LoneFire

by Stephen Deas

  Everything’s fucked, sergeant-major! Little bastards are probably calling in an airstrike. Certainly feels like it. And so it begins. Stomach first. Gut second. Dribbling from both ends in the back seat of Jez’s car. If she’d stop driving like she’s in a high-g dogfight with the traffic for a moment then I might get coherent enough to speak. Then again, maybe that’s the point.

  One thing’s for sure, we’re not going back to Bethlehem.

  When we stop and I lurch out of the car, we’re back at Mr Cray’s place. This is good, because at least I won’t have any trouble finding the toilets. But there’s nothing else here I want except maybe Ortov, locked up in his underground safe, virtual tentacles spreading out across the galaxy like some mutant electronic spider. When I’m done with emptying my insides, Jez is sitting in the lounge and the place smells of coffee. This phase of Purge can last for hours and it’s only going to get worse. No point in feeling sorry for myself– may as well find someone else to take it out on. I check my phone for messages.

  Ten fifty-one:‘Jez. I heard about the hospital. Call me.’

  Ha.

  One ten:‘Jez. What the fuck are you up to?’

  One thirty-six:‘Jez again.’

  One fifty-eight:‘Jez. Look, I know you’re alive. I’m sorry, OK. Call me. Something’s come up. We’ve got work to do.’

  Two seventeen:‘I spoke to you on the shuttle from Szenchzuen. You would not listen then. If you receive this message, waste no time in finding a new place to live. Your current location is no longer safe.’

  Two twenty-one:‘Constantine. This is Jester. Stay where you are. I’m coming in. I want my money.’ Pause.‘And we need to talk.’ Jester? What the fuck?

  Three sixteen:‘Jez. Right, you bastard, I’m tracing you. If you don’t get back to me in an hour, I’m coming looking. I’m done with sorry. Now I’m on pissed off.’

  Voicemail. My whole life in microcosm.

  ‘I’m still pissed off,’ says Jez.

  ‘Yeah, well you weren’t blown up this morning, Jez. I kinda figured the rest of the world could wait for me to sort my head out under the circumstances. You couldn’t though, could you? Anyway, I thought you said it wasn’t safe here.’

  She snorts.‘If I waited for you to sort your head out, I’d need a fucking cryogenic suspension chamber. And yeah, it’s not safe here. It is now– I’ve got the place watched. But someone else knows about it. Well, judging from your messages, at least two people know about it. Care to comment? Who is this mystery voice? You never told me anything about a call on Szenchzuen.’

  I can smell the coffee. Seems to be getting stronger.‘Did you get Ortov to turn the kitchen on?’

  ‘Oh yeah, that’s right, talk about me like I’m not here,’ says Ortov from some hidden speaker or other.‘Yes, I turned the kitchen on, although I quite forget what reason I had.’

  Can’t help remembering how much shit I had to take the last time Jez was here.

  ‘At least you’re not screwing right in front of my cameras this time. Anyway, I’m getting more used to this death business. And what the fuck do you think you’ve been up to for the last few days? You don’t write, you don’t call…’

  Jez gets up.‘I’ll be in the kitchen. Sort your shit out. I want to be gone inside the hour and we’re taking Ortov with us.’

  Ortov rambles on some more but I’ve got him filtered now. Calls from Gemini and then Jester, one after the other. Interesting. Especially what with Jester’s being dead and all. I Don’t care if his skull was titanium weave with built-in emergency life support, he’s still dead. Cybersystems claim someone with the full treatment can survive for hours after being guillotined. Handy for any random French Revolution time-travel accidents, I suppose. Rumour has it they even chopped someone’s head off to prove it and then sewed it back on again, but I figure that’s an advertising myth. God, I hope so.

  I stare at the fire. Not a real fire, just a screen in the wall programmed to look like one. Never really noticed it before but Mr Cray’s flat has a lot of stuff like this. Middle class professional comfort technology– think that’s this week’s phrase.Can’t figure what Cray saw in all this shit.

  There weren’t any pieces of Jester left that big.

  Maybe they have cell phones in hell.

  A tap on my shoulder. Jez hands me a mug. The coffee is warm and sweet and strong. Not that strong means shit while I’m tanked up on Purge but it tastes good. Can’t remember the last time someone actually gave me food. Well, except for the pizza delivery boy, but I’m not sure that counts.

