by Sean Platt
“You turned off your canvas,” said Micah. “It’s a building system. I don’t even know how you’d go about turning it off. It would require an excellent workaround. My building is wired the same way. They sold it as a feature. If my canvas glitches, the larger system knows. And on the other hand, here’s your canvas: off in the middle of a perfectly functional building. You’re in an isolated, dead-air capsule surrounded by soundproofed walls. If I were hiding from something — or perhaps hiding something — I might employ a hack like this.”
“Hack?”
Micah chuckled then switched legs, crossing them to the other side. “Don’t pretend, Nicolai. I’m not Isaac.”
Nicolai looked guilty. That response would need to be reined in if Nicolai was to operate on his side of the fence, as Micah’s group typically had more to consider feeling guilty about than Isaac’s bootlickers.
“Look. You have secrets. And do you know what?” Micah spread his arms wide. “I don’t even want to know what they are. How great of a boss am I?”
“I don’t work for you.”
“That’s one key difference between Isaac and me,” Micah continued. “Isaac was never any good at getting his hands dirty. When we took over the arctic operations in the ’30s, his official role was PR. Do you know how much PR he did? None. Do you know why? Because he thought what we were doing was wrong. It wasn’t. The Arctic was like the old American West, all yahoos staking their claims in a gold rush. If we’d let private enterprises mine the area, we’d never have discovered the precursors of Plasteel. Or any number of other materials we all now take for granted, like Warp. We wouldn’t have Alumix or Plaxi. That was all vital. It allowed the network to get back up and running, down to the high-capacity nanofiber in the ground lines. But more importantly, it allowed the network to become embedded into the NAU as it regained its feet. If there had been no conquest of the north, there could have been no Crossbrace and no Beam. Isaac was able to see the network’s future once I told him how things were going to be, but even then he couldn’t stomach it. You and me, though? We understand that making an omelet sometimes means working the chickens to death and stealing their babies.”
Nicolai was still standing, his eyes wide and confused. Maybe guilty over whatever secret Micah didn’t care to know. Every man had his closets. The trick was in closing the door.
“Sit down, Nicolai.”
“It’s not a good time.”
“Why is your canvas off?”
“Because…”
“Because you’re hiding something. We’ve covered that. But this is paranoia. Beyond paranoia. I actually can’t blame you because you don’t see the system’s true nature. But you suspect it, don’t you? I can imagine the feeling. You see The Beam and the parties as an iceberg, and you’re worried that there’s something larger under the surface that you’re unable to see. That’s because Isaac never truly took you into his trust. All that time together, and he kept you in the dark.” Micah shook his head. “I will never do that, Nicolai.”
“Okay…”
“The Beam can be hacked and snooped, of course. But there are levels of access, and there are quarters it cares to snoop. Finding secrets is not simply a matter of surveillance. That’s the problem with an intuitive network. Did you know that The Beam was built by AI? It’s true. Crossbrace was built by Quark, but The Beam wasn’t really built so much as given a playground. It sat atop Crossbrace, and the developers said, ‘Go forth, and build because you know better than we do.’ We’re analog beings, but AI is born digital. They are better architects than we could ever be.” He picked another piece of lint from his pants. “So while you can hack The Beam, The Beam almost has to allow it to happen. Your secrets, such that you reveal them to your canvas, are protected by a loose kind of client privilege. Haven’t you ever noticed that your canvas has a personality? Don’t you trust it?”
“How can I trust it?”
Micah waved his hand. “Immaterial. You’ll see. Isaac kept you below him because he thought — I’d say ‘knew’ — that you were smarter than him. Now that you work with me, you’re more like a partner. Have you heard the term ‘Beau Monde’ ?”
“Yes. No.”
“Of course you have. The rumor mill talks about it all the time, but like all rumor mills, the information it churns is half conspiracy and half-too-outrageous to be real. But beneath it all is truth. There is an upper tier. And once you’re in it, you won’t be afraid of the system because you’ll be the system’s master. Now tell me the truth, Nicolai: you want to know about your father’s hovertech bots.”
