“Is this supposed to frighten me?”
Argosi shook his head.
“No, but this might help me make my point better.”
The graphics of the sea and the islands and the sky suddenly disappeared. Only a blue background remained with the yacht suspended in it. Slowly the blue background darkened until it was pitch black. The only light was from the ship itself. Then one by one, until it was a torrent. Chairs, light fixtures, the dining table, all the crystal on the nearby bar, the bottles from the shelves, the water from the pool, and the VTAL sitting on the landing pad, were pulled apart into pieces before being sucked from the ship into the blackness. For a moment cracking and popping sounds of the yacht being pulled apart was deafening. Then as quickly as it started it stopped, leaving large pieces of the yacht missing or destroyed.
Argosi leaned back. “If these murders were to continue, I might find it necessary under current terrorism laws to shut down New Polis. Break apart and isolate all the sentient beings. Not in cubes but sheer nothingness.”
Argosi stood and tossed the cube with the yacht in it to Mathias. He caught it with shaking hands.
“Keep that as a souvenir. I’ve grown tired of it as a play toy. My agents will be at your bank in the morning. See that they are accommodated. Agent Callum, take us back.” Before Mathias could say anything Argosi and his team vanished from Mathias’s view.
The table captain came over and picked up the cube with Adams in it, studying it before he spoke. “This Commander Argosi is dangerous. I could have killed them all. I was in communication with their H-Pods except for the Asian one. He must be using an older model.”
Mathias looked to the servant who had changed his appearance and clothing.
“No, Alex. That would have just brought more of them. Never forget, as the commander so inelegantly expressed, they have the power to extinguish our world. At least for now.”
New Polis, Metaverse
MD had been on the phone all morning with various contractors regarding the progress of the tunnel into the mine from the ranch in Utah. All the contractors were imbeciles. They constantly kept talking about this or that delay, all of which didn’t concern MD. He wanted the job complete so he could concentrate on collecting as much money as possible before disappearing. He would not be able to do that until these things got done for Edgar. So he made the repeated phone calls and filled out the endless paperwork for this permit or that approval.
MD was tired of doing simple assistant work for Edgar, as if he was one of his underlings. Whether he liked it or not though he needed Edgar’s continued cooperation. It was the only way he could process the massive amount of financial transactions and deposits into some two thousand accounts each under different identities. Then use those accounts to buy nonexistent products and services from online companies that he created. Which in turn paid into various accounts in the Real World most held in a branch or affiliate of The Bank of St. Petersburg.
On the positive side, he had so many people now paying his “Safe Passage” fee that he was nearing full capacity to be able to process the payments. He may soon have to divert some of his AE’s from fighting off DLS, letting them remove the bodies.
It didn’t matter. They had served their purpose. Especially the three in the business district. Unlike the bodies of the two victims in the Grand Canyon way out in a remote location, the ones in New Polis were in well-traveled areas. They served as a constant reminder to the corporations, workers, residents and visitors that they could be next.
The body of the Russian banker, still impaled on the flagpole jutting out from the American Enterprise building, seemed like a stroke of genius to MD. Having the body hanging over the sidewalk, bleeding onto it, was a strong visual.
MD didn’t care about the victim, but he wondered what the dead man had done to cross Edgar and deserve such a fate? It would help The Bank of St. Petersburg to distance itself from the killers and any financial connection, since they too had been targeted. The bank, like other corporations, was also demanding that DLS and its vendors pay the killers’ corporate fee since they could not prevent them from striking.
As for the other victim, Gerry Sanders the former CEO of Silicon Data Group, MD had targeted him specifically. The hideous man had it coming after the way he treated MD. Sanders really thought business experience was superior to what MD brought to the game? That was laughable. Sanders always held him in contempt. Well, now he got his due.
Alex had produced and released another video capitalizing on the two victims taken yesterday afternoon. DLS was now being swamped to pay the fees for other companies and a good many individual account holders were joining that chorus call. Soon MD could move on to the next phase, approach DLS directly for a large settlement with a portion of every subscriber’s fee paid to MD. Then the killings would stop.
But not before one more. A spectacular one that would demonstrate his ability to reach outside the Metaverse. He had it all setup. Killing in that fashion would anger Edgar who would be upset with the exposure of capabilities that Edgar wanted to reserve for future use.
That was the idea. MD needed to remind Edgar of his abilities. Edgar had far too much money and power. He needed to be taken down a notch or two, and he knew that the feds would be seeking all types of controls over AE’s.
He needs me more than I need him,at least in the long run.
MD looked at the massive amounts of money they were collecting where a running total on one of the monitors regularly updated to a larger number. Maybe one more demonstration then a meet with DLS.
Today might be a good day to kill in the real world all from the coziness of the Metaverse.
MCT Lab, New Polis, Metaverse
Argosi looked around the conference room. They had just finished watching the latest video from Reynolds et al. They all had grown tired of these videos and the smugness of the main character, who was becoming a bit of a rock star. He even had his own following of sentient being rights activists. The people in this room weren’t fans. They watched the videos, trying to obtain clues or other information, which had been quite scant.
