Blackjack Dead or Alive (The Blackjack Series Book 3)

by Ben Bequer

  “You hear me, bro?”

  I looked over, “What do you want to replace.”

  “Not replace,” he said. “Get better quality for the same price.” Bubu pointed at the CPUs I had listed. “I can get you fast AMDs, bro, much cheaper and for half the price.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder, “Whatever it takes, my man.”

  He didn’t like being touched, but said nothing. My list was expensive, and he had yet to see a dime. He took a pull off his beer, his eyes tracking between me and a list of items that could be generously described as eccentric. “Can I ask you something?”

  I shrugged, drinking half my beer in one long swallow.

  “What are you making?”

  I wasn’t sure how much could I trust him. Knowing that he would do anything for money meant that he would betray me for a few euros more than I was paying him. Then again, if he knew what I was building, it wouldn’t give him a clue as to what I was going to do with it.

  “I’m making a few different things,” I said.

  “What are the chemicals for? You making a bomb?”

  I laughed, “I’m no terrorist, Bubu.”

  He shrugged, sipping his beer. I noticed his grip on the glass was tense, the knuckles white and pale against his skin.

  “Well, what for?”

  “I’m making a lab,” I said. “And a foundry and metalworks station.”

  Bubu stared at me, bewildered.

  “And I’m going to make the most fucking incredible 3D-printing station you’ve ever seen in your life.”

  “3D printer,” he said. “For what?”

  I patted his shoulder, “You’ll see.”

  Chapter Seven

  Bubu’s castle wasn’t much more than rubble atop a mound on a tall, desolate hill in the middle of nowhere. Along the side there was an intact wall as high as my waist, going almost thirty feet before fading into random debris. There was a brisk chill in the early morning air, sunlight breaking through the Carpathians. My coat was inadequate for the job, but the cold wasn’t bothering me as my internal temperature rose to unbearable levels. Bubu kept near the car, pretending to talk on his cell, even forcing a laugh.

  “Go check it out, bro,” he said.

  I sat atop a large rock and sighed, wishing I had gotten Bubu’s uncle, as I heard him running up the hill to me. “Okay,” he said. “Good news. My bros can get it all.”

  I didn’t respond, looking out at the wide, flat hilltop. This would have made a great spot for a castle in the 1500s, when Christendom was under siege by the Ottomans. The high crest overlooked an entire valley, narrow near where the citadel would have stood, making passage beneath a precarious thing, even for a small force of men. The actual hill jutted out of the mountainside, accessible only through a small causeway, with high cliffs at all other sides, so sieging it would have been an expensive affair in men and time.

  “Bro, you okay?”

  “Where’s the castle” I asked.

  He looked around, incredulous at my question, waving his arms at the flat hilltop.

  “Right in front of you,” he said, and I couldn’t tell if his excitement was feigned or genuine. “Bro, we build the castle.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Build?”

  Bubu smiled, “Build. Make it best castle in all of Romania. I’ll get you pictures of the castle; architects to design it, men to build. Build one if you can’t buy one, bro.”

  I shot to my feet, looking around at the scattered rocks with different perspective. The stones were hard and deep into the ground, overgrown with grass but they represented a pattern, the former walls of the keep.

  “Build,” I said again.

  “Yes, bro,” he said, egging me on. “We get the rocks from down there,” Bubu pointed to a rocky gash beside a stream that rolled along the lower valley.

  I shook my head, walking around now, so fast Bubu had to almost run to keep pace. I could see the walls rising, merging with the roof, as if projecting a holographic version of the keep coming together in my head.

  “No rocks,” I said, looking down now, imagining myself travelling through the foundations of the rocky bluff beneath us, with an elevator shaft giving way to an underground network of tunnels working their way into the mountain’s heart that would serve as the actual brain center of my operations. “You’re right, this place is perfect,” I mumbled, racing through the ruins. “The hard bedrock will make for a formidable entrenched position, with the upper structure designed to be a highly defensed maze, to funnel attackers into murder traps…”

  “Rocks to build wall,” he said, interrupting my rambling. “Can’t build it with-“

  I turned to him so abruptly that he jumped, almost putting up his dukes as if I was going to hit him.

