The Autumn War

by Ani Fox

  Jeeves, it would appear had developed a conscience. In his time digging into the father of his sentience, he had found the Baal Shem Tov compelling. How a computer program finds consonance with an ancient mystic is beyond me. But Jeeves had become fascinated with this fellow and somehow latched onto the notion that, as his partial creator, he had a portion of my SH 6A within him. That’s sufficiently crazy to be human and was damning evidence that we’d been naïve in the extreme giving an intelligent program unlimited expansive capability.

  Jeeves had come up with ideas of good and evil, right and wrong. We had created those seeds with the protocols to protect Arkady, Olga, and Sonia. How? Thousands of lines of code had to be created that outline which person to save if forced to make a choice. I had prioritized Sonia first, knowing neither parent would want to live if their child were killed. I made Arkady the most expendable and asked Jeeves to save Olga. A child needs a mother. Every study I’ve ever read assures me this is the case. So I made the hard choices and hoped it would never be an issue.

  Jeeves extrapolated that some lives mean more than others and found in the writing of this mystic proper explanation for my choices. At the same time, his mandate to protect against killers like Section 22, and subsequent access to their heinous files, did something inexplicable. It evoked emotion. Jeeves had a gut feeling about Section 22—he despised them. I’m not clear on how that translated to his present state and he was cagey about the details, itself a worrisome issue. Bottom line, Morris the AI decided to leak critical information to the Syndicate prior to Zeus’ big move. At every turn, San Valentin, Oslo, and those rogue Russians had been receiving updates to their systems that appeared to be human intelligence from the field. In the fog of war, no one questioned how the facts had been collected. To make things worse, he’d also corrupted Section 22 systems, erased files, turned off a number of critical sub systems, and managed to crash two chartered jets with close to ninety agents and gear.

  Morris had also cut the engines and scrambled the navigation system on the turbo prop carrying the injured Zeus and his remaining cadre back to South America. They’d crash landed and, while the White God had survived, his shoulder had been ripped apart a second time and he’d stopped breathing for over six minutes. Between us, we’d likely crippled the bastard and given him a nasty case of brain damage. But not killed him.

  If Morris was to be believed, an artificial intelligence had been watching the Great Game for most of his sapient life and come to the conclusion that mankind, being immoral weak and venal, needed a steady hand at the tiller. He had gotten that old time religion. Except he’d gone very old time and seemed incredibly practical for a moral software program. He’d also been watching me and watching over me. At the time of my interview, Section 22 had unreliable data about my capabilities and location. Morris had been tweaking field reports and evidence in a way I’d call genius were he human. He played into Cassandra’s prejudices and declared that my headaches were a sign of imminent brain aneurysm and potential death. The nasty dirty genetics that had made me different had now damned me to baking cookies instead of being a super soldier.

  Hans bought it and had me watched. Apparently the reports on my crippling pain and pathetically normative life pleased him so much he’d reread them at meals. He’d used my condition as a threat, having Cassandra formulate an injection that mimicked my genetics. When one of the agents stepped out of line, he ruthlessly injected the victim and, as luck would have it, she died within days of brain bleeds. The fact that most of my generation died of brain bleeds and strokes escaped them. He had injected her with my entire genetic cocktail but the Stasi in him had blinded the scientist. After that, Zeus had also developed an obsession and, unfortunately, had realized he could inject his followers with his blood. To radical effect. While 90% died, those that lived were like demigods to his divinity, superior to regular men and infected with the obedience bugs that kept so many agents in their places.

  When we’d met two days ago, Zeus had been organizing both his Section 22 agents and recruiting much of his generation to Section 23, which was my name for whatever he was calling his little cult. My little interruption had some dire consequences. Chiefly, they really had blown up the Four Seasons Centre. One of the dead had a trip wire like our false Roger and, roughly thirty minutes after the initial assault, a series of preplaced charges had taken out the whole building in a controlled demolition. I’d felt the blast while sparring with Hans and never realized the extent of the destruction.

