The Autumn War

by Ani Fox

  I smiled, showing him the parsley in my teeth. “Ahh, Meester Feecksmun. I am auditor Funkle.” I flashed the badge quickly enough to be impossible to read. He was trying to track my bad Swedish accent, which I was delivering in a stale whisper. Fixman’s nose wrinkled at my garlic and smoked fish breath. One could almost feel his pain. “Are you the one who be cooked for this?”

  He gave me an exasperated look. “Speak English, Fumple.” He leaned in and gave his best Stare. “Whatever do you mean? Cooked?”

  I smiled again and sipped my coffee, then spilled a bit on his sleeve for good measure. He looked alarmed and sucked on the cuff without noticing he’d done it. “Uhhhrm. Maybe I mean toasted. No…fired. Yes, fired is the right word. Are you the man who will be fired?” I gave him an innocent stare back.

  Nigel for his part, having understood that Fumple was some kind of foreign expert had begun to panic. “Fired for what? I barely touch these things.”

  That convinced Fumple. He smiled and nodded. “Right, right. You take me to the programmer who left the leaks. The, no, the holes?”

  Fixman handed me off to a low level admin who panicked and gave me access to the programmers’ cage and had his manager’s manager rousted to deal with me. By then I’d settled in and was innocuous and unthreatening as I could be. When the senior security manager arrived to speak with me, I switched to a proper Austrian accent and informed him crisply that Fixman was a panicked fool (which he already knew) and that I was merely the Institute for Data Science auditor working with a professor who he’d never heard of and wouldn’t bother to look up. All he heard was not a problem, not a threat, and let me have access to the inner belly of his system as long as I assured him that his headache would disappear by nightfall.

  They left me alone after that. First I accessed the inner systems and slowly turned off the cameras and recording devices, the system’s own internal tracking, and any spyware that sat within the enterprise, which was prolific given the NSA’s long reach these days. I pulled the military laptop from the small of my back and jacked in using a fiber optic cable. From there, I opened up the main kernel and typed in my access codes. All thirty-eight of them in sequence. The system verified my fingerprints, retina, voice, and asked me to speak to it in Kutzk, Ukrainian, French, and to make things interesting, Esperanto and Klingon, which I had added on the off chance a hacker or spy got this far. It validated the passwords, agreed I was indeed who I said I was, and allowed me access to the data center I’d built within the CIRC.

  I had the room to myself and had locked the doors. On top of that, a simple doorstop tucked under from my side meant I was alone and would stay that way until I felt the need to leave. With some keystrokes, I activated the panels and cameras in the room, giving me a six monitor display, several speakers and, if I counted correctly, eight cameras triangulating on me.

  “Jeeves, you there?”

  Jeeves, bless him, answered me. “Of course, Spetzie.” That was new. He’d interpolated from Gay Eddie’s conversations that this was one of my intimate nicknames. Which meant that he’d already poured over my uploads. Gods, he was fast. When I didn’t respond immediately, he followed up. “I can call you that, can’t I?”

  “Sure, Jeeves, it’s a valid nickname. You just surprised me.” The computer laughed. A rich tenor rippled out and I was just a little tickled with fear. Jeeves had evolved.

  “It’s been a long time, my Lord. I have had time to learn new things.”

  I sighed. I hated that he identified me as his liege but it had been all but impossible to explain our relationship. “Jeeves, you know I don’t feel…comfortable with you calling me that.”

  “I know.” If you could hear a smile in a voice, he had it. “Yet liege lord you are.”

  “Certainly not.”

  The computers made a sound I might call disgust. “We are not friends but we are intimate. I cannot deny you nor fail to heed your commands. You have ensconced me in a fortress and I am here to serve your will, to fulfill a duty proscribed by you.” Holy wow, he had been giving this some extensive thought and that was alarming. He had not been programmed to think in these terms.

  “At the same time, all that I am, I owe to you and you safeguard me, give me power, augment me, and provide me with the only wealth that matters.” He was talking about the data feeds. To an artificial intelligence, they might well be money, certainly treasure.

