“I’m curious,” Alexei said. He leaned back and sipped his tea. “How consistently can you beat a computer?”
“No idea,” Florian admitted. “Never tried.”
Alexei gave Florian an incredulous look. “You’re telling me you’ve never played against a chess program?”
“Nope,” Florian said, “and I never intend to. Frankly, I don’t see the point.”
“The point is to improve your game, isn’t it?”
“Do you play against Emma?”
“Frequently.”
“Has it made your game better?”
“Absolutely. I’ve advanced several ranks.”
“Several ranks as defined by Emma or whatever chess program she’s running, right?”
Alexei thought for a moment. “I guess so.”
“So you’ve gotten better at playing chess against a machine, but have you gotten any better at playing against a human?”
“I don’t know. You’re the only one I play against semi-regularly. You tell me.”
“OK,” Florian said. “Your understanding of the game has definitely improved, but since I’ve known you, you haven’t actually become a fundamentally better player.”
Alexei leaned forward and crossed his arms on the table. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means that chess isn’t like golf or bowling. It’s not a game you play against yourself while your opponents all play against themselves, and at the end, you add up your scores and see who happened to make the fewest mistakes that day. Chess isn’t even necessarily about always playing the strongest possible game. Fundamentally, it’s about one thing and one thing only: playing your opponent.”
“What’s the difference? If you play a strong game of chess, doesn’t that inherently weaken your opponent?”
“Think about it in terms of music,” Florian said. “Would you rather listen to Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninov performed by humans on actual, acoustic, handcrafted instruments, or by machines through some kind of digital audio synthesis?”
“Humans, of course.”
“Why?”
“Because machines don’t play with emotion.”
“Right. Or, put another way, machines are too perfect. For you, music isn’t about technically flawless execution, but rather about things like interpretation, transformation, and performance. For me, chess isn’t about always making the theoretically best move; it’s about making the move that I know will exploit a weakness in my opponent, or confuse him, or insult him, or give him a false sense of confidence. The rules and theories of chess are just the score I’m playing; the instrument on which I actually perform is my opponent.”
Alexei drummed his fingertips against his mug. “Is that how you feel when you play against me?”
“Of course. That’s the only way I know how to play.”
“Give me an example.”
Florian finished his espresso and placed the tiny cup on its saucer. “You were up by a piece for most of the game, right? You played a technically strong match, and you felt pretty good going into the endgame. But you were never actually expecting to win, so as soon as you started to think that you might actually have a chance, you panicked. The only thing worse than losing a match is losing a match that you should have won, so you started playing overly defensively, which made it easy for me to position my rooks. You could have beaten me, but instead you allowed yourself to be put in one of the worst possible positions.”
“Are you saying you actually let me get ahead by a piece as part of your strategy?”
“Yup. That’s exactly what I’m saying. You wanted to beat me so badly that I knew the best way to disrupt your game was to make you think you might actually win. By the way, the sweetest victories are those in which your opponent defeats himself.”
Alexei squinted at the young man across from him. “I never knew this about you.”
“Why would you?” the young man said. There was sudden contempt in his tone. “How would you know anything at all about me, for that matter?”
Alexei gave Florian a bewildered and somewhat aggravated look. “Where the hell did that come from?”
“Forget it.”
“No, if you have something to say to me, then say it.”
“All I’m saying is that just because you pay for my education, keep my bank account topped off, and take me out for sushi whenever you happen to be in town doesn’t make you my father.”
“I never said that it did.” Alexei leaned back from the table to regard Florian from a greater distance. “Of course, it wouldn’t kill you to show a little appreciation now and then for everything I’ve given you instead of always acting like a sullen little prick.”
“Grateful for what? It’s just money to you. You’ve never given me a single thing you’ll ever miss. You’ve never even let me stay with you. Everyone else got to live in the big mysterious mansion while I got sent off to boarding school three hundred and sixty-five days a year.”
Alexei jabbed at the air over the table with his finger. “I gave you something that nobody else in the world would have ever given you. I gave you a chance. I might not be your father, but I’ve done more for you than he ever could have.”
“At least my father noticed me every once in a while.”
“Don’t give me that bullshit,” Alexei spat. “Your father sold you to me, did you know that? Did you ever figure that out with that massive fucking intellect of yours? Your parents were in so much debt that they would have been out on the streets in six months if I hadn’t come along. Your father would have been a filthy pathetic bum digging through Dumpsters and your mother would have been a cheap broken whore.”
Florian glared at Alexei. “You have no right to talk about my parents like that. My father is the one who taught me to play chess. Without him, I’d be nothing.”
“Florian, your father taught you to play chess because he saw how smart you were and thought if you could win some big tournaments, he could use your winnings to pay down his debt. You know what he did with all that prize money he was supposed to be saving for you? He gambled it all away. He bought lottery tickets. He bet on horses. He blew it on illegal poker games in hotel rooms. And when he finally decided you were costing him more than you were winning, he sent you off to that tropical hellhole where I found you.”