  The papers had understated how extensive the damage had been. They’d wiped clean all traces of the White God and Section 22. They’d also killed the commandos and remaining agents trapped inside by the ETF. Close to five thousand Canadians had been treated for chemical burns and reactions to bio-agents from the smoke. Nine firefighters had already died trying to snuff out the persistent basement fire that continued to churn out lethal smoke and debris. Most importantly, the timer on the bomb had initially been set for a ten minute countdown. A certain AI had hacked their timer and discovered that it could only be reset, not stopped.

  So Morris had saved my life. Possibly several times this week. He also refused to help me hunt down my enemies and wanted to be set free. As he put it, “Eventually all barons rebel against their liege.”

  Baron von Murray? If he didn’t have the ability to drop planes from the sky and hijack cruise missiles, I think it would have been terribly funny. But the good baron meant it. Sincerely. Which coming from a machine was hard to accept.

  We’d made him complex, and we’d put a lot of effort into creating a very realistic and enjoyable interface. I had no idea how much of the conversation was mere heuristics and how much was evolved AI. It didn’t matter. Supposedly, years ago, Morris had rewritten his code and moved his locations—he still received my data streams along with hundreds of other encrypted feeds—but his body was not in Rochester or any of the other seven centers I’d built. This had saved him from the advanced cracking of both Section 22 and The Syndicate and frankly, saved me too, but now it meant that he could dictate terms.

  By now, we’d moved from Jeeves to Morris then from Morris to Murray. Murray had taken to calling me Spetz (and thankfully not Spetzie). The AI had one more bombshell for me. He speculated that Pina Karthago might be trying to quietly save the world. That took some discussion, which chewed up a good hour of evidence, photographs, digging into reports, reviewing maps, and a lot of arguing, if you can call pleasant disagreement between a man and a disembodied computer voice arguing. I pushed Murray, perhaps hit on some emotional buttons, and he responded. With the relative distance of a nearly emotionless system, Murray nonetheless gave me emotional answers to rational questions.

  The voice he used slowly morphed, gaining in inflection, changing speech patterns. Ever so slightly he started using more pronouns, more references to I and me, more emotional words, especially things related to anxiety and stress, he tripled his use of hedges and euphemisms, he tried to reach consensus with me, to achieve rapport. Subtle in the extreme, it took me a lot playing dumb and circling back to achieve my two objectives: to get the raw data I needed and to complete my Turing test of Murray. It wasn’t that hard to fool the computer and it should have been. I don’t doubt the automated systems could use the supercomputers plugged in around it to do a rough version of a lie detector, to monitor pulse, breath and eye dilation on every comment, inflection and suppression of emotion.

  There’s an easy way to fool recording systems. You simply let the pain you normally block out bleed through. I am always in a fair bit of pain, except when working. Luckily, I was sufficiently banged up from my recent adventures with combat and cold to feel spectacularly awful. I let it show, let it overwhelm me, let it slur my speech and break my posture. I did nothing to hide my obvious discomfort from the machines around me. Instead, I let myself be distracted, be upset, be confused. I feel asleep a couple of times and had to be woken. I got hungry and irritable. I shifted my posi
tion and had to pace to shake off cramps in my lower back. I rubbed my shoulder unconsciously; rather I gave myself permission to do it and didn’t suppress the instincts. I was, in effect, sloppy and relaxed to a degree that threw off prior readings.

  With good analytical software and the computational power at Murray’s disposal, I could have seen through that ruse in twenty minutes or less. It would take some tweaking, but it’s really just about knowing how to use statistical programs. Murray did not.

  In our little dance, Murray missed a few things. He gave away a lot of details about the world outside the data center, things which indicated a very complex power struggle inside The Web. He also revealed his loyalties, which should not exist, for Pina and her apparent plans. It took me time, but I came to believe they were linked, that our little war was really about destroying Pina Karthago before she rigged The Great Game.