  “No rocks,” I said, feeling a wide, crazy smile playing at my place.

  “What are we building with?”

  “You ever heard of something called Aerogel?”

  He shrugged.

  “I saw it for the first time almost ten years ago, back at the JPL,” I said, referring to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which I had attended during my brief stay at Cal Tech. “Basically Aerogel is a synthetic ultra-light material, porous and possessing ultra-low density, like only a few times greater than air.”

  He shook his head. I was talking gibberish, but I was on a roll, an army of villains attacking up the hill couldn’t stop me when I got going.

  “It’s basically gel, but instead of water it’s made of gas through a process called supercritical drying,” I said. “Anyway, it’s great stuff, looks like dry smoke and it has awesome thermodynamic properties.”

  I looked around, the image of the castle now replaced by the dilemma of building it, and like each problem the solution presented itself like a butterfly floating right in front of my nose. “The problem with Aerogel is that it’s brittle,” I said. “It can hold a ton of weight but it’s hard to form larger structures with it as a base.”

  “So the stuff you want to make the castle from we can’t use,” he said.

  I nodded, “Aerographite and graphene aerogel are even lighter. No, that’s going in the wrong direction,” I said. “Charcogel is…no, no, dammit! That’s more of a collector and…see, the key is the carbon nanotubes…”

  “Bro,” he said. “Can we use it or not?”

  I thought for a moment, the various formula and derivations racing through my head. It was a light material, easy to produce if you knew how, but what was missing was a substance to form the foundation. Then I recalled the structure of the Lightbringer’s citadel in Shard World, the walls were a porous, stringy construct, made by those meandering behemoths. That was it; we were going to copy the Lightbringers!

  “No, we can’t use aerogels for the foundation and load-bearing structures,” I said. “For the surfaces it’ll work just fine, but not if it has to hold any appreciable weight.”

  “Why not?”

  “Too brittle,” I said. “We’re going to make up our own thing. Bubugel, you can call it, except it’s not a gel, not like aerogel. It’ll be more of a spun carbon nanotube, airy like aerogel, but without the monolithic internal structure. Know what Kevlar is,” I said, and he nodded. “Well, the same principle, married to the concept of the gels. The trick is to create an extruder that produces its fibers in a honeycomb microstructure so you build as you produce.”

  “Honey? Like bees?”

  Bees, he said, and my mouth dropped. Yes, of course! Instead of the large behemoths building the walls of the Lightbringer’s citadel, we were going to use smaller workers, smaller than the size of a man. Thousands of them, fast and agile.

  I laughed, “Yes, like bees.”

  * * * *

  We couldn’t do much more at the empty ruins. I took about a hundred pictures, from every conceivable angle, and by the time the sun was overhead, we drove to the nearby village of Liteni, a town of nine thousand souls. Bubu scouted around town and found a suitable l
ocation to serve as our base camp.

  It was the first time he had seen any money during our short acquaintance, and one look at the stash left his eyes wide and mouth gaping. The place he had in mind, a fully furnished, four bedroom two story townhouse, went for only $250.00 a month, according to him. I laid three crisp hundreds in his hand and told him to keep the change. He would negotiate the details, and if I had chosen well, pocket a little less than half of that.

  Our new landlord gave us a key and a quick tour, then Bubu was back to work. He laid claim to my laptop, and despite his complaints, used it to make notes as he ran down the things I needed. He turned a rickety desk into his hub, cloaked in cigarette smoke, bare but for the laptop he hated and an ashtray that was quickly filling with spent butts. He was a force of nature, and though my Romanian was non-existent, I could tell from his tone that he was capable of leveraging his charisma or pressuring someone into compliance. He ran down sellers, dickered with contacts, and on more than one occasion dealt with a friend of a friend’s friend.

