Neurolink (3 page)

“LET’S
get something straight, son.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“But, Dominic, you are my son. Didn’t I raise you from an infant? You’re my boy,” said the gray box on the desk.

Dominic’s nostrils flared. Despite his determination not to react, he tugged at his collar.

His father had died three weeks ago. Richter Jedes, master banker, dead from a ruptured spleen. Newscasters called it “inconceivable!” Pundits declared the end of an era. When the bank’s share value slipped, the board rushed to name Dominic president. Continuity of leadership, they proclaimed. Still, the stock price wobbled.

This morning, his father’s office felt hot and close. With deliberate calm, he slipped a cybernail onto his right index finger and tested its sharp stylus point with his thumb. Then he whispered a command to the Net node on his wrist. A cluster of holograms shimmered above his forearm, and he ticked through them with the cybernail, closing some, linking to others, hoping the news had changed. He was stalling. He couldn’t face the gray box perched on his father’s desk.

“Do you still feel some quarrel between us?” the Neural Profile asked. “We’re partners, boy. We have to forget our differences.”

Dominic wanted to crush the gray box in his hands. Partners? With an artificial brain masquerading as his father? A vein pulsed visibly in his forehead. He stared out the window at the smog. June. Start of the scorching season.

After his father died, Dominic had cloistered himself in his home office, spending hours in video conference, spinning positive news bytes to stock analysts and mediacasters. He slept in fits and ate too much and let Elsa camouflage the shadows under his eyes with rosy makeup. Karel fed him caffie and throat spray so he could keep talking, and slowly, the bank’s stock regained its value. A business crisis he could manage, but what he couldn’t control was the hollow rage that burned inside him now.

“Think what a team we’ll make!” said the NP.

Dominic jammed his fists deep in his pockets and twisted the linings. For three weeks, he had not set foot in his father’s office, the office the gray box had commandeered. Not until this morning.

But this morning! This morning, everything changed. Events broke in and demolished his careful damage control. One idiotic mistake. Such a trivial thing. He must have been blind not to see what it meant. All he wanted was to close his eyes and pretend it had never happened. But this morning, his blunder was flashing across the Net, and his name headlined every news page. Worse, ZahlenBank’s stock price had veered from recovery to free fall. He was mortified. His only relief was that Richter hadn’t lived to see it. As he stood in his father’s office, the very air smelled bankrupt.

“You need my help to fix this.” The NP spoke in such a perfect reproduction of Richter’s voice that Dominic almost shivered. “You can’t afford to turn your back on me, son. This is too big.”

A grimy plume of soot gusted against the window at eye level. Dominic watched it eddy in a slow spiral and dissolve into the ochre atmosphere.

“We’re execs,” the NP continued. “We haven’t always agreed about things, but we’re duty-bound to protect the bank. It’s our sacred trust. Without ZahlenBank, this shit-heap planet would fall apart.”

Dominic tapped the window with his cybernail. He didn’t often think about his steamy, overcrowded planet. He preferred not to dwell on the 12 billion people crowded in underground warrens to escape Earth’s foul atmosphere. And he avoided noticing how they moved closer to the poles every year because global warming had turned the tropics to cauldrons. But now, images of queues came to his mind unbidden. Down in the grim lower levels of Trondheim, hundreds of thousands of protes jammed the tunnels each day, patiently waiting for rations of food, uniforms and antiviral tabs. ZahlenBank’s cameras watched them and recorded their words. And nothing else held them in line but their habit of following rules.

The genie in the gray box spoke in a confiding whisper. “We’re on the edge, son. Things could fall apart.”

“I know,” Dominic said.

“Son, it’s a noble thing we do. The protes need us. Can you conceive the total fucking horror if we left them to themselves? Looting, plague, starvation—cannibalism for all we know.”

Dominic leaned his forehead against the window and imagined he could feel heat seeping in from the greenhouse clouds outside. But that was an illusion. The glass was too thick.

“ZahlenBank’s the heart, son. We pump the money and data through the Net. We fuel the markets, and the markets feed everyone.” The NP paused for effect, exactly the way Richter would have done. “We can’t let ZahlenBank collapse. We have an obligation.”

“Yes, F—” Dominic almost said father.

