Baker Street Irregulars

by Michael A. Ventrella

  “Yes, silly!” Tanisha shook a small shopping bag at the camera. “Because this time you two are coming with me.”

  “We are?” What’s-On? asked, delighted. “How?”

  “Yes,” Sure-Lock asked, unable to conceal its cynicism. “How?”

  Tanisha opened the bag to reveal a neat little pendant. Sure-Lock zoomed in on its nearest camera and saw that the teardrop-shaped blue crystal was full of nanocircuitry.

  “Hop in,” she said, fastening the chain around her neck. “We’re going places. What’s-On? will tell us where to go, and you, you old grouch, can make sure we all get there.”

  “We shall have such a wonderful time!” What’s-On? declared, his voice coming from two places at once. “I have just heard of a gallery opening that will begin at midnight. If you wish, I can obtain an invitation for you. And there is a coffee house holding a poetry slam beginning at three o’clock in the morning. Very exclusive, but I will get you a prime table.”

  Sure-Lock Home merely extended its programming into the device, careful to ensure that all connections to the Internet and private servers were all sound and responding.

  “More to the point,” it said, “I will get you home safe.”

  Investigations upon Taxonomy of Venomous Squamates

  BY

  R. Rozakis

  “You know, Lock,” I said, ever so carefully, “you may want to take a bit of a break.”

  “Nonsense,” he replied, without even glancing at my avatar. “I am succeeding perfectly well.” Nearly a hundred orcs shrieked and died under his assault. I understood the game was intended to be played by a group. Nevertheless, I’d never seen Lock join another player. He seemed to regard the challenge of playing a level designed for six or eight people by himself to be merely another puzzle, akin to his theoretical physics.

  “Still,” I pressed gently, as it is unwise to irritate someone who can cut off your power source. Being turned off would hardly kill me, of course, but I always find the lapse in time disorienting and a bit alarming. I did my best to strike a tone that Lock would find persuasive without wheedling. “When was the last time you ate?”

  “Twelve hours and forty-three minutes ago,” he replied, his attention still focused on the battle before him.

  “Surely this cannot be wise.”

  “How so?” He lit a fuse and a chain of bombs dominoed across the battlefield, zigzagging their way to the enemy gates, which blew out in a spectacular fashion. I devoted a subprocess to studying the maneuver—I had watched him lay the bombs seemingly at random for the last hour and a half, and had not divined his purpose until he had achieved his goal. “I have been advised”—he spat the word—“to pause my work until my advisor has caught up once more. I have nothing to focus on, nothing to quiet my mind with. I’m bored. And there is nothing, nothing, that is worse in this world than being bored. These games,” he waved his hand languidly without missing a beat, “at least afford some kind of stimulation. Or would you prefer I turn to cocaine?”

  I had to hit a database for a definition of the last. It was enough to assure me that no, I did not want him turning to illegal stimulants, no matter how archaic they might be. The caffeine already in his system was quite enough. “I merely meant that if you wish your brain to continue to function in any capacity, it would be sensible to provide it with some fuel with which to do so. And more chemical stimulants do not count.”

  He ignored me, lost in calculation. Then he raised an arrow and fired it, watching it bounce off six different surfaces before burying itself in the right eyeball of the lich king, whom I could identify only because of the helpful floating label. The king toppled over, ending the level before the tsunami of bypassed guardsmen chasing Lock’s avatar could catch up.

  “Very well,” he said. He waved a hand, sweeping the holoprojections clear from his view of the tiny office. He rubbed his hand over his scalp, the dark skin no longer gleaming now that the fuzz of black hair was growing back. It bothered me when he sunk low enough that he stopped attending to grooming. He produced an energy bar from the back of a drawer without looking, peeled back the crinkly wrapper, and took a bite. “If I’d known you were going to be such a nursemaid,” he said around his mouthful, “I would have thought twice about liberating you from the comp sci jail in the first place.”