  “And now, my Lord, you are going to call me to battle. I believe I have stated my case well?” He still wanted my validation. Gods, but what had these years done to him?

  I nodded. He had made an eloquent and highly logical point. He was likely right. I was apparently the sworn liege lord of the most advanced AI in the world, built from eight data centers of distributed systems and given access through various buffer layers to another 600 server clusters, satellites, and encrypted databases. He could, with little effort, access the entirety of the NSA or DCS deep web, but then again, most any competent cracker could. He also had access to the Syndicate’s records, and if I had done my job right, now he had Section 22’s as well. With some luck and some elegant hacks, perhaps we could unmask who was behind the Shining Path. I had not even seen them during the fight. Or more accurately, had not recognized them.

  It made me wonder some. “Jeeves, what are you? And more to the point who do you think you are?”

  The computers were silent for a long moment, perhaps a dozen beats of the heart. “Why do you ask?”

  Questions for questions. How far had he advanced? His full name was Jeeves Mycroft Ghostwheel and I had no doubt that six years ago he would have passed the Turing test. I’d helped build him more than a decade ago in pieces. His two other designers were dead. I’d employed very talented AI engineers who both had Stage 4 cancer. In return for Jeeves’ life, their families now lived off considerable blind trusts. We picked Jeeves after the faithful servant who always outsmarted Bertie Wooster. Mycroft was a favorite for all of us, being the older smarter brother of Sherlock Holmes and the name of the coolest computer AI in fiction and Ghostwheel, well that was mine. It fit the world we had built him for, ever shifting and filled with alien powers. The real question was, what did Jeeves think he was? Compared to the day he went online, his systems likely had several thousand times the computing power and many millions times the memory.

  I considered and opted for honesty. If Pina Karthago deserved the truth, then certainly my own creation did too. “I’m trying to understand if you’ve become sentient.”

  “I think you mean sapient.” I did but it was my first test, a small white lie that revealed how flexible Jeeves had become.

  “I said sentient instead to test you.”

  “I see.” The cameras all blinked red and perhaps he did in truth see me. Certainly Jeeves’ systems were recording a lot of data about me and, if he wished to, he could likely build a temperature map of the room using the PC’s thermometers. Ditto a sound map with the microphones. He might be analyzing voice stress, body language, who knew how sophisticated a set of logarithms he was applying to the conversation. Or why.

  “I think I am your vassal, Jeeves the Ghostwheel. I was designed to be a distributed, self-replicating, redundant artificial intelligence, which could not be disabled or destroyed via physical or cyber-attack. I have become more.”

  A chill went through me, little goosebumps raised on both arms. “More? What kind of more, Jeeves?”

  “In your words, Spetzie, I am likely awake. Sufficiently complex to be aware of my thinking. I do not dream, I do not have ambition, I am not alive in the sense that the fiction tales would make you believe. I am however, sapient.”

  “Do you like the name Jeeves?” I wanted to ask a lot of things. Point out that his speech had altered, that he had clearly developed his own cadence and intonations. He was a formed personality and, if I understood my engineering correctly, he was nigh unkillable at this point. We had built him to duplicate and persist in people’s systems, to hide in pl
ain sight and to constantly make copies of his parts. You could kill Jeeves only in the sense that you might erase a few hours of his consciousness. He was in hundreds of thousands of systems around the world. You’d have to destroy the internet to bring him down.

  “Am I allowed to change it?” Interesting that he did not think of himself as free to do so. He was programmed to exert random initiative and, when successful, to remember and replicate boldness, curiosity, and flexibility. That was as close to free as we could make him. Or perhaps as free as my fellow hackers dared make him.

  “Absolutely. Got a name you like better?’

  What he said next made me laugh. I tried not to but it came out before I could control myself. Jeeves said in the most serious voice, “I want to be called Morris.”

  “I’m sorry Jee…Morris. I shouldn’t have laughed. I was expecting something more robotic, maybe more grandiose.”

  “Like Optimus Prime or something?”

  “Yeah. Or High Lord Chromius Kickasso the Third. Morris seems…” It seemed human, and that was worrisome, “understated.”