  ‘Jester really is dead, isn’t he?’ she asks.

  ‘Yeah. Can’t find much room for doubt there I’m afraid. Someone’s hoping I’m sentimental enough to believe in miracles.’

  ‘Someone doesn’t know you very well then.’

  ‘I’m not so sure. You might be surprised one day. But not this time.’

  ‘So who is it?’

  I shrug. How the fuck am I supposed to know?‘Desperate Bratstva, maybe. Last I heard they were still trying to kill me. Although it looks like there’s a queue now.’

  Jez paces round the lounge, walking in little circles around Mr Cray’s two contoured chairs and his tiny smoked glass tables. I’m starting to remember the last time the two of us were here in too much detail to be good for my concentration.‘Could be,’ she says without really believing it. Or maybe she doesn’t care.‘You had some visitors a couple of hours before I found you. Corporate types. Technically they shouldn’t have been here but they went quietly enough. Ortov let me know. I kinda think that if they come back, they might not be so peaceful. I’ve got a couple of Analysis squads on watch duty, but this place is a write-off. Who was the call from? The warning.’

  Bastard.

  A good negotiator doesn’t need to lie. A good negotiator can honestly answer almost any question and yet convey the exact opposite of the truth. Jez knows this. And she knows from my hesitation that I have a secret and I’d really like to keep it.

  She smiles, like she can read the thoughts in my head.‘Come on,let’s get Ortov and get out of here. It’s been a hell of a day.’

  Feeber, J. ‘Homo Sapiens Maximus’. Proceedings of the 47th Forum on Artificial Intelligence, 225-235 (2257).

  Bannerman once said Feeber taught him everything he knew. There are two ways of taking that, and knowing Bannerman’s ego I know where my money is. Still, Feeber is one of the great names of AI lore, and here it is, his vision of the future. Feeber reckons that the same physics which gives us instant communications and near instant travel will one day give us limitless control over our own minds. It’s possible, he says– don’t ask me how– to show that a spinspace object can interact with a real world object and that such interactions are not bound by quantum uncertainty rules. Theoretically, then, a device in spinspace could precisely and instantaneously measure the quantum state of every particle in your body. Feeber predicted an eventual symbiosis between humans and spinspace AIs but you can see where this is going– teleportation, true cloning, you name it. Only one slight problem being that no one has the first clue how to build one of these“Feeber” machines. Or not that they’re admitting to.

  Twenty-Eight – I always wanted to shoot a lawyer

  Jez takes me back to Bethlehem. We lie naked together. She’s sorry about Doctor Pike exploding on me, but I don’t really give a shit about that any more. Maybe it’s the Purge, but I have a deep empty feeling approaching.

  I watch her. She’s like a kid who knows she’s got candy coming– twitchy and excited, hopping from one foot to the other, anticipating my secret, whatever it may be. Most days I’d find her mood a bit of a turn on – we’d feed on it and make like rabbits – but not today. Today I stare at the ceiling and the darkness. I’m going to tell her about Gemini, sooner rather than later. In her place I’d throw me to the wolves but I don’t think Jez thinks like that. Kinda makes things worse.

  She pretends she doesn’t notice my shit
tiness.‘Space Race were getting flight profiles for Cestus shuttles though some relay on Banshee.’

  I say nothing. She wriggles, settles into a more comfortable position.

  ‘Ortov is being very helpful. Do you trust him?’

  Floating here, Jez whispering in my ear, listening to my own mumbled replies. I could be anywhere; deep in space or deep under water, somewhere so dark the Sun is a myth. Yeah, deep in darkness, that’s me.‘Don’t be stupid. I don’t trust anyone. Especially not dead people who think they’re God.’

  ‘You let him share a house with you, let him in on all your little secrets. What have you got going with Ortov?’

  Business talk. No chance she’s going to shut up and leave me in peace, so I sit up and light up.‘I put him in Mr Cray’s flat because some bastard had already told him all my little secrets and he was practically holding a gun to my head; what the hell else was I going to do with him? I don’t trust him, he doesn’t trust me, but we had an interest in common– we both want the Bratstva off our backs. Way I figure it, Ortov’s got some connections out there somewhere– don’t ask me how. Maybe he can tap into the Bratstva network. That mercenary enough for you?’

