by D L Young
“You’ve got some explaining to do, salaryman.”
He rubbed his temples. “Couldn’t you just shoot me instead?”
She tucked the pistol into her jacket. “Maybe later. Come on.”
***
The hover drifted away from the building and merged into the busy transit lane. Maddox’s head throbbed mercilessly. The kid’s nonstop what-happened-in-theres from the back seat only made it worse. A stern look from Beatrice finally shut him up.
Thoughts jumped around Maddox’s head uncontrolled, bouncing back and forth between his train station encounter with the Latour-Fisher AI and the surreal experience with the nameless old woman on the beach. The whole thing seemed insane, like something you’d see on a conspiracy theory discussion feed. AIs at war with each other. Mercenaries and datajackers used like pawns. A dream impossibly planted into his head. And the craziest of all: the disturbing new version of his personal history.
Rain pelted the hover’s roof as they glided through the City.
Your last job with Rooney…Latour-Fisher arranged it.
No. There was simply no way…
“Hahn-Parker’s dead,” Beatrice said, a chill in her voice. “It’s all over the news feeds. Heart attack, they’re saying.” The last words inflected in disbelief.
Unmoved by the news, Maddox said nothing. It was as if he’d exhausted his ability to be surprised. He gazed through the rain-streaked window, idly wondering if the high-floor corporati’s fate had taken the same bad turn as his own. Had he made a wrong step or said the wrong thing, flipping his status from asset to a liability? Or maybe he’d simply outlasted his usefulness. Maddox laughed inwardly, darkly amused by his own bizarre contemplation: pondering an AI’s motive for murder.
It’s a crazy world, Rooney’s voice told him. Trying to make sense of it is a waste of time.
True words, Roon. True words.
Could it all be true? Could Rooney’s death have been part of some invisible scheme? Could he really have been…murdered by an AI?
“We’re going to have another talk, salaryman,” the mercenary said. “And this time you’re not going to hold out on me.”
When they arrived at the rented room in Nowheresville, Beatrice turned to Tommy. “We need some privacy.” She hiked her thumb toward the doorway she’d just passed through. “Go on.”
“He can stay,” Maddox said, shutting the door. “He’s neck-deep in this, too. He ought to know.”
Beatrice looked at the kid skeptically for a moment. “Fine.” Tommy set out folding chairs and the trio sat.
“We’re pretty fucked,” Maddox announced. “That’s about the size of it.”
Beatrice frowned. “I’d gathered that much. You want to give me some more detail?”
“More detail, yes,” the kid parroted, nodding in agreement. Beatrice shushed him with a look.
Maddox rolled a cigarette, emptying the bag of its last strands of tobacco. On top of everything else, he was down to his last smoke. “Hahn-Parker was a face man,” he said. “Our real employer was an AI that sits on the company’s board.”
“An AI?” the kid gasped.
Maddox licked the rice paper, sealed the cigarette, then lit it and blew smoke. He kept the story short, running over the most important parts of his separate encounters with the rival AIs. The entities had a bone to pick with each other and they’d all been caught up in the middle of it. They were expendable soldiers in some unseen war. At least that was what the AIs had told him. He didn’t mention the dreams of the ant mound or the old woman’s claims about her rival’s manipulations in Maddox’s life. All that still seemed too surreal to him, too impossible to grasp.
Beatrice furrowed her brow as she listened. When he finished, she asked, “What about this ’Nette woman? How’s she connected to all this?”
“She’s not, really. I thought she might be able to read what was on the dataset. Or at least recognize what it was.”
“How do you know her?” Beatrice asked.
“We were involved,” he replied.
“What happened?” she pried.
“What do you think happened?” he snapped back. She’d had brainjacks drilled into her skull, that was what had happened. She’d slotted wares that let an AI read her every brain wave. She’d swallowed nanobots that let it monitor her body chemistry. That was what had happened. Everything she did, every decision she made, had ceased being her own and became a consultation with an intelligent machine—the thing with whom she was connected—to maximize her happiness, her personal efficiency, her peace of mind, her whatever. She’d bought the fringe movement’s bullshit hook, line, and sinker. That was what had happened.
