Oracle's Hunt

by A. Claire Everward

  “Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll see about that. In the meantime, however, I do seem to be developing an overwhelming desire to shoot you.” His tone was conversational, a friendly smile on his face.

  “Well, that would certainly delay your investigation. May I suggest you wait until you resolve it?” She spread her hands, her smile every bit as sweet as his. “I am, dear neighbor, here for the shooting later, any time you want.”

  Donna gaped. “Okay, enough. Enough, both of you. Truce!”

  They both stepped back, realizing they were now toe to toe.

  “What on earth is wrong with you two?” Donna looked at both of them in disbelief. They still hadn’t taken their eyes off each other’s, both clearly still aiming for a fight.

  “Enough already! What’s going on here? Look at you!” Her voice took on an edge of distress.

  Lara heard it and immediately turned to her and put a gentle hand on her arm. “You’re right, Don, I’m sorry. Don’t worry about it.” She spoke soothingly, throwing a subtle look at Donovan, and he gave the slightest nod and joined in.

  “It’s nothing, Donna. Just work issues,” he said.

  “Oh, so you don’t want to kill each other?”

  “You called a truce, remember?” Lara smiled, avoiding answering. Just then her phone beeped. She took a look at it and frowned. “Sorry, I have to take this.”

  Donovan watched her walk a distance away, noting the sudden alertness in her step.

  “I didn’t even consider the possibility that the two of you wouldn’t get along. I made her come here because I thought it would be good for her. I hoped she would be happy here.” Donna looked miserable.

  Donovan frowned. “You made her come here? I don’t understand.”

  She looked toward the house, shaking her head. “My grandparents wanted so much to move, you know that. This place was becoming too much for them. Solitary, too. They wanted to go somewhere nice, to that new retirement community all their friends have already moved to. But the difference in the prices . . .”

  Donovan knew what she was talking about. He had even considered buying their house himself, so they could go, but then they told him it was already sold.

  “Lara bought the house for the price it cost them to move there,” Donna said.

  It was his turn to gawk. That was one hell of a thing to do. Even with the status of this neighborhood, it still meant she’d paid a substantial premium for the house.

  “Yes, exactly. They wouldn’t let me do that, and with the baby . . . Lara lived next door to Patty and me, you know. Even before Greg was born she talked about moving out, giving us her apartment so that we could extend ours. She’d thought about getting a new place somewhere, a new apartment, maybe closer to IDSD, and then when this came up, when she bought the house—she wasn’t going to live here, you know, she only wanted to help my grandparents and thought that she would rent it out or something, didn’t really think about it. But I talked her into actually moving here. Even though it’s a house, you know. She was pretty set on an apartment. Not a house. A house would be . . .”

  “Lonely,” Donovan completed the thought.

  She looked at him, then back at the house, and he had that feeling again, of something being hidden from him. He glanced at where Lara was standing with her back to them, still on the phone.

  “It’s a good place, and it’s nice and safe, and I know you, Donovan, you’ve been such a good neighbor to my grandparents and you’re a good guy. I wanted someone to watch out for her.”

  Once again, her choice of words confounded him. From what he’d seen, Lara Holsworth didn’t need anyone to watch out for her.

  “She didn’t even decide at the end, you know,” Donna continued. “I knew she would be away for a few weeks, so I prepared everything, you saw it, and then I just packed and moved her things. Made it a surprise. I thought it would be good for her, the change.”

  “You’re right, it is a good place to live in, that’s why I moved here,” he said, reacting to the worry that was so clear in her voice.

  Donna looked up at him, unhappy.

  “I promise I won’t actually shoot her,” he said, smiling, trying to cheer her up. “Just please don’t tell her that.”

  “She is really an amazing woman.” Donna said quietly, her eyes somber. “I wish you knew . . .”

  She stopped as Lara came toward them, putting her phone away, her eyes thoughtful. She was a completely different person now, as if she’d slipped into some professional persona. Just like he did when he was on a case, Donovan realized, coming back from where Donna had taken him with her surprising revelations about Lara to who she was for him, and wondered about her again.

  “Oh, please don’t tell me you’re being called in again,” Donna said, and Donovan frowned.

  “No,” Lara answered her, acutely aware of the USFID investigator’s presence there. “It was just an update. Come on, let’s go before I change my mind,” she prodded, using the opportunity to get away from him.

  Waiting for Donna to give Donovan a friendly kiss, noting with some irritation how she whispered to him, “Behave!” and trying not to note with more than a little irritation at herself that quick, disarming smile meant for Donna that lit up his blue-gray eyes, she led her friend away.

  Donovan’s mind was on her as he walked into his living room, and found a message in his home system voicemail. Jenny, a woman he’d been with on and off in the past months, had called to tell him she was in the city, if he wanted to hook up. Just the right diversion, he thought as he took out his phone and started saying her name to initiate a call. Then he stopped. Stared at the phone. Flung it at the sofa with a curse and walked away.

