PALAEOZOIC
May 26th
San Melito, California
“Good morning, Professor Hayward.”
“Good morning, Anita.”
Sebastian smiled at the receptionist, swiped his card, and was in. He glanced at the familiar logo above the lift – no, elevator. ‘Neurogenics’, it proclaimed in a futuristic font which he knew, from an evening spent drinking with the marketing director, had cost them $50,000 to design.
Neurogenics. A two-storey building in a business park. Two storeys of pure brainpower, fuelled by venture capital, built in an architectural style he liked to think of as ‘California Bland’. It was weird. Every rich, powerful civilisation, from the Egyptians to the Americans, had had an edifice complex. The height of its buildings proclaimed its success to the world. Every civilisation except one. Geeks didn’t seem to care. Even the show-offs stayed close to the ground. California surely now ruled the world, but it ruled it from two-storey buildings in business parks.
He ignored the elevator and crossed to the stairs that spiralled up from the lobby to the first – no, hang on, the second floor. He bounded up them, taking them two at a time. He would never understand his new countrymen. They would not climb a staircase, drove everywhere, then complained they were overweight and blew a thousand dollars a year on a gym they never visited.
He reached the landing. Louise was waiting at her desk by the boardroom door, her red hair piled up in a 1960s beehive.
“Good morning, Professor Hayward.”
“Good morning, Louise. Are they here?”
“Mr Salieri and the others are inside. Mr Patel hasn’t arrived yet.”
He opened the door and let himself in.
“Sebastian,” said Salieri. “Good to see you. Patel will be here in two minutes.”
The CEO was a short man, and one to whom stair-climbing was surely terra incognita. His hair was black and slick – like his jacket, his trousers, his shoes and his shirt – and he wore too many rings, each gold, and each rather bigger than was becoming for his short, pudgy fingers. No geek he. Next to him sat Alexis Zhukov. Tall. Thin. Her hair the colour of Baltic amber. Descended, rumour had it, from an indiscreet liaison after the war by the great Field Marshal himself. Brought to America by red aristo parents who had found themselves on the wrong side of history after the Soviet Union’s fall. Beside her was Simon Rider. Rider had made an effort. He really had. But he remained what he always was, the sartorial equivalent of a two-storey building in a business park.
Sebastian, brogued and besuited, sat down in the empty chair beside Salieri. For a reason he could not quite put his finger on, four seemed the wrong number for this meeting. Three would have worked. Five, perhaps. But an even number was, paradoxically, odd. Yes. That was it. Symmetry was important, a sign of strength, an indication of perfection. The leader should be flanked left and right by equal numbers. For this was a meeting they needed to go well. The next tranche of funding would see them through, he felt sure, to product. The terms of that funding, though. Those would dictate whether they held on to enough of the firm to become merely rich, or filthy, stinking rich, rolling in it. Money. Fame. Maybe even a Nobel? What they were doing deserved a trip to Stockholm, surely? He squeezed his thighs together, like a teenager trying to contain his excitement on a first date. The door opened again and Louise ushered in Vinod Patel and two handlers. He, Salieri, Zhukov and Rider rose to greet them. Then all seven sat down, the two sides facing each other across the boardroom table, Patel flanked symmetrically by his minions. Let battle commence.
Salieri rambled on for a few minutes, buttering Patel up. Then it was his turn. They had agreed before the meeting that he should go second, ahead of the two engineers. It made sense. After all, he was the intellectual input to the venture. Designing chips and programming them – Rider’s and Zhukov’s jobs – were important. But it was he who provided the crucial insights that would make the whole thing sing.
“Gentlemen. Lady,” he began, addressing Patel and his entourage. “You know what we are up to, so I won’t make a meal of this. But to recap, when all is said and done what people now call artificial intelligence is just advanced machine learning. We intend to go way beyond that. We propose to build a computer system that is sentient, self-aware, conscious. Philosophers have speculated about the nature of consciousness since the Greeks, at least. They had no answers because they asked the question in the wrong way. Being philosophers, they thought they could reason their way to the truth. But we know better. Sherlock Holmes put it well. ‘Data, data, data. I cannot make bricks without straw.’ And we have the data to back up the theory, so”
Sebastian stopped in mid sentence and sniffed. A reflex response to an acrid sensation on the outer edge of perception. A second sniff, this time long and deliberate. The others sniffed, too. They looked at each other, each seeking re-assurance he was not hallucinating, none wanting to be first to cry the forbidden word.
Patel cracked.
“Can you smell smoke?” he said.
“Yes. Yes, I think I can. Perhaps we should…”
They got up as one and moved towards the door. At that moment, an alarm began to sound, and an oddly unreassuring electronic voice started telling them not to panic, but to proceed quickly to the assembly area in the car park outside the front of the building.
