Anti-Hero

by Jonathan Wood

  “OK,” Gran surveys the list. “First few hits seem a bit tentative. Low security targets. Totally didn’t make our radar ’til we went back, looked at the pattern. Crazy level of sophistication in the hack. Totally gave it away in retrospect. But he’s hitting some of our sponsored labs out in San Francisco, Chicago. Then Alaska. Next he tries his hand at the Smithsonian institutes—”

  Oh shit. Oh shit.

  “Then the Library of Congress.”

  My eyes flick up and catch Tabitha’s. And she knows it too. Right there. Those two targets. As soon as the hacker works out he can crack in, he goes for the books.

  “It’s Clyde,” Tabitha says.

  “We don’t know…” But I’m half-hearted.

  “You feckin’ know,” Kayla says.

  I look at her. And for once she’s not looking daggers or sword blades at me. Just something faintly grim. A woman who had already accepted an ugly truth. Waiting for me to catch up.

  I glance at Felicity. My last port in the storm. She reaches over and squeezes my arm, and looks sad for me. Because she knows. We all know.

  There has to be a reason. I need there to be a reason.

  “Where next?” Felicity asks. “Keep going down the list.”

  “Few more museums and libraries,” Gran says. “This is all like, over two or three days, mind. But then the big one. Put him on our radar. DARPA. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Went in and just, man, scoured that place. Took a copy of everything. Like, everything. We even worked it out halfway through. You can’t hide traffic like that. And they couldn’t stop him. They were pulling plugs out of servers at the end but it was too late, man. It was fucking crazy.”

  “Feckin’ science nerd.” Even now he’s a supervillain, Clyde has not managed to elevate himself in Kayla’s eyes.

  A supervillain. Clyde. It just doesn’t make sense. Even looking at the list of places he’s hit. It’s all so typically Clyde. Nerdy, high-minded, and essentially harmless. Just someone whose curiosity doesn’t have the same boundaries as other people’s. How do you go from that to someone who uses a military drone to attempt mass murder at a funeral?

  Felicity squeezes my arm again.

  “Where does he go after DARPA?” I ask.

  Gran scrolls down. “Increasingly random after that, dude. More science labs. But infrastructure stuff too. Power grids. Sewage lines. The political buildings. Embassy offices, that sort of thing. Then he went into the FBI. For some reason he’s mostly left us alone. Homeland Security, though, man. He loved them up almost as much as he did DARPA.”

  Homeland Security? Why on earth would Clyde be curious about them?

  “Random,” I say. But… I look at the list again, and I can’t quite put conviction into the word. I chew my bottom lip.

  “What is it?” Felicity asks.

  “Well…” I chew on it a second, because I don’t like it. “It could be random,” I say. “A purposeful covering of tracks. Creating something too big and messy for us to pull apart.”

  “Or?” Felicity prompts.

  I hesitate. Because I don’t want to admit it. Not to myself, not to the room, not to my memory of Clyde. But… “Or, well, he’s the king of tangents, but he’s also incredibly good at synthesizing all of those tangents. So maybe it’s not all random. Maybe it’s all related. Maybe he’s planning something terrifyingly large.”

  12

  Gran bounces up out of his chair. “See, I totally knew bringing you dudes over was the right idea. This is the good insight shit I was talking about, man.”

  He holds up his hand and aims it at Tabitha. She stares at it for a moment, and then tentatively reaches out and high fives him.

  “Nice.” Gran grins.

  And Tabitha grins back. This may be the most smile-dense day Tabitha’s had since… I cast my mind back. Since… Since she and Clyde hooked up actually.

  Wait.

  Nooo.

  I look at the two of them. And Gran is good looking.

  But…

  No. Just. No.

  I glance at Felicity. And I know she’s seen it too, because I can tell she’s trying to restrain herself from facepalming.

  But then Gran goes and ruins the relationship before it can even begin.

  “OK, dudes,” he says, “I’d love to just fire up the Clyde versions now, if that’s cool.”