Beatrice narrowed her eyes, but she didn’t press him for more details. His expression or his tone or maybe both must have been enough of an answer.
“The call with Hahn-Parker that never connected,” Beatrice said, leaning forward. “That’s when you had your parley with the company AI?”
Maddox smoked and gave her a small confessional nod.
She blew out a hot breath. “And why the fuck didn’t you tell me any of this before?”
“Maybe I should have,” he conceded, then shook his head. “But at the time it all seemed so…”
“Unbelievable,” Beatrice completed.
“Yeah.”
“And it was that company AI who called in the rhinos.”
Maddox nodded. “He didn’t exactly like it when I told him I was holding on to the dataset until I felt safe.”
“Jesus,” Tommy moaned, “you got a highfloor AI pissed off at us? Why didn’t you just give it to him?”
“Because it’s leverage,” Beatrice said. “I would have done the same thing.”
The kid pulled his knees up to his chest, his face twisted with anxiety. “But he doesn’t have the dataset no more. That ’Nette stole it back. Can’t we just tell the company AI that? No harm, no foul, right?”
“It’s not that simple,” Beatrice said.
“Why not?” the kid whined.
Maddox took a long draw, blew out smoke. “Kid, whatever’s going on between these AIs, it’s not the kind of thing they want people knowing about. And they’ll do whatever they need to to keep it a secret.”
“Did they tell you that?” the kid asked.
“They didn’t have to.” He flicked ash to the floor. “Look, if you were some insanely expensive AI, built to sit on a company’s board and do nothing but focus on product development and marketing and shareholder value and all that corporate crap, how do you think your fellow board members would feel—after paying hundreds of billions to create you—when they find out you’re hiring datajackers and mercenaries and stealing datasets from other AIs? They’d think you’d gone nuts and unplug you pretty damn fast. We’ve all seen that movie, right?”
The kid let out a long breath. “Maybe that other AI, the one from the beach, can help us.”
“You mean the AI that’s jacking people’s brains by the thousands?” Beatrice said. “Wouldn’t be my first choice.”
“Mine either,” Maddox agreed.
They sat in silence for a long moment, the gravity of their situation weighing down the air in the room. The kid looked pitiful, rocking back and forth, gazing hopelessly at the floor, hugging his own legs for comfort.
Your last job with Rooney…Latour-Fisher arranged it. The unnamed AI’s claim repeated itself over and over in his head.
He looked at Beatrice, tried to guess what was going on behind her eyes, how she might be digesting the impossible meal he’d just served up. Did she believe any part of it? None of it? Maybe she’d get up, call him crazy, and walk out the door. Maybe she’d decide he was trying to play her and put him in a choke hold until he came clean. Her face betrayed nothing. No anger, no fear, no panic. She sat there quietly, turning it all over, sizing up the situation with the cold detachment of a doctor diagnosing a patient.
“So what do you know about AIs?” she finally said.
He smoked. “I know enough to stay away from them.” Until recently he’d never spoken directly with an artificial intelligence. Apps, smart bots, intelligent sentries, sure, but those were nowhere near the same thing. Match flames compared to an entire sun. Datajackers—the nonsuicidal ones, at least—never went anywhere near an AI. They were too smart, their weapons and defenses too advanced. And they were the stealthiest entities in virtual space. If they wanted to take you down, there was virtually nothing you could do about it. By the time you knew one was onto you, you were frozen already and tagged for a rhino squad to come pick you up. Or to save time and legal fees, they might simply grab you and input-overload your brain until you stroked out.
Beatrice stood, pulled some cash from her jacket, and held it out to the kid. “There’s a Thai stand a few blocks south of here.”
Tommy stared at the money, blinked. The kid was in way over his head, involved in things he didn’t understand, and it showed on his face.
