Reality 36 (33 page)

  Richards was methodical. His main attention was on the data rebuild of the VIA files, his second tier awarenesses running through a chronological examination of the information as his highest functions pulled the fragged files back together. The general information thinned toward the end, petering out about nine months before Karlsson lost his job with the VIA. The life-site posts ceased first, and his finances and other dealings became increasingly heavily encrypted. From June 19th his personal messages stopped. Fragments that Richards scales retrieved indicated they'd been fragged five or six times over, probably by Karlsson himself, because the remains of these files were so minute as to be no better than nothing at all.

  Around the same time, Karlsson began to use increasingly esoteric code forms that were beyond Richards' capability to decipher, even where he could reconstitute them, and if they were beyond him, they were beyond anybody. About nine weeks ago, the man's life ran out. Soul-capt data ended. It was as if he'd died, only he hadn't. The wipe became complete six weeks later. Not a trace remained on the Grid. Karlsson had ceased to be alive in the modern sense a day after Qifang's death.

  "Now that," said Richards, "is quite something." And then he stopped, because if someone went to all that trouble to hide their dealings, they'd make sure to be informed if someone were trying to uncover them.

  Richards checked the digital wall round Karlsson's home to see if he'd probed too deeply. It remained unruffled, no sign of datastreams out hunting for him. He let it be and went to the older material.

  The VIA had fired Karlsson because he'd been holding back on them, Richards deduced. The encryption the VIA employed was supposed to be second to none, but it was clearly second to that which Karlsson had. There was more to encoding data than making it unreadable, like the quantum fractal system Otto's MT worked off. Karlsson's work ran into self-aware informational packages, predictive ciphers that assessed their own vulnerability, updated themselves accordingly and launched counter strikes at those who attempted to decode them, corrupting code-reading programmes' ability to think and spreading this inefficiency to others. In a similar vein were the automatically generating false data seeds that reacted to their observers, showing them utterly convincing material that happened to be entirely untrue. This was what the VIA had needed counters to, vital in their work of policing the most powerful minds on the planet. On a scale of one to ten, Richards rated Otto's military MT a seven to break; time-consuming, but not impossible. Cracking the VIA was a nine. What Karlsson had defending his own interests was easily a twelve.

  He was too dangerous to live, thought Richards, but far too dangerous to kill, so the VIA'd fired him instead, on the mutual understanding that he'd not blow the secrets of the agency wide open if he wanted to stay alive. It was an effective threat; dead was still dead, even a pimsim was only a copy, and, for a man like Karlsson, the thought of becoming a number was probably tantamount to treachery.

  The reconstruction of Karlsson's file was completed shortly after 9pm. Richards had it open after only five more hours of fiddling. What he found inside bore out his suspicions.

  "…want to help safeguard the future of mankind." Karlsson, speaking in his initial job interview. Audio and vitals only, no video, the only piece of non-text data in his official file, incomplete.

  "Why?" asked a nameless interrogator. "What do you mean?"

  "Because we as a species… benefit from the machines," replied Karlsson. "But they could also supplant us. I would rather that not happen. If…" Static for three seconds. Clarity returned.

  "Explain," asked another voice.

  "Explain?" Karlsson laughed. "What is there to explain? All life exists to promote its own survival. A fish crawled from the sea a billion years ago, and I sit here. When I get to the afterlife I don't want to have to say to that fish, 'Sorry, we blew it, we're done. Flesh is dead.' If it comes to that, I want to be able to tell that fish that I tried."

Funny,
thought Richards.
For a Norwegian
.

  The interview panel did not laugh.

  "The AIs are no different. It is in the nature of life to evolve and compete. They are on a collision course with mankind. They will out-compete us. They already are," said Karlsson.

  "You do not see the machines then, as a continuation, an evolution of ourselves?" said the first voice. "One could argue that they are the next stage in our evolution."

  "Some argue that, and I do not agree with them. A child carries part of its parents forwards when they are gone, in its genes and in its memes. The machines may carry our mental stamp, but they are not us, they never will be. They are not alive in the same way we are."

