Reality 36 (24 page)

  The office was small, a reception area equipped with a holographic receptionist, and a sheathed AI One on security which did not come out of its closet for Otto's visit. There was a conference room out back and not much else. All the important workings of their agency were back in New London.

  The extra business such places generated was useful, but the main function of the offices was their attached garages. Otto went up to a plain diamond-weave door, hidden at the back of the premises, submitting himself to the usual scans before it opened and allowed him access to the garage's staircase.

  Richards referred to the garages as walk-in wardrobes, and for him that was the case. They contained multiple sheaths for him to inhabit and a rack of his favoured attire of hat, trenchcoat and suit. Richards & Klein, Inc, Security Consultants, had twenty-three such installations around the globe. In form they varied greatly. In the relative peace of the northern world they were overt, with offices where Richards could meet clients by pinging himself over from the main branch in the Londons. In the most dangerous of places they were little more than hidden weapons caches with a secure Gridpipe and a couple of heavy-duty sheaths.

  In LA, the stores were extensive: a single large foamcrete room, weapons and sheaths neatly racked on the walls, lockers of equipment lining one side. An airbike and a groundcar were parked in the middle on hydraulic rams. Keeping all this stuff licensed was a nightmare, but that was Richards' job. Otto got to buy the weapons. It was a good arrangement.

  Otto had not been permitted to bring arms on the stratoliner from the UK, so he picked out a clutch of EMP grenades, a flechette railgun, a grenade launcher, one of his favoured Hechler caseless 9mm pistols, a bunch of ammunition, a heavy-duty nanoBabbage laptop – slow compared to optic computers, but immune to EMP – and a change of clothes. He put it all in the boot of the groundcar and signed it out. He got into the car and activated the ram. The ceiling door slid open and the ram took him out into the bottom of a multi-storey carpark. He drove past a preserved nodding donkey, a relic of oil-age LA, its concealing wall replaced by glass and a plaque. He drove through the car park, turned off onto Wilshire and set off toward Valdaire's house.

  Valdaire's place was a small duplex hidden amid thousands of others, nothing showy, but the neighbourhood was a relatively good one, away from the refugee camps and gang wars of the south. In the main LA had fared better than London; there had been no bomb, for a start. A few key areas were underwater, Long Beach, Malibu, places like that, but the Californians hadn't had to contend with the massive increase in rainfall the UK had seen and the swollen rivers that had brought. It was a little cloudier, a little wetter, cyclones were a yearly occurrence, but the winds were brief and most of the rain hit the coastal ranges and the Rockies. LA also did not have to contend with the storm surges that broke onto London with the regularity of waves on a beach. A few lengthy dykes safeguarded much of Los Angeles. Besides the seaward walls, and few score arcologies, it hadn't changed that much in the last hundred years. If the Big One ever hit, the cities might be on a more even footing disruption-wise, but it had not yet.

  Valdaire's flatmate knew very little; Otto could tell that from the moment she opened the door and began to complain about being interviewed three times by the cops. He watched her face in IR as they talked, but his near-I could find no evidence of untruth either in her thermal signature or vocal patterns.

  Jones and Valdaire did not get on well, having being placed together by the UCLA's governing Class Six, supposedly for maximal benefit of each other's personality traits. Valdaire was focused, intense and obsessed about her fitness, Jones told Otto, though Otto dialled down "obsessed" in his mind to merely "concerned". Letitia was big, the kind of big that thinks walking across the room to pick up a twinkie is "obsessed with fitness". The flatshare was a typical odd-couple set-up of the kind the dippy AIs loved. They rarely worked. It was clear Letitia hated Valdaire, and the feeling was probably mutual.

  Otto got a picture of a career-driven woman whose only concessions to frivolity were her dancing and her near-I PA Chloe. Chloe was a life-companion, incepted at the birth of a child, in her case when she'd immigrated to Canada, designed to grow alongside them as pet, confidante and playmate. A lot of kids tired of them by the time they hit their tweens. That Valdaire still had hers did not surprise Otto; it all tallied with her psych and gene profiles. Driven people find it hard to make human connections. Valdaire had been an outcast at school, a rebellious student, then a soldier.

  Some things never changed.

