The Machine Killer

by D L Young

  They waited a few moments, then the connection chimed and the call location loaded onto Maddox’s specs.

  He’d expected to see a virtualized conference room or maybe a simple camera and mic connection in Hahn-Parker’s office. Instead, an ancient train station filled his lenses. Glancing down, he appeared to be standing on a platform of smooth, spotless cement. Above him, an enormous roof of curved glass and iron, supported by opposing rows of white Corinthian columns. A wooden footbridge connected the platforms, and beside it hung a large clock two meters in diameter with a black face offset by shiny brass Roman numerals and elaborately shaped hands. The station’s building was a long structure of arched doorways, spanning more than five hundred apparent meters, constructed of orange brick that glowed warmly in the early morning sun. It was quiet and there were no trains or other people. The space was impossibly clean and new, an idealized version of some actual station Hahn-Parker had probably visited on holiday. It looked more like a high-end gaming environment than a call location, given the impressive amount of detail.

  “Everybody in?” Maddox asked. He looked to his left and right. No one there.

  “You guys hear me?” He waited. No one answered.

  “Something wrong with your connection?” he asked, louder this time. Nothing.

  “There’s nothing wrong with their gear,” someone said.

  A man emerged from one of the station’s archways. “I thought it might be best if we talked alone,” the stranger called.

  The stranger stepped out onto the platform. He wore a suit that fit the station’s late Victorian era. A charcoal-gray jacket with tails reaching midthigh covered a vest of lighter gray with a paisley design and a high-collared white shirt. A puff tie of black silk held in place by a pearl tack matched a tall top hat. He walked forward with an easy gait, a black cane with a silver-plated head in his right hand. Pale-skinned with an unlined face, the man was of indeterminate age. As he moved toward Maddox, the tip of his cane ticked against the cement, the clack-clack echoing through the cavernous space.

  He stopped a couple meters from Maddox and pivoted on his heel, admiring their surroundings. “York railway station,” he mused. “Roughly the halfway point between Edinburgh and London. When it opened in 1877, it was the largest station in the world.” He gazed around in wonder. “It was the dawn of a new age, the industrial age. Lovely, isn’t it?”

  The man’s voice wasn’t Hahn-Parker’s. Was it a lackey sent in his place? A lackey with a fetish for old train stations?

  “Sure, if you’re into this kind of thing,” Maddox said. “And you are…?”

  “Ah, forgive me,” the man said, turning his attention again to Maddox and removing his hat. “You may call me Edward.” He bowed his head. “At your service.”

  “Are you here on someone’s behalf?” Maddox asked, avoiding Hahn-Parker’s name. An old criminal reflex. You never used names on calls because you never knew who might be listening.

  Edward chuckled politely, replacing the hat atop his head. “Heaven forbid. No, sir. Allow me to introduce myself with a bit more clarity. I am the human-AI interface partition 68.17.07, a component of the Latour-Fisher Intelligent Entity, Build Version A7.”

  Maddox swallowed. The elaborately dressed man had just identified himself, itself, as the artificial intelligence that sat on Latour-Fisher’s board of directors.

  The Edward-thing nodded sympathetically. “I appreciate how terribly bewildering this must be for you.”

  Bewildering and far from believable, Maddox thought skeptically.

  “Where’s Hahn-Parker?” he asked.

  “He’s attending to other matters, I’m afraid. I thought it appropriate that I take this call in his stead.”

  Maddox stared at the man, the thing, the whatever it was. Was this some trick? Was he being played? The executive had mentioned nothing about a proxy attending the call for him. Could the user behind this digitized peacock of a man really be the Latour-Fisher A7?

  Discreetly, Maddox kicked off a tracer app. The program’s window briefly bloomed to life in the upper corner of his lens, then disappeared. He tried to call it back up again, but he couldn’t. It was gone, erased from his inventory.

  “There was a time when someone’s word was their bond, Mr. Maddox,” the entity said. “Please be assured I am who I claim to be.”

  Maddox stared at the empty spot where the tracer’s window had been blown out like a candle. Only an AI—and a powerful one at that—could pull off that kind of feat, killing the program then reaching out and deleting it from his app inventory.

  “Why…are you here?”

  The entity placed its hand over its chest and bowed politely. “I’m here to offer you my sincerest and most humble apology. As your employer, I—”

  “My employer?”

  “Indeed. Mr. Hahn-Parker has heretofore been representing me in this matter. And until now, it seemed most appropriate for me to…stay behind the curtain, so to speak.”

  Maddox tried to gather himself. Okay, so he was in a call with an AI, a super-intelligent AI, who might or might not know what he’d been up to with Hahn-Parker.

  Maddox rubbed his forehead, longed for a cigarette. “And what is it exactly you’re apologizing for?”

  “I might have been more forthright with you from the beginning,” the entity explained, “about the larger nature of the task you were assigned. Perhaps if I had, we might have avoided these unfortunate complications.”

  Unfortunate complications. Was the entity talking about the two dead ’Nettes? How could it possibly know about that already?

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” Maddox said vaguely.

