Alexander Jablokov - Brain Thief (10 page)

Before he could think more about it, he turned and climbed back down the ladder.

_______

Ignacio wasn’t that
 big a guy, but his body was a tensed spring. He paced back and forth. His curly hair was trimmed perfectly around a blocky head. “I notice stuff like that, Patty girl. Answer me!”

“I just...” Patricia spoke so quietly you could barely hear her.

“What? You just what?”

“Never mind.”

“No, really. I’m curious. I’d like to know why you took off with the maintenance truck in the middle of the goddam night to come out to this miserable place. What are you moving, Patty? What are you up to?”

“I’m not up to anything.”

“Oh.” Ignacio must have been working on his “obviously fake” laugh for it to sound so implausible. “You’re smarter than that. You’re real smart. I’m starting to see how things really fit together—”

“Excuse me,” Bernal said.

The hair on the back of Ignacio’s head twitched. He turned. “You!”

“Me?”

“Right. Who the hell are you?”

“Is there a problem?”

“That’s not a name. ‘Is there a problem’ is not a name.” 

“Listen.”

“Are you telling me to listen? To what? What am I listening to here?”

“Me.”

“What?”

“You’re listening to me.” Bernal knew better than to try to sound ominous. That just wasn’t in him. So he tried for matter of fact. As long as he kept a terrified quaver out of his voice, he should be all right. “You’ve interrupted my dinner.”

“I’m sure sorry about that. Now that things are cleared up, you should probably get back in. We don’t want your food to get cold.”

“Very thoughtful.”

Bernal didn’t move.

“I said, you should—”

“She’s here working on the air conditioning.”

“And what the hell would you know about that, Mr. Sophisticated Diner?”

“I know when an HVAC crew comes in and starts clanking tanks of Freon. Kind of a pain, tell you the truth. I’m not complaining, but I know what’s going on.” Ignacio stared at him for a long moment. His face was smooth and olive colored. He was handsome, actually, the kind of guy women seemed to accept bad treatment from. He wore a black suit jacket, which Bernal pretended to himself he could identify as Armani, and a white shirt that looked similarly expensive.

“You know HVAC. Everyone knows my own shit better than I do. That’s just wild.”

“The surplus,” Patricia said, a bit louder this time. “They want to buy it here.”

“Our registered illegal toxics?” In a split second, Ignacio had gone from swollen with rage to coolly professional. Bernal didn’t relax. He could just as easily switch back. “The ones we got set up to ship?”

“Yes.”

Ignacio stalked, stiff-legged, over to the tanks, pulled a small flashlight out of his jacket, and peered down at their tags. He whistled. “Wow. This was going to cost. ..” He tilted his head up. “How much were you paying for this stuff?”

There was no sound from the roof.

“You, up there! I’m talking to you. How much is Ms. Foote here charging you?”

The seconds stretched, and Bob finally poked his head over the edge of the roof. “Five hundred a tank.”

“Five—” Ignacio was clearly startled, but recovered quickly. “You’re getting a deal, my friend. A boner fide deal.”

He looked at Patricia. “Were you going to tell me about this?”

“I wanted to see if it would fly first. They have some compressor repair work, too. Got to redo the paperwork, update the F numbers, all that, but it comes out pretty clean.”

“Good. That’s real good. If I see it juicing the bottom line, I might overlook a few things, right? And, for heaven’s sake, can’t you use the electromagnets to attach them to the undercarriage, like you’re supposed to? Don’t want to be caught with shit like that.”

“You’re right. Thank you.”

Ignacio grinned, suddenly relaxed, moving fluidly, his hands hanging loose at his sides. “Matter of fact, there’s a little reward in it for you right now, you hurry your ass back to the yard. You up?”

“I’m up.”

“Let’s make that trailer swing, girl. See you there.” He turned to Bernal and gave him a wink. “Got to keep the staff happy. It’s a full-time job.”

Bernal watched Patricia’s taillights as she left the parking lot, followed a moment later by Ignacio’s.

“You want some more fries?” Bob was at his shoulder. “I got a lot left over. They’re on the house.”

“Some other time, thanks.”

Bernal checked the address again, but it was right. Social Protection’s northeastern regional headquarters really was in a cinder-block building in an industrial area on the east side of Cheriton. The access road was entirely generations of temporary hot patches, with no trace of the original roadway, and most of the other buildings were either shuttered or housed startups trying to get in touch with the area’s last economic heyday, which had been some time in the 1950s.

