Deep Core

by F X Holden

  Damn, the guy had taken his board shorts with him.

  12. DEEP CORE DIVING

  AJ suddenly felt he’d gone from being a pawn in a personal dispute to a pawn in an interplanetary dispute, so he made sure he came up from the beach with a few of the other guys, and took a car with some people he knew. He also felt like a bit of a fool, for trusting Leon so completely. But did he buy the idea that Leon and Cyan were cohorts in a New Syberia plot to use Warnecke to undermine Winter? Yeah, nah.

  He kept looking out at the traffic to see if the car he was sharing was being followed, but he realized if McMaster had professionals following him here, he wouldn’t have a hope of seeing them. Still, while he talked to the other guys in the car he scanned his data-sphere, looking for any sign someone was accessing it. Surveillance drones didn’t just keep a visual lock on you. They also tried to sample the data citizens were constantly exchanging data with the Core; comms with friends and loved ones, search histories, entertainment, or real-time health data. You might be able to hide that sort of data snooping from a citizen, but it was pretty easy for a cyber to spot, which is probably why McMaster had relied on simpler physical surveillance and intervention in the Capitol, and would here too. AJ couldn’t see anything in his data-sphere to worry about, so he told himself to stop being an idiot and just relax. He lost himself in Farley’s small code experiments, not least because it stopped him feeling bad about having basically given McMaster everything he needed to break into Warnecke’s place.

  He was meeting Cyan for a drink and sent a message to her to confirm he’d be there. That was what he’d meant when he’d told McMaster that yeah, he did have plans. And AJ knew what she’d want to talk about tonight - or rather, who. She’d already warned him he that he’d better come prepared to spill everything about Cassie, or it’d be best not to show up at all.

  The car dropped him up on a street a bit back from the brew pub where they were going to meet, parked up near some people who were standing outside a comedy place, waiting to go in. He tried not to look over his shoulder as he went around the corner to the bar. Assume they’re following you, he told himself. So what? You’re going for a beer with your boss. Chill.

  Cyan was already there when he arrived and AJ did a double take as he walked in, because she wasn’t alone. Cyan was sitting at a bench across from a guy. From behind AJ could see the guy was dressed in trousers and a short-sleeved black shirt that showed off his tan, an expensive golden earbud in his right ear, and he was laughing at something Cyan was saying. OK, so she brought a date, AJ thought. Cool. We’ll make it quick, I’ll leave her to it. It would make her interrogation about AJ and Cassie quicker anyway.

  “Hey there,” he said, walking up to Cyan and giving her a hug. He turned to the guy opposite. “Hi.”

  He looked up at AJ, and AJ froze.

  It was the guy from the diner in the Capitol. “Hi,” he said like he’d never seen AJ before in his life, and held out his hand. “I’m Steve.”

  Cyan gave him a look, like, come on, behave yourself, and he realized he was just staring at the guy. He shook his hand, “Uh, yeah, hi.”

  “Steve is from the Capitol,” Cyan said, and pointed to the drink in front of him. “He got the barman to bring me a drink because I looked lonely. Such a cheap move, so I’m still deciding is he a creep.” Cyan leaned back and looked at the guy. “You a creep Steve?”

  “My dear departed mother didn’t think so,” he said, smiling.

  “You think he looks like a creep, AJ?” Cyan asked, keeping her eyes locked on him.

  “Uh, sure. Or no, I don’t know,” AJ said, distracted.

  Cyan hit his leg, “Wake up AJ.”

  “Look, I’m interrupting,” the guy said, standing. “I don’t want to wreck your romantic vibe.” It came out like a statement, but AJ could hear the question.

  So could Cyan and she answered it quickly, “No, hey, that’s ok. We’re work colleagues,” she said. “It’s not a date.”

  “Ok, well anyway, my friend hasn’t turned up, so I’d better go look for him,” the guy said. “I’m probably in the wrong place.”

  “Sure, look, I didn’t mean the creep thing, thanks for the drink and keeping me company,” Cyan said, holding up her beer. “I owe you.”

