A breeting sound echoed through the high-ceilinged mansion. Alice tensed, then realized that it was the cordless phone on the nightstand next to the bed.
She walked over, picked it up, and hit the TALK button. “Yes?”
“Janus,” said the voice on the other side.
That, Alice knew, was the code word indicating that this was a security call. She immediately hung up the phone and moved into the living room. Spence got up and followed her.
Next to the Louis XIV couch—which Alice had been afraid to sit in when she first arrived for fear that a museum guard would yell at her not to touch the exhibits—sat a beautiful wooden end table that looked to be as much an antique as the couch. It doubled as a cabinet, probably originally intended to store drinks or table linens or some such. This one housed a red phone that was attached to a phone line installed under the end table via a hole drilled into the bottom that probably cut the piece’s value by eighty percent. The receiver was attached to the hook via a good old-fashioned spiral phone cord. As good as telephonic security could be, a hardwired line was infinitely easier to secure and harder to penetrate.
Alice picked up the red phone. “Prospero.”
The voice on the other side was the same androgynous voice that had called on the main phone. “Verify position.”
At that, Alice let out a breath she hadn’t realized she had been holding. It was just a simple check-in call, making sure that she and Spence were safely ensconced. “We’re in the house. All’s well.”
“Verified. Out.”
The line went dead.
“And you have a nice evening, too.” She sighed, hung up the phone, and closed the end table cabinet door.
Spence smiled. He had, she decided, a charming smile. And he really did have a nice ass.
“So, ten o’clock and all’s well?”
“Something like that,” she said. “So, want to show me how to make an ashtray?”
He laughed. She liked his laugh, too.
Maybe this assignment wouldn’t be quite so boring after all . . .
FOUR
OVER THE LAST TWO MONTHS, LISA BROWARD had learned to well and truly despise the Hive’s computer system.
Since it first came into existence, Umbrella had always had state-of-the-art computer technology, always first with the newest innovations in both hardware and software.
What they put on the market was usually about five years behind what they had for themselves. The head programmer for the most recent upgrade to the Hive was a British man named Dr. Simon Barr.
Lisa had first encountered Barr at MIT when she was an undergraduate, and he was teaching a class in applied artificial intelligence. He opened the semester with a variation on Lewis Carroll that had fooled most of the students, including Lisa, into thinking he would be one of those charming, daffy old Brits.
“The time has come, the walrus said, to speak of many things,” he had said. “Of bits and bytes and decision trees, of compilers and fMRIs, and if the software’s well designed, and whether they’re truly living machines.”
After lulling the students into a false sense of security, he dropped the bombshell: nobody in the class would receive any higher than a B, and most would receive a C or D grade. His theories, he explained, were far too sophisticated for any undergraduate to possibly begin to comprehend. He only taught the class because the powers-that-be had convinced him that he might find one or two great programmers there, and it behooved him—and those potential great students—to benefit from Barr’s own vast stores of knowledge.
However, he had said, ninety-nine-point-nine percent of his students would not be great programmers, and probably that last point-one percent wouldn’t be either, and this was truly an appalling waste of his time, but he supposed they had better get on with it and get it over with.
That speech alone prompted half the class to drop it.
Barr announced the second day of class that—now that he had weeded out the stragglers and the ones who wouldn’t amount to anything except some job as a corporate drone writing drab code for unappreciative middle-management types—“you are going to work your brains to the very nub.”
He also reiterated his position: nobody would get higher than a B. “But you will learn more from me than from any other professor you will ever have in your life.”
Half the remainder dropped the class after that.
Lisa decided two things at that point: that she would stick with the class no matter what, and that she would get an A.
She spent the next three months being subjected to an amazing amount of abuse, vitriol, condescension—and also the most brilliant theories on AI she had ever heard before or since. Barr came by his arrogance honestly: he truly was an absolute master of the field.
He also made no effort to talk down to the students, leaving most of them scrambling to try to decipher what he was talking about.
Except Lisa, who lost a great deal of sleep, dropped ten pounds off an already rather skinny frame, got sick regularly, and came dangerously close to a nervous breakdown more than once. But dammit, she followed every single word Barr spoke in that arrogant tone that was peculiar to Brits.
On her final exam, he wrote the following on the back:
“Miss Addison, I commend you. You have tremendous drive and a willingness to apply yourself to the task at hand. You also have a stick-to-it-iveness that one does not see in the younger generation much anymore. One might admire you for your perseverence in pursuit of understanding of this subject.
“However, you will not number me among those admirers. All you have proven is that you are able to parrot back the works of greater intellects. The fact that you had to work so hard to comprehend this class merely proves that you lack the creative spark yourself. You are, in fact, precisely the sort who will become the type of corporate drone that I despise. The only difference is that you will be much much better at it than most, though to my mind that is akin to being the best muckraker in the cow farm.
“Nevertheless, you have performed the tasks you were given in the class, and I would be dishonest if I did not give you fitting reward for that accomplishment, even if it is less of an accomplishment than I might desire.