  Chapter Seven

  Sundays tended to be slow and provided a respite, to an extent, unless an investigation demanded his attention. And this particular investigation couldn’t wait. But on this Sunday Donovan chose to work here, in his home. The quiet, the solitude, the rustle of trees in the cool autumn wind took away an edge that would be there if he worked in the sprawling, even if mostly empty USFID building, where, as the agent in charge of SIRT, he would be available for unwanted interruptions.

  He would go farther away, if he could. If he didn’t need to think about work, he would go even farther away. But today he had to balance the need for solitude with the need to think, to focus, to resolve. And this house, on this quiet day, in the autumn peace, would do.

  The morning after a sleepless night—and he still wasn’t ready to ask himself why—found him sitting at his kitchen nook table with a hot cup of coffee, contemplating his techs’ reconstruction of the data center break-in based on what they’d deduced from the forensic evidence collected at the site and what he’d learned at the USOMP. If not for the footage they had from the on-site camera, the data center destruction could well have been mistaken for an accident, so that the theft of data from the IDSD unit would never have been discovered, and that had been the perpetrators’ plan, Donovan knew now.

  According to Reilly and Sidney, the perpetrators used the fire suppression system against itself, which would likely have been perceived as an internal malfunction. When the two techs broke the footage down into frames and analyzed them, they found that the devices the perpetrators had placed on the individual data storage units had initiated a high-intensity spark that created a plasma gas that, Reilly and Sidney had said, had to have been manipulated to increase its potency. The devices then seemingly communicated with one another, generating within a split second plasma arcs among themselves. The arcs reacted with the inert gas in the fire suppression system and with the electricity in the storage units, as enhancers, causing a devastating explosion and a high-temperature fire that fed on the composite materials enclosing the data storage units as well as on the protective coating on the inside of the data storage level’s walls. The devices themselves were completely destroyed in the initial explosion, not leaving a trace, so that if not for the camera footage, their existence wo
uld never have been known.

  Between that and how they had gotten into the security system and disabled it in the first place, in and out without anyone knowing, as Reese had said, clearly the perpetrators hadn’t intended to be discovered. But then there were the dead guards. A mistake? Donovan now knew that the perpetrators probably wouldn’t have known about them beforehand. This particular manned security, a secondary, even redundant feature, was not included in the USOMP mainframe’s security protocol for the data center, unlike the backup specialist security teams, which the automated system was programmed to both manage and alert if they were required. And Donovan didn’t think the perpetrators had been watching the data center in any way other than remotely scanning for the security system signal as they had. The kind of surveillance that would be required to watch the secure perimeter around the building, which was located in an uninhabited area, would have meant risking exposure, and these guys seemed to be too smart—and too technologically savvy—for that.

  Still, anyone planning an operation of this sophistication would be prepared for the possibility of human presence, or it would be an oversight. And the perpetrators were obviously armed, so they must have been ready for at least some resistance—they were, after all, aware of the presence, even if off-site, of the backup security teams who could turn up at the data center if they suspected anything was wrong. So, once they did in fact encounter and kill the data center guards, why not dispose of them in the fire, instead of leaving them outside the fire perimeter with bullets in them? Why not make it all look like an accident? He himself could think of a couple of ways to do that.

  So maybe these guys didn’t care after all if it looked like an accident or not, and only wanted to ensure that no one would know which data storage unit was accessed and what data was stolen, information that could possibly point to their identity, not to mention their intentions. Either that, or they were arrogant enough to think no one could get to them.

  The latter possibility worried him more than the former one. A lot more.

  He leaned back. These guys were well trained—the data center guards had had designated training and would have been able to respond to an attack, even if they hadn’t expected one, and yet there were no indications of any resistance by them at the scene. And the perpetrators had gotten through the outside perimeter six miles away covertly—even with the security system disabled, they had run the risk of the backup security teams’ spotters identifying them. And yet they managed to avoid them. They were clearly highly capable technologically speaking, and patient—finding and locking on the security signal, using it to get both into the security system at the data center and the monitoring station mainframe at the USOMP, learning the security layout from inside while laying low, undetected for months, and carefully preparing, attacking, and disappearing again without a trace. Literally so—they had apparently been prepared for the ground conditions around the data center and had concealed their tracks, despite what would have been a hasty escape.

  And they were determined. This wasn’t something militant groups did, work so long, so hard on a single attack that wasn’t even the final target, and then keep quiet, no boasting, no exploiting the windfall of their success.

  This thing they were looking for, this Oracle, had to be one hell of a target. It looked too much like it was worth a lot to them. Worth everything to them.

  So what the hell was it?