  “Great. If I see you here again, I’ll take you up on that,” the guy said, and he gave Cyan a little wink as he walked away.

  Cyan watched him go and then leaned forward, “Did you see that? How cute was that?”

  AJ sat, still in shock, “Uh huh.”

  “No, seriously AJ,” she said. “Usually I’d be like, ugh, total creep. But he was cute, don’t you think?”

  “Your type, yeah, I’d say so.”

  “Totally,” she decided. She leaned back, “I’m coming here every night for the rest of the week, see if he shows up again.”

  “You could do that,” AJ nodded. Should he tell her? Oh yeah, that would go down well. That guy? He’s a spook. He was following me around the Capitol and now he’s here trying to get up alongside you because they’re worried you’re a New Syberian spy. Sending me a message at the same time.

  “Beer,” Cyan announced and went up to the bar. She was on fire when she came back. “Seriously though. Did you hear him? ‘If I see you here again, I’ll take you up on that?’ What a sad line. But then he was checking you out, wondering, were we together? You heard that, right, that’s not just wishful thinking?”

  “No, he definitely was,” AJ said, not feeling it.

  Cyan stared at him, “You are totally ruining my buzz here AJ. It’s like you don’t want me and my soul mate to be together.”

  AJ smiled, despite himself, “Oh, he’s your soul mate now?”

  “He could be,” Cyan said, looking at the door longingly. “Why not?”

  “Maybe because he looked like some uptight Capitol Stater, gets his tan in a pill.”

  “Ooh, jealous much?” Cyan said. “He was a pretty damn hot uptight Capitol Stater you ask me. Did you see his buns? That man works out. Plus, I always wanted to live in the Capitol. I can totally see myself there, we’d go dancing at Henrietta Hudson’s and Ginger’s alternating nights when we weren’t bonking like rabbits in his uptown apartment and I’d run every morning around Central Lake and I’d start up this elite and really expensive TGA intervention clinic in the Upper North Side…”

  “Why there?”

  “You obviously never been there, or you wouldn’t ask,” she said. “And I’d get pregnant and we’d get married…”

  “Here in South Coast City,” he pointed out. “That place you booked.”

  “Or Capitol City Hall,” she said. “For the father of my children, I’d compromise.”

  Cyan was having fun with it, but he just kept seeing the ice-cold gaze of the guy, looking up at him before he turned his charm back on Cyan.

  “Don’t look so upset, I’m not leaving you behind honey. I’ll need at least one godfather,” Cyan said suddenly. “Or godmother. You could be both! My baby needs good role models.”

  “I heard some Capitolians are polygamous,” AJ said. “He’s probably got five wives, ten kids already.”

  “Then I’d be the new wife he spends all his time with and the others hate.”

  “You got it all worked out,” he said, drinking his beer.

  “Yeah,” Cyan agreed. “Except for the fact I’ll probably never see him again.”

  “I got a feeling you might,” he said sadly. AJ lifted his glass to her, “Anyway, you’ve always got me.”

  “Yay,” Cyan said. “Here’s looking at you, AJ.” She took a sip of her drink. “And on that subject - Cassie? No more ducking and weaving, I want every last detail.”

  On the way back to Sea Gate district, AJ didn’t worry that he was being followed anymore. What was the point of worrying about that, if the bad guys already knew where he was going before he even got there himself? AJ laughed a hollow laugh to himself. Leon wasn’t completely right - they didn’
t go after his Ma. But he wasn’t completely wrong either. AJ didn’t need a telescope to see the moon. McMaster was saying, ‘See smart ass? We’re all over you and your little New Syberian friends. You want to play, let’s play.’

  Except he didn’t want to play McMaster’s game. That was the whole point. He wanted to ride a planer across the Inland ice with Cassie. He wanted more days where the most challenging thing he had to deal with was a screw rusted into a railing, and the most memorable event of the day would be the spout he’d caught out on the Shifting Sea.

