Steel, Titanium and Guilt: Just Hunter Books I to III

by Robin Craig

  Jack charged into the room, manager in tow, and looked up to see Miriam nearly at the top. He looked down, then back up. Work smarter, not braver, he told himself. “Is there another way to the roof? A quick way?” he asked the manager.

  The manager nodded and jingled his keycards. “Follow me.”

  Miriam pulled herself over the edge of the roof in time to see a dark figure darting away along the roof: a figure trailed by a long tail. “Stop!” she shouted, drawing her gun. But Katlyn just changed her gait to a random dodge. “Dammit!” swore Miriam. She wasn’t going to send bullets flying wildly across the city skyline. She took off after her.

  Katlyn did not slow as she neared the edge of the roof. She ran straight to it and launched herself into space, clearing the gap and executing a skillful roll back onto her feet to continue running over the next rooftop. Miriam slowed to a stop, panting, aghast. She looked at the gap and estimated it at twelve feet. I can do this, she thought; I’m fit and I’ve jumped that far before; just never where missing it would kill me. Then she looked at Katlyn’s fleeing form and her anger decided for her. No, not again, she thought; I’m too close, I’m not letting you get away this time. She gritted her teeth and ran.

  Miriam was correct. She could have made the jump. But the roof was slightly damp from the mist, that damp had lubricated the grime encrusting the rooftop, and just as she launched herself from the roof her foot slipped slightly. It was enough to lose a fraction of the power behind her jump; enough lost power that she knew she wouldn’t make it. Sweet Jesus, she thought. She could feel her trajectory fading, as if the mist and shadows below were dark fingers of the chasm reaching to drag her down; but she stretched out to her limit and her hands made the edge of the roof. Her body slammed into the wall and her gun clattered away as she let it go to grip the edge with her fingers.

  But it was too tenuous a grip on too unhelpful a material, and the wall gave her toes little purchase. She could feel that she would not be able to pull herself up on the smooth surface; knew that even if she could stop herself from sliding off, the strength in her fingers would give out before rescue could come.

  “Jack!” she screamed. “Help me!”

  The manager and Jack had taken the stairway to the roof three steps at a time but fumbled finding the right key to the outside door. Jack had only just pushed his way through it when Miriam called, and he was too far away even if he could find the courage to make that jump. Even if, finding the courage, he could make it across. “Miriam! Hold on!” he called. He broke into a shambling run, eyes scanning for something, anything, he might be able to use to reach her or help her.

  Katlyn glanced over her shoulder at the commotion and stopped. Miriam saw her turn, saw the cold golden eyes regarding her, tail twitching. She looked away into the darkness where escape lay, back at Jack, down at Miriam. “Help me!” Miriam called to her. “Please!”

  Katlyn bared her teeth in a chilling smile that held neither mirth nor kindness. She looked away once more into the darkness that led to safety, but suddenly turned and darted back. She slowed, regarding Miriam silently, then came to a stop, looking down at her clinging to the ledge.

  “Hello, Miriam,” she said softly. “I suppose if I were a nice girl I’d give you a hand. But I’m neither nice nor a girl, am I?”

  “But you came back. I don’t believe you are evil. Please don’t let me die.”

  “Ah, but maybe that’s all I want. Just to see you die, up close and personal. Look into those innocent eyes as you fall. Perhaps I’ll see Heaven in them. That’s as close as I’ll ever get to it.”

  Jack had seen Katlyn stop and run back toward Miriam, so he gave up looking for a rope or ladder and accelerated to meet this more immediate threat. He came to a stop at the edge and stared at Katlyn, for the first time seeing her fully in the flesh. She stood there in the wisps of mist, luminous yellow eyes staring out of a pale face made paler by black hair, dark cattail flicking. He thought how people of a past age would have called her a demon; how many in even this age would agree. He could sympathize: he felt a twinge of superstitious dread himself. He pointed his gun at her and she lifted her head to stare directly at him. He swallowed involuntarily but stood his ground.

