followed the trail past a folded-back accordion door; into what looked like a vehicle maintenance and repair area.

  A heavy rack against the brick wall held complex legs ending in wide pads, springy wheels, a part of a carapace, an aluminum chassis, a collection of oculars, antennae, and other sensing equipment.

  What looked like a gigantic bug hung from a sling.

  Crude welds marked its carapace, and its six legs didn’t quite match. Spare legs hung askew, and a toolbox had been knocked to the floor, spewing nuts and bolts.

  Ungaro was Muriel’s pr
ivate project, but Bernal still knew a bit about it, just from the invoices. A few years ago, a local start-up called Hess Tech had built a prototype planetary rover under a speculative NASA contract, supplemented by a grant from the state, which was trying to move some research business outside the Harvard/MIT zone near Boston. The rover, called Hesketh, was meant to explore earthlike planets on its own and had incorporated a lot of experimental technology along with its AI. Like anything that experimented with more than one thing at a time, it hadn’t worked that well, and a new administration had not renewed the contract. The company had gone out of business, and the developers went their separate ways.

  But one of them, Madeline Ungaro, had acquired the company’s assets and settled some of its debts. With a further grant from Muriel, she had moved Hesketh, its various parts, and its support gear out here to this lab, and continued working on it.

  Bernal looked at the mess of complex mechanical gear. Ungaro, as he understood it, was on the cognitive, not the mechanical side. She’d developed the intelligent processor that would guide the vehicle across rough terrain and, if possible, contact whatever life lived on that mysterious planet circling a distant star. More than once, he’d wanted to call her, just to chat things over. He’d been out of the field since Muriel had hired him, and he’d never managed the call.

  This ugly thing had to be Hesketh itself, or, rather one of its bodies. The name applied specifically to the processing unit, which contained whatever identity a self-directing planetary explorer had. The thing was supposed to be flexible and easily modifiable.

  This vehicle configuration was about six feet long and vaguely arthropod. One side of the carapace was open. A half dozen manipulator arms, very much like something you might see in an automated manufacturing facility, stood at the ready above the interior. Each arm was lipped with a different tool. They looked like they had stopped in the middle of something, but Bernal couldn’t tell what they had been working on or what had stopped them. A constellation of glowing LEDs communicated a message about the state of Hesketh’s universe that he could not interpret.

  The entire setup mixed sophisticated with crude. A lube gun lay on the floor, with two rubber gloves on top of it. If Hesketh had to be lubed up like this, how would it ever have managed to move around alien planets? Back when Hess Tech was strutting its stuff, looking for venture capital, someone had probably been in charge of making sure Hesketh got greased before any serious VC demo. Keeping the undercarriage from squeaking and then seizing up while exploring some kind of jungle planet would have been a cost-plus improvement. Bernal knew how these things worked.

  The leg pads were covered with mud. The trail had come up the back slope, through the unlocked door, and across the floor to here. Where had Hesketh come from, and why had there been no one here to receive it?

  And where was its main processing unit? The bodies— the carapaces, wheels, legs, manipulators—were just the externals. Somewhere in here was the genuinely interesting thing, the intelligent processor that could direct the exploration of another world. That was the actual thing Muriel had been funding.

  This carapace looked mostly hollow. It was either just a simple mechanical device, mostly motors and legs, or disassembly had proceeded for quite a while before Bernal had shown up. Was this sorry-looking thing really some kind of intelligent being?

  Beyond the maintenance area was the loading dock, with a large garage door. Trash was piled up in the pull-in area: empty paint cans, the large cylinder of what looked like an automatic transmission, a big canister of oil. It didn’t look like the dock got much use, but simply served as an additional storage area.

  Just off the loading dock was a small office, with a desk on casters and an equipment cart made of red metal tubes and with large rubber wheels. It was loaded with gear: a couple of PCs, a large LCD screen that showed a scene of some lake in the North Woods, a laser printer, a power supply with glowing indicator lights, a rack of pressurized gas cylinders, a keyboard, and the joystick controller from a game console. One end of the cart was a crane. A shiny cylinder, about as wide as it was long, dangled from a cable at its end, with gas and power lines running into it. A cable ran from the cart to a locked high-amp plug in the wall.

  Bernal pushed the cylinder. It was massive. His first poke barely moved it.

  He looked at the gear on the cart and put his hand on the joystick. With a hum of a motor, the massive cylinder lowered. The other way, and it went up again.