  “No,” Tabitha replies so quickly there’s almost a sonic boom.

  Gran snaps his head around to look at her, eyes wide. I swear, I hear Kayla chuckle.

  Felicity leaps smoothly into the liaising breach. “Tabitha, please just shut up and cooperate. We’re done with this discussion.”

  Well, kind of smoothly.

  “No,” Tabitha repeats. “Spawn of evil mind-controlling AI. Not safe. Not cool. No.”

  “Well, to be fair,” I point out, “they were created prior to the whole, and still potentially questionable, going evil thing. They’re from an earlier psychological model.” I’m not sure if that last bit would stand up as expert testimony, but I’m pretty sure a morning TV show host would buy into it.

  “Full of bullshit. You are.” Tabitha is evidently still getting in contact with her inner morning TV show host. “Same person. Same endpoint. Inevitability.”

  But if I’m full of bullshit then so is she. “That’s determinism horse crap, I say. People are more complicated than that. It’s probabilities and environment and a thousand—”

  “Look—” Felicity says, trying to cut the argument off before it can really get going.

  She fails.

  “They’re not people!” Tabitha shrieks. Everyone stares. The red spots on Tabitha’s cheeks seem out of place in her uniform of black and white. “They’re programs. They’re code. It’s math. They go bad.”

  I try to work out if I really do disagree with her, or if my defense of the versions is misplaced loyalty for a friend I’d like to see actually tried before we all condemn him.

  From the end of the table comes an odd popping sound. I turn and look. Kayla has managed to produce bubble gum. She blows a second bubble. It pops as we all stare.

  “Feckin’ buckets of stress you lot are,” she says.

  “Look, dudes,” says Gran. “I totally realize that, you know, the whole situation is like this really heavy thing for you.” Gran is trying his best to be serious and emotionally grave. It is clearly not his comfort zone. “And the Clyde versions, man.” He shakes his head. “That’s like… so not helping. I can see. But, I mean, I don’t mean to be a dick, or ‘the man’ or anything,” which seems a hair disingenuous considering that he is with the CIA, “but from an outsider’s point of view, you are in possession of some software that could really, really help us deal with another piece of software that is making a mockery of your friend’s memory.”

  “Software?” Tabitha repeats the word.

  Gran nods. “That’s all, dudette. Ones and zeroes and all that groovy shit.”

  And, goddamn it, despite it all, Gran has managed to make the situation OK for everybody.

  Well, everybody except the Clyde versions, I suppose.

  “This room is firewalled, like, to hell and back.” Gran shrugs. “No way out. Nothing for him to grab. It’s a safe room. Cross my heart.” He performs the motion with exaggerated care.

  “Fine.” Tabitha relents, opens a bag, pulls out the versions’ laptop and slides it over. Gran taps another invisible panel in the table which opens to reveal a large number of cables. He spools one out and connects it to the laptop. A moment later, three Clydes stare at us from the massive wall-screen.

  “Hello!” says one.

  “How do?” says another.

  “You must be Agent Monk,” says the third extending a hand. Then he retracts it. “Oh, can’t shake. Silly of me.”

  “Still getting used to the disembodied thing,” the second says.

  Again the sense of things sliding headlong towards the uncanny…

  “Hello to you too, T
abby,” says the first, with a tentative smile.

  “Fuck off,” Tabitha informs the version.

  All three Clydes slump. Though what they were thinking would happen, I don’t know.

  “Feckin’ idiots,” Kayla chimes in, apparently assuming the mantle of team peanut gallery for good now.

  “Could we just…” Felicity starts, but then just shakes her head. I don’t think we’re quite living up to her hopes.

  “Dudes,” Gran says by way of introduction. “Not sure if your software is totally calibrated to our synthetics interface protocol.”

  The Clydes look at each other with varying degrees of confusion.

  “Come again?” says one.

  “No worries.” Gran smiles. “We’ll download a copy to your reference database. Peruse that and this whole tête-a-tête thing will be smooth as an Olympic swimmer’s legs.”