“Any observations? Anything that stands out?” Argosi asked, met with silence and shaking of heads. “Okay, I didn’t pick up on anything either. Let’s talk about last night’s activities.”
Argosi then went through a quick debrief of the meeting with Mathias. Argosi was not surprised that he had heard nothing from Stezno, or the DOJ. Mathias, he thought, must have reigned his attorney in and has chosen not to make an issue out of it.
“Anyone have any thoughts about Mathias’s silence so far?”
“Day’s still young, boss.” Parker yawned.
“You could be right. But it’s been my experience that people that are lacking in power are the ones that tend to scream and complain the loudest. I think that he is biding his time and considering his options. Which could still include making the phone calls that he hinted at. I think the thing that is keeping him from doing that is the result of such an action is an unknown. He is wondering if complaining could bring more scrutiny on him regarding his banking activities.” Argosi rapped his nails on the table.
“Callum, what are your observations about last night and how Mathias might react? Are we going to get flack when we send a couple of agents over there today to begin to look through the financials?”
“Well, sir, I think that he was shocked by both the attack on his operating system directly and to a lesser extent the demonstration of our powers. He knows that our attacking him like that is unprecedented regarding technical ability but even more so about what has come to be known as ‘sentient sovereignty.’ A legal clause that recognizes that only he can lawfully access his own operating system. The fact that you—a representative of the federal government—did that would cause him real anxiety. His future actions will come about out of that anxiety. The thing is, sir, and I am not questioning why you did it, is why you thought it was necessary to lean on him during t
he first meeting? It’s just something that I did not expect, and I’m wondering from an investigative perspective what it does for us?”
Argosi smiled. “Anyone else have that same question bouncing around in their head? It’s okay. That’s a valid question.”
A few hands went up, mostly younger guys with little real world experience.
“Well, gentleman, it’s really a simple concept. In fact, Callum, you hit very close to it. You get an ‘E’ for effort.” Argosi said with a laugh, making sure that everyone was at ease.
“I did, sir?”
“Yes, Pete. When you talked about creating anxiety in Mathias. I’m after a different emotion, but I’ll take anxious. Besides Agent Parker, have any of you worked any organized crime details?”
No hands went up, so Argosi continued. “In the movies and even in real life the gangsters always talk about respect. This applies to the cartels, Mexican Mafia, etc. as well. But what they are really after is something else. That something is fear. Their business partners and other associates and particularly their victims don’t respect them, never have. They fear them. When I read the brief on Mathias, one thing stood out loud and clear. This sentient being, for all his haughtiness and supposed sophistication, is just a bully. He never had any intent to cooperate with us. His intention was to steal the one thing that we cannot get back, that for us is a finite resource and for him endless, time. He can’t do anything with it of course, but he can keep it from us. He demands respect but uses bullying tactics to get it. So I turned the tables. I became the bully. I made him fearful of me. No cartel or mafia organization respects the Bureau, but they do fear us. That was a lesson that Mathias learned last night.”
Argosi paused and sipped his coffee then looked around.
“Plus, it just felt good to do.”
State Highway 24 Northeast of Roanoke, Indiana
Edward Roland sat in the right front seat of the large four-door utility truck. The twenty-five-year-old was a field supervisor for Buchanan-Miller Management, a large corporation that among other enterprises worked under contract for a variety of government entities. The division that Roland worked for did roadway maintenance and repair. Today Roland and his crew were heading to a stretch of State Highway 24 also known as the “Hoosier Heartland Highway” southwest of Fort Wayne Indiana near the small community of Ellisville.
Roland ignored the cornfields rolling by and focused on the GPS. Thirty-four minutes until they got to where they needed to be. He had already done his email and other supervisory duties. They headed to their second work location for the day. Checking the work orders he knew it was going to be a long day, longer if any of the worker-bots in the back of the truck have any maintenance issues. He had been working them hard trying to fulfill all the work orders the sales department had been racking up. He had been on the road for two and a half weeks straight. With any luck in a couple of days, he would get back to Indianapolis for a few days of R & R and get the bots into the shop for preventive maintenance.
He hoped to be moved off the road soon. Despite his undergraduate degree in robotics and his Masters in Business the University of Michigan graduate had to start in the field learning the corporation from the ground up. Literally. He had been in this position for over a year and would soon be moving back to the district maintenance facility where he would oversee the maintenance programs as well as new acquisitions and adaptations of commercially available bots for other divisions of BMM as it was known.
Roland looked over his left shoulder at Matt Clemons sleeping in the backseat. Clemons was going to replace Roland, and for him, that couldn’t happen soon enough. He longed for being home at night with his fiancé and getting to work in-world at least a couple days a week at the Metaverse HQ in New Polis.
Clemons was twenty-two and a recent graduate of Georgia Tech. His southern drawl took some getting used to for a Yankee like Roland, although the bots didn’t seem to notice.
