Reality 36 (28 page)

  He went home.

  Richards secure-piped himself back to the office in the Wellington Arcology – a little under the speed of light when you took all the trickle and shunt into account – and remanifested himself in his fake office overlooking his fake version of ancient Chicago. He rubbed at his neck. His head felt off, splitting himself like that, and the sudden disconnection had left him disoriented. He needed a drink and a think.

  First he attended to the chip fragments from Otto and Valdaire's Grid. He'd had a bunch of tailored near-I reassembling the fragments for the last three days, and they pestered him as clerks banging on the half-glass door, yammering that they were finally done. He took the results as paper from an eager, code-generated office junior, and slumped into his chair. The chip was incomplete, but quantum traces in the reconstruction suggested Qifang had fashioned a key, one that mimicked permissions from two separate sources. As the v-jack cases at UCLA needed three signatories for opening, that was pretty straightforward. Richards had been right.

  Valdaire's trail was harder to crack. He shut his eyes and concentrated on his diffuse parts. Many of his scales had been killed, others had turned up nothing. Some, there were always some, had hit home. She'd fabricated a wide-band Grid cheater, a self-replicating machine devil, a sophisticated variant of those favoured by the Nigerian gangs, cyclically employing false IDs and actively screwing with security software. Its coding was illegal, really illegal, high-end criminal stuff empowered with cracked military cyberwarfare capsids, doubtless of Valdaire's devising. It was so illegal, in fact, that he informed Hughie by way of the million-layer EuPol bureaucracy that he had it in his possession.

  He didn't trust Hughie not to use it against him when it suited him if he kept it quiet.

  Coding like that took care and deliberation. There was no way she could have knocked it up before going on the run. Like deactivating the Six at UCLA, she'd cooked that up earlier. Intention for the v-jack robbery, or insurance? Hard to say. It was slippery as hell, and the virtualities he constructed to replicate and crack it imploded one after another, murdered by the reproduced virus. Frustrated, he persisted.

  Version 13,078 gave him a valid simulation of her blocker, self-hate protocols deactivated. From it he estimated a spread of likely anchor points it would use to plug into the Grid, and the residual code patterns it would leave on the skin of the virtual world. There was no finding Valdaire, but she'd not been able to bring herself to kill her PA.

  Chloe had copied herself off the net, fragging her main iteration and back-up in the process, copying her core programming into Valdaire's phone. She'd been careful, arguably more careful than Valdaire, but it was impossible for something like Chloe to sever all her ties with the machine world. Even weak AI needed some part of herself free floating in Grid space to unfold her and think. That's ultimately how the scales had found her. She had been expecting the tail, had spread herself thin, and was disorienting the scales with a barrage of locational information, spinning out some nasty programme of Valdaire's. Otto's adjutant couldn't tell where Chloe was on the Grid or the Real, but with the help of Richards' scales, it did narrow the phone's location down to a corner of Colorado.

  Valdaire should have destroyed Chloe. He tagged her with a couple of scales. Finding her precise location would be down to Otto now; there was no more he could do from here.

  It was a serious piece of forensic reconstruction. He was pleased with it.

  Outside, ancient Chicago rained its rain and tooted its antique groundcar horns.

  He decanted a glass of single malt that had no counterpart in the Real. He called Otto, but got no answer. Genie intercepted the call and gave Richards a non-verbal interjection that told him Otto had gone off-Grid. Richards congratulated her on her task management via the same method. For an experson, she was learning quickly.

  Never mind, Richards had made preparations for that. Otto liked to work unobserved. Richards left the codes and reconstruction data for Otto in one of the many anonymous info-drop sites they used, and sat back, dirty shoes on the scuffed leather of his desk. He took a sip of his drink.

  "Ah," he said, happily.

  Real or not, Richards liked his whisky.

Chapter 18

Colorado

Otto gridded the area on a map, did it the old way, asking place to place. Photo; "Have you seen this woman?" Frowns, shakes of the head, no recognition. On to the next drugstore, the next truckstop, the next one-street town, everything face-to-face. He drove roads that led from from verdant peaks to humid lowlands that remained deserts only in name. Temperatures went from hot to hotter as he went up then down, again and again, over the wrinkles of the Rockies. He didn't know how to dress; the climate control of the groundcar struggled. The terrain was too treacherous for turbofan aircars, dangerous thermals came off the mountains, too many storms blew in off the distant Pacific. The only aircraft Otto saw were fixed wings, blimps and quaint rotary copters far off, navigation lights flashing against the angry skies, hurrying against the threat of the weather. The local radio carried crash stories in every county.