Nicolai looked like he might fall over but instead sat in the chair as Micah had wanted him to all along. That was the point of his rapid conversational pivot, away from the Beau Monde yammering to Salvatore and his wonderful little machines. What he’d done to Nicolai was the equivalent of drawing his attention with a flourish of his left hand so he could blindside him with the right. Most people thought of conversation as a way to trade information. The truly powerful person saw it as high-stakes fencing with razor-sharp foils.
Inside his mind, Micah set down his conversational sword. It was time for Nicolai to regain his balance, and that meant he needed a break from the jabs.
“It’s just you and me here,” said Micah. “Two men in comfortable chairs, sitting in a dead apartment with even the most inconsequential pickups offline. So stop fucking around, Nicolai. Stop trying to figure it out on your own. I dropped you on your ass with that bombshell. That was intentional. But now it’s time for you to stop sneaking around and acting like I’m your enemy, trying to hide from me and figure everything out behind my back. I know you’ve been searching. Tell me what you want to know, right now, no matter how brash or bold you believe it to be. Don’t worry about offending or angering me; don’t worry about showing your cards. Everything’s on the table. Let’s clear the air. What do you want to know?”
Micah settled back. Nicolai, however, still looked unsteady at the edge of his seat. His eyes kept flicking toward the bedroom, and Micah suppressed an urge to ask him what was in there. He thought he knew anyway, and could deal with it later.
“What did you mean about me bringing hovertech to you?”
“Exactly what it sounds like. You brought it to us.”
“But how could you…”
“Do you remember where you met Isaac?” said Micah.
“It was at the port. Just after I was processed at immigration.”
“Looking back, does that seem coincidental to you?”
Nicolai nodded. “Yes. Just like how coincidental it was that the borders closed behind me.”
“By the time you showed up in the NAU, our network was back online. We had the very beginnings of AI, but it was stupidly basic. Call-and-response stuff. It could mimic intelligence but was really just regurgitating programming, shuffling through prefab responses selected from a pool of factually equivalent data using things like random number generators. Scientists had hit a wall. They had yet to understand the required paradigm shift and were mired in Internet thought. The old way was all wires and nodes: This connected to that; this called to that; this requested that and fed back another ‘that.’ It wasn’t the AI-compensating network of Crossbrace, and it sure wasn’t the AI-native network that The Beam has become. But even in spite of that, our network was talking to satellites and even the moon bases again by the early ’30s, and although it’s not widely known, there were even drones sent into the East. Some were news-gatherers. Many of the covert ones were military. To assess our potential threat.”
“And?”
“I’m not an egghead, so I might get the details wrong, but the way they explained it, even then, was this: Data leaves footprints. Most programs leave predictable tracks. They’ll modify files and, in doing so, change modification dates. They’ll be queued by a running daemon and be recorded in a log. We were really starting to play with EverCrunch algorithms on the limping Internet, and from what I understand about those algorithm
s, they parse huge amounts of data and search for patterns to exploit — something compression software has been doing forever, except that EverCrunch had algorithms on top of algorithms, yada yada, not something I really care to understand. But somehow, when it was going through all that data from the East, they started to see some rather surprising patterns amidst the expected ones.”
“What kind of patterns?”
“Today, they call them ‘footprints suggesting an autonomous agent.’ But back then, they were simply oddities. Pieces that didn’t fit. I see a neat stack of papers in my head, all tidy and clean. Except that on closer inspection, I see that there are a few corners here and there that won’t stop sticking out.”
“Loose ends.”
“Sure. So they started to pull at those loose ends. At first, they thought the East was re-starting its networks. The paranoid military thought it might be a kind of war machine starting up. So to try and answer the questions, the cyberneticists unarchived the data and started to compare the datasets that contained anomalies.”