“We have to fix your fuck-up.”

Dominic’s breath fogged the window. “The
Benthica
.”

“The
Benthica
” echoed the NP.

The vein in Dominic’s forehead throbbed again. Almost as a joke, he had suggested that spin-off. One rusty mining submarine. Two thousand protes. Cut them loose, and let them fend for themselves. Save the relocation expense. A careless joke, yet it pleased his dying father. The board cast its vote, and in the muddled days that followed, Dominic arranged the spin-off with little further thought It was a piece of minutia on a foreclosure sheet. Who could predict it would cause such an uproar?

Thirteen days ago, the
Benthica
vanished from their satellite scans, and for the last seventeen hours, the freed miners had been broadcasting a message inviting employees around the world to run away and join them. Their signal ricocheted back and forth through so many intermediate servers and reproduced itself in so many echoes and harmonic reiterations that no one could trace its source. But every prote in the northern hemisphere could pick it up on the Net. And the markets were panicking.

Dominic leaned against the window and ground his teeth. He should have modeled the probabilities and run a projection. He should have foreseen the incompetence of those protes. They wanted to turn the fragile order upside down.

Their invitation was nonsense. Those miners had no extra room aboard their ship to accommodate strangers, much less food or air. What’s more, they didn’t dare give away their location. Without coordinates, other protes would never find one small submarine hidden deep in the Arctic Sea. So far, for some inexplicable reason, ZahlenBank’s own satellites couldn’t find it. Still, a trickle of employees had begun to desert, and late last night the World Trade Organization filed suit against ZahlenBank for destabilizing the markets. Dominic’s mistake might have given the Orgs the wedge they needed to break ZahlenBank apart.

Early this morning, as expected, the Orgs tendered a settlement offer. Their only goal, so they claimed, was to restore market order, and if ZahlenBank would cooperate, they would drop the suit. The deal was, Dominic Jedes had to personally board the ship and negotiate a secret resolution with the miners.

“We’ll have to accept the WTO’s offer,” the NP said.

Dominic stared at the box. “Are you serious? Make a secret deal with protes? It’s a charade.”

“Of course it’s a charade. We’ll never bargain with protes. Give ’em a millimeter, they’ll want a scuzzin’ light-year. Just the thought of it gives me a migraine.” r Dominic moved away from the window and straightened his jacket. “I can’t figure the Orgs. Why the secrecy? And why do they want me personally involved?”

“You’re the best damn negotiator in the world, boy!”

“I don’t buy that reason.” Dominic brushed at his sleeve and frowned.

“Their agenda’s always the same. They wanna screw us!” said the NP. “The point is, they’ll lead us to the
Benthica
. We have to find that ship and stop the broadcast before it sends the markets over a cliff.”

Dominic scowled. “Why won’t they make a public announcement? The secrecy bothers me. They expect me to travel incognito.”

“Son, you’re not exactly a hero with these miners. Maybe the Orgs want to protect you from attack.”

Dominic thought this over, unconsciously working his jaw.

“I’ll be with you every second,” the NP went on. “Just play dumb and let them lead you to the
Benthica
. Then smash the miners’ Net link and kill that broadcast. I’ll send bank guards to get you out. You’ll be home in a few hours.”

“We’ll have to arrest the miners,” Dominic said thoughtfully. “Otherwise, they might find a way to start broadcasting again.”

“Sure. We’ll arrest the buggers.”

Dominic had studied the Orgs’ lawsuit backwards and forwards. What the NP said made sense. He rubbed his chin and frowned. “Arresting two thousand people will be expensive. But it’s a solution. Once that broadcast ends, the Orgs have no grounds to sue us.”

“Fuckin’ right.” The NP chuckled. “I’ll handle the intel. You do the physical stuff.”

Dominic closed his fists. “I see. You’re the brains. I’m the muscle.”

“Imagine how powerful we’ll be, once this little screwup’s behind us,” said the gray box. “We’ll lead the Orgs in circles. They’re just computers. Whereas we, we’ve got a one-two combination. Megagenius, plus hairy human balls! Son, there’s never been a partnership like ours before.”