  The thing looked like a superconducting quantum interference device, a SQUID: a device for measuring incredibly small magnetic fields, consisting of two cryogenically cooled superconductors separated by an insulating layer. Electrons snuck through the gap via quantum effects, and their alibis revealed the details of subtle magnetic fields. They were used to read the internal states of computers and processors, among other things. These things had lots of uses in intelligence work, and much of their early development had been during the Cold War.

  You didn’t go through the trouble of maintaining a SQUID unless you had a good use for it. The gadget was touchy and the constant cooling expensive. It helped explain the size of the utility bills for Ungaro’s lab. But why would Ungaro need to use quantum interference to analyze the outputs of a device she herself had put together? Why didn’t Hesketh just have a USB port on its side, or something?

  And the thing had a huge amount of cooling, with racks of nitrogen tanks. Even as he sat there, a massive compressor hummed up, cooling the nitrogen further. The maze of piping seemed to have access ports on it for more. It looked like enough cooling to run two or three of the big devices, but Bernal saw no sign of any other SQUID cylinders. There was nothing else in the lab that would have required any liquid nitrogen to operate, much less the huge quantities this thing could produce.

  A counterweight lowered in the loading dock and the door rumbled up, letting in a flood of morning sunlight.

  5

  When Bernal stepped out, a Hummer stood backed into the loading area, its rear hatch open. It was shrinkwrapped with a forest scene. A doe drank from a clear stream while a bald eagle stared nobly off at the whip antenna. The wrap had wrinkled, and was starting to peel.

  There was no one in the vehicle, but the double doors to the lab were still swinging. Bernal pushed through.

  A large woman in a puffy red parka and jeans leaned over Hesketh’s hanging carcass, peering into the open interior. She shook her head at something.

  He waited to see what she would do next, but the swinging door must have made a sound behind him, because she turned and stepped back from him, so the space between them opened up. She looked him up and down quickly before speaking.

  “Sorry. I didn’t know anyone was here.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Charis. Charis Fen.” She had a wide face and a huge tangle of dark hair. Her eyes were pale brown, almost yellow, nearly the same shade as her skin. She had a gift for stillness, and stood and stared at him, feet spread wide. She wore a bulky sweater under the parka.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I could ask you the same thing.”

  “You didn’t.”

  Charis paused. “Right. I didn’t. Where the hell is Muriel?”

  “Muriel?” Bernal was startled. “She send you here?”

  “You got it. You too? Whatever your name is. I guess I didn’t ask that first either.”

  “My name is Bernal. I work for Muriel.”

  “That girl has employees? Who knew? What’s that like?”

  “It’s fine. You still haven’t told me what you’re doing here.”

  “Well, if Muriel didn’t inform you, I’m not sure it’s my job to do it.” Charis patted the leg she had been examining. “Were you here when this thing came home?”

  “I haven’t been here long at all.” He had to regain control of the situation. “How did you get in here?”

  “Key card.”

  “Did Madeline Ungaro give it t
o you?”

  “Nah. Muriel. She’s got some issues with this Ungaro gal, I’m guessing. You know anything about any problems Muriel might be having with her?”

  “No.”

  “How long you been working for my friend Muriel, anyway?”

  “Couple of years. Now what did she want you to—”

  Charis stepped up to him and examined his face. “You know, it looks like you got smacked pretty good there.”

  Bernal put his hand up to where the doorstop had hit him. “It’s nothing.”

  “Nothing? A subdural hematoma’s nothing to screw around with.” She pushed her fingers into his skull. She wasn’t taller than him, but she seemed larger in every dimension that mattered.

  “Ow!”

  She wore a springlike scent. Strong. Lilac didn’t suit her. “I’m no doctor, but it don’t look too bad. More cosmetic. You got lucky.”

  Bernal pulled himself away from her. “Does Muriel know you’re in here?”

  “Just remember that every superball-headed PI in those old detective books ended up as a drooling vegetable in some Home for Old Flatfoots. A brain’s not a basketball.”

  She was evading his questions, but that in itself was a kind of answer.

  “You’re here for some reason,” Bernal said. “If you don’t want to tell me what it is, I guess I can’t force you. But I can ask you to leave.”

  “Really.” Charis seemed amused. “You have control over Madeline Ungaro’s lab? Does she know that?”

  “I represent Madeline Ungaro’s funding agency. We hold the lease. In her absence, I am in control of this space. I was about to seal it up. You’re trespassing. Could you please leave?”