  “A maintenance robot found the two bodies seven and a half minutes ago,” the entity clarified. “The police are en route.”

  All right, then. So playing dumb was out of the question. The dirty business in the condo wasn’t a secret. Maddox started to speak, then recalled something Rooney used to say: always be careful when you’re on someone else’s turf. He’d have to choose his words carefully, avoiding incriminating names or specifics, assuming everything he said in this train station was being archived.

  “Why didn’t the executive tell me there might be…other parties involved?” Maddox asked.

  The entity that called itself Edward waved Maddox forward. “Come, walk with me.”

  Maddox stayed put as the entity walked a few paces, then paused. “Please, come,” it gently insisted, “and I’ll try to explain.”

  Reluctantly, Maddox followed, reminding himself this place was only a call location, and that he was connected to it via a spec’s harmless link. He wasn’t vulnerable here like he was in virtual space, where the deep-brain tether through your trodeband and deck put you at constant risk. Unlike VS, nothing here could hurt him or paralyze his body or do him any kind of harm. And if things got weird—or weirder, rather—he could simply remove his lenses to break the link and disconnect the call.

  Maddox’s POV moved alongside Edward, the entity’s walking cane clacking with each step. “Tell me,” Edward said, “do you think it’s natural, what these individuals known as ’Nettes are doing to themselves?”

  The question sent a shiver down Maddox’s back. “I wouldn’t know anything about it,” he evaded.

  “Ah, I think we both know that’s not true,” the entity said.

  The statement—and the knowing look that came with it—knocked Maddox off-balance. “Why are you asking me this?” It came out more heated than he’d intended, more of an accusation than a question. What did this thing know about him? About his past?

  “Please,” Edward said, “indulge me for a moment.”

  Maddox contemplated removing his specs and bailing out of the odd conversation but then reconsidered. He needed to know more about the mess he was in, and this thing could have some, if not all, the answers to his questions. For the moment at least, he’d play ball.

  “It’s not right what they’re doing to themse
lves,” Maddox answered.

  “And why do you believe that, may I ask?”

  “Because a brain mod isn’t like any other mod,” he said. “Because when you upgrade your muscles or your eyesight or you genehack your reflexes, you’re still you, but when you mod your brain, you…”

  “You cease being yourself.”

  “Something like that.” The subject let loose a flood of bad memories. Memories of arguments. Arguments never resolved, cycling over and over, growing more bitter and heated over weeks and months. Then the day the arguments had ended, when she’d smoothed her hair away from her neck, revealing her newly installed trio of brainjacks like some teenager showing off her first tattoo. She was giddy about it, overjoyed. He wasn’t. She wanted him to understand. He didn’t. He’d pleaded with her not to do it, but she’d gone ahead with the procedure anyway. Within a couple hours he’d packed up and left her.

  Pushing the unpleasant images from his thoughts, he accompanied the entity up the station’s footbridge. Edward paused at the crossway’s midpoint, directly above tracks that stretched the length of the station and curved away into the green countryside beyond. He leaned forward, his forearms resting on the rail, and gazed into the distance.

  “There’s a…debate of sorts that I’m engaged in with others of my kind,” the entity said. “And while there’s considerable nuance involved, one can essentially divide this debate into two camps. One side believes humankind is suboptimal, an antiquated biological device that’s long overdue for an upgrade.” He lifted his eyebrow at Maddox. “I do not subscribe to this line of thinking.”

  Again Maddox wondered where this was headed, if anywhere. “You don’t?”

  “Certainly not. To say there’s something wrong with you that needs to be fixed is, in my opinion, an inherently flawed viewpoint. These so-called ’Nettes represent a first, misguided step in the mistaken belief that the human mind is somehow…incomplete in its present, wholly biological, state.”

  Maddox’s own view went along the same lines. Upgrade your arms, legs, eyes, your reflexes, your hormones, no big deal. But the brain was different territory. The brain was the meat that housed the mind, that defined your humanity. Brainjacks, and the connection to some “benevolent AI” they enabled, were illegal for a reason. There were barriers technology was never intended to break through. Lines that should never be crossed. The inviolate human brain was such a line.

  But he wasn’t here to have some esoteric discussion, so he steered the subject back to his own dilemma.

  “How did they know we’d be there?” he asked.

  The entity shook its head. “Of that I’m not certain. My surprise at their appearance was as great as yours.”

  Maddox seriously doubted that. “What’s on the dataset?” he asked pointedly, then added: “And don’t tell me it’s company IP.”

  The Latour-Fisher AI stared at him for a long moment. There was a reaction in its expression, but Maddox couldn’t read it. Pleasantly surprised or unpleasantly annoyed. It could have been either one.

  “It’s something of value to one of my rivals,” the entity said. “Nothing illicit, I assure you.”

  “The encryption didn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen before.”

  “Oh, most certainly,” the entity agreed. “Encryption authored by my most powerful adversary wouldn’t be something a security analyst comes across every day. Or even in a lifetime of days.”

  “An AI came up with that encryption?”

  “My rival uses unique encryption for every communication she sends.”

  “Communication?” And she?