  “You needed me,” I reminded him, aware that I sounded prim. I was grateful, of course, to have been rescued from the archive of potentially malignant code. But I still had my pride.

  “Nonsense,” he replied. “I do not deny that your services have been of great help in the past, but I have no doubt that, should I be denied their use, I could devise another solution.”

  I felt a pang of genuine concern. I quickly accessed the interaction databases and discovered another possible hypothesis: that his callousness might represent a form of ritual male bonding. To test the theory, I tried an arch reply. “Oh? So why do you keep me on, then?”

  “Why, for your own good, of course.” I fancied I saw the hint of a smile as he took another bite.

  I considered. It was true enough—perhaps more than he realized—but it seemed needlessly hurtful to point out my own vulnerabilities if someone discovered an AI roaming outside a contained environment. The modern responses in my behavioral database seemed to call for a return insult of some sort, perhaps denigrating his mother. Lock, on the other hand, tended to express himself in more anachronistic modes, a habit I blamed on an over-fondness for Jules Verne. I tried a more appropriate tone. “That is unworthy of you.”

  “My friend,” he replied, kindly, “pray accept my apologies. I had not meant to threaten. I merely meant that, in keeping me company, you are afforded a great number of opportunities to further your own studies into human nature.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling somewhat mollified, even as I wondered if I had once again misread the nature of our interaction.

  He did not respond, his eyes distant. I wondered, not for the first time, if I should just order him a nutrient/insulin pump of the kind they used to use to treat diabetics. I doubted he would ever bother to wear it, though. Once again, I had a fervent wish for hands.

  He had already begun glancing speculatively at the dormant game logo burning in the corner of his vision when someone knocked on the door.

  She paused for a moment in the doorway, backlit, hip cocked, clothed in black. The vest seemed a size or two too small for her, from the way it squeezed her breasts together. Impractical, but then, most human clothing is. This was one point upon which Lock and I agreed. I could see her carefully applied makeup—a quick check of a tutorial revealed that the white shadow in the inside corners of her eyes was intended to make her eyes look wider, while the flesh-colored penciling around her lips was to make them look pouty. Why one would want lips to resemble an adjective more frequently used to describe misbehaving toddlers, the tutorial did not explain. She stood there, hands braced in the doorway, for a full two seconds longer than necessary. A few quick image searches suggested to me that if she had her choice, sultry saxophones would have been playing in the background. I suspected she had misjudged her genre.

  Lock regarded her politely. After another moment passed without a more passionate reaction, she entered the room, hips swaying in an inefficient manner that I noticed tended to have an exaggerated effect on men. Most men.

  “Good evening, madam,” Lock said, deliberately over-formal. Over-formality was listed as a distancing behavior, and I observed that he employed it often. “Please, sit down.”

  “I’m told you solve problems,” she said without preamble.

  “Physics doctoral candidates typically do,” he replied. Even I could tell he was misreading her intent, which led me to wonder if he was choosing to initiate courtship rituals or if he was simply irritated. I kept quiet as I pulled up her records and dropped them in a folder Lock could access. She was a biocyberneticist, it looked like, a fellow grad student. I said nothing out loud. Humans tended to be u
nnerved by disembodied presences.

  “You look pale,” he continued. I thought it was the makeup. “Perhaps it is the cold—would you like some tea?”

  “It is not cold,” she replied, eyes wide. “It is terror.”

  She did not display the outward symptoms of terror. Not only did her low voice not tremble, it contained resonances that implied her normal speaking voice was quite a bit higher. And if her eyes seemed wide, it was because of the aforementioned makeup. Still, I checked the biometrics. To my surprise, they indicated poor circulation at the skin and an elevated heart rate. She was indeed stressed, perhaps even frightened. Why she would hide her fear with artifice confused me. I forwarded the findings to Lock’s implant, where it would appear as a discreet line at the bottom of his heads-up display.

  If he had a reaction to the information, he gave no sign. Instead, he fixed her the cup of tea. “If you’re terrified, perhaps you should be consulting the authorities.”