  She pokes me in the ribs.‘He likes you, you know.’

  ‘Bollocks.’

  ‘Thinks you’re a lost soul who needs his help. What gets me is how he gets his information.’

  ‘What information?’

  ‘All sorts of stuff. The relay on Banshee. Says he’s been through all communications to the Crypt over the past two years and correlated them against the shuttle attacks. That’s AI work, never mind how he got the access to do it in the first place.’ She starts nibbling at my ear, teasing me to tell her what I know.‘Come on Constantine, you must have some idea how he’s getting this…’

  I shrug.‘Yeah? And? I don’t know what Ortov’s up to any more. If what you want and what he wants are the same, it’s cool. Otherwise he’s screwing you. Same deal as everyone and everything else. Fuck it, Jez, you’ve been in this business long enough to know that.’

  She bites, hard enough to make me wince and suddenly I really want to hit her, but she pulls away and flops back onto the bed.‘When Ortov was alive, software was essentially linear. Most of it was written by other software, I grant you, but it was still linear. How the fuck anyone from then could figure their way through a Pseudo-AI structure in a couple of weeks is beyond me. And I don’t care how clever he is, that box of his ain’t big enough to pack the processing for what he did. So, my sulky lover, he must have had help. The question is how and who and where and why. Don’t tell me you don’t know. Isn’t that what the great Constantine does?’

  I light up another cigarette. Purge is still having my lungs hacking up the last few months of crap, so I figure I’ve got some credit down there right now.‘Ortov’s an AI of sorts. I don’t trust AIs.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘No, he is. He can switch his emotions off– he as good as told me for fuck’s sake. Said we were all little simulations in his circuits, that he could switch us out any time he wanted. He doesn’t have a real face or a real voice. It’s all smoke and mirrors. Could be straight and level or sly as a snake and I wouldn’t have a clue. Could be mad as a bag of spiders for all I know. It’s kinda the impression I get.’ I blow smoke over her. Maybe she’ll get the hint to back off. I wonder if she’s figured out that a good chunk of Ortov is actually Melissa. Not that he’ll admit it, but sometimes it’s too fucking obvious to be true. Shit– with bits of two people all messed up together in there, no wonder he’s all over the place.‘What did he give you exactly?’

  ‘A lawyer. Somewhere on Banshee. Su and Doyle are checking her out.’ Jez runs a finger down my spine.‘Sally Losche. Not a player as far as I can tell. Runs her own private practice. A citizen lawyer, freelance. Not one of us corporate lackeys.’

  ‘Or so she’d have her clients believe.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘And Ortov cracked that for you?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Shit.’ I get up and order the window to start letting light in. I hear Jez shift behind me.

  ‘Quite. And that’s not all he cracked. And this really takes the biscuit.’

  I make like I’m not interested.‘Yeah?’

  ‘How about Gregori Marshall’s life history, straight out of the Company personnel files?’

  OK, now she has my attention.‘You what?’

  She grins.‘Everything checks out. Squeaky clean. Too damn squeaky. Thing is…’ She turns to look at me.‘Thing is, I done some checking, and I can’t find a single person who remembers Gregori Marshall. Sure, people remember him being the director of Analysis, shit like that, but no one, absolutely no one, has ever met the man. Is that weird or what?’

  I have a kind of sinking feeling that spreads through my gut.‘Where’d he go after Analysis?’

  ‘Government. Something to do with a project Sunscreen, I think. Very vague.’

  I start. What did Ortov say? About the only thing that hasn’t had a major fuck-up…

  Jez’s eyes bore into me.‘Means something to you, huh? I’ve known you too long, Constantine. You’re hiding something and I want it.’

  ‘Yeah.’ And I reckon I ought to tell her about Gemini around about now. But what am I going to say? There’s a big bad AI out there and I’ve got a personal grudge against it and I think it’s messed up in all this but I don’t have any evidence? Oh, and by the way, while I want nothing to do with it, I’ve also been betraying all your secrets to it for years? Yeah, that all sounds like it makes sense. Should go down real nice…

  I’ve spent too much of my life trading information to start giving it away for free. Word got out, that’d be that for what’s left of any credibility I might still have.

  ‘Tell me!’

  I can see her in my mind, standing behind me with a gun, but it doesn’t cut anything anymore. Too many times she’s pointed one at me and not used it. Bad habit.