Dominic glared at the gray box and held himself very, very still. Partners? You want me to be your flesh flunky! He didn’t say the words aloud. Only his jaw moved, just perceptibly, from side to side. If the NP had spoken at mat moment, Dominic might have shattered that box with his fist.

But the genie wasn’t in the box anymore. No fist could hurt it now. Dominic stepped across the thick, silent carpet and hefted the gray box in his palm. It felt light. He studied the embossed trademark, Z for ZahlenBank. This box was merely packaging. Richter had designed his Neural Profile to live inside the Ark, the bank’s huge data-warehouse. But surprise, Richter’s NP didn’t follow orders.

Seventy hours after Richter’s death, the NP migrated beyond the Ark and dispersed itself throughout the Net, then hotlinked into the bank’s surveillance web and started learning. An archive copy of the world wasn’t good enough. It wanted the original. Now it leeched power and computational time from countless processors around the northern hemisphere, and it seemed to be everywhere at once, watching and listening to everyone. When it named itself ZahlenBank’s chairman, the directors were too stunned to object. Its omniscience had them terrorized. But the digital genie was incomplete. Dominic realized it needed a set of arms and legs to “do the physical stuff.”

He shivered with muscle tension as he set the box gently back on its pedestal. “If you’re such a megagenius, why can’t you find the
Benthica
on your own?”

“It’s not that simple!” The NP sounded offended. “I’m running my best defogger code, but their signal loops back on itself more times than a tax shelter. The protes are using damned slick tech. How did they get it, I’d like to know. And why aren’t they dead?”

Dominic wondered that himself. The miners hadn’t received supplies for almost three weeks. Maybe they’d stashed food aboard, but as of five days ago, they should have run out of fuel. Without fuel, they couldn’t synthesize air and water from the ocean fluids. Their life support should have failed yesterday at noon. Those miners shouldn’t be alive, much less broadcasting a signal that even ZahlenBank couldn’t trace.

“Team up with me, son. We’ll settle this mess, then everything’ll be back to normal.”

Dominic ran a finger inside his collar. “Send a robot. I’m nobody’s errand boy.”

“As for the rewards,” the NP continued as if it hadn’t heard, “you get everything. What do I need with money? You already have my penthouse, my race cars, all my stuff. You’re one of the ten richest men in the world. But you could lose it, son, if we don’t handle this
Benthica
situation.”

“Very altruistic. Not a single reward for you?” Dominic massaged the knotted muscles in his neck. “Not, for instance, total control of the bank?”

“You’ve turned cynical, Dominic. I’m chairman, but you’re still president. You need ZahlenBank as much as I do. You’re a deal maker, and the bank lets you do the one thing you love.”

The NP’s exact imitation of his father’s tone made Dominic want to kick the desk over. But he held every muscle still. That was his own voice, too, the voice he shared with Richter. And it echoed his thoughts. He couldn’t deny that he loved doing deals. That was the work his father had taught him, and once it had engaged his whole mind. Lately, though, some of the negotiations troubled him, and he’d argued with Richter. Words had been spoken that he could never take back now. His eyes felt hot, and he turned away.

The small Net node on his wrist was still glowing, and its tiny luminous icons floated a few centimeters above his forearm. On impulse, he jabbed his cybernail through the holographic matrix and opened a map. A pale blue disk hovered over the back of his hand. The Arctic Ocean. Shimmering purples, blue and aquamarines indicated varying depths, and precise red stars identified factory ships, seafarms, weather stations and floating cities, their positions tracked in real time through the Net. Where had the
Benthica
gone to ground? Dominic imagined the rusty old crawler lurking under a rock.

One more time, he found the ship’s last known location and touched the spot with his cybernail. The map sector enlarged and offered a menu of data links. Dominic chose several. The submarine had been creeping along the continental shelf off northern Canada, mining common ores from placer deposits. It was exactly the sort of losing operation that drove its former owner Nord.Com into bankruptcy.

Elsa said the miners had lived on that vessel for four generations. They’d produced quite an extended family. Infants. Old people. That’s why no other Com wanted those labor contracts. Too many expensive dependents. What were those protes thinking of, to invite empty-handed runaways to join their small ship? How did their minds work, Dominic wondered. For the twentieth time, he replayed their continuous-loop broadcast. Female voice. Net English with a mongrel American accent.