Charis, dressed in painter’s pants and a worn jean jacket, poured concrete into a hole in the ground. Below her, a toppled chain-link fence straggled down a slope to a drainage ditch. Charis had already levered out the old concrete anchors. Poles and a new coil of fencing lay next to her Hummer. It was still early, but she had clearly been busy for some time.

“What the hell are you doing here?” she said, as he got out of his van.

“What about, ‘Hey, good morning’? We went through shared danger last night. Isn’t that supposed to be a bonding experience?”

“I’ve got nothing for you, Bernal.” She didn’t sound angry with him, just tired. “We’ve both been skunked, according to our own fashions, and we should just cut our losses. We’re no good for each other.”

“I need to talk to you. I have to find Muriel.”

She said something he didn’t hear.

“What?”

“I said, you’re pretty sure she wants to be found!”

“Of course, I’m .. . what are you getting at?”

“I’m getting at a missing AI researcher, a missing funder, and a remote-controlled decoy that almost killed us both.”

They must have looked pretty funny, he thought: a skinny vaguely Asian guy facing off against a gigantic vaguely Afro/Hispanic/West Asian woman, both with' poorly kept hair. He was still suspicious of her motives, but she knew things that could be useful to him.

“I can help you true that, if you let me.” He got out of his car. “I worked for my uncle’s yard company a few summers. We did a lot of fences. What happened, by the way?”

“What happened? The usual shit happened. I’m a terrorist, you ever hear that? A lunatic who wants to drag humanity back to the Stone Age. Aside from the stupid-ass e-mails I get every day, people key my car, mail me dog shit, fun stuff like that. And, last night, in addition to trying to blow me up, someone came in here and knocked over my fence. The landlord will be on the rampage if I don’t get it fixed.”

Bernal looked down at the fallen fence. Something had hit the center pole, bending it almost double, and then pulled the rest of the fence right off its supports. A Bobcat lay on its side in the drainage ditch. Looked like someone had gotten it started and used it as a battering ram.

She didn’t say anything else, but she didn’t stop him from helping her, either. She was strong, stronger than he was, but she had a casual attitude toward fenceposts. They had to do more than look straight—they had to be straight. The previous fence had not been the best quality, so perhaps her standards had been encouraged to slip. He measured carefully. Maybe the next fence could hold back a rampaging Bobcat.

“At one time I worked in cognitive research,” Bernal said. “And I have to admit, I’ve never heard of Social Protection.”

“Yeah, we’ve had some positioning problems. You know, your messaging goes too far one way, you’re a homicidal terrorist, the other, just an ineffective viewer-with-alarm. We hired a marketing consultant, she charged us a lot, designed a logo, wrote a few press releases no one picked up, and cashed her check.”

“I searched for your name.” All he’d had to go on was the logo on her travel map, but he’d finally found it.

“I hope that was informative.”

“Informative. Sure. I found some kind of retro ska band, a homelessness advocacy organization, a dance club, a homemade deodorant, some kind of pyramid scheme where you sell home-security equipment to homeowners, a designer condom, and a dog-walking service. The dog-walking service had by far the best-designed Web site, by the way. Some nice Flash animations about proper leash technique.”

“We neglected to trademark our name. Those lawyers have been fired.”

“When I tried to tie Social Protection down to artificial intelligence, it didn’t help. First of all, a lot of the same sites showed up. I guess modern home-security apparatus has a substantial AI component, homeless people benefit by communicating with AIs, the band has a song called ‘Artie’s Fishing Intelligence.’ ”

“Maybe we should fire our search engine optimization guys too.”

“Charis,” he said, “I don’t have any reason to like or trust you. But I need to figure some things out.”

She wiped her wide forehead with a bandanna. “Let’s get some food. You may be a weenie, but you’ve earned it.”

“Gee, thanks.”

The office space was as bleak as the exterior: a couple of gray partitions that looked like they came from an Air Force base circa 1960, metal desks and heavy filing cabinets ditto, a Ridgid Tool calendar from three years before, showing a woman in a yellow bikini posing with a pipe wrench, and a wall sign that said SOCIAL
 PROTECTION: DELAYING THE SINGULARITY SINCE 2005.
 Coffee rings patterned the top of the minifridge in the food area. She tossed two frozen burritos into the microwave.