  ‘I’ll trade,’ I say.

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I want to know who set us up after Network SixtyNine and landed us with GZW on New Amazonia. And I want to know why the Company wanted Victor Longthorne dead.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And I want to know who did the run on Ortov. That’s what I want. Who and why.’

  ‘And what do I get in return?’

  I give her my best you-first look. She’s not holding a gun on me after all, just sitting on the bed, cross-legged and naked. Worried.

  She holds my eyes longer than she should. Then nods.‘Okay.’ She gets up, fishes something from her bag and places it on the end of the bed. Small and black and shiny.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Privacy. We got five minutes of privacy before the battery burns out, but in that time I guarantee you that no one, not even the Company, will hear us.’

  ‘Better make it quick then.’

  She nods.‘Not hard. I know fuck-all about what happened after you hit the Network Sixtynine tower. Believe me, I want to know as much as you do– that little affair screwed us over worse than it screwed you. As for Melissa, she was put on ice in Gateway. I tried to have the Company bring her down and have her brain scanned. Might get something. Probably not; depends how quickly she died– you know how it goes. But guess what? Seems they had an itsy bitsy electrical failure. She thawed out and everything went to mush.’

  I shake my head. No surprise.

  ‘As for Victor, everything leads back to Gregori Marshall and I reckon he doesn’t actually exist– guy ran the whole fucking department via e-mail, best I can tell. So until I can find out who’s pulling his strings, I’m getting nowhere there too. Shit, there’s a million reasons why someone might have wanted Victor Longthorne dead. Could be a fucking independence movement, for all I know. But I’m still pretty damn sure it came from inside.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘His money. Since he died, Longthorne assets have been reaching the
market in a steady trickle. Shares, mostly. And since every transaction is brokered and monitored by the LoneFire AI, whoever’s laundering this stuff knows enough to fool LoneFire into thinking it’s all legitimate. I’d say one of the system designers but I’ve been over their files and they’re squeaky clean. Fuck it, I know half of them better than their partners do. The only one I can’t positively account for is Vishmir– you heard of him? Yeah, who hasn’t. But he disappeared way before this started. I know that doesn’t mean shit but I’ve been all over his file. Check it out yourself if you like but he’s the type. And that’s it, that’s all I got.’ She looks at the privacy jammer.‘That and the vague hope that someone’s listening in and figures I must have a whole lot more to go on for turning that thing on. Two minutes left. Your turn.’

  I smile, prolonging her agony, letting the seconds tick away while I stare out of the window. Twilight out there. City lights looking kinda drab and stupid in the grey air. One word is all it takes.

  ‘Gemini. The call I got on my way out of Szenchzuen was from Gemini. You want to know where Ortov gets his information? Gemini. Who cracked the Crypt? An AI? Well, gee, Mary Lou, wonder who that could have been. And that’s only the start of it.’

  I tell her. I tell her everything. I tell her about Charlemagne and how he screwed her over. I kinda expect her to fly off the handle, to scream at me and stamp around the room telling me what a prick I am. Instead she gives me the silent treatment.

  The jammer gives a raucous beep to announce its demise. Jez looks down.

  ‘Shit.’

  We lie side by side, together but apart. Sleep doesn’t come easily, and when finally I cross the veil, I dream of Gemini and of Jez and of Devotion. For some reason Gemini looks like a short bald man with an unfeasibly large head. That’s dreams for you.

  Jorlson, E., J. ‘The LoneFire Project’. Twentifourth Century Timebombs, 12 (2325).

  Network SixtyNine’s series on impending disasters was supposed to be capped by this piece on the LoneFire AI. What’s here is worrying enough. An AI running every aspect of Longthorne’s financial dealings and regulating markets across the whole of Cestus and maybe more. LoneFire is huge and pervasive and somehow hardly anyone’s heard of it. What’s more, it’s been down and up again more than twenty times since it was activated (and those are the ones the government admit to) because of terrorist attacks. Seems these terrorists are pretty well informed. There are hints here that this is only the tip of the iceberg, that Network SixtyNine were on to something far darker. But then, hey, guess what, some naughty urban guerrillas broke in and stole their evidence. A week later their parent company was bought out by a Longthorne funded holdings company and the programme never went out. Wonder who did that… I did some checking. Jorlson seems to have disappeared. Permanently, one suspects.