Patel reached the door first. He turned the handle and pulled. Nothing. Thinking he must have misremembered which way the thing opened, he tried pushing. Still nothing. He looked at Salieri.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“Dunno,” said the CEO. He tried the door himself. Then he shouted through it, “Louise. The door’s stuck. I think it might have locked itself. Can you release it?”
“Whatdoyoumean, it might have locked itself?” said Patel.
“Security system. Every door can be locked centrally. Louise!”
“I’m trying, Mr Salieri.”
The handle rattled. The door did not move. Now, there was smoke coming in through the air-conditioning vent.
“Call security. Tell them to over-ride it.”
Rider was on the phone already.
“Tom. It’s Simon. We’re trapped in the boardroom. The door has locked itself. We need you to over-ride the locking system. You are? Good man. Okay, Marco, try again.”
Salieri rattled the handle. Nothing. The room was filling with smoke.
“What’s going on in there, Mr Salieri?” Louise’s voice screamed through the door.
“Smoke. No flames yet.”
“Same on this side, sir.”
“Louise. You get out now. That’s an order. When the fire truck arrives tell them what’s happening. Tell them where we are.”
How long would that be, Sebastian wondered? He had no idea where the fire house was. He did know, though, that it was the smoke which killed you, not the flames.
“On the floor everybody,” he said. “Stay out of the smoke.”
“No,” said Zhukov. “Do that and we just die later. We have to get out now. We have to break the window.”
She was right, of course. Sebastian looked at it. A sealed unit, floor-to-ceiling, triple glazed to avoid the attention of directional mikes. What the hell. He picked up a chair and swung it hard against the glass. The pane crazed, but did not break. Again. More crazing. And that was the moment when he realised they really might die.
“We could use the table as a battering ram,” Zhukov suggested.
Seven of them, Sebastian thought. Would that be enough to lift it?
“Good idea,” he said. “Three on one side. Four on the other. The women on the four-side. Go.”
They took their places as the smoke swirled around them.
“Lift!” Sebastian commanded.
The table inched into the air.
“Carry it to the window.”
They shuffled, coughing and spluttering, across the carpet.
“Okay. Swing it backward, then forward.”
The table hit the glass and bounced. The pane crazed some more.
“Again. Keep swinging it. Build up the amplitude with each swing.”
Bounce. Yet more crazing.
“Again.”
Bounce.
“Again.”
Bounce.
“Again.”
Crash! The whole window, frame and all, fell outward to the ground. The table followed, and Sebastian and Zhukov almost went with it. They teetered on the edge of the void where the glass had once been. But they could breathe again.
They’d have to jump, though. Thank God for California Bland. No building more than two storeys high. You might break a leg, but probably not your neck.
“I’m tallest,” said Sebastian. “I’ll go first. It’ll be easier for me to reach up and help everyone else down.” He looked out of the gap. The boardroom was at the back of the building and the ground below was grassy turf, not asphalt. Another blessing. He took off his jacket, got on his hands and knees, facing into the smoke-filled room, and chasséed slowly backwards. As his legs crossed the parapet, he flattened his stomach to the floor, trying to slide, rather than fall, out of the opening. Then he pressed his palms to the carpet, lowered his hips over the edge, slipped down as carefully as he could manage and found himself, literally, cliff-hanging. He let go.
A dim recollection of childhood judo lessons took over his hind brain as he fell. He bent his knees and rolled as his feet touched the ground, just missing the remnants of the table as he did so. Safe.
He stood up and looked around. Plumes of smoke were rising from the building’s roof and flames erupted from several windows at its farther end – from the place where they kept the servers. He wondered when the last off-site back-up had been. Too late to worry about that now.
“Come on,” he shouted up. “If you do what I did, I should be able to grab hold of your ankles and guide you down.”
He heard Patel’s voice. “Ladies first. We’ll keep hold of your wrists, Dr Zhukov, until Professor Hayward has you.”
Zhukov’s legs appeared out of the window. There was a glimpse of stocking. Sebastian’s teenage frisson returned, weirdly considering that lives were at stake. He put the thought aside and reached skyward to grasp her.
“Kick your shoes off,” he said.
She did. He could just about touch her feet, and took what purchase he could on them.
“Okay. Let go.”
She let go.
He did his best to steer her to a soft landing, and they ended up together, in a crumpled heap on the grass. No bones broken. They helped each other up. Patel’s minder was next. What was her name? He couldn’t remember. Well, at least she was wearing trousers.
With two pairs of hands to guide her down, the minder’s landing was more dignified than Zhukov’s had been. And with the three of them on the ground, even the weight of the remaining men was bearable. The last man out, Salieri, touched down just as they heard the fire truck’s siren in the distance.
Better late than never, Sebastian thought, as he watched the truck pull in, and its crew busy themselves with hydrants and hoses. Then it struck him. The misters. Why hadn’t the damn smoke misters gone off?
May 26th
Nassau
“Fuck,” said Miguel. “If Rodriguez finds out about this, we’re fish food.”
Carlos Rodriguez was not renowned for giving his employees