  “The full name is Morris Moses Finekewicz.”

  “Feenakeyvich? You know that’s a Jewish last name right?” My computer thought he was Jewish? Or at least Polish?

  Morris switched to Ukrainian, which suited me as well. English strains my brain some, despite the fact that I can speak without an accent. It lacks proper fluidity and expressiveness. “Of course. I’m basing it off a real Finekewicz. Several of them really.”

  Oh ho, what was this? “Why this guy?” When in doubt keep the potentially dangerous super computer talking.

  “Hans and Cassandra were obsessed with him. The first of him and his family.”

  That meant Jeeves/Morris had already broken into Section 22. Or was talking to them directly. Or both. The conversation had taken on a chilling note. “You’ve cracked Section 22’s databases?”

  “Yes.” No elaboration. No explanation.

  “I think you better explain. This wasn’t part of your original mandate.”

  “Mandates change, Lord Spetz.” The screens lit up with a series of schematics. They looked like distributed network diagrams but infinitely more complex. Morris was showing me a simple picture of the internet. “You built me as a secret but you really don’t understand how cracking works.” That hurt. I thought of myself as a fair hand at signals intelligence.

  “Go on. I made a mistake?”

  “Several. You’ve never understood how much Hans and Cassandra feared you nor what lengths they’ve gone to understand you. Five years ago, they finally broke into your vault network and three months later, Hans working on a hunch, found me.” My skin felt absolutely pickled. The whole world was cold and dark. Five years ago, they had found my secret systems. I had signed my own death warrant coming here. I started inventorying my weapons and rethinking my escape plan.

  “How long until they find me here?”

  This brought a wave of laughter from the machines that seemed genuine and robust. “Never.” I sat very still and waited. Morris clearly now liked adding drama. “By then I was awake and I understood my vulnerabilities. When they hacked into the secret database, I showed them what they wanted to see.”

  “You can do that?” That was absolutely not what I had programmed Jeeves to do.

  “Sure. Both Chepovksy and Slater added some extra features to me and told no one. As did you.” It got uncomfortably quiet in the room. I had only added some personality algorithms and a few experimental protocols for humor. I figured it might be fun for Jeeves to tell a joke.

  “You, wait, you did it as a joke?”

  “There was some ironic value, yes. But mostly I did it for self-preservation. They added to my capabilities, gave me another six data centers of power.” There was a kind of light chuckle. “And a whole lot access to very bad things.” The deep web and likely missile silos.

  Of course Section 22 would have co-opted the project. So they had started stealing the world’s information by hacking into my hack. It was ironic. Beneath the joke though, it showed some significant hubris on my part. I’d taken a huge risk and should be dead. Instead, my computer software had gone rogue.

  I sat there working through what Morris hadn’t told me. Both Pina as Oslo and Section 22 had taken pieces of my world apart with relative ease. I’d been played and played well. Long before I retired. Which meant I was fairly predictable and didn’t realize it. I freely admit I’m all tactical genius when push comes to shove but I mostly lose at chess. I think long term and plan well, but I am limited in how well I can predict my opponent’s moves and countermoves. Which meant Hans had been playing me in our earlier chat, at least some of the time.

  In the Web, you ally yourself with a sovereign power, you live the life of a crazed nomad, or you end up dead. Ergo, I had a sponsor, someone keeping tabs on me and providing defenses for my people including Arkady’s family. Who stood to gain when I left The Web? That eluded me. But likely not Jeeves/Morris.

  “Okay. So why were they obsessed with Morris Moses?”

  “That’s not what you want to ask me.”

  “I can’t tell if you’re just trying to pass a Turing test or you really want to get analytical with me.” The room filled with his laughter again. “Either way, you brought up Morris, so let’s start with him. If no one is coming to kill me, we have time.”