“What were the anomalies?” said Nicolai. Micah resisted a smile. The smaller, darker man was now sitting forward, looking less guilty and more engaged. Perfect.
“Nobody knew. They only knew where they were coming from. Someone in the East was accessing not just a local network (we probably wouldn’t have seen that over here), but the global network, through the satellites. Positioning satellites, mostly. But that should have been impossible.”
“Why?”
“For one, we hadn’t seen reliable power sparks from the East for years. There were camps where they cobbled together old generators, gyroscope machines, chemical batteries, and other such creative things, but there was no grid. No power of the sort that anyone would allow to be wasted on charging mobiles.”
“Mobiles?”
Micah nodded. “One individual unit in particular. A Terrence Ferris Doodad. One of the originals, from way back. Your Doodad, I assume.”
Nicolai blinked then mumbled something.
“Did you have a unit that stayed powered, despite the fact that it should’ve been dead? One that communicated with satellites that should have been long dormant for your sector, as far as upload/download? You know those devices needed permission to access global positioning, don’t you? Did you ever wonder why yours worked?”
“Holy shit.”
“Not shit. It was the extra brain you didn’t know you had. By the time Isaac got me a few of those bots as a sample, they’d already evolved far beyond what we knew your father to have. I’d say you put them through a trial by fire, trekking through hell all those years. There’s no way they’d have been forced into such radical adaptation if they’d stayed in Salvatore’s lab. You did us two favors, Nicolai. You brought them to us — on your clothes, in your pack, hovering around you like bees in a hive — and you sent them through a rather rigid process of natural selection.”
Nicolai looked punched. “I was in the arsenal for thirty seconds. Even if I got a few of the bots on me, how could they possibly know…”
“Oh, based on what we reverse-engineered from the few we got that first time — and understand, it was like snatching a few neurons from a brain, so we only had a small part of the larger picture — it probably was only a few bots at first. And at the time, they probably just hovered, nothing more. But those few, thanks to their ability to form an intuitive distributed network, began to work together and learn. The birth of true AI, able to make its own decisions. To improvise. To make more bots from the materials around you then learn new abilities. Like the ability to power a dead mobile, spark a dead data connection, and hack a GPS satellite. Did they do anything else for you to ease your way, do you think?”
Nicolai seemed to think. Then, clear as day, he lied: “No.”
Micah let it go. “That AI, working from what was supposed to be a dead zone, suggested loose ends worth following. As GPS told you where you were, it also told us where you were, once we knew what to look for. And as luck would have it, just as we were considering sending troops in to check you out, you boarded a ship and came to us.”
Nicolai stood then walked to the windows and stared out over the city.
“Take your time,” said Micah, again recrossing his legs. This time, he left the lint alone.
Nicolai didn’t turn. “Did your people kill my family?”
Micah felt genuine surprise. “What? No, of course not. How was your father killed? By a mob?”
“A Rake Squad. In our house. And not just him; everyone.”
“How did you escape from the squad?”
Nicolai turned. His eyes were steely and solid, not at all nervous or guilty.
“I killed them all.” He paused. “You had nothing to do with that?”
“Of course not.”
“You said you had connections in Italy. You tried to persuade my father to work with you. You said you were willing to steal it from him. So did you? Did you try to steal it from him and murder his children in the doing? Did you burn Allegro Andante to the ground?”
“This is the first I’m hearing about any of this.” Now Micah, accustomed to being in charge, felt unsettled. “I’m sorry.”
“Your ‘connections.’ They were Mafia?”
Micah paused then nodded. “Yes.”
“Your grandfather had dealings with them. Not just in Italy. Here in the US, too.”
“That’s all over. It died with my grandfather.”
“And it wasn’t passed down to your father?” Nicolai looked angry. He took two steps forward, his eyes on Micah’s.
“He was my mother’s father.”
Nicolai’s head bobbed. “Rachel. Yes, Isaac shoveled a lot of her shit during my time with him. I hear she’s almost 130 years old, now living at Alpha Place.”