Roland decided that Clemons had the right idea and closed his eyes to get some shut eye. The truck would take them right to the stretch of highway scheduled for repair. He double checked the GPS and the trucks gauges. Everything looked fine. He put his earphones on and closed his eyes.
Twenty minutes later, he was startled awake when the truck bounced as it turned onto a long dirt driveway with trees on either side. Roland looked around. Where was the highway?
He looked down at the GPS. It showed them moving along on highway 24.
“That’s not right,” Roland said.
He looked up to see an old faded white farmhouse with boarded up windows farther down the dirt driveway. Just beyond that was a large wood barn in even worse conditions, one of the doors was partially open.
“Hey Ed, where are we?” asked Matt from the back seat as he sat up rubbing his eyes.
“No idea man. Something got screwed up on the GPS.” Roland answered.
As the truck rolled past the farm house and towards the barn, Roland pulled up the flipped down control console on his side and grabbed the wheel on it at the same time he pushed the brake pedal which had descended from under the dashboard when the control console was pulled up.
Either one of those things should have given him positive control of the vehicle. Instead of slowing though the truck accelerated heading directly toward the barn doors. Roland slammed the brake harder. When that had no effect, he smacked the large red button marked “Emergency Stop” that bypassed the driving program and would slow the truck manually.
Nothing happened.
Roland was still pushing the brake, and frantically trying to turn the wheel when the truck careened through the barn doors then slammed to a stop inside the old structure.
“What the hell, dude?” Clemons shouted from the back seat.
“It wasn’t me bro; something is all messed up. I’m shutting it down.” Roland said.
Before he could turn the truck off manually, it shut down completely. Everything was off including the uplink to HQ. Roland opened the door and jumped out of the truck on the passenger side as Clemons did the same from the rear passenger side door.
Roland looked down at his watch and tried to activate his phone so that he could call HQ as he walked around the front of the truck and surveyed the damage. He saw the right head light and grill area smashed in; the engine was spewing hot fluid. A large piece of wood was sticking out from the radiator protruding through the grill.
“Fuck me,” Rowland said under his breath. “How am I going to explain this?”
“Beats me, you were in the front seat, bro.” Roland glared at Clemons for a moment, then tried again to activate the phone. Still nothing.
Roland looked up to see several of the bots getting out of the back of the truck. They were moving around the trailer that carried their tools and the asphalt paving machine.
“Why are they out?” Roland asked more to himself. “Matt, get them back in the truck. I’m going outside and see if I can get a better signal.”
“Got it, man.” Clemons jogged to the back of the truck telling the bots that this wasn’t the work location waving his arms at them and telling them to get back in the truck.
Roland walked past the bright yellow workers and their flailing quad arms. All of them rode on rubber treads a couple of feet long and split into a left and right side for better maneuverability. Each tread was about a foot wide, providing a stable platform for the six-foot, four-hundred-pound worker bots.
Roland walked outside of the barn through the door they had driven through. He looked down at his watch to see if he could get a connection. Roland heard the familiar whirring sound of one of the bots coming behind him but ignored it trying to get his phone to connect. The whirring sound grew closer, and Roland was about to look to see which bot was following him when he heard Matt yell something.
He turned, now face to face with one of the bots. Beyond this bot, he could see Matt struggling with one of the four-armed bots near the back of the truck. Two of its arms
held Matt in a bear hug around his chest while the other two arms held his arms over his head. A second bot grabbed him by the legs.
Roland ignored the bot that followed him as he side stepped it and reached for his fob control. One of the bots had his coworker by the legs and lifted him up so that the two machines now carried Clemons between them as he struggled and yelled for Ed. Roland had never seen a bot do anything like this on its own and was more puzzled than alarmed.
Roland didn’t get the chance to activate the fob before the bot closest to him grabbed him in a bear hug with two of its arms around his chest while the other two began pulling his arms over his head. The bot lifted him off his feet.
Roland kicked at it, and another bot that came and grabbed him by the legs. Roland’s kicks at it were ineffectual. The bots held him tightly as they carried him back into the barn holding him in the same fashion as the other two bots had done with his coworker. He began to hyperventilate as the first two bots pushed his fellow employee up against a center barn pole off to the right front of the truck. The bot with four arms held Clemons arms over his head with two of its arms as the two other arms wrapped industrial grade bailing wire from an attachment on the bot’s frame around Clemons’ arms at the wrists, forearms, and biceps securing him to the pole.
“Ed, what the hell is going on with these dang things? They won’t respond! Can ya get loose?” Clemons yelled to Ed, struggling against two bots a few feet away.
“No man, I’ve tried everything. I don’t know what is going on with them. If this is someone’s idea of a practical joke, it’s not funny.”
Roland was struggling to get loose, but the bots responded by moving farther apart and stretching Roland to the breaking point.
The machine with the bailing wire then wired Clemons legs to the pole at the ankles while the other bot held them still. The bots then let go of Clemons who struggled to get loose. The wire pulled so tightly that it cut into his arms now held to the post over his head. Roland could see blood running down Clemons’ forearms.
The Metaverse: Virtual Life-Real Death Page 32
