Chapter Twenty-Three

Chance left Meg in the coffee shop without another word. Did he feel like a complete asshole? Yes. Did he have any other choice? No. As he practically sprinted across the parking lot to his Prius he realized, with dawning horror, that he had never had a choice. It was always going to come down to this.

His mind was racing as he drove the busy road home, and more than once he wished the car was driverless so he could start his research immediately. He’d put a stop to the driverless car department in X-Tech years ago, mostly because he worried about the huge numbers of people the tech would put out of a job. Change was coming there, though. Chance could not stop it. What else had he been unable to stop?

His stomach was rolling as he pulled into his parking space at the bottom of his apartment building. One of his neighbors waved as he passed by. Chance barely managed a wave back. He raced up the stairs to his apartment, threw the door open, and practically skidded into his office.

He clicked his fingers. The tech woke up. Chance dropped into his chair and immediately began pulling up the files he needed. He’d never been great at filing. Over the years, Chance wrote things down, stored them away where he thought he’d remember, forgot, and then found them months later. It had never bothered him before because he often found things that jogged a thought that jogged another, and before he knew it he was discovering something new.

It bothered him now. As he frantically flipped through file after file he couldn’t fucking remember where he had stored the program. How long ago had he created it? Half a decade ago? Maybe even more than that?

He scrolled to some of the older folders. The one labeled “The Golden Group” he ignored. He’d created that one after he returned from Japan. Hadn’t he written bits of the program toward the end of his stay in Tokyo?

He scrolled down some more and began to open folder after folder that had been created around that date. His fingers were shaking as they moved, but worse was the way his stomach felt. Clenched tight and rolling at the same time. It was panic. Chance had never felt this way before.

He skipped past a folder containing photos of his time in Tokyo. He did not want to see them now. Hell, he didn’t want to see them ever. Why had he even kept them? Those months had been some of the worst of his life. How old had he been? In his late-twenties? Chance had felt like he’d been a lot older back then. It was the exhaustion. A decade’s worth of exhaustion. Every program he’d written, every new equation, every discovery he’d made, every dollar he’d added to his oversized bank account.

And the responsibility, that heavy weight of responsibility. Knowing what was possible but not wanting to make it so. It had driven Chance to the very edge back in those days. Was it any wonder he’d had to escape? Looking back, it was entirely possible that he’d been in the grips of some kind of depression. But then, uber-rich tech billionaires couldn’t be depressed, could they? They had everything.

Chance’s heart raced as he skipped past that folder. He almost paused to delete it. He didn’t know what stopped him. Maybe the pictures of the restaurant. He hadn’t lied to Meg when he’d told her that he’d spent a year in Japan working as a server. What he hadn’t said was that he’d loved every minute of it. They hadn’t recognized him over there. Not with his shaved head and the beginnings of a scruffy beard. He’d been Jack Chance, backpacker, not Jack Richards, genius.

That had been the start of it all. The beginning of a painful journey that saw Jack Richards being squeezed into the smallest part of his life, and Jack Chance given the rest. And yet…Jack Chance was fucking stupid. He was the one who had created the program, not Jack Richards. He’d created it because of the Golden Group. Because of all the things he didn’t want the world to know about.

He’d decided they weren’t ready.

He’d decided that he should hide the solutions away.

And he’d made a program designed to do just that.

A folder flashed up. It had a modified date of more than a week ago. Yes! He’d opened it then to crib a bit of the code for the search program that he’d planned to use on the senior management team. He’d barely given it a second glance at the time, pulling the code free and pasting it elsewhere. He hadn’t even opened the log history that he’d created to go with the program. It had never occurred to him that he needed to.

He needed to now.

He took a deep breath as he clicked the file open. It was called ERQ, an abbreviation of the Latin words et reditus quaerere. Search and return. That was the program’s primary function.

How could he have been so fucking stupid?