“You don’t have to tell me that the office could use a little sprucing up. In movies your basic organizational HQ has gleaming $200 per-square-foot office space, with Herman Miller furniture and a carpet that requires weekly cleaning, not a toxic-oil-soaked square of asphalt with a cinder-block shed on it. What can I say? The donations aren’t exactly rolling in.”

There was no sign that anyone else used the office, though there were three desks, two of which had fast-food containers in their wastebaskets.

“I looked you up, too.” Charis shook crumbs off a paper plate and dropped Bernal’s burrito on it. “That was hard luck, getting blown up like that. Since it’s exactly that kind of thing that gives us a bad name, I’d like to hear your story.”

“What’s earned you a story?”

“Tell it to me, and I’ll tell you exactly why I’m so pissed off at this entire Hesketh deal. Then, having established why this is all a crock of shit, we’ll go our separate ways and never see each other again. There should be a couple of packets of hot sauce in the basket there . . . careful, that’s duck sauce, or some damn thing. And old too. Toss it.”

_______

“Two years ago
 I went to get the mail for my office. I was doing PhD work, data analysis. A project about cardiac outcomes that was getting canceled for public relations reasons, and I was searching around for another topic. There were a bunch of packages there: books, manuscripts, all kinds of things. There was ... I don’t know ... a leak, something. A pipe, I think. There had been some kind of exhibit in the front hall, promoting something or other. Diversity, ecological awareness, open enrollment for health plans. I don’t remember, but someone had shoved all the big mail over into a corner, right under the drip from the pipe. The addresses were all smeared. I hauled the stuff in.”

Charis just sat next to him and listened.

“I was expecting a book on fake Minoan relics. Pulling a signal out of noise is .. . was .. . part of what I did. I’d read that many things we think of as coming from ancient Crete were actually forgeries made to reassure ourselves that Arthur Evans’s Knossos was the real deal. Edwardian design with bare breasts, clearly the best of all worlds. I was eager to see how archeologists distinguished the signal from the noise. So I didn’t look at the label carefully and opened the package. I clearly had my own problems with signal and noise. It detonated. Semtex.” 

“My God.” She looked at him. “It’s amazing. I think whatever happened to you yesterday did worse damage. I mean, before that decoy exploded.”

“Cast-iron doggie doorstop. Another story. But, yeah. I came out of it pretty well. Good plastic surgery. I get headaches sometimes. All my fingers work.”

“If it had been Caspar Nordhoff, everyone’s favorite anti-AI activist, there would have been a manuscript. That was his MO. Back in the day, sitting in his asphalt shack, he could churn out ten thousand words a day on that Smith Corona upright, with the ribbon he managed to buy in a thrift store in North Platte. They found all  that stuff in his fawlty in the Sand Hills. He has to write by hand now, fountain pen on copy paper. When they let him have it. But it wasn’t Nordhoff.”

“Why are you so sure of that?”

“As it happens, Nordhoff contacted Social Protection. Wanted to work together.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Are you crazy? Because he sure was. We’re a real organization, Bernal, not a bunch of nutcases. Nordhoff was nothing but bad news. After that, we kept an eye on him. I know every case, every attempt, how much he spent on postage, how many cans of Indian pudding he had on the shelves when he got arrested.”

“How many?”

“Thirteen. He got them delivered from Massachusetts. He was from Ohio, but I guess he picked up the taste for classic New England cuisine while he was at MIT. The stupid stuff’s easy enough to make, cornmeal, molasses, heat it up in a saucepan, that’s about it, but he was too busy setting the world straight to cook.” She I paused. “So who had it in for you?”

One of Caspar Nordhoff’s characteristics had been that he never attacked anyone famous. No Minskys, no Moravecs. His reading of cognitive science research had been deep and extensive, and he had proved an astute and perceptive critic of the field. He never tried to murder anyone who wasn’t a genuine contributor to the intellectual dialogue. He picked, unerringly, only those researchers whose colleagues were in awe of them, brilliant men and women who would someday transform the field but were not yet widely known. Most of his victims had been young, although one had been a former Fidelity fund manager who turned his mathematical skills to the human mind after his retirement.