  “You! Jack!” she said. “Lose the gun or lose your girlfriend!”

  He hesitated. “How do I know you won’t just push her off if I do?”

  “As they say in the vids: you don’t, but you haven’t much choice do you?” she replied harshly.

  Jack hesitated again then tossed his gun into the shadows.

  Katlyn gave him a look that told him she had expected a more convincing throw, but she must have decided it was enough. All she said was, “Good lad. Now don’t you move.”

  She crouched down and stared at Miriam for a second, then said. “So. What reason can you give me to save you? Let’s see how well you beg.”

  Miriam thought of their last encounter and wondered, what indeed? Then she said. “I think you like the excitement of having a nemesis chasing you. And I think when the time comes you’d like to kill me in a fair fight with your bare hands, not just watch me fall off a roof.”

  Katlyn looked surprised for a second then put her head back and burst into a peal of her tinkling bells laughter. She stopped and looked back down at Miriam, teeth still bared in an amused smile. “I see you’ve learnt something,” she said, but made no move to help her.

  Then Miriam felt her grip begin to slip and she cried out in panic, “Oh! No!” But Katlyn’s hands darted out with their lightning speed to grab both her wrists. She lifted Miriam up into the air before she fully realized what had happened.

  For the second time Miriam found herself face to face with her enemy with only inches between them, only this time the enemy was offering to save her not kill her. With her feet still dangling over empty space she did not dare struggle or even move: Katlyn literally held her life in her hands, and Miriam knew how unpredictable her moods were. Katlyn sighed. “If I let you down, you’ll just chase me again, won’t you?” she said resignedly. “That’s the trouble with a nemesis: you can never trust them.” She paused then continued, “There’s a cost for everything, you know. I hope you appreciate how low my fees are.”

  With that, she stepped back and put Miriam down safely, but then stamped hard on her foot and sprinted away. Jack ran for his gun. By the time he got back, Miriam was on the ground holding her foot and Katlyn was a shadow in the distance. He trained his gun on her until there was nothing left but a swirl of mist from her wake. Perhaps he could have taken the shot. But he did not fire.

  Chapter 34 – Sam

  “Gods of Chaos!” swore Miriam softly.

  After the excitement on the roof she had retreated to the sedate safety of her office. Forensics had found nothing. Except for the initial alarm there was no record of Katlyn’s break-in or presence in the apartment. She seemed able to block any number of sensors very effectively; even her method of removing the glass from the window wasn’t obvious. It made her like some kind of ghost visible only to humans, and Miriam was silently thankful that this time she wasn’t the only witness. The scientists’ report had concluded that none of what Katlyn had done was unheard of in principle, but she must have some very high tech equipment: and they would dearly love to get their hands on her tool belt. By “what she had done” they meant evading detection: nobody knew what she had done, or had intended to do, while she was there.

  Ramos had not banned Miriam from field work but had made it quite clear she should be more careful about risking her life in what he called, though in her own mind she respectfully disagreed, “hare-brained acrobatics.” In any event it made no difference. In the weeks since there had not been a whisper of further activity, or at least none noticed by her AI.

  An AI which had just proudly announced a group of especially idiotic ideas. She knew from experience that when the AI started getting too divorced from reality it was probably an error in its reasoning engine: which usu
ally meant she had entered a logical error herself when trying to explain what was wrong with some other mistake. Oh well, nothing for it but to fix it.

  A ping and a flashing image announced that Fergus was trying to contact her. She touched it to accept the call. “Hi Fergus, what goes?”

  “Hi Miriam. I’m heading out to lunch, and I think you should come. My treat. Can I collect you in five?”

  “Sorry Fergus, I’m too busy today. The AI has gotten itself confused and I have a bit of work to do to straighten it out. Some other time?”