“Kid,” she said a bit louder, “go get us something to eat.”
Tommy snapped out of his funk and took the cash. When he reached the door, he paused and cast Maddox an uncertain look.
“We’re off the grid here,” Maddox assured him. “We’re safe.” The kid didn’t seem entirely convinced, but he stuffed the money in his pocket and left.
When the door closed behind him, Beatrice said, “Safe for now. That hustler’s running around loose out there. And he knows where we are.”
Maddox was worried about that particular loose end as well. Nowheresville was an ideal place to disappear, but only if no one else knew you were there. By now the company AI surely had cops and mercs and who knew what else hunting them. And if Lozano got collared by any of them, he was the sort who’d roll over and give up their location in about three seconds.
“I know,” he said. He dropped his cigarette and squashed it under his shoe. “We can’t stay here much longer.” He sank down into the chair, dejected.
“So,” he sighed, “you never told me why you couldn’t say no to this job.”
She looked at him crossly. “What does that matter now?”
“I showed you mine.”
She shrugged. “Like I told you. Same deal as yours. Hahn-Parker—or the AI, I guess—was holding my job over my head.”
“Good gig?”
“Cushiest I ever had,” she replied. “Security for a corporati banker. Vanity gig.”
“Vanity gig?”
“She was a player, very rich, very connected. Pretty high up the food chain, but not so high she really needed a body person. But she liked how having security made her look. Pay was decent and I could do it in my sleep.”
“Nice.”
“It was.” She sighed. “Ten months of easy work, and then a week ago she asks me for a favor. A friend at Latour-Fisher needed some short-term help, the kind of work I was suited for. So I say no problem. Don’t want to piss off the cash cow, you know?”
Maddox knew exactly what she meant.
“Next thing I know,” she said, “I’m talking with Hahn-Parker, and he’s got me in a chatter bubble, telling me if I don’t play ball he’s going to out me to my employer.” She stopped herself, as if she realized she’d said more than she’d intended.
“Out you for what?” Maddox pried, suddenly curious.
She hesitated. “Let’s just say he had dirt on me.”
“What kind of dirt?”
“The kind I didn’t want getting out,” she evaded.
Maddox mulled this over for a moment. “I don’t get it.”
“Don’t get what?”
“You tell him yes and he owns you. He could hold whatever he had over your head for a long time. Forever, if he felt like it.”
“I suppose.”
“But if you pass on the gig, you lose a cushy job, but you’re still a free agent. There’s got to be plenty of work out there for someone like you.”
She didn’t say anything.
“So why would you say yes,” he pressed, “if it puts you under Hahn-Parker’s thumb?”
“Maybe I liked my gig that much.”
“Sure, but it’s not like it was the only gig in the worl—” He stopped before finishing the sentence, a thought hitting him like a lightning bolt.
After a moment, he popped up out of his chair. “Tell me,” he insisted. “Tell me why you couldn’t say no.”
Beatrice looked at him crossly. “It’s not your business, salaryman.”
“Ex-salaryman,” he corrected. “Come on, it’s important.”
She folded her arms across her chest and didn’t answer.
“It’s because you couldn’t get another job,” he said, “could you? At least not in your line of work.”
Beatrice remained silent.
He fixed her with a knowing stare. “You were at rock bottom right before that cushy gig came along. No money, no prospects. And when a well-paying job fell out of nowhere, you couldn’t believe your good luck. But you didn’t ask questions. You grabbed that gig with both hands and held on to it, and there was no way you were going to let it go. Because nobody else would hire you.” He stared at her, a kind of madness in his eyes. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
For the first time since he’d met her, Beatrice appeared genuinely surprised. Her mouth hung slightly open. “How?” she uttered. “How could you know…?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” he said.
She crossed her arms and frowned. “Try me.”
18 - Alcatraz
Maddox unpacked the extra gear he’d stored in the hover. Backup gear he’d thought he’d never have to use. A Kitajima deck and trodeband set and a portable access link. Beatrice watched as he brought it inside and placed it on the floor.