“A.”
In later years, Lisa would admire Dr. Barr’s ability to fulfill her every wish and destroy them all at the same time. Back then, however, she was up most of the night crying.
Now here she was, ten years later, having fulfilled his prognostications by spending her career as a corporate drone—even excelling at it, as he had also predicted—only to find herself providing security for his latest and greatest system.
The Red Queen.
Barr was currently working in Umbrella’s London office, working on some new system that would be even better than the Red Queen, but for now, this AI—which was about a decade ahead of any other computer system available on the open market—was the best possible.
This was a computer system that was in many ways the holy grail of AI: it was adaptable, flexible, and even had a personality.
For some inexplicable reason, the personality he gave to the Red Queen was that of a ten-year-old girl. Specifically that of Angela Ashford, the young daughter of one of the muckitymucks in Research & Development. Lisa couldn’t imagine that Barr came up with that himself, as it required a level of sentimentality the old man simply did not possess. No doubt it was required by Ashford or one of his supporters on the Board of Directors.
Never having met Angie Ashford, Lisa had no idea if the personality Barr had programmed in matched that of the young child. She suspected it didn’t, that Barr had made the girl as unpleasant as possible in revenge for the political sop to Ashford that modeling the computer after his daughter likely was.
If, on the other hand, the personality did match that of the real Angie Ashford, Lisa had the utmost sympathy for Dr. Ashford’s pain and suffering.
Lisa’s job description was to make sure that the Red Queen’s systems
remained secure. In reality, this meant spending all her days dealing with a ten-year-old girl who had inherited her creator’s attitude problem.
“It isn’t working,” the Red Queen said in her prissy little schoolgirl voice. The voice came crisply from the Perrymyk speakers sitting on either side of Lisa’s flatscreen monitor. The upper-right-hand corner of said monitor was taken up with the image of a prissy little schoolgirl face, whose lip movements matched the sounds.
Sighing, Lisa wondered why anyone would find this preferable to a simple error message. As it was, that face was a daily reminder of why she was eternally grateful that she and Nick had decided not to have kids.
“All right,” she said, typing in a sequence of commands, “let’s compile it again, see where the error crops up.”
“We don’t need to do that. The error is in the patch you wrote. Don’t worry about it, I can rewrite it for you.”
“No you can’t, either,” Lisa said. “Show me where the error is. I’ll fix it.”
Eight weeks, and the damn machine still was treating her as if she were an idiot. Like programmer, like program.
“Very well, if you insist, but it’s wholly unnecessary. I can do this myself. The whole point of having an artificial intelligence is to give me the opportunity to be intelligent.”
Barr had said the same thing ten years ago at MIT, word for word. No surprise he programmed it into his greatest achievement.
Luckily, Umbrella’s higher-ups were a bit more far-sighted—or, at the very least, had seen 2001. No matter what happened, there was always to be some human oversight to anything the Red Queen did.
In the last two months, Lisa had learned that Barr had not been thrilled with this, and had tried to have Lisa’s position eliminated after her predecessor transferred to another department.
Instead, they took the job out of Barr’s purview. Although she worked with the computer system, she was not part of the Computer Services staff—she reported to Security Division.
Though most of their work involved the physical security of Umbrella’s various corporate headquarters and their employees, Umbrella’s bosses decided to include electronic security. That meant that she reported directly to the head of Security Division, a taciturn man who went solely by the unlikely codename of “One.”
They still put her in with the other techies, though, giving her a sleek metal desk indistinguishable from all the other sleek metal desks. On the far wall was a large window, covered in blinds, that gave a spectacular view of the Raccoon City skyline.
All the more spectacular by virtue of its being fake. They even piped muffled street noises in. It was Umbrella’s way of making them feel like they weren’t a thousand feet underground. After all, despite the size of the Hive, it could still get damn claustrophobic, knowing you were spending all your time in a big hole in the ground, surrounded on all sides by earth, rocks, mud, or whatever the hell made up the underside of Raccoon City. Lisa had no idea, nor did she care to. She just tried, like everyone else did, to pretend that the view out the window was real, that the sounds she heard were genuine.
Sometimes she even believed it.
She often wondered how anyone stood this for five years, and was grateful that—one way or another—she was not going to find out for herself.
Even as she found the error in her patch—which was a simple typographical error, one she would have caught five minutes ago if the Red Queen hadn’t insisted on getting huffy about it—the phone rang.
Wanting to keep her hands free to type, she plugged the headset into the appropriate jack in the phone, hooked it around her ear, adjusting the mic so it was near her mouth, then hit the SPEAKER button. The phone routed the sound, which would normally go out on the phone’s speaker, to the headset. “Broward.”
“Lisa, it’s Alice.”
Smiling at the familiar voice, Lisa said, “How’s life among the rich and famous?”
Dryly, Alice said, “Oh, thrill-a-minute, like usual.”