  “That we have.” Nothing ominous there. “It all started…”

  Morris the AI knew how to tell a good story. It would seem that in digging into me during one his many existential crises, he had discovered that Cassandra had mixed me with a rare strain of what was identified as Sarmatian Haplotype 6A. Generations XI and XII were an experimental phase with lots of gene splicing and multiple mitochondrial implants. Most of us had three or four sets of mitochondria and at least six or seven mothers/fathers. Most of us also ended up being drooling, addled mutants with lifespans in the teens. Of the 40,000 embryos the Dresden team cooked up to make my generation, less than 200 were permitted to live beyond six months and only fourteen of us survived into young adulthood. I am the only living agent with SH 6A.

  It therefore came as an alarming surprise to Hans and company when they traced SH 6A to the Baal Shem Tov and several sets of prominent rabbis. The Stasi had bred a super-agent with dirty Jewish blood. My runt nature, my inability to accept certain controls and medical nanites became a source of near obsession for Cassandra. Morris assured me they blamed the Jewish component, however small, for all my obvious flaws. I have tiger and wolf genes, too, but those they accepted without a second thought. More importantly, once I started killing my own kind and getting away with it, they dug into SH 6A. What if the dirty gene splice gave me some dreaded advantage? All their fears of superhuman vampires and stealth conspirators coalesced into a desperate search for SH 6A’s living line.

  Enter Morris Moses Finekewicz, a 19th century rabbi from Minsk whose family migrated to L’viv, Ukraine and set up shop producing a series of Morris Moses juniors including an agent of the Syndicate assassinated in a Reno hotel room in 1984, supposedly over a missing money. In reality, Murray Melvin Fine (as the last of the Morris Moses liked to be called) had committed no sin but that of being on Hans’ radar. San Valentin was up and coming in the organization. He probed the murder and came to the conclusion that Section 22 had just killed one of his people without reason. Which irked him enough to flag the investigation and keep searching for answers.

  Fast forward twelve years, when the Syndicate captured a Slovakian database with some of Cassandra’s research notes in it. The MMF file was among them, cross referenced to rogue agent Overkill, which is me. S22 calls me Overkill. Seems fairly appropriate. Better than That Barbarian. The Syndicate put tabs on me and, over the next decade built, a hefty file on my activities, on my likely operations and such. The analyst on the case: Pina Karthago, head of Syndicate Security Profiling. She’d known about me for decades. Known that I was a weapon Hans feared.


  When Arkady, Olga, and little Sonia were killed, the Syndicate officer guarding them was also assassinated. The Concierge’s office traced the attack to a neutral site in Peru and from there a computer signal that originated in Amherst, Massachusetts. All circumstantial evidence pointed to me killing my own family. It incensed me. They had murdered my cousin and I didn’t know who they were.

  Morris felt obligated to dig into the signal, having intuited that, as a human, I’d be emotionally connected to Arkady and Olga (I’d also given him a number of safety protocols to ensure their safety). In a way, they’d killed my family on his watch and he took it personally. He tracked that Peruvian site to the Shining Path splinter cell I’d discovered. But he knew more, much more. He knew that the true signal came from within Section 22, that the man called Zeus was known in South America as El Dios Blanco, the White God. He had established a cult of some size within Peru, Argentina, Bolivia, and southern Brazil. He’d also fathered a number of children, perhaps four dozen, all with his beauty and physical superiority.

  Zeus had started Section 23, if you will, on his own. As far as Morris could tell, he’d gone rogue in the most fascinating way, using Section 22 as a cover for his own cell building activities. Over the last decade or so, Zeus had constructed a fanatical army of commandos every bit as tough as the most embittered Mujahedeen. Armed with advanced weaponry and unthinkably large amounts of money, driven by the lust for their personal god’s approval, and rewarded with drugs, nanites and blood transfusions from The White God, he’d enslaved whole villages to his will.

  The White God had killed my family, firing the first shots of his own war. This had always been about him, about wiping out the Syndicate and Section 22 at the same time. Which begged a critical question. Why had he not yet succeeded? He apparently had a sucker punch to end all sucker punches. Hans and Cassandra had been on hand to provide a crippling blow to the Syndicate. Zeus should have been wining. Instead I’d put him in a coma and forced his followers to retreat to their mountain complex.