  “They’d never take me seriously.” She accepted the cup but did not drink. “Only another academic would understand. But there are rumors that you sometimes help people…”

  “Ms. Stoner, I still do not see why you have come to me.”

  Her surprise confirmed her identity. Helen Stoner tightened her grip on the teacup. “My advisor, Dr. Roylott, has a government grant to develop security measures for military installations. He was once considered the foremost expert in the field. Lately, though, he’s published very little. If he doesn’t produce something substantial with the current grant, I doubt he’ll get another. And it doesn’t help that he’s withdrawn from the academic community. I don’t know when he last attended a conference, but I’ve heard rumors that the last time he did, he was asked not to return. He lives in the lab as much as possible. I’m afraid he’s gotten somewhat of a reputation as…unsocial.”

  “I suppose this has made the atmosphere in the laboratory somewhat tense,” Lock said.

  She gave up entirely on pretense. “He’s an asshole. Nasty, belittling, and impossible to please. He actually threw glassware at my head once. No one wants to work with him. I’m his last grad student, and I doubt anyone will replace me when I graduate.”

  “And when will that be?”

  She fidgeted with the cup. “Well, that’s the problem, really, isn’t it? It should be soon. I have the data; the thesis is nearly written. All I should have to do is submit and defend, and I’m free.”

  “You seem to have doubts.”

  “Of course I have doubts. You can’t get research done without grad students. I don’t know what it’s like in physics, but in bio, we’re indentured servants. When I’m gone, if he can’t find someone to replace me, any chance he has to finish his own work evaporates.”

  “So you think that he plans to sabotage you to prevent you from graduating?”

  She lowered her voice. “I think he already has. Sabotaged someone, that is. My labmate, Julia, was the last grad student to leave. She was almost ready to graduate last year. After years of trying, she had perfected the control mechanism we were working on. I know it worked. I’d seen the results myself. But one day, I came into the lab to find her completely distraught. Her eyes were wild and the lab was nearly ripped apart.”

  Lock, who had slouched down in his chair, sat up. “Please, be as specific as you can.”

  “It looked like Julia had been up half the night searching for something. All the monitors were completely full of open files. Then she grabbed my shoulders and nearly shook me. ‘It’s gone!’ she’d said. ‘The test data. My results. Everything!’

  “It didn’t make any sense to me. Everything was backed up on the server, every night. Julia’s thesis, too, had the data embedded in it. There was no way it could all have been wiped. Who would do such a thing? And why?

  “I pinged the server and started pulling up files. All of them were there. Years and years of data collected. For a moment, I truly thought the stress had gotten to Julia and she’d lost her mind. She hovered over my shoulder, staring at the same files.

  “‘They’re not my files,’ was all Julia could say.

  “I tried to calm her down, but I was trying get away long enough to call the university health services without her hearing. Still, she was insistent that I look at the data. So I looked.

  “It wasn’t the data that I remembered. It was close enough, certainly, to seem the same at first glance. But it was off, just enough to invalidate all her results. Each test—tests that I could remember having worked—was a failure. For minor, understandable reasons, of course. But the data was clear. She had been so close to succeeding, but had never quite made it.”

  “And her thesis?” Lock asked.

  “The version in her personal files had the data that I remembered, but the lab files contradicted it. In fact, it looked like she had created the discrepancy on purpose—nudged some numbers in the correct direction, fudged the results so it looked like it had succeeded. Any reputable scientist would have sworn that she had been falsifying data for years. I remembered her succeeding, but I had no way of proving it, and neither did she.”

  “And what did Dr. Roylott say?” Lock asked.

  “We hadn’t planned to tell him,” she laughed bitterly. “At least, not until we’d figured out what had happened. Naturally, he walked into the lab in the middle of all this. There was no way to avoid him finding out. He compared the data—spent the entire afternoon with us, actually. Then shook his head sadly and told her that he could not have someone so untrustworthy in his lab, but if she left quietly, he wouldn’t make a fuss.”