  “Your delightful company and the sweet memories it evokes are only part of my motivation,” he replied. “This is actually work. I’m having lunch with that old math tutor of mine, the one we sent the videos to. I am assured we will find the results exciting.”

  “You know, I am feeling a bit peckish. I’m in.”

  ~~~

  Miriam and Fergus sat down at a table outside, chatting and enjoying the contrast of sunshine and cool breeze while they waited for Fergus’s friend. “Ah, here comes Sam now,” said Fergus, pointing.

  Miriam had to smile. She wondered how much of Fergus’s penchant for busting stereotypes had been inherited from his tutor. The mathematician was hard to ignore. She wore intense black pantaloons tucked into lace-up boots. Between those and her long, equally black hair she wore a bright shirt showing a complex fractal pattern in shades of yellow, with a fiery red jacket to round out the ensemble. Even people who said math was boring would have to exclude this particular practitioner of the art. Fergus introduced her as Dr Sam Allende. Sam gave Miriam a big grin and pumped her hand enthusiastically: it appeared that everything about her was overclocked. Miriam found her immensely amusing and decided she liked her. She was like a force of nature.

  Sam regaled her with tales of her history with Fergus and any number of wide ranging topics, wherever there was a laugh or an insight to be had from it. Miriam was dying to know what she had found out but obviously she was going to bide her time: but if this was what she wanted as payment for her consulting, Miriam was happy to oblige.

  At last they ordered some steaming espressos and after a few sips Sam looked at Miriam and said, “You are a very patient young lady, I like that. But I can tell you are itching for my news. Well, never let it be said that I keep people in suspense! I have found something very exciting!”

  Before Miriam could reply, she rushed on. “I have looked at your raw footage, the interpreted image provided by your victim, and the rather less informative version Fergus provided. First, let me say that the last is not anyone’s fault. This kind of analysis is always a compromise between too little and too much processing. The police, of course, want anything they produce to hold up in a court of law, immune to the sneers of cynical defense attorneys. They hone those sneers to perfection in their bathroom mirrors, you know. So the compromise they choose is, wisely, set to the conservative. Hence the poor results in this case with such heavily corrupted raw material. Your victim, however, was more interested in whatever he could discover. As it turns out he did pretty well: he must have some excellent software. My more theoretical colleagues could no doubt argue the finer points over the course of a dozen publications; but for practical purposes there’s not much in it. Any less processing and the final image would show less detail; too much further processing and there is a rapidly increasing chance of producing sharper images of pure fantasy.”

  She paused to glance at her audience.

  “Miriam, you look disappointed. No doubt you surmise that the logical implication is that no more data can be extracted than what you already have. You would, however,” she added with a smile, “be mistaken.”

  She sipped some more of her coffee, watching Miriam with obvious glee over the rim of her cup. Miriam gave her a severe look, though the upturned corners of her mouth belied it.

  “Ha-ha, Fergus was right about you!” she laughed. “But here is the crux. As I understand it, the raw footage is from a security video feed that was rendered almost useless by some kind of signal interference, correct?” Miriam nodded. “But, you see, that is not the case!” Miriam sat up straighter. “You cannot inflict electronic interference on physical circuitry without leaving a footprint in the noise, as it were: an echo of the characteristics of the system. It cannot be purely random, but rather inherits frequency and time dependencies and the like from the two systems, creator and victim. When instead of attempting to clean up the image I analyzed the noise itself, do you know what I found?”

  Sam attempted to wait for a dramatic pause but rushed on almost immediately. “The noise was random! It was added later! In other words, your original recording was not corrupted: the signal fed into the system was perfectly clear. The recording was corrupted later by purely electronic means!”

  Miriam looked at her eagerly. “You mean, knowing that, you can extract the clean original? You have it?”

  “Oh, no, I am afraid that is impossible. You’ll never get any more out of it than your victim himself found.”

  “So... so...” Miriam was confused. “What good is it then?”

