Also by M.T. Bass

 

 

 

Go to The Invisible Mind Page at mtbass.net

 

 

“After the ending of The Darknet I couldn’t grab The Invisible Mind fast enough…I love this series…” – J.D. Bronder Book Reviews (5 of 5 Stars)

 

“M.T. Bass melds the characters into a macabre tale of murder and mayhem confounded with artificial intelligence…skillfully crafted to keep you entertained and guessing.” – Rosepoint Publishing Reviews (4½ of 5 Stars)

 

“M.T. Bass kept me on edge the entire way. I can’t compare it to anything else.” – Frank Frission Reviews (5 of 5 Stars)

 

Now unleashed, the “Baron” is resurrecting history’s notorious serial killers, giving them a second life in the bodies of hacked and reprogrammed Personal Assistant Androids, then turning them loose to terrorize the city. While detectives Jake and Maddie of the police department’s Artificial Crimes Unit scramble to stop the carnage with the Baron’s arrest, the cyberpunk head of the Counter IT Section, Q, struggles to de-encrypt his mad scheme to infect world data centers with a virus that represents a collective cyber unconsciousness of evil.

 

 

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Chapter 1 — The Baron

 

He savored the cruel irony of it all as he watched through the observation window in the Intensive Care Unit: Jake, the synthoid hunter, was being kept alive by machines.

Jamal, dressed in green surgical scrubs, pulled his phone out and tapped on the screen. Waitress Amy’s head jerked around to the bed next to Jake’s as the alarms on that patient’s medical monitoring equipment began to flash and bleat.

“Code Blue to ICU bed nine,” an emotionless automated voice announced over the public address system. Soon after nurses and doctors swarmed the bed.

Jamal did not wait to watch the patient die.

 

In his glass-walled office in Exit Alley, one of the three cell phones neatly lined up on the credenza behind his desk dinged out Morse Code for the letter ‘V’, causing him to look away from the lines of computer programming language filling his laptop screen. He pulled a fourth burner phone from his shirt pocket and called the IT department at MetroHealth Medical Center, then called EC with his police issued iPhone.

“Just now. In bed nine, next to Jake.” Q listened, then hung up.

 

Maddie looked around Cutty’s Deli as EC, sitting across from her at a back booth, took a call. It was one of the few places where she felt safe anymore. To her, it was like home—her childhood home—warm with fond memories: of lunching with her dad once a week ever since she was twelve years old; of “Uncle” Cutty’s career counseling that tipped the scales in her decision to go to the police academy instead of law school—an act of defiance to her father’s urgings, but one that warmed his heart nonetheless; of endless debates on so many arcane subjects with Jake over coffee when they were partners in Robbery/Homicide. She knew it was a false sense of security, nevertheless Maddie felt safe at Cutty’s.

“That was Q,” EC said, setting his phone down on the table. “He’s been monitoring the data traffic in ICU. There was an inbound spike and the patient next to Jake died.”

“The Baron? Is he there?”

“Even if he was, I doubt he stuck around.” EC sighed. “We should probably check it out, though.”

“In a minute. Okay?” Maddie fingered the rim of her nearly empty coffee mug. “Let me, ah, finish my coffee.”

“No hurry.” EC wanted to say more, but couldn’t find the words.

 

Shackled to the metal bed frame, a child sat stoically staring at the door, almost as hungry for freedom as she was for food. Amy hoped someone missed her, but doubted it—after all, she was homeless and had no real family. Even if anyone did miss her, who of them would come to her rescue? Her social worker? That thought brought a wry smile to her young face. Maybe the female detective…

 

Though medically shackled to his hospital bed by a chemically induced coma, Jake’s mind floated freely through his own subconscious, like a Freudian derelict riding the waves of swelling and ebbing dreams and memories. He was aware of waitress Amy’s presence there beside him and commotion at the next bed over and even, vaguely, briefly of some malevolent presence nearby, but Jake seemed to stir or blink only when Maddie came to visit.

 

***~~~***

 

Chapter 2 — Richard Speck

 

It sat on a bench outside the dormitory of nursing students, waiting with its kind’s infinite patience. Originally acquired and programmed for landscaping at the Cleveland Clinic, the synthoid was one of a brigade of units which had been hacked and Munchausened, then returned to their menial daily services to mankind to await the Baron’s call.

There was no adrenalin surge behind the extremely life-like facade of humanity when that call came. Data packets, sent scatter-shot through the Atlas Grid, coalesced at the location outside the Cole Eye Institute, where it methodically trimmed and shaped the immaculate shrubbery around the building. To avoid Q’s metadata sniffing algorithms from detecting a download spike in the grid, the information came in digital sprinkles over the course of its human handler’s work shift, slowly building a malevolent intent to be executed that night. In the middle of the afternoon, it left the topiary unfinished to melt into the hospital shift change and disappeared.

Personality modules were a Gen-3 feature upgrade, which is why the earlier models were initially preferred. Swapping out a few IC chips and uploading hacked firmware was a relatively easy way to turn a quick buck with an automated contract killing. But evil innovates, too, and the same features that made synthoids even more human-like in their behavior also helped create robotic assassins which could better camouflage their malicious intents and evade the reach of the Artificial Crimes Unit by melting into and moving undetected through the humanity that surrounded them. For the Baron, it allowed for a greater measure of artistic expression in programming the synthoid’s behavior to not only recreate infamous crimes of the past, but to mimic the behavior of their perpetrators, which intensified the thrill of watching the video feed through the eyes of Jack the Ripper, Ted Bundy or, this particular evening, Richard Speck. Jake wasn’t the only history buff and it amused Jamal that London police had photographed the eyes of Jack the Ripper’s victims, hoping to capture the last thing they ever saw: their killer’s face. If only Scotland Yard could have imagined the future.

The Gen-3 personality modules also supported the ANSI Adaptive Artificial Intelligence Protocol #9 to enhance the artificial human experience of real men and women who interacted with synthoids. The constant writing and rewriting of code in the personality/experience loop formed unique individual synthoid consciousnesses, which manufacturers uploaded to their servers for product improvement teams to study. In Munchausened units, that feed was hijacked and routed to another portal in the Darknet to build a collective id of evil.

At eleven PM, it rose from the bench and entered the dormitory. The bodies of nine women would be found the next day, having been strangled and stabbed to death. Unlike 1966, no eyewitness was left alive, though the phrase “Born to Raise Hell” was written on the wall in blood.

 

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Go to The Invisible Mind Page at mtbass.net