“You’ve met her?” Micah said, blinking. In fact, Rachel was 147. She’d given birth to Isaac just shy of her sixty-third birthday. That had been before the Fall, decades before medical nanotechnology. Pops had still been dealing with Mob ties at nearly a hundred years old. Good genes ran in the Ryan family — as, apparently, did leftover eggs. There were newspaper articles about the births of both Ryan boys, but Rachel had scoffed, pointing out that the oldest women ever to give birth had been in their seventies. She’d been one of the first unofficial test cases for medical hoverbots at age ninety. The process of trying to hold her together since had been like trying to patch a terminally rusted classic car with Internet-age bonding cement.
“No, but I have decades of Isaac’s bitching behind me,” said Nicolai. “I’ve also been doing research. Seeing as we’re being honest with each other now, I have to know whether I can trust you. Or whether I should try my best, here and now, to kill you.”
Micah stood, nonplussed. It was hardly the first time he’d been threatened with death. “Of course you can trust me. Why wouldn’t you?”
“Because you’ve lied to me since I entered this country — since before I even knew who the hell you were. You had Isaac meet me at the border then snatched some of these bots that you wanted so badly without telling me about them.”
“It was a need-to-know situation.”
Nicolai stepped down from the sill along the window. “I needed to know.”
“I wouldn’t have known where to begin explaining it, how, or even why. You’re not a cyberneticist. You don’t care about how nanobots work.”
“I do when they belong to me.”
“At most, they lived on you.”
“And were engineered by my father.”
“Under a strict NDA. He was never to be credited. He was paid ridiculously well for the work that he did.”
“But not by you.”
Micah shook his head. “Water under the bridge. We did what we thought made sense. We paid you without telling you why or even that we were doing it. You were an asset; I’m not lying about that. I wanted you for Enterprise because these things run in the blood. I knew you’d turn out like him, a
nd wasn’t wrong. But Isaac needed more help than I did, as has always been the case. So you went to Directorate. Got a big dole, and though he kept you at Presque Beau and not in Beau Monde, you’ve had a privileged life.”
Something in that statement seemed to rankle Nicolai. “I’ve made myself a privileged life.”
“Sure, sure. My point about Enterprise. Believe me. The idea of a dole is insulting. But now you have a chance to come to my side. To work with your father’s technology. To help it grow.”
“I think the cat is out of the bag on that front, wouldn’t you say?”
Micah forced himself to focus. With the canvas off, he would have to rely on his own mind, discipline, and persuasion if he wanted to get and hold the upper hand. It was no problem; persuasion and control were among two of his finest talents.
“What do you want from me, Nicolai?” he said.
“The truth.”
“I told you the truth.”
“You saw me from across the ocean, became interested and presumably recognized my father’s technology in the noise, then watched and followed my movements around the dead grid and across the sea. Then you stole my father’s nanobots when I got here. Are you saying that’s all there is to the story?”
“We also kept you in the dark, which I just told you I’ve long seen as a mistake. Yes, that’s all. But to be clear, by the time we took the bots off you, they were no longer ‘your father’s nanobots.’”
“If Salvatore Costa didn’t create them, then who the hell did?”
“They did. The bots made themselves.”
Nicolai rolled his eyes. The fact that he thought Micah’s point was only semantics proved that he still didn’t understand. “Why did you really keep me around, Micah?” he said.
“Because your mind was an asset.”
“Mmm-hmm. And because you felt you owed me. For the theft.”
“Not in those terms. But yes, there was some of that.”
Nicolai met Micah’s eyes for another few beats then turned with a disappointed frown.
“If I may be blunt,” Micah said, speaking to Nicolai’s back as he looked out across District Zero, “I didn’t have to tell you any of this. And if I could be even more blunt, if we still operated the way my Pops ran things, it would have been simpler to get you out of the way. But I did tell you, and you were never in danger. The old ways died with Pops. The Fall years were tough. It was kill or be killed.”