He pulled up the log history and navigated to where it kept a record of its movements. The horror Chance felt only increased when he saw what it had been up to, where it had been. There were thousands and thousands of entries on the log. They stretched back to the very day when Chance had created it.

He ran a search on the words “KIT,” “MARLOWE,” and “ANTS.” It returned several results. Chance let out a shaky breath as he scrolled down and read the lines of text in the log. The program had found its way into Meg’s computer. It had taken all of thirty-seven seconds to find the back door that Chance had spent a good few minutes navigating to. There were several documents listed in the log. The program had taken them all. Question was, where the fuck had it stored them?

In X-Tech. Chance knew the answer even as he frantically logged into the servers to confirm it. It took him a while, but eventually he found them, even with a whole bunch of new search terms to work off, but there they were. Not the whole documents. They’d been scrubbed clean and only certain parts of the information within them extracted. Information connected to the Golden Group. Information that was now seamlessly integrated into the X-Tech files like it had always been there.

“What have you done? What have you done?” Chance muttered as he searched through the extracted data.

There was no doubt that it was the information Meg had accused X-Tech of stealing from her. And she was right; they had stolen it. They’d stolen from dozens of developers by the looks of it.

How had this happened? How? Chance had designed the program to venture out into the Web—all of the Web—including the darkest parts, but it was only supposed to look through the forums there, to look through news articles, obscure posts; it was supposed to search for anything connected to the Golden Group. Chance wanted, no he’d needed, to know how close others were to solving the problems that he had hidden. Not because he wanted to release the solutions before they did, but because he didn’t want them to be released—ever.

He had toyed around with code that would trace the Golden Group throughout the Web and would then delete anything that it found. He had even gone so far as integrating that code into ERQ but had abandoned it at the last minute. He hid his own work, but was it right to do the same to others? Chance had never been able to make a decision on that. It hadn’t even been pressing because ERQ mailed him lists every day. None of them had suggested that anyone was close to solving the most world-changing problems in the Golden Group. Except, maybe Meg. She was close. A few years more and she’d probably crack it. Did ERQ know that? Was that why she’d stolen the information and added it to the work that X-Tech was doing? Had his command to return been followed too literally?

Chance dropped his head into his hands. He couldn’t quite believe this and yet, the evidence was right in front of him. Somehow, and he didn’t even know how, he had designed the perfect weapon for industrial espionage. ERQ was making her way around the Web, finding the things Chance had asked her to find, tracing them back to the source, using what? The code he’d originally intended to integrate into her? Had a version with that in it survived?

Only, she wasn’t deleting what she found. She was stealing it, bringing it back to X-Tech, and then adding it to the work that X-Tech was doing. She was integrating it so perfectly that there was no trail left behind. That was why Chance’s searches hadn’t turned up anything. ERQ was simply too good. She was learning as she went.

Unregulated AI is dangerous.

Hadn’t that been what he’d told Meg? Only, ERQ wasn’t true AI. She was simply a very, very smart program.

He bolted upright. Dear God, had she found his files? His solutions? Had she stolen them, too? He logged out of all the servers he was connected to, logged out of ERQ, too, putting her into hibernation mode, and checked his Golden Group. He ran through every, single line in their history. It took him hours. The room darkened around him. Chance didn’t even notice.

His knees felt weak when he eventually stood up. Was it with relief? Chance didn’t know, but he found himself sending a heartfelt thank you down the years to his younger self, to the nerd who had somehow known to add a little line in ERQ’s code that had kept her out of his own files. He couldn’t even remember doing it. What else had he added into her that he couldn’t remember doing? All those nights, fingers flying over the keys, almost in a daze of creativity and precision…what had he done?

“You fucking idiot,” he whispered. “How bad is this?”

Chance did not know the answer. ERQ probably did. He eyed her program. She would stay in hibernation mode for now. In the meantime, he had no choice but to head to X-Tech. He needed to talk to Gabe.