“There was this gig,” he began, then paused a moment, realizing it was the first time since Lora he’d told anyone about what had happened with Rooney. He took a breath, longed for a smoke, and unlocked the closet of his darkest memories.
It was supposed to be an easy job, he explained. They’d gotten word about someone—some contact of a contact of a contact—who was holding a hot data archive he needed to sell quickly. It was the kind of thing they did all the time. Bread-and-butter work. Somebody stole or came into possession of valuable data—bank loan IDs or medical records or credit histories or whatever—but didn’t have a clue how to sell it. Or maybe they had a clue, but they didn’t want to dirty their own hands transacting in the shady world of orbital data havens and black market information brokers. So Rooney and Maddox would operate as go-betweens for a fee, connecting client A with reseller B. “Finder fee” work was much easier than datajacking, and much less risky. Normally.
The client insisted on a tight turnaround, giving Rooney no time to do his typical background screens, searching for any client criminal records, outstanding warrants, red flags in their digital history, and so on. The due diligence he carefully performed before every job. Finder fee jobs were invariably low risk, so Rooney suggested they go ahead, skipping the background checks to save time, and Maddox agreed. And after a two-month dry spell of no work, they were reluctant to turn away easy money. And the standby they’d hired failed to show, the person whose role it was to watch them as they were plugged in and yank off their trodebands if they suddenly went stiff or began to convulse. Neither mentor nor pupil liked the idea of plugging in without the safety net of a standby, but they didn’t have time to find a replacement, and the lure of an easy payday proved too strong to resist.
The go-ahead turned out to be a fatal decision, one Rooney would regret for the short remainder of his life, and one that would haunt Maddox for the rest of his.
As soon as they plugged in and took possession of the hot data, everything went to hell. The dataset was tagged, which meant they were tagged, and before they could unplug, they were trapped. In an eye’s blink they found themselves in a virtual prison modeled after the real one on Alcatraz Island. No matter how they
tried to gesture and subvocalize themselves out, they couldn’t unplug.
They were locked in cramped cells that faced each other, separated by a walkway. There was no one else there. No guards, no other prisoners, no one. The place was old and dank and falling apart and it smelled of mold and the faint scent of the ocean. Their cells had rusted iron bars and crumbling concrete walls and floors, but even in their seemingly dilapidated state, they proved to be inescapable cages. The bars and locks held firm against hundreds of kicks and shoulder strikes.
Maddox extended the access link’s antenna and fired up the deck. “When you’re plugged in, time stretches out sometimes. A second can seem like five minutes. It can work the other way too. An hour of real time can pass by like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Whoever made that prison fixed it so time expanded. We were in there five days real-time, but what we experienced felt like a lot longer.”
“How much longer?” Beatrice asked.
He paused before answering. “Over a year.”
The mercenary grunted. “Christ.”
Before the incident and since, he’d never heard of anyone subjected to that kind of hell. He hadn’t even thought it was possible, dilating time perception to such incredible lengths. For the first few hours, he and Rooney had marveled at it with a techie’s awe. Then eventually amazement gave way to boredom. Long days passed as they waited, expecting to unplug at any moment and find themselves handcuffed and on their way to jail. That’s how traps like these usually ended. They kept you immobilized until the cops came for you.
Every attempt to unplug themselves or escape the prison ended in failure. They subvocalized disconnect commands and overrides, cried out for help. They tried to gesture, but they had no awareness of their physical bodies back at Rooney’s flat. Couldn’t tell if their hands were making commands or not. Nothing worked.
Their virtual selves didn’t need food or water or sleep, and the lack of biological routine made the perceived days creep by even more slowly. After what felt like weeks had passed, in a fit of pent-up anger, Rooney tried to break the connection to his avatar by banging his head against his cell’s iron bars. In the real world, the act would have knocked him unconscious, but in that place—as they had already long since discovered—physical rules were altered. Rooney had ended up with nothing more than a painful purple lump on his forehead.