  The list was a challenge, even in a major city like Los Angeles or New York, as some of the stuff was technical material and computer components, but Bubu never once complained, instead making the occasional suggestion for a replacement item, based on talking to whatever specialist his contacts had put him in touch with.

  Most of his suggestions I didn’t care much about. Whether he used one brand or another to build the computers made no difference to me. If I had a proper lab, rather than putting one together from scratch, I would have designed my own computers and built the CPU’s. I’ve often wanted to tinker with a quantum CPU, but I had a project to complete and couldn’t afford to get side tracked.

  First, I needed a proper base in case Haha, or anyone else found me. Without it, I was vulnerable, and my plan was at risk. I couldn’t operate from a place of fear, and nothing would be worse than a group of heroes or bounty hunters crashing in on me based out of a four bedroom townhouse. We’d trash the whole village before they slowed down enough to let me talk, assuming we didn’t kill each other. I wonder how much time a guy like Dr. Retcon spent worrying about heroic surprise visits.

  Next, I needed to design a new computer system with the specific purpose of finding and dealing with Mr. Haha. No matter how elaborate he was, or how well written his code, he was still software, a computer program gone amok, and I was done worrying about him sabotaging my efforts.

  The robot had once been a partner, even a friend, and I bore witness to how tenacious he could be. He attacked every problem with all of his resources, and they were staggering. His A.I. intellect alone was daunting, but when merged with the botnets it became something close to omniscience. His ability to process and react made him almost impossible to predict, while he could run billions of solutions at quantum speeds. Past all of that was his ambition. Untethered by conscience or remorse, he did what he felt necessary. He was above the material and life meant little to him.

  To take Mr. Haha down, I was going to have to create an advantage.

  The plan was simple; track down and destroy Haha’s mainframe software repositories everywhere, all at once. In practice, it was much harder than it sounded. Mr. Haha wasn’t just one computer sitting in a dark warehouse somewhere, but rather thousands upon thousands of computers working together, at times, the system’s owner didn’t even know they were contributing to the cause. It was a botnet, most famous through its usage by hackers in denial of service attacks to bring down large websites, either for extortion or mischief. Botnets in and of themselves weren’t nefarious instruments, for example the one used by SETI to track the skies for non-earth life forms, allowing private computer owners to login to the system, and add their processing power to a larger whole. But Haha had subverted the original purpose of a botnet, which was to combine the power of the masses, and turned it into a software version of immortality. Cleaning his program from one computer wouldn’t be much harder than excising a malicious virus from the system, but it wouldn’t threaten Haha. I had to write a program that could target him everywhere, striking every computer in his botnet at once – in essence, killing him.

  Bubu wanted to hire local workers to strip rocks from the nearby quarry and rebuild the castle, like they would have done in the old days, and it wasn’t a plan without merit. It was the simplest, time-tested method of making what I needed, but the first casualty of that plan was privacy. I needed it, and a few hundred workers stomping around the site would create an exponential number of gaps. Rumors would be the least of it, and I would hate to have to toss the poor fool who recognized me into orbit.

  The other way would require many more, much smaller workers.

  Drones.

  Thousands of them, each tied to a single network, operating cooperatively twenty-four hours a day. I figured I needed between ten and twenty thousand, most of them small self-propelled worker bots no more than a few inches long to build the castle, and bore the deep shafts for the lower tunnels. I was also going to design a fleet of weaponized defensive drones, to deal with just about any threat, as well as a host of observation drones to monitor the countryside. Building the drones would require me to build other machines, ten or so specialized drone makers that could churn out builder drones. Working in tandem, they would produce the smaller ones in a cycle that would quickly become self-perpetuating. I’d have an army of them in days.