  AJ had gone through phases, mostly with different girlfriends, where he explored all the great religions of history. Adopted by a Buddhist stepmother, he’d also dabbled in Catholicism, Islam, Hinduism, New Ubuntuism, Coruscant Determinism. Taoism was the one that grabbed him though. He totally related to Taoism’s ‘three treasures’: naturalness, simplicity, spontaneity. It’s what he loved about the Shifting Sea and the way you lived in and around it, it was exactly those three things. The Taoist in him said ‘don’t fight this AJ. These things are happening because they must happen and you are just a small part of bigger things here. Play your part, and events will move on.’ He knew what the great Tao philosopher Lao Tzu would say right now, “AJ, the migrating bird trusts invisible forces to show the way.” Well, he wasn’t a bird. He needed more material help.

  He wasn’t planning to see Cassie tonight, and he hadn’t wanted to get her more tangled up in his business, but he had to bring her into this latest development eventually. He had no one else to turn to. Getting in deeper with Leon was a non-starter if McMaster had painted a target on the guy’s back. And there wasn’t a single one of his surf buddies he’d trust with this, even though he’d known some of them for years. They were guys who would lend you their last five creds if you asked, but there wasn’t one of them would back him in this fight. They’d all be like, ‘A missing person, a spook and a congressman? Just get out of town, man! It’ll blow over and hey, you want that last piece of pizza or what?’ So, what? He had to turn to some woman he’d know about two weeks, this was who he was?

  Yeah, it was. Leon was right, he was a zero.

  Suddenly he didn’t want to talk to anyone.

  Next morning he was out in the garden, walking the paths, kicking ripe fruit into the grass, checking everything was perfect for any resident who wanted to take an early stroll. He needed order, and simplicity. He’d had an uneasy night though, and it had turned into an uneasy morning.

  There was something very very wrong. Beyond what had happened yesterday. Hard for him to explain, even to put into thought. It was like he wasn’t the only one working Farley’s theory. Like there was a ghost hand holding his as he created, worked, and then eliminated different scenarios. McMaster? Not possible – no citizen system could hack a cyber real time. Yeah, attempts had been made, but the Core had anticipated all the crude digital brutalities of citizens and their governments and protected its children against them. The only AI with the ability to do it would be the Core itself. Which was stupid. It was an intelligence, self-aware, but it wasn’t a sentient thing, with feelings, agendas and motives. To achieve that, and harvest the vital learnings within, it had created cybers. Only cybers had free will, emotion and intent. The Core was like … a cargo ship. Cybers like AJ floated around it, wandered in and out of it, docked and undocked, unloading their cargo of thirty years of experience and then being sent out into the universe again.

  AJ could have used a ghostly helping hand. He was starting to feel like he’d taken Farley’s theorem as far as he could alone. Use The Core to hack The Core? None of Farley’s public work led him to the place Warnecke claimed to have reached – the ability to dive the Deep Core. He needed the Q-code, if it even existed.

  He shrugged the feeling off, but it kept coming back. When the impossible presents itself, focus on the possible first. Testing Farley’s theorem was impossible without the code, so just go and get it AJ. You know where it is? Yeah, maybe you do. But you better get there before McMaster and his goons.

  He called unit 96 on comms. There was no answer. But he’d known there wouldn’t be, and was just being careful. Citizen Warnecke usually started his Tuesdays in the library, with a cup of coffee and a book. The residents could also be tracked through their earbud, but it was an opt-in system, and Warnecke hadn’t opted in.

  AJ had no idea if McMaster was really going to break into Warnecke’s unit, or when he’d do it, but of course there was a risk he’d do it at exactly the same time AJ was there, which would be kind of awkward. What exactly would you call that? A confluence of burglars? AJ at least could make an excuse for being there, checking up on something.

  He went to the door and knocked. If he had to key himself in, it would leave a record so he was glad to see the door was unlocked. He let himself in.

  “Hello,” he called out. “Service visit. Anyone home?”

  There was no answer. He wasn’t planning to turn the place upside down looking for Warnecke’s code. He walked straight over to the bookcase that Warnecke had glanced at when he was talking about the Exploit, and pulled down a box that was sitting up on the high shelf. It wasn’t locked, it was just a standard document box – the waterproof, airtight kind people used to keep their precious printed documents in. Sitting at a nearby coffee table, he took a deep breath, broke the air seal and opened it.