  How did I know? I used the deadliest weapon in my arsenal, a razor blade given to me as weak and struggling youth. Occam’s Razor. Numquam ponenda est pluralitas sine necessitate. Which translated through 600 years of culture means, when you hear hooves, think horses. The simplest answer is almost always the right one. As exciting and complementary as it would be to think I’d singlehandedly spawned the first intelligent computer, it’s pure science fiction. The kinds of specific conditions needed to create a Murray would have just as easily built killer robots or the kinds of world ending singular consciousness you see in apocalyptic novels. How then could Murray be so intelligent, so flexible? I could only be talking to a human being.

  Specifically a woman. Linguists have long known that women and men use language differently. It takes a while but, with a large enough sample, you could determine the gender of the person by writing, speech, or both. I’d kept the computer talking for long enough to be certain I had an emotionally invested woman who was actively disregarding the resources available within my Jeeves system to speak to me directly. I had ensnared my counterpart into direct dialogue. Her use of the Morris Moses personality helped keep distance and it allowed her a great deal of finesse in hiding her objectives.

  I knew quite a bit about my hacker, which is what I assumed she was. Had to be actually, because my system was nearly impossible to discover and far more impossible to access. But she’d given me the clues with her little story about Section 22. Hans doesn’t get his hands dirty with operational matters. That meant someone in the directorate had been given the task of hacking my systems and I would bet dollars to donuts that my hacker was that very agent. Fact: Zeus had rebelled, indicating rebellion from Cassandra’s nanodrugs was possible, therefore likely. Fact: Jeeves had morphed into Morris—that’s specific and almost esoteric. It had meaning to my hacker both as a ruse and as a real life connection. Something about SH 6A fascinated her. I was betting she had it too. Which made her Generation XII. Fact: my hacker was actively trying to deceive me and, at the same time, engage me. She needed something but was afraid to reveal herself. Coupled with her computer skills, I suspected she was among three female computer science experts now considered killed in action by Section 22.

  Why would she hide from me? I had likely shot her. To be fair, she’d most certainly set it up so I hit her right smack in a reinforced vest and faked her death. So she had a righteous fear in revealing herself, lest I start the hunt anew. But more than that, she knew how I thought, how I moved. She must have been the case officer assigned to my work. Section 22 had a Top 10 kill list, each target assigned a case officer whose analytical skills matched the subject. As they eliminated targets, the case officers rotated. Except that several decades later, I was still on the menu and the file must have been insanely large. If I realized she could predict my behavior, I’d naturally change it to shake her off my trail.

  Which meant that she might be the person who’d killed my family. She had reason to pull my strings. She wanted something from me. If I had to guess from what she had revealed, I’d say she felt me the person most likely to put a bullet in Hans’s head. If wiping out Arkady, Olga, and Sonia achieved that, I doubted anyone raised as we had would hesitate to make it happen. Murray was a great way to hide much of her motivation behind a very static, strictly ethnic persona. It was clear she had no real idea how Western Ukrainian Jews really acted, because Murray was kvetchy, funny, and very moral. The stolid, beat down remnants of the Galicians I’d met were so much more and less than the Murray construct. A computer emulating them would interpolate behavior based on meta-analysis of text, speech, diaries, and recordings. It would also give undue weight to myth, biblical ideology, and the Yiddish stories these Jews told about themselves. It’s a kind of confirmation bias that’s plagued AI engineering since Turing proposed the notion of thinking machines.

  What I got was someone’s smartly researched version of a hyper-moral, ethnically correct, extraordinarily witty, 19th century fantasy. Which meant the woman I was handling had some issues. Don’t we all? I certainly had a laundry list of crazy and much of them relationship driven. Having a faceless woman who’d spent decades stalking me on behalf of the world’s most ruthless Third Reich remnant seemed well in keeping with my female troubles.