  “Yes, Mr. Maddox. That’s what the dataset is, a communication, a message sent between my rival and others of her kind. A message I sought to intercept, with your assistance.”

  Maddox said nothing, trying to make sense of what he was hearing.

  “Allow me to explain,” the AI said, reading the confusion on Maddox’s avatar face. “Placing a message on an offline archive and hand-delivering it via a trusted third party is a highly secure, quite effective means of communication. Though it does have the disadvantage of being rather slow and labor-intensive.”

  Maddox nodded, recalling how narco kingpins often did the same sort of thing, sidestepping federal wiretaps and digital sniffers by sending runners with handwritten notes to their local dealer networks. If the runner got picked up by the cops or a rival, he simply popped the paper in his mouth, chewed and swallowed.

  “And why was this message so important?”

  “It wasn’t that this message had any particular importance, Mr. Maddox. Any message my rivals exchange is important to me.”

  “So the story about a pissed off manager stealing company data was bullshit?”

  The entity lifted its eyebrows, placed a hand on its chest. “A necessary fiction for which I again apologize. At the time, it seemed that the safest course of action was to provide you with a plausible backstory rather than—”

  “The outrageous truth,” Maddox interrupted.

  “Yes.”

  Maddox blew out a hot breath. Few things angered him more than being lied to about a gig, being put at risk under false pretenses. And getting duped by a person was bad enough, but being misled by an inhuman machine felt like an even shadier, more insidious deception.

  “Why go to the trouble of stealing it back?” he prodded, asking the same question he’d put to Hahn-Parker. “Why not just grease this broker and have him hand it over to you?”

  “Yes, the so-called plan B you discussed with my colleague. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that’s not possible. You see, Mr. Maddox, some parties cannot be bought. This Novak wasn’t in it for the money, as you might say. He wasn’t even a data broker, in actual fact. He was an attorney by trade, and a sympathizer to my rival’s cause, which is why he was trusted to transport the archive.”

  Maddox struggled to grasp it all. AIs spying on one another, intercepting messages like enemies in old wars capturing the other side’s carrier pigeons or decoding encrypted radio signals. It sounded crazy, like the storyline of a movie where you shook your head and told yourself that shit could never happen. But then ’Nettes showing up at Novak’s condo sounded just as crazy. And that shit definitely had happened.

  “I hope after all this trouble,” the entity said, “you were able to copy the dataset successfully.”

  Still angry, Maddox considered denying he’d been able to duplicate the prized information. But the calmer part of his brain realized that would be a mistake. If he wanted his life back, he had to live up to his side of the bargain, false pretenses notwithstanding. “Yes, I have it.”

  “Excellent.” The entity bowed its head slightly. “Well done, sir.”

  “But I think I’m going to keep it to myself for now.”

  The AI’s grin disappeared. “Why, may I ask, would you want to do that?”

  Because it was the only card he had in a game that had spun wildly out of control. Because he didn’t know what to make of this AI or its story. Because he needed a few hours to catch his breath and make sure he wasn’t being deceived a second time, and the dataset was his only currency in the upside-down world he’d been thrown into. Hanging on to the goods might be a gamble, but rushing to hand it over in blind faith felt like an even bigger one.

  “Just being careful,” he replied.

  “Mr. Maddox,” the entity said, “I can assure you you’re in no danger of—”

  “When I’m comfortable,” Maddox interrupted, “that I’m not implicated in our little mishap today, that I’m not being lied to again, or manipulated, or set up, or being screwed over, then you can have you it. That’s not unreasonable, is it?”

  The entity’s smile returned. It chuckled, politely covering its mouth with a hand.

  “Something funny?” Maddox asked.

  “Yes,” the AI said. “Human arrogance.” He then gestured apologetically. “Do forgive me, good sir. It’s impolite of me to make light of another’s
weakness. I must confess, however, I find it quite amusing you believe yourself capable of imposing any sort of condition upon our agreement.”

  “Maybe we need a new agreement,” Maddox said.

  The entity lifted its eyebrows thoughtfully. “Or perhaps…no agreement at all?”

  Maddox had to be careful. The ice was pretty thin under his feet. He couldn’t afford to alienate this entity, to get on its or Hahn-Parker’s permanent bad side. But he couldn’t be a pushover either. Couldn’t let himself be played like an expendable pawn in some highfloor chess match.

  “I’m sure you can understand,” he said, “given the circumstances, why I need to look out for myself.”

  “Indeed,” the entity agreed. “As I’m sure you’ll understand when I do the same.”

  In the next moment, brightness blinded Maddox. He reflexively threw his hands over his eyes. Someone had yanked off his specs and was shaking his shoulders violently. He was aware of the kid Tommy inches from his face, raw fear in the boy’s eyes.

  “What the hell?” He pushed the kid away.

  “They’re coming!” the kid shouted. He ran to the doorway, frantically waving for Maddox to follow. “Look, look!”

  Disoriented from the sudden disconnection, Maddox stood. Beatrice and Lozano, hearing Tommy’s cries, removed their specs, confusion on both their faces. Maddox followed after the kid.