  "So you deny them their rights? They are not equal as sentients?"

  "No, of course not," said Karlsson haughtily, as if his interlocutor was an idiot.
He must have been a hit at office parties,
thought Richards. "They are, if anything, superior. That is what scares me. It scares a lot of other people too, that's why the machines need protecting as much from us as we do from them. To co-exist is…"

  The file broke up into buzzsaw roars, then skipped. Richards scrabbled at the data fragments, but could not rebuild much more of the interview that interested him, although he did discover that the VIA healthcare package was good. The text he managed OK, but that was formulaic; standard employment clauses, the deal between the agency and Karlsson when he'd departed, nothing enlightening.

  Whatever Karlsson had been up to since he'd been fired was cloaked in secrecy. There were his marching orders, then nothing. The logs of others that had come to see him had been stripped, or altered. There were a handful of streetcam footage files, a few more from free-roaming spy-eye cameras that had escaped his attention, but not many. Zhang Qifang was on several. One five-second video sequence in particular: Qifang entering Karlsson's castle, made a blob by Karlsson's countermeasures, round the time he was presumed to have died.

  "That's interesting," murmured Richards. "Very interesting."

  He worked on for several more hours, accelerating his conscious processes so he subjectively experienced a week of time. He found nothing else. Karlsson had been thorough.

  He slowed his mind down, and brought the office back. He walked across the room as it materialised about him and plopped down into his chair, whisky and cigars appearing on his desk as it rippled into being. Outside, Chicago teemed with life. A whole world existed on the other side of the dusty window glass. Richards wondered where it all went when he wasn't there. He sometimes wondered the same about the Real.

  He had to get more on Karlsson, dead or alive.

  In his mind's eye he constructed a world within a world, and brought up a three-dimensional representation of Karlsson's Detroit lair. He looked over the fortress factory, superimposed his reconstruction over realtime footage in the Real. The place was crawling with aggressive drones, its exterior studded with not-so-hidden weaponry. There was no way in without tripping its formidable security systems, not Gridside.

  Karlsson had been frightened of the machines. It was against them he'd set his most formidable defences.

  The plans were deliberately incomplete, and out of date. They probably had a low-grade intelligence embedded in them, ready to alert the real fortress to practised penetrations. The building's systems would be aware he was looking at the plans right now. He checked the systems again, going as close as he dared. The whole thing was EM screened; there was not a chance he'd get anything other than the highest strength databeam through without it being chopped in two, but there were other, more old fashioned ways. Richards walked to his office door and turned up his collar. Time to get tough.

  He activated the Three running Richards & Klein, Inc, Security Consultants' commsat, and had it reposition itself in a geostationary orbit over the Great Lakes. He told the Three to keep a low profile. Then he told it again, because Threes sometimes drifted off. Once he was happy the thing had understood his instructions, he stepped out of the office door, and into Richards & Klein, Inc, Security Consultants' New York garage.

In a rat with a microchip mind perched on a pile of dissolving concrete, Richards watched Karlsson's fortress from a safe distance. The street was half-submerged and deserted, but then all the streets here were half-submerged and deserted. Karlsson had fetched himself up in the dead heart of Detroit's old industrial port district, a warren of decaying factories, tottering warehouses and unidentifiable iron constructions washed deep red by the rain. Further upriver on the old Canada side, the waterfront gleamed with luxury low-rise, but not here. The ground, honeycombed with salt mines, was not stable enough to support the weight of arcologies, not desirable enough to go upmarket when Canada had joined USNA, so the shoreline remained a skeletal maze of concrete and foamcrete, a three-dimensional warren standing in grim waters, the remnants of earlier attempts at redevelopment undone by the financial crash of 2052 complicating its nineteenth- and twentieth-century layout. Older port buildings slumped tiredly into the lake, the sturdier constructions boxy islands overhung with plant life. Away from the water, trees grew freely in the middle of the street. The sidewalks were thick with grass. Only those at the margins of society lived here, sharing their ruinous home with returning wildlife. Upper Detroit–Windsor was a moderately prosperous, modern city, but large parts, poisoned by two centuries of heavy industry, had been abandoned to the rising lakes, a true industrial wasteland left by way of remembrance. Obsolescence of centralised mass production had left the Detroit Metro area one of the poorest in the USNA. The population here was half what it had been a century and a half before.