  Otto could have learnt all of this from the files, or the Grid, or he could have gone there virtually and never have left the Londons. But there was no substitute for being in the scene, no digital intermediary to lessen the immediacy. Otto was oldfashioned that way.

  He drove across skypasses crossing the Long Beach lagoon then north to UCLA's Computer Sciences campus up in the Chino hills, a twenty-storey, quake-proofed needle. It looked out over the tawny city, the sea a blue promise in the distance.

  Otto called the VIA when he reached the AI Department, finally getting through to some high-up eugene after he'd used his AllPass. Otto's near-I had some pretty good truth software, and it said the eugene was not lying when he said they'd not found Valdaire. He said he'd been surprised at Qifang's death, but that their case had closed when he'd died. This also appeared true, but Otto's near-I was only so good, and eugenes were past being human, so he took his statements with a large truckload of salt. The eugene hung up shortly afterwards.

  By the time he entered the university it was late in the day. The Six had been forewarned; it was polite but refused to speak to him on the subject of Valdaire or Qifang, pointing out that his AllPass was superseded by a VIA gagging order. He was denied access to the lab. None of the other grad students who worked with Qifang and Valdaire would be made available to him. Good day. The usual fob-off.

  Some desk monkey named Guillermo had been the last to see Valdaire. He was poorly educated, unenhanced, fat and lonely-looking. He'd let the agents in at the Six's request. No one would tell Otto what they were there for, or why they'd decided to show up a few hours after Qifang's estimated death.

  One unholy inter-agency stink was about to kick off, but that was not Otto's concern. What the VIA might have to hide was.

  Either Valdaire and Qifang had hatched some plot together and had come under the scrutiny of the VIA – and if so, it would have to be extremely serious for the agency not to acknowledge their own investigation of it – or Qifang and his assistant had stumbled on to something, and the VIA wanted to cover it up.

  Otto sat in the car and considered breaking into the building at night. Burglary here would be hard, but not impossible. He would almost certainly get caught, though, and what little he could hope to find did not justify the trouble he'd have to go to to extricate himself.

  He needed to find Valdaire, and Chloe was the key to that. She could be tracked. If someone was following her, they'd know that too, and so no doubt did Valdaire. But Otto had Richards.

  Otto put in a Gridcall to England. The new girl, Genie, answered.

  "Hiya, Otto!" she said. Fed through his mentaug, she appeared to hover over his dashboard, as a thirty-centimetre-tall woman in dressing-up-box harem wear.

  "Get me Richards," said Otto.

  "Sure thing," she said, and winked suggestively. "Putting you through."

  A square like an old cinema screen arrived in the middle of Otto's field of vision: augmented reality. Velvet curtains rose to the skirl of a Wurlitzer, a tiny homunculus playing it manically at the bottom of the vision, to reveal a grey screen. Flickering numbers played over the screen, and then Otto was looking at Richards sitting in his office, in an image running in monochrome 2D.

  "Hey," Richards said. He was dressed ridiculously, with braces and baggy trousers, his hat pushed high back on his forehead. He was speaking in a cod early-twentieth-century American accent. "Here's looking at you, kid."

  Otto sighed.

  "You have no sense of fun!" tittered Genie.

  Otto pushed a button on his dash. Genie stuck out her tongue as she faded out of the feed.

  "I got your pictures." Richards said it "pickchewers". "Dis is what I got, dese here documents." He pointed a cigarette at a scatter of paper on the desk. "Looks like some kinda key. Dey said something was missing from da lab?"

  "Yeah."

  "Hmm. Dey's got a coupla old v-jacks dere, I'll bet one o' dose is missing, sure, right?"

  "There is an information lockdown by the VIA. The LAPD did tell me there had been a theft."

  "I ain't no genius, but the v-jack is missing. So we haveta assoom she's gone into da Realms. I got my snouts out on the street, big guy, looking for that kid Chloe, we find her, we find Valdaire," he said, reaching the same conclusion as the German. "Knowing what she's got, where she's headed, will make it easy."

  "Not easy. Valdaire was a skilled InfoWar operative. She's still on the reserves list, a lot of her record is classified. That means she's good. She'll have covered her tracks."