  He stopped at a charge station high in the mountains, isolated on the road, trees for company. The valley where the charge station stood was precipitous and shaded for much of the day, so its solar cells glinted brash in the afternoon sunlight on the slopes above, thick cables curving lazily from pylon to pylon down to the cabin-store by the carriageway.

  Otto pulled up, the wheels of the groundcar crunching on forecourt gravel. The whisper of the engine died off, then nothing but birdsong and the wind in the trees. He yawned. He rotated his shoulder and grimaced. The pain was insistent. He had his healthtech dull it to a low discomfort.

  The air was clean, damp with the morning rain; sharp with old pines and the quick sap of the broadleaves challenging them. For a moment, he relaxed. Nature calmed him, the smell of the green and the rain and the rustle of growing things, not a machine in sight.

  He could sleep here. He probably should.

  He scooped the photograph off the dashboard, and got out.

"Her, yeah, sure, came in about a month back. Bought a lot of sugar." The attendant was oily, greasy hair, grubby rock T-shirt whose logo had stopped working. There were a number of run-down vehicles out back. This guy was a one-man show, mechanic and till attendant in one. There were no traces of anyone else. A loner.

  "Sugar?"

  "Yeah, sugar. You know, for your coffee. And two big bags of salt."

  "Are you sure?"

  "Salt, like that," he pointed to a row of sacks. "Yes. I'm sure," he said defensively. "Not many people like her come up here. Salt's for the hunters, some like to preserve their kills the old way."

  "Quirkies."

  "Sorry?"

  "Quirkies. Those trying to live pre-industrial lives."

  "Right, quirkies, huh? That what you call them in…"

  "Europe."

  "Yeah. OK. They're kind of like that, like your quirkies. I sell them that amount, and more; of salt, I mean. But not women like her, not usually. She was a city lady, all right. Say, where're you from?" He smiled. "Europe's a big place."

  "I am German."

  "And…" – a wave round Otto's body.

  "I am a cyborg."

  "Military, huh?"

  "Ex."

  "I was service myself, once, long time ago. US Army." The attendant stood a little taller. "But you guys, man. I seen some things but cyborgs rocketing in? That beats it all."

  "We do not use that insertion method in our army," said Otto flatly. The attendant was not to be discouraged.

  "Hell, but we're all on the same side. You in Brazil?"

  "Yes."

  "Hell of a place."

  Otto tapped the photograph. The creased paper used the kinetic energy to run through four seconds of footage, Valdaire dolled up, wineglass in hand, laughing, a happy night out. "Her. Do you know where I can find her?"

  "Lot of cabins round here, lots of off-the-Grid types." The attendant jutted his chin out the window and hooked his thumbs into his belt. "Hey, man, you want to be careful, there's some serious crazies up here. Some of them been waiting for the end of the world for fifty years, their folks a hundred years before them."

  Otto nodded. Maybe they wouldn't have to wait long. He was in the mood for a fight. "I can take care of myself."

  "Yeah, I s'pose so."

  "If you were her, where would you go to avoid such encounters?"

  The man ran his fingers through his dirty beard. "Let me think… You know, I'm sure she said she was heading out Flagstaff way."

  In that case she was probably going the opposite direction. "What lies in the opposite direction?" he asked.

  "Not much till you hit Phoenix if you head off route 17. Payson and Showlow if you follow 270 to the east through the parks."

  "Anything near here? To the west, up in the forest?"

  "Nothing. The lake, the falls down there in the valley," he shrugged. "Nothing. Just trees and nature, man, the way I like it, y'know?"

  Otto did not speak. His lack of warmth was bothering the attendant. His smile faded. "You're hiding something," he asked.

  "What?" said the attendant. His cheeks coloured.

  "What did she do?"

  "Hey, man! She came in, she bought stuff, she paid, she left. No biggy."