  “Ha! My dear, you are too busy trying to shine a light inside a box, when you should be looking at the box itself to see where it came from! What this means is simple but profound. If the video was corrupted after the event, it had to have been corrupted by your victim’s own AI!”

  Miriam and Fergus both stared at her. “You mean, the man who gave me the video and its reconstruction is the one who fuzzed it out in the first place?!”

  Sam grinned. “Well, that is possible from a practical viewpoint. But psychologically it seems unlikely, don’t you think? Why go to that trouble when it would have been simpler and less risky to report nothing? No, I think the truth is far more interesting. I think your man is perfectly innocent. I believe it is his AI that did the job, without his knowledge!”

  “You’re kidding,” said Fergus. “You mean the thief hacked into it? In the short time he was there? That might work with some cheap shareware AI, but we’re talking about a rich guy. High quality AIs can’t be hacked at all, let alone in ten minutes. Well, not without setting off alarm bells from here to Canada. The AI would have a fit if someone tried it; even if you could get past its defenses, you’d just crash it before you could take it over. And even if you solved that problem you’d leave footprints all over it! Our guy ran all the diagnostics. Nothing.”

  “I don’t know enough to know what’s possible,” Miriam admitted, “but I can’t see how it could work either. The AI must know it did it. It would either report itself or be deranged, and the owner would know. But it was clean!”

  Sam grinned again. “Imagine you are sitting in your office one day, and some alien replaces your personality and memories with someone else’s, and you do something as that person. Then they swap everything back the way it was, along with memories of some boring routine you might have been doing during the time you weren’t in control. How would you know next week? How would you know to even suspect it? When you were the other person you would have felt completely normal; when you were yourself, you would feel the same and have no memory of the other.”

  “But there’s still the problem of doing that to an AI,” Fergus persisted. “Sure, there are ways around AI security protocols. There have to be, in case of a severe fault, the owner dies or there’s a court order or something. But the AI knows about it and reports it; and it remembers. There’s an audit trail.”

  “Well, that’s what people like to think, I’m sure,” Sam answered serenely. “And no doubt it’s usually true. But while I confess I am not the world’s greatest authority on AIs, I am sure my explanation is the most likely. It is the clear implication of the signal analysis, and on that I am an expert. Here, Miriam. I have given you the contact details of a colleague who knows far more about AIs than I do: you might find it worthwhile interviewing him. If anyone knows how it might be done, he will.”

  She threw back the last of her espresso and rose.
“Well, I must be off, I have a graduate class to torment. Thank you both for a lovely lunch. It was good to see you again, Fergus; and I’m so glad to have met you, Miriam. Enjoy the rest of your day. And think about what I’ve told you.” She gave Fergus a stern glance. “I can read young Fergus’ mind, you know. He is right to be skeptical, but don’t discount what I told you.”

  With that she left, making her way through the lunchtime crowd, the chromatic inverse of a grouper gliding through a swirling school of neon reef fish.

  When she had gone, Miriam said, “Wow, what a live wire! So what do you think about her theory?”

  Fergus shrugged. “You probably noticed she has a flair for the dramatic, and if a thief who can corrupt an AI is not the most likely theory no doubt it is the most exciting. But I’ve learned not to ignore what she says. Underneath that butterfly exterior is a preying mantis.”

  Chapter 35 – Neubold

  After lunch Miriam went back to work. She knew where her department’s priorities lay, so she spent the next few hours repairing the AI: she did not want to have to explain to Ramos why she had spent time on the Katlyn case while the AI was languishing in need of attention. They had to let her take her lunch breaks but what she did in official working hours was another matter.

  At last Miriam brought the AI to a state that looked more promising. Then she had it record its findings of the last week; erased its memory of all that data and its reasoning and conclusions; and finally set it on reanalyzing the same data in the order in which it had received it. Once it caught up to where it had been she would have it compare its findings with what it had done originally. That would let her know whether the latest version was better or worse than before.