Unlike One, who was at HQ in Raccoon City proper, Alice—currently in charge of security for the Hive, stationed along with Spence Parks at the lavish mansion that served as one of the main entry points into the Hive—was approachable and easy to work with. Like One, she didn’t take any shit. Unlike One, she didn’t give any, either. As long as there wasn’t a crisis, she could actually talk to you like a real person.
Although Lisa’s desk was in the same general area as the other Tech folks, they viewed her with disdain, as she wasn’t really one of them. Unfortunately, she didn’t really have much in common with the gaggle of ex-cops and ex-cons that made up the Security Division, either.
Alice, though, was different. She didn’t treat Lisa like some kind of weird other being who didn’t belong in the club because she couldn’t field-strip an M16, or whatever kind of fancy weapon the thugs in Security hauled around.
Not that it mattered all that much whether or not Lisa made friends. Not given her long-term goal.
Still, in the short term, it was nice to have someone to talk to.
Especially when that someone also had the potential to help out with the long-term plans.
“So what’s the problem?” Lisa asked.
“I can’t get into my account.”
Again, Lisa sighed. “I know, I know, there’s a problem with the protocols. I should have it fixed in a few minutes, assuming Her Royal Highness doesn’t throw a fit.”
“I heard that.”
Making a face at her monitor, Lisa said, “You were meant to.”
Lisa heard Alice Abernathy laugh.
After rewriting a few more lines of code, Lisa said, “Okay, try it now.”
There was a pause, though Lisa could hear the clickity-clack of Alice’s fingers moving quickly over her keyboard.
“Fuck! I still can’t get in.”
Lisa frowned. “You sure?”
“Yes, I’m sure. It says ’access denied’ in big letters on top of my monitor.”
“That’s a pretty good indicator, yeah. Hold on a sec.” She entered a few more commands. All the computers in the Hive—including the two in the mansion—were hardwired to the overall Red Queen network, and it was a simple matter for her to provide a more direct link between her and Alice. When she was finished, it was as if they were a single workstation that just happened to have two keyboards.
Her monitor lit up with a window taking up the right-hand side of her flatscreen display. It showed her what Alice was seeing on her monitor, complete with ACCESS DENIED in big letters along the top. In the center of the screen were two fields, currently empty, asking for username and password.
Lisa hit F11, then entered her own username and password at another prompt. The latter was a series of numbers she had literally picked at random. Lisa had always had a good memory for numbers—she never had to write down phone numbers, nor use a speed-dial for them—so she was always able to pick wholly random passwords, always the most secure. Her username was standard, of course: LBROWARD. All the usernames were keyed to last name preceded by first initial—the latter a necessity, especially since there was a guy down in Medical named Phillip Broward. In fact, just in the Hive alone there were fourteen people named Smith, ten named Jones, six named Clark (plus one named Clarke), three named Martinez, two named West, and, oddly, three named Milewski (all three unrelated to each other).
Entering that username and password rewarded her with a series of commands and codes in another window on the left-hand side, right under the faux adorable face of a ten-year-old child that Lisa had never met yet desperately wanted to drown.
She then Alt-Tabbed over to the other window, used the trackpad located between the main keyboard and the number pad to place the cursor in the username field, and entered “AABERNATHY.”
“Okay,” she said to Alice, “enter your password.”
This time, the clickety-clack that Lisa heard over her headset was matched by the appearance of several asterisks in the password fie
ld.
“Done,” Alice said after fourteen asterisks appeared.
“That’s some password.”
“It’s my birthday,” Alice deadpanned.
“Right—when you’re reincarnated in the year one billion.” Lisa followed the streams of code that flew past the window on the left-hand side of her monitor, even as the right-hand side once again declared access to be denied and cleared the username and password fields.
“Fuck,” Alice said again. “What’s wrong?”
“You’re gonna need a new birthday,” Lisa said with a smirk.
“Hm?”
“Don’t you always complain that you’re bored shitless up in the mansion?”
“Yeah—mainly because I am always bored shitless up in the mansion.”
“Then you should have plenty of time to read my memos.”
“What memo?”
“The one I wrote six weeks ago that says you have to change your password every week, and anyone who goes eight days without changing it will be locked out.”
“Oh, that memo. You do know that there are seven days in a week, right?”
Lisa laughed. “Yeah, but I thought I’d be generous and give everyone an extra day in case they forgot. Pretty pointless, as it turns out, since anyone who doesn’t remember for seven days isn’t likely to get a sudden burst of memory given another twenty-four hours, but I like to live the life of a cockeyed optimist.”
“No, you just like to be an even bigger pain in the ass by pointing out that we’re all too stupid to remember to change our password even when given an extra day.”
“That, too.” Lisa’s tone grew more serious. “All kidding aside, it’s a necessary concern. Most of the security problems on networks like this are because people don’t bother to take the simplest precautions. And changing your password every eight days is pretty damn simple, don’t you think?”
Alice sighed. “Apparently not, since I haven’t changed mine in eight days.”
Peering at her monitor and noticing a date on a particular line, Lisa said, “Nine, actually. Didn’t you log on yesterday?”
Genesis Page 3