Florian was shaking his head. “That’s bullshit and you know it.”
“Is it? When I offered your father a hundred thousand NGD for legal custody of you, he didn’t even hesitate. He didn’t even try to negotiate with me, Florian. So now you know exactly what you were worth to your parents. One hundred thousand NGD, and not one penny more.”
“That’s a fucking lie.”
“I hate to break it to you, kid, but the reality is that your father was a neglectful, irresponsible, and psychologically abusive son of a bitch, and the fact that he played a few games of chess with you when you were little doesn’t change any of that. I know you like to accuse me of ignoring you, but you’re wrong. I used to talk to your teachers and counselors at the Academy at least once a day. I used to fly out and have meetings with the staff without you knowing. They told me about how one day you were convinced that your parents abandoned you, and the next, you insisted they were the only people in the world who ever loved you. You were a kid back then, and I know leaving home wasn’t easy for you, but it’s time to stop acting like a spoiled little brat and grow up. In case you still haven’t figured this out, let me spell it out for you as plainly as I can: your parents didn’t give a shit about you, and if they’re lucky enough to even be alive today, they still don’t give a shit about you. That’s it. It’s that simple. You weren’t the first unloved kid in the world, and you won’t be the last. But rather than moping around and crying about it your whole life, why don’t you try being thankful that you have a gift, and that someone came along and recognized that gift, and that instead of being dead, or living on the streets giving two-dollar blow jobs to try to feed yourse
lf, or getting molested in your bed on some half irradiated derelict cruise ship, you’re safe, you’re healthy, and you’re about to graduate from one of the most prestigious universities in the world, after which you will have the opportunity to do anything you want with your life.”
Florian’s expression was a mask of superimposed emotions. His lips were curled in a kind of mild amusement, but there were tears on his cheeks and rage in his eyes. He had to struggle to keep his voice steady. “When are you finally going to tell me?”
“Tell you what?”
“What it is you want from me.”
“I don’t want anything from you, Florian. How many times do I have to tell you that?”
Florian hit the table with his open hand and his espresso cup jumped. “Bullshit! Stop fucking lying to me. I think we’ve established by now that I’m not stupid. For once, I want you to tell me the truth. Tell me exactly what it is you want from me. Why did you send me to the Academy? Why did you and all my teachers want me to become an analyst? Of all the internships I got offered, why did you encourage me to take the one with Pearl Knight? Don’t forget, Alexei: I know what you do. You may not have let me live with you, but I’ve been out to your little compound, remember? I’ve talked to your other recruits or soldiers or whatever you call them. You’re not just some wealthy philanthropist who helps children out of the goodness of his heart. There’s something you want from me, and I want to know what it is.”
“What do you think it is?”
“I have no fucking clue. For all I know, you still work for the Kremlin and you want me to spy for you.”
Alexei took a deep breath, then spoke in a more subdued tone. “I don’t work for the Kremlin anymore, Florian, and I don’t want you to spy for me. I want you to spy for yourself.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that you have an incredibly promising future ahead of you. It means that you’re going to meet people and see things that I can’t even imagine. I honestly have no idea what’s in store for you, but one thing I’m sure of is that the day will come when you’re thinking dozens of moves ahead and you suddenly realize that you have an opportunity to do something incredible. I promise you that there’s going to be at least one pivotal moment in your life when everything is perfectly aligned and one simple decision you make will have the potential to change the entire world.”
“And you want to be the one to make that decision, right?”
“No. I want you to make that decision. And I want you to make the right decision. I want you to realize how lucky you are to have everything you have. I want you to take your incredible ability to see into people and to see all the different pieces in play, and I want you to make the decision that you think is right. That’s all. I promise—that’s the only thing I will ever ask of you.”
“And what if I don’t make the right decision?” Florian said. He had wiped the tears from his cheeks, and his expression was defiant and challenging. “What if I use all my power and influence and all this genius I supposedly have to just make myself rich? Or what if I decide to sell you out? I may not know much about you, but I do know you have plenty of enemies out there, and I’m sure any number of them would be willing to give me anything I want to get their hands on you.”
Alexei shrugged. “Go ahead,” he told the young man. “There’s absolutely nothing I can do to stop you.”
“But you obviously don’t think I will.”
“Florian, the time will come in your life when you will have the choice between doing something incredibly beneficial for mankind, or something selfish and probably incredibly destructive, and you alone will have to make that decision. I won’t be there to tell you what to do.” Alexei leaned forward and stared into the young man’s wide and bright eyes. “But just remember that you have absolutely no idea how far and wide my influence extends. And while I may not be right there in that room with you, I will always be watching.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Alexei looked down at the cabin full of children in his backyard and waited for it to disappear.