  Otto pressured the man to let him see the store records. He resisted. The AllPass swung it. "A cop," the man muttered, cowed and unfriendly. Otto pulled his files; the attendant had a record, not the first ex-soldier to have run-ins with the law.

  Valdaire was not on the store logs. Her smartcard or phone had presented a false identity at the behest of the blocker, one that would have been changed immediately the transaction had been completed and smothered with false leads. A faint trace, no good, dead end.

  Still Otto's near-I adjutant indicated the man was prevaricating: high heartrate, pheromones off, perspiration up, pupils too big. Not an outright lie, a lie of omission. "What else?" demanded Otto.

  The attendant backed away for a moment, looked like he was considering reaching for something, a weapon maybe, then looked into Otto's stony face and thought better of it. The man's eyes darted left to right. "Look, man, I watched her, OK? Just for a while. I didn't mean no harm by it. She left her car here and went for a walk in the woods, stretching her legs or somesuch. I only watched. No women come up here. Not ever. A guy gets lonely. Thought I might ask her for a date, down at the local dance. She said she liked to dance when she saw the poster there" – he pointed past Otto's head. Otto did not move his gaze from the man – "but I ain't got the nerve, city lady like that."

  "Where did she go?"

  "There's a path here, a local beauty spot, goes down to the falls. It's why I'm here, passing trade, you know? She went there, came back. I didn't watch her the whole time. I ain't got the nerve." He looked ashamed.

  Otto stared down at the man, motionless. He reached into his sports jacket for his wallet. The attendant managed to control his flinch.

  "Thank you." Otto picked up his picture, paid for the car's charge, added some vat-grown jerky and a couple of chocolate bars to his bill. He disliked American candy – it was all sugar, no cocoa in the chocolate – but he needed to eat something, and there was precious little else in the station. These people ate shit. "I am going to the falls. Do not follow me." He stymied all further attempts at small talk, upsetting the attendant's attempts to cover up for his lapse in bravery, and left.

Otto thought carefully before he tied himself back into the Grid. Chloe had to be here. It was worth the risk. He activated his mentaug's full capabilities and reluctantly booted up his augmented reality overlay. With annoyance he swatted a dozen adverts from the air and spent three minutes updating his filters. The path to the waterfall was signposted clearly on the AR, about 300 metres down the road from the station. He followed the blinking directionals to a series of steps down from the road. Wooden sills packed with earth, they were well-maintained, hemmed in with split log railings. Evidently a popular spot. The slope was steep. Otto walked down the steps, scanning the woods as he went. He was alone, nothing but birds in these woods. The splash of the falls became audible about halfway down. Otto went to the bottom and stood on the oval viewing platform by the riverside. The mountain was faulted, a knife-mark slash picked out with ferns and mosses growing in the damp air. The river was small, a child could have jumped it; but the falls were high, a drop of fifteen metres or so to a brown-black plunge pool fringed with more mossy rocks. The opposite bank was steeper than the slope he'd come down, almost a cliff. He doubted Valdaire would have crossed the river to climb that. She'd have tried for somewhere less visible and more accessible. He turned and walked back up the steps. He stopped at one or two likely looking places, his nearI running tracking software, but it had been raining heavily all the previous day, and any genetic trace of Valdaire that might have remained had long since washed away.

  He walked on, stopped again where the slope levelled off a little. There, what could be a footprint, a mark in the lee of a tree within easy grasping distance of the trail. The steps curved off away from the direction the footprint pointed. This could be it.

  Otto grasped the railing, positioned himself so he was looking past the print. He steeled himself, and began to activate Richards' software.

  Technically, no AI was allowed to make a copy of itself. Artificial intelligences had been granted the right to life on a par with that of a human on one condition, that they lived as humans – unique, a single entity, mortal. Such a stricture made it easier to apply the law to them; there were no struggles with who was really who. The law had not proven hard to enforce. The higher AIs' Gridsigs were exceptionally strong and could be hidden for a time, but duplication set up unique wave patterns that were easily intercepted. Batteries of lesser machines run by the VIA and similar authorities constantly scanned the Grid for infringements. No one wanted a repeat of the Five crisis, the remaining Fives included.