  It was a good hiding place.

  Karlsson's abode was an old port warehouse made of prefabricated concrete slabs whose chemical make-up had been altered to render it resistant to the acid waters round its base. According to the plans, these were supplemented internally by a modern foamcrete coat sprayed 1.3 metres thick. Heavy buttresses had been thrown up its side, atop which unconcealed near-I weaponry scanned the surrounding wasteland. The original roof had been replaced with more reinforced foamcrete, grassed over and allowed to run wild. This roof meadow was studded with dishes, field projectors and energy generation equipment of solar, magnetic interference and wind-driven varieties. A heavy chainlink fence and flatribbon defined a generous perimeter. Small drones darted about the air, and combat sheaths patrolled the shallow lagoon around the building.

  Karlsson was making very little effort to blend in.

  Richards looked through the rat's eyes, zooming in on the building, searching for weak points. There were precisely none. None of the small constructs he had at his disposal would make it in. There were a lot of mosquitoes here. Millions. Karlsson's drones were very busy methodically hunting down each and every one. That level of paranoid diligence left no room for robotic rats.

  As if to prove the point, Richards' rodent exploded as a passing drone spied it. Richards switched to his back-up rat, a half block away.

  With luck, the drone was following a routine extermination programme, a take-no-chances, kill-everything approach. Hopefully Karlsson's machines had not logged the outgoing EM traffic between Richards and the rats. If he'd had breath, he'd have held it.

  Alarms rang out.

  "Shit," said the rat, before promptly exploding.

  "Shit," said Richards' android sheath, and opened its eyes. He was operating a standard humanoid shell of the kind routinely employed by a wide variety of businesses, which as of the moment sat in the front of a truck also of a kind routinely employed by a wide variety of businesses, this one emblazoned with the logo of a prominent carbon feedstock merchant – though feedstock was most definitely not what currently sat in the rear of the vehicle – and hidden in a broken-down factory building half a kilometre away.

  Richards drummed his borrowed fingers on the dashboard. He thought, but not very hard. He was out of plans A to C, leaving him with plan D. Actually, he had known all along that plan D should really have been plan A, that subtler options would not work, but it was his least favourite option, and he liked to think of himself as an optimist

  He was going to have to go in fighting. He groaned, and banged his head on the truck window. This war shit was Otto's job. Richards hated violence, he hated fighting. It wasn't that he wasn't very good at it. His heart wasn't really in it. Otto's was. But Otto was a continent away; by the time he got here Karlsson could have packed up and left.

  "You shouldn't have tripped the alarms," he said to no one. "You should have waited, and contacted Otto first," he said, then stopped, because he felt like a twat.

  Then he tried to contact Otto anyway and found he couldn't get hold of him. "Fucking mountains," he muttered. He tried Otto's Gridware, though he knew Otto was off-Grid, out hunting. He left a message.

  "Hi, Otto," he said tersely to his messenger. "This is your partner. Because you're out creeping around like a fucking ninja, I'm going to have to go in for a fight. Fighting, I recall, is your job, not mine. I don't like fighting, so thanks a fucking bunch. End message."

  "Fucking MT!" he shouted. "Why can't he just use the Grid like everyone else? He's a fucking cyborg! What's he got to be frightened of?"

  Richards was not frightened. Richards could feel fear or not as the fancy took him. But Richards did not like to kill, and that was a sensation he could not disable. There were no fearless adversaries when Richards fought, no uniforms, no masks, no noble opponents, no
enemy
. The Grid stripped all that away, all the distancing that could make a man a thing. Richards knew the life history of every man, woman and child whose death he had caused. He knew where they grew up, what music they preferred, what toppings they took on their pizza. It made it all so
personal
. Fighting was Otto's job. Humans had a conscience they could ignore.