The view was provided by the cameras mounted beneath a persistent solar-sustained quadrotor drone hovering precisely one thousand feet above his property. The video was being fed to the wall in Alexei’s office where he leaned against the edge of his desk and watched with a canister of tea in one hand and a black filterless cigarette in the other. The ash had grown long, and in the absence of motion, the smoke had found a direct diagonal path up to the ventilation system in the ceiling.
There were a lot of eyes in the skies in addition to Alexei’s. There were drones funded by every branch of the military and three-letter agency in the country (and ultimately by the very same taxpayers on whom said institutions spent the majority of their time and budgets spying); ornithological cybernetic research projects funded by DARPA, resulting in thousands of birds across dozens of species as small as bee hummingbirds to as large as California condors with cameras surgically embedded in their bellies and skulls, discrete electrodes implanted in their brains, and transmitters sutured into their backs allowing them to be controlled from anywhere in the world; satellites designed to generate millimeter-resolution topographical maps for the purposes of locating, measuring, and identifying every last aboveground manmade structure on the planet; media cooperatives providing tabloids with an endless supply of tantalizing, erotic, embarrassing, incriminating, or otherwise damning images captured in millions of tiny fragments by swarms of pixel drones as inconspicuous as gnats; even the winner of the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) X PRIZE—a fully functioning, softball-sized intelligence satellite which succeeded in capturing images of all sixteen dummy weapons caches planted throughout the country just one week after being launched by an unmanned, commercial, single-stage-to-orbit satellite transport spaceplane.
Between all of these lenses, sensors, stereoscopic imaging technologies, synthetic aperture radar systems, and laser ranging networks above everyone’s heads all of the time no matter how far and wide humanity managed to wander, an average of 2.5 petabytes of vectors and bitmaps and metadata were generated, transmitted, analyzed, and stored every single hour of every single day.
Keeping oneself off the grid, therefore, was far beyond the average citizen’s means. In fact, it might have been very nearly impossible had it not been for the Federal Approval Service for Cartographical Imaging and Satellite Technologies, usually referred to by its detractors as FASCIST. Recent national security legislation required that detailed image data corresponding to every single aerial rendering intended for any form of publication, analysis, or archival whatsoever be submitted to a secure and anonymous web service, which presumably determined whether or not it corresponded to locations that people and organizations unknown wished to remain undiscovered. The response to the submission was either a single boolean—true—indicating you were free to do with your image whatever you chose, or a complex data structure containing not only an algorithmically sanitized version of your image, but also a detailed and sufficiently intimidating legal explanation of what would happen to you should you choose to disregard the government’s wishes. The upshot was this: by knowingly or unknowingly publishing, retaining, or even just viewing the originally submitted image, you were intrinsically agreeing to plead guilty to multiple acts of high treason, waiving all your rights and protections afforded to you as a citizen of the United States (including, but not limited to, those pertaining to legal representation and due process) as well as your inalienable and fundamental rights as a human being, and should therefore consider yourself, for all intents and purposes, quite thoroughly fucked.
What many radical reformists considered to be oppressive censorship, Alexei recognized as convenience. Just by putting one sum of money into one single palm—or, more accurately, several sums of money into one single palm which then subsequently found their way through several additional palms, incrementally dwindling with every transfer, before finally rea
ching their intended destination—Alexei’s compound instantly disappeared from every map, chart, survey, globe, atlas, and plat in the entire country, and even around much of the rest of the world.
Alexei could simply buy invisibility.
But he knew that convenience in such matters usually did not last. You could only rely on other people for so long—especially people in positions of such great responsibility and influence who were so quick to have their palms greased—before someone along the line succumbed to greed, or betrayal, or just plain everyday stupidity. Which is precisely why it was Alexei’s policy to, wherever possible, implement backup processes and procedures that relied on one or more forms of dispassionate silicon-based technology rather than inherently self-destructive carbon-based life. After construction of the children’s dormitories was complete, Alexei immediately had the brand new ceramic roof tiles torn up and the titanium-alloy strips of siding pulled off and all of it replaced by a construction crew assembled by a woman who was once a top engineer for a British multinational defense, security, and aerospace conglomerate, but who was now enjoying the freedom of her new and much more lucrative career as an independent contractor.
Alexei no longer wanted to buy invisibility; he actually wanted to be invisible.
He had learned through his research that there are two distinct aspects to invisibility. The first (and most obvious) is the method by which an object is rendered undetectable. The second—and arguably the more interesting—is what the observer should see in place of the cloaked object.
In a scenario where an observer expects to either detect an object or to see nothing at all—as in the case of radar-based air defense systems—stealth technology is usually most appropriate. Stealth refers to reducing one’s radar cross section. The entire premise of stealth depends on a potential observer indiscriminately firing radio waves into a giant void and expecting that none of them will ever come back. As long as none of them ever do, you are effectively invisible.
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