  “No flying beakers?”

  “No,” she said decisively. “And that’s part of what made me so suspicious. The idea of him taking something like this so calmly was completely out of character. After all, he lost his temper if you put too much sugar in his coffee!”

  “And what did Julia do then?”

  Stoner looked sad. “I took her home, put her to bed, and told her things would look better in the morning. I didn’t hear from her for days. When I went to her apartment to check on her, she was gone. Her note on her door for me said, ‘Look out for the snake.’ That was the last I heard from her.”

  He looked surprised. “People don’t exactly disappear these days.”

  “Well, I put a trace on her, obviously,” she replied. “Julia had sold all her stuff, deleted all her profiles, and emigrated to Mars. Do you know how much interplanetary bandwidth costs these days?”

  “I see.” Lock chewed on a stylus. “So you wish to discover what happened to her data?”

  “Oh, I don’t care about that.” She waved a hand dismissively. “Water, bridge, whatever. I want to keep it from happening to me.”

  “Altruistic,” he murmured.

  “I haven’t worked this hard for some has-been blowhard with a Napoleon complex to come along and steal it all,” she continued. “He’ll file off the serial numbers, wait another year or two, and then publish my data. He has to move fast—Dr. Angela Rouse at Yale is practically on our tail as it is. Well, Julia might have been willing to have a little nervous breakdown and give it all up, but I’m not interested. You’re my insurance policy.”

  “I see.”

  “So you’ll help me?”

  He raised an eyebrow and gave her the barest smile. “Give me a little time to do some research. I’ll contact you.”

  She returned her own wide smile, looking up at him through her lashes. He escorted her to the door while I wondered at his change in manner. Perhaps her outfit had produced the desired result after all.

  Lock closed the door, leaning against it. Already his eyes sparkled with the thrill of a new puzzle. “Thoughts?”

  “She’s genuinely anxious,” I began. We always played this game. I would do my best to be hyper-observant, and then he would explain to me how I missed the critical step. “She’s got a handful of minor papers that have her name, but she’s always buried somewhere near the bottom of the list of con
tributors. No first-author papers. She’s in her seventh year as a Ph.D candidate in what’s supposed to be a five-year program, so she would naturally be concerned.”

  “What about the professor, Roylott?”

  I flicked through some files. “Two restraining orders, no arrests. Impressive academic credentials, but spectacularly bad scores on students’ professor-rating sites. She’s right about his publication rate tapering off.”

  “And Julia?”

  “Fell off the map. She’s got no trail after leaving for Mars. She must have gone completely off the grid.”

  He tapped his forefingers together. “And Julia’s comment?”

  “I had assumed it was merely bitter ranting,” I said cautiously. “With the snake metaphorically referring to Dr. Roylott?”

  Lock remained silent, with just a trace of a smile.

  Clearly I’d missed something, so I did a fast search, looking for other meanings of “snake” that might apply. I offered the best answer I could come up with. “There’s an archaic programming language called Python. Academic computers are sometimes built off legacy systems, with underlying structures that no one has looked at closely in years. Perhaps there’s a back door into the system through outdated software?”

  “Why don’t you look into that?” Lock suggested.

  That undoubtedly meant I was on the wrong track, but I went to work anyway. It’s my function, after all.

  I grabbed the Python documentation and then pried into the university servers. I got into Roylott’s lab group directory, but there was nothing there—really nothing. It was suspicious. Clearly our professor was sufficiently paranoid to have taken the important servers off the network entirely. It made it rather difficult for me to jump in and investigate how I wanted to.

  “I think we need to go there in person,” I admitted to Lock.

  “Fifteen and a half seconds,” he said. “You’re getting slow.”

  I refrained from commenting.

  “We shall give her some time,” he said. “I find people tend to be mistrustful when they feel that not enough time has elapsed for thorough research.”