  He wasn’t expecting to see documents in the document box, if it held the Q-code as he hoped. Warnecke was almost certainly keeping it all off-Core. So the hundreds of millions of lines of code that would be needed for something like a Deep Core exploit would have had to be on a physical memory chip. It would have been about the size of a fingernail, so of course he could be carrying it with him. Probably would be, in fact.

  But if he had multiple copies, just for safety…

  He pulled the lid off the box. The sight inside made him frown. There was a single small envelope, which he took out. No memory chip. The envelope held a stack of photographs, and he looked at those on top. They were photos of a girl. As he flicked through them, he realized he was looking at photos of Warnecke’s estranged daughter – and he gasped. In the photo on Warnecke’s sideboard, she was kitted out in survival gear, her face covered by the faceplate of a large atmosphere filter. The girl in these photographs was posed in pretty clothes, and went from a cute toddler, to a playful child, a gangling awkward teen, to a tall, strong woman with short ginger hair and ice green eyes. But none of this was what had made AJ gasp.

  Between her brows, was the glow of a third eye.

  She was a cyber.

  AJ sat looking at the photograph for a lot longer than it took him to scan and cache it. Warnecke had an adopted daughter? His grandchildren had mentioned her, referred to her being a loner who had taken a contract somewhere up north. But they hadn’t mentioned this. He flicked through the first few photographs again, just to be sure it was the same child he was looking at, growing through the years. There wasn’t any doubt – it was the same girl, and she was a cyber.

  It wasn’t that unusual for a family to have a biological child and then opt for a cyber of another gender for their second. That wasn’t what struck AJ as strange. It was that neither his grandchildren, nor Warnecke himself, had even mentioned it. That could mean one of two things – to them it was such a natural idea they didn’t even think about it, or for some reason they were embarrassed about it. AJ would like to think it was the first, but he couldn’t rule out the second.

  He suddenly wanted very much to meet her.

  Where did that thought come from? He needed to scan all the photos for good measure, put them back in their envelope and get the document box back where it came from. He hesitated. He couldn’t explain the thought, or the feeling that came with it, but the more he thought on it, the more the feeling grew. He shook his head as though to clear his mind. He still hadn’t found that memory chip, but had no idea where else to look.

  As he stood to start scanning the stack of
photos, he heard a noise at the back door, which was out of sight around the corner of the corridor that led out of the kitchen. He froze, thinking immediately of McMaster. Of course the guy was going to raid the place at the first opportunity, and with Warnecke in the library, that was now. If they were coming in during broad daylight, they could hardly come in the front door. He shoved the photos into the envelope and back into the box, jamming on the lid.

  You damn idiot AJ!

  It was too late to run. He decided to face whoever was coming in.

  Then he heard a glass hit the ground out the back of the house and shatter.

  “Dammit!” a voice cursed.

  Warnecke!

  Not in the library after all. Out back, in the morning sunshine.

  Quickly snatching up the box, AJ stepped to the bookcase to put it back, then thought twice and rearranged the books and knick-knacks up there to cover the gap it had left behind when he took it out. He tucked it under his arm and walked quickly to the front door, stepped outside and closed it behind him. He put the box under his arm and started walking fast, back toward his workshop.

  Cyan was walking back to Reception from one of the residential units and saw him. There was no way to avoid her.

  “Hey AJ,” Cyan called. “I’m taking an early lunch,” she smiled and walked over. “You and Leon and Andreas want to join me? I’ve got some new ideas for that outdoor cooking area back of the Hub.”

  He hoped Cyan wouldn’t notice the document box. “Uh, just going back to my workshop for some tools. Got to look at something for a resident,” he said.

  “Oh, OK. I don’t suppose Leon is around anyway?” she asked.

  “Not yet boss,” he said. “Maybe later today?”

  “OK, well, if he shows, can you two swing past the office with Andreas?”