  "Sure, sure, big guy, OK, OK, jeez, calm down. Difficult, but possible." Otto's adjutant informed him that a million of Richards' scales, configured as near-I hunter-seekers, had hooked into his mentaug. They put noses down and dispersed on to the grid, tracking Valdaire's tortuous digital trail. In return, Otto downloaded edited experiences of his trip to the Five. Richards would have preferred to peer out of his eyes, but Otto didn't like Richards to see his every move, it was far too intimate, and it distracted the AI from his own jobs. The mem-edit was a workable compromise.

  "Thanks a bunch for yours, kiddo," said Richards. "You flatfoot it after the broad, while my guys do the paperwork. Me, I'm ofta Hong Kong, see Choi."

  "Choi," said Otto.

  "The frames for the cydroid heiress been traced back to him, I learnt a few things. Remind me to teach you dem sometime. Choi'll sing like a canary, don't you worry. But there's one more thing I gotta tell ya."

  And then Richards, in infuriating mid-modern American English, outlined exactly how Otto was going to have to find Chloe.

  Otto was not happy about that at all.

  Richards smiled, and raised his hat. The curtains swung shut, and the cinema vanished.

  "Genie," Otto said. She reappeared in his field of vision, standing on the car's dashboard.

  "Yes?" she said.

  "I'll be off the Grid for a while. The VIA are looking for Valdaire. I can't rule out that whoever sent the second cydroid after the Qifangs aren't looking for her either. They will probably follow me. I've deactivated my MT. It is a risk after Tufa. If you need me, contact me the usual way. Yes?"

  Genie nodded and disappeared, leaving a trace of perfume in Otto's olfactory centre.

  "Can't tell what is real or not any more," he said sourly.

  He left the UCLA campus, went to eat, and considered his next move. Whatever happened, he was going to end up with a colossal migraine.

  Maybe sixty-three wasn't too young an age to retire.

Chapter 15

The Great Firewall of China

The Great Firewall was one of the great wonders of the Grid, and the Grid was not short on wonders. The People's Dynasty had gone to a lot of trouble with the way the Wall looked, investing time, money and processing power to create a feast for the qualia, a declaration of power and intent.

  Richards assembled a sensing presence outside the wall over the course of a day, the fastest he could bring himself there without alerting the People's Dynasty government, who watched their borders zealously. Disguised as a virtual tour group, one of thousands visiting the Wall every day, Richards pushed himself lazily along. Hour by hour he'd had bits of himself show up, each hidden within a human Grid avatar, identities swiped to construct a believable bunch of online gawkers. There was a virtual tour guide, and as each of the tourists had arrived, he'd had them go off and enjoy some of the many distractions near the Wall. Running twenty-three complex simulations at once was taxing even for Richards, and the tourists were acting a little strangely as a result. He assured himself that no one would notice, humans behaved strangely all the time online. Later they convened at a genuine guide stop of a bogus tour, where the guide gave them a particularly dull speech. Richards was proud of that touch.

  The artistic director of the Great Firewall project had taken the firewall part literally, and crafted a kilometre-high rampart of flame, with heavy towers set into it every two nominal kilometres. Pennants of varicoloured fire snapped above the battlements, inscribed with writhing patriotic slogans in all the world's living languages, and a few of the more prominent dead ones besides. Dragons flew over these, each whiskered face hiding powerful phage programmes or snatch code, primed to swoop down and sever the connections of high-class AIs like him who got too close to the wall, or drag them within to face interrogation, because the Chinese did not like independent AIs.

  The parapet was patrolled by figures from Chinese mythology, towering gods clad in bronze. Cannon mouths like railway tunnels gaped from gunloops halfway up the ramparts.

  There was one gate, tall as a hill and bound in iron, large enough, were it in the Real, to allow one of the Atlantic Wall's floating fortresses through without scraping the sides.

  The gate never opened.

  The Great Firewall was a big "fuck off" to the world's AIs. The digital borders of the People's Republic were closed by order of the People's Dynasty Government, and had been for twenty years. Bringing digital data over twenty megabytes in any format into the country was a criminal offence, punishable with serious hard time building eco-villages up in Sinosiberia. You wanted to speak to someone in China, it was easier to send a letter than an email. On paper. By mule.