  It wasn’t the code name for an operation. What his techs told him didn’t support that. They hadn’t managed to decrypt the data, but they did analyze its underlying patterns, and these didn’t conform to the mention of a single unrepeated operation, but rather to multiple instances in which this code name was used. It wasn’t a person, either. People could be found using far easier methods, no matter how important or protected they were. No need for the elaborate measures these guys seemed to have taken. It obviously had some sort of connection to them, did something to make them react in the extreme way that they did. So, a weapon? A missile, a drone, or maybe even core technologies—control, communications. Intelligence, perhaps. But then it would have been better for the perpetrators to stay under the radar and steal it in the field, then reverse engineer it. Even some of the narrow AIs used for these applications were accessible in the field if the perpetrators could get their hands on the systems using them, and these guys were certainly resourceful enough to do so. Except what if they couldn’t, what if there was no direct access to this AI in the field? And what if it did more than control a single system, a single application, what if its impact was more encompassing, more critical, more damaging perhaps to those who were now after it?

  Artificial intelligence. Now that was an interesting thought. Donovan contemplated it for a long time, then played with a memory, something from a past incident he had not given much thought to at the time. Something that connected all too well with his current line of reasoning.

  He got up, went over to his living room screen, and made a call. On the screen, a bleary-eyed Sidney appeared, her hair—pink that day, to match the shiny pink oversized pajamas she was wearing—sticking out to all sides. Behind her, the living room of the home she shared with Reilly, her identical twin sister, looked like it had been hit by a disoriented tornado. He tried hard not to smile. He needed her focused, and it looked like that would be difficult to achieve as it was.

  Sidney yawned. She had obviously just awoken. A perpetual early riser himself, not much of a sleeper in fact, Donovan still accepted that some people liked to sleep late on a Sunday. Especially since the sisters had diligently prepared the data center reconstruction for him most of the day and night before.

  Sidney yawned again. “Sorry. Morning, sir. Boss. Agent Pierce. Donovan.” She went through the range of choices fast, pretty much as she always did, then gave him a bright smile.

  “Sorry to wake you, Sidney.”

  “Party,” she reminisced dreamily. “Time?”

  So it wasn’t just the reconstruction. “Eleven. In the morning. I’ll let you get back to sleep as soon as you explain something to me.”

  Her eyes opened wide.

  “AI.”

  “Wrong twin. Reilly.” And she turned her head, and shouted at the top of her lungs, “Reilly!”

  Donovan had to make a real effort not to laugh. Which was tough, with those two.

  A yellow-haired, bright yellow pajamas-clad Reilly shuffled into the room. So they weren’t in sync that day. It was a bet that ran in the SIRT unit, pretty much daily.

  “What?” Reilly answered, then saw him on the screen. “Morning, sir. Boss. Agent Pierce. Donovan,” she said distractedly, then turned back to her sister. “What?”

  “AI,” Sidney said profoundly.

  Reilly squinted at Donovan. He briefly explained the type of artificial intelligence he had in mind.

  “Would it be able to run a field mission?” he then asked.

  “No. Well, not completely. Not even close. No.”

  “Why?”

  “These things can do a lot. Organize and analyze data. Run scenarios and probabilities and provide recommendations. The control side of the mission, they can run drones and identify targets or deploy missiles in response to a threat and stuff, yeah, they can do that, be autonomous to an extent. We’ve got AIs running military aircraft and robotic support for field combat, that too. But they have crucial limits. They can only deduce and decide to a limited extent, and they can only operate within limited uncertainties and even less so in the presence of incomplete information. No matter how advanced we’ve made them, they still need to be preprogrammed and pretrained, and given boundaries within which they would act.”

  She had obviously thought the concept through. “We people can reason and guess and use our intuition and be creative, unlimitedly so. We can go the extra mile, out of the box. We can think like only we can, that’s the point. We can make split second decisions in the presence of unexpected occurrences based on experience, gut feeling, and a
lot of stuff that we’ve accumulated in our mind. We can see the exception to the rule and act on it.”

  “And we can feel,” Sidney chipped in and received a glare from her sister.

  But Donovan was interested. “That’s important?”

  “Sure.” Reilly was still glaring at Sidney, although the words were aimed at Donovan. “We’ve got machines out there, but we’ve got people, too. People who walk into danger. People who could be injured, who might have a peer, a friend, injured or dead. Who might find themselves under attack or need to attack targets that are not straightforward, like ones in too close a proximity to a civilian population. A zillion scenarios. The human factor here is significant. A computer still can’t understand that, it can’t assimilate that fully into its set of considerations and deductions, into a decision what and how to do next. Plus, a computer isn’t able to talk to soldiers on the emotional level. It can’t . . . talk people down. Or up.”

  “So artificial intelligence can’t replace a person.”

  “No. Not yet. Not for decades. We’ve come a long way but an AI that can also truly emulate human capabilities—and be trusted to do so correctly and infallibly— is still a dream, even today. It’s still an unscalable wall, very much so. You invariably need humans beside it.”

  Donovan considered this. “Who?”

  “Sorry?”

  “What human?”

  “Let’s see. Running a mission, right? Military? Experienced combat soldiers, someone who actually commanded others in the field would probably be best. Strategists, tacticians. People who can run the show as it happens. Know the available technologies and weapons. Deal with the soldiers, deal with the enemy, deal with uncertainties. Them and more.”

  “No. Too many.” It didn’t fit in with the theory he was still constructing in his mind.