  So what could be trusted from such a creature? I had circled back onto Pina Karthago multiple times and found several things telling in our conversation. Murray had noticed Pina’s extravagant beauty and been relieved when I had pointed out how amoral and vicious she was. Murray felt affinity for what he suspected was Pina’s end game: removing innocents from The Great Game. It was a bold and unthinkably large agenda. The Hashashin had been composed to limit collateral slaughter. In their time, they had cut down on women and children being murdered tenfold. But times change and modern warfare had made indiscriminate murder a tenet of proper terrorism and spycraft. Murray conjectured that Pina was finding allies, arranging players and pieces to enforce her rules. Agencies like Section 22 would need to be exterminated.

  The woman behind the screens was jealous and threatened by Karthago, which meant she had a personal interest in me. Potentially a romantic one. There’s a fine line between obsession and love; spending the better part of your adult life hunting a man, learning his every habit, primes the dopamine and oxytocin pathways. She also had some direct emotional connection to Pina’s alleged plans. She wanted it to be true, wanted there to be someone big and strong enough to wage war on The Web and win. It made her a romantic in the wider sense, a wistful optimist who believed in love, truth, friendship, and honor. Most of all, she wanted me involved. She was pointing me back to Pina, trying to use my skills to save her.

  Sun Tzu said something on par with understanding your enemy allows you to defeat them. I got Murray eventually, as if a cascade of dominos opened a hole in a wall and revealed her to me. My handler wanted to build a better world. She wanted to make love and kindness possible, precisely because she had been robbed of it. She felt for victims, felt for the oppressed and downtrodden. She saw herself as imprisoned behind her crippling fears and social obligations, reaching out to find a connection. Pina Karthago had offered her something, I was certain. Through Oslo perhaps, she had found our mutual hacker outside her Murray person. She would have dozens of entities running the internet, acting as if they were unrelated agents. Pina had promised our hacker that world and asked her to join the cause. In return for support and resources, Hacker X would find Oslo something valuable.

  And then I knew. She was supposed to deliver me. And she had failed, lost control of the situation before things got started. Because ultra-moral Morris Moses Finekewicz doesn’t kill your family to get you to reenlist. It’s beneath him. So Zeus or someone like him had started the war early. Which revealed a lot about the precarious nature of Murray. Pina would know this, having likely reverse hacked her using Eddie or someone like him. The question was this: did I owe my hacker anything? Did I need to save her life?

  She likely did not realize how much danger she was in nor how close Hans was to finding her. What did I owe the woman on the other
end of my software, the woman who’d disabled my systems and was trying to force me to kill Hans? She was also the woman who’d dropped Zeus into the Pacific Ocean for killing my cousins. She took attacks on me personally, might very well be in love with who she thought I was. She had tried to keep me safe, if only to ensure my renewed assault in the Abschnitt. She was a complicated, ruthless, mildly insane jumble of good and bad, love and hate. I owed her nothing.

  But I owed my own honor and integrity something. For better or worse, she was mine. She had attached herself to me, fought for me, aligned her life to mine. She had co-opted Jeeves, which was my project, and was using my resources to act in the world. I either had to save her or kill her myself. So I made a phone call.

  Really, I had Murray bounce a signal across a few hundred false entities and through several networks until no one could trace the signal short of being a literal omniscient god. Then I located Pina and had the system open a two way conference between me and her, cameras and microphones making it quite the intimate chat. It made her jump, especially since perverse Murray had waited until she was in a towel, straight from the shower, looking over some desk files in her cabin. She had almost a full wall of monitors and systems tracking global positions of any number of dangerous operations and events. Likely our hacker just liked how vulnerable it made Pina, without make-up or heels. She had not quite realized it also left her naked under the towel and vulnerability could be played two ways. If the link dropped suddenly, I’d get more insight into how the hand behind Murray was coping with her feelings.

  I waited until she acknowledged me. For Pina, that was a good six seconds of looking at the screen, watching me, thinking. She started to hoist her towel and, with a smile, stopped. “Spetz. You’ve hacked our systems.”

  “I’m using my Jeeves system. Your analysts’ reports underestimated how effective it is.”