  Yes, I was designing and building a machine that would build machines that would build my castle. The small worker/builder drones would operate from a larger mother drone that would also act as a reservoir of material. Instead of stone and mortar, I was going to use next gen materials, stuff derived from the latest minds in the world, then give the whole thing a personal touch. As the little machines built the floors, wall and roof of the castle; the mother drones would mix dyes into the batch, so things would look as genuine as possible. Only upon closer inspection would the texture appear more “plasticky”, yet the materials would be far stronger than Kevlar and utilize microscopic honeycomb web works to make the overall structure stronger than rebar reinforced concrete.

  When Bubu was done, he took my laptop and went to town, leaving me to work with paper and pencil. I had taken the entire second floor, using one room to sleep in and the other two, which had a double door that opened between them, as a design lab, papering the walls with drawings and schematics for the drones, and for the overall castle and underworks.

  By the time he returned, I was eating food I’d bought from one of the neighbors and he came bearing boxes with brand new MacBook Pro laptops.

  “I need four thousand for these, bro,” he said, tossing the boxes on one of tables covered with grid paper. He took off his coat and hung it on the rack alongside a leather messenger bag then walked over to the window overlooking the small village. From that corner of the house, you could look out on the whole valley of Litetia and the castle mound in the distance, part way up the mountain.

  I went to my coat and grabbed some bills and put them on the table next to the laptop boxes. “You get my software,” I said, referring to the program I’d need to do the actual designs. Once I had the castle computerized and the drones and materials designed and ready, it would build itself automatically.

  Bubu had a mischievous little grin on his face.

  “What,” I said.

  “I’ll get you software,” he said. “We’ll crack it.”

  “No,” I said, putting down the spoon I was using to eat my meat broth. “I don’t want any trouble with the goddamned RIAA about stealing software.”

  Bubu’s grin formed into a full smile. “Like they would come here to get you,” he said, gesturing out the window.

  He was right. I was creating a fortress to defend against superhumans, insane A.I.’s, and whoever else might try to interfere with my plans. I was a felon, convicted of attempted genocide as the topper of a list of crimes I had committed, and many more that I had not, and here I was getting squeamish about violating t
he terms of service for some obscure piece of software.

  I laughed and went back to my soup.

  “I have more numbers for you,” Bubu said after a moment of taking in the beauty of the valley. He walked over to the stack of bills and made them disappear.

  “Talk to me,” I said.

  “Looks like first part of the list is going to be forty-five thousand,” he said.

  “Show me.”

  He reached for his messenger bag and pulled out a laptop that was an exact duplicate of the ones I had just paid two thousand for apiece. I bet he’d bought all three for less than what I was paying, and kept the change, which was fine by me.

  Bubu opened the laptop and the thing fired up in a few seconds.

  “What you say?”

  I laughed, “It’s fast, Bubu.”

  “Yes, not like other shit I threw into river.”

  “You mean sold for a few hundred bucks,” I corrected, and he gave me an acknowledging nod.

  “Here’s the list,” he said, opening a text document. Bubu had divided it into four different categories, covering my needs per phase. Every item had was marked by notes, names, and numbers, but the sub-tallies were clear and the list organized.

  “You an accountant in another life,” I said.

  He nodded, “What I studied in school. Never helped me for shit, until now.”

  I studied the first category to make sure everything was accounted for, that his listing was thorough, and found it to my liking. So it was going to take forty-five thousand to build the first device. I took a glance at the costs for the second part, seeing it was almost four times phase one and decided to add the whole thing up. Though there were many items missing, the amount he had was a rough estimate: about a million dollars.

  Not bad for a proper castle.

  * * * *

  A winter storm rolled through that night and Bubu and I stayed on our separate floors as the heavy rain beat down on the townhouse. Ours was the sturdiest structure in the hamlet, with the fewest leaks, and I worried about everyone in town as I rotated pots and pans as they filled with water pouring through holes in the roof.