  “Erm… OK,” says one Clyde. “Sure this will all make sense at some point.”

  “Righteous,” Gran nods.

  One Clyde looks at me with something like panic on his face. I have no idea if it is a genuine emotion or just a simulation of one. Still, this does seem an odd way for Gran to have started this conversation.

  Gran keeps talking. “We’re also going to provide you access to a whole ton of classified material perused by the software program known as Clyde 2.0,” he says. “You’ll be, like, running a standard pattern recognition search through them. We’re looking for, like, anything scoring a six or higher. Interim report when you hit the fifty percent mark. Groovy?”

  Two of the Clydes look at each other. “You know,” one whispers to the other, “TV sitcoms led me to believe I would find it easier to understand Americans.”

  “This is all going to make sense once we read the protocol document, right?” says the third.

  “Don’t mean to be nit-picky about this whole interfacing thing,” says the one who whispered. “Not that picking nits seems like a terrible thing, of course. Keeps gorillas and the whole primate class relatively clean as I understand it. At least that’s what David Attenborough tells me, and he’s not known for being a big fat liar. But anyway, assuming negative connotations apply to the act—not aiming for those. But that said, and albeit us having only known each other for about forty-five seconds, is there any chance we can dispense with the whole standard protocol, which is a tad confusing, and explain all this to me in words of a limited syllabic number, and possibly with diagrams?”

  Gran opens his mouth.

  “Shut up,” Tabitha says to the versions before Gran can say anything. Then she leans over to Gran. “Interface protocol I’ve been using. Mostly.”

  All three Clydes lean forward peering close to the screen. Their noses distort as if approaching a fish-eye lens. They eye Gran suspiciously.

  If they just shouted, “I don’t like you,” they could not be more obvious.

  Felicity cannot suppress her sigh.

  I should probably say something, defuse the situation. Except, I’m not completely sure where my sympathies lie. Perhaps treating the versions like software is for the best. Stop us confusing them with… with Clyde. Real Clyde.

  Nobody says anything.

  “Fine then,” says one Clyde, sagging back from the screen and collapsing in an easy chair. “We’ll be happy to give the protocol a good old-fashioned perusing.” A stack of documents appears out of nowhere next to him. He picks it up and starts reading.

  “Groovy,” Gran says. “All settled then.”

  JUST BEFORE JET-LAG WINS

  The CIA put us up in a rather nice hotel a little north of Times Square. Night falls but the sheer density of nearby neon and LCD denies it, keeps the world stuck in a permanent twilight.

  Felicity and I share a room, proving that the CIA files on us are remarkably thorough. I don’t exactly object to the sleeping arrangements, but I am slightly worried that Gran has read an “Arthur Wallace inserts tab A into slot B” version of my relationship with my boss.

  Bags unpacked, I collapse on the bed. Felicity sits next to me. With one hand she plays with my hair.

  “Well,” she says, “the hotel part is going better than expected anyway.”

  I smile, reach up to the hand in my hair and squeeze it. “Tabitha and Kayla not behaving as you’d like?”

  She looks at me for a while.

  “What?” I protest my innocence.

  She shakes her head. “You did good, Arthur,” she says eventually. “Well… better than them.”

  Which is not exactly the most enthusiastic praise.

  “I think Gran likes them,” I say. “Actually if you’re going to worry about anything I’d worry about him liking Tabitha a little too much.”

  And that does make her smile. “I don’t think he’s up to the challenge,” she says.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Worse decisions have been made on the rebound.”

  Felicity nods. “Well, that’s true.”

  I furrow my brow. “That sounds like personal experience.”

  She shakes her head. “I suspect you don’t want to know.”

  Felicity Shaw is an insightful woman.

  I sit up, wrap an arm around her. “We save the world,” I say. “It’s what we do. MI37 won’t let you down.” I kiss her. “Scout’s honor.”

  She eyes me. “Were you ever even a boy scout?”

  “Two years in the cubs,” I offer.

  Another smile, but a thinner one. “You’re skating by on a technicality.”

  I shrug. “It’s worked so far.”

  The smile rallies momentarily then slips altogether. Felicity bites at her lower lip. “We will make it work here,” she says. “We have to. I am not going back to the way things were. I am not.”

  There’s surprising passion in her voice. This means a lot to her. MI37 means a lot to her. Not just me and her. There is something about the institution itself that is integrally woven into the fabric of her. And I am reminded again of the idea that I don’t even know that much of her history with the institution.

  “How did you get started with MI37?” I ask her, leaning my head against her shoulder.

  “What?” She leans away, unceremoniously dumping my head so she can get a better look at me.

  I shrug. “I don’t know. So much of what we do is about the now, about responding to the immediate threat. I want to know you better. MI37 is under your skin. How did it get there?”

  She looks defensive, searching for the criticism.

  “I think it’s sweet,” I protest. “I just want to understand it.”

  She hesitates a moment, and then finally says, “It was because of my sister.” A look of sorrow crosses her face.

  “You don’t ever talk about her,” I say. I’ve only heard of her sister once before, and that wasn’t from Felicity but Kayla.

  Felicity looks away. “It was a long time ago.”

  She doesn’t want to talk about it. That much is obvious, and maybe if I was really going to do the thoughtful boyfriend thing properly I would back off, but this feels important, some critical part of her I should know. “What happened?”

  Another hesitation. A working of the jaw. “She was called Joy,” she says eventually.

  Joy and Felicity. I nod, encouraging her to go on.

  “We were twins,” Felicity says eventually. “Not, you know, all these in vitro fraternal twins you see nowadays. We were identical.” A slight smile. “The boys used to double take when we walked across the bar.”

  And that I can believe.

  “She was always more academically inclined than me. Read more. Remembered more. Some twins… it’s like they’re the same person, really. But that wasn’t us. More…” She hesitates again, looks at me, as if checking to see if I’m worthy of this, but I must pass the test because she carries on. “More like two halves of one person. At least that’s how it always felt to me. She did the books, I did the sports. That sort of thing.

  “But, well, that sort of thing
has repercussions, doesn’t it? And you don’t see it when you’re young. But then university looms, and you realize that being captain of the hockey team, or the tennis team, that isn’t going to get you into the same university as actual good grades, and that someone you thought was integral to you is on a different trajectory altogether.”

  She stops, licks her lips. “So Joy went off to Imperial College, and I was just scrambling for anything close by. I ended up at the University of Westminster, which I wouldn’t say anything against. Not at all. It was just…”

  Felicity reaches up to her eye and flicks errant dampness away.

  “I’d always thought I was the strong one, you know? Because I was in better physical shape than Joy was. It was foolish really. Somehow thinking physical strength equated to mental…” She shakes her head. “I was over visiting Joy at Imperial all the time. I had more friends there than at Westminster. I think some of them thought I actually went to Imperial.” She smiles at the memory. “We made it work. Joy did. She was…” But she trails off. That thought, it seems, is not for me.

  “Anyway, in her second year she started dating this boy, Mark.” Some tremor of emotion runs through her face at the name but it’s gone too quickly for me to identify it. “He was older. A post-grad student. He…” She licks her lips. “He,” she starts again, falters. She looks up at me.

  “He was writing a thesis about some early English occult texts.”

  Oh. Oh dear. And I suppose I knew that Joy Shaw wasn’t going to make it out of the story alive. But… Jesus. Her boyfriend.

  Felicity shakes her head. “I don’t blame him,” she says. “Not anymore. He didn’t know. It was all theory and bullshit to him. Just some old beliefs. A little foolishness. But he found things… texts. They led him to groups. To people who knew things that weren’t just theory and bullshit.”

  She grimaces. I reach out and squeeze her hand. Her fingers feel cold and hard.

  “Joy got scared,” she says. “And I was so eager to be the hero. To be the strong one again. I’d been taking jujitsu classes since I was twelve and she thought, well… Mark wasn’t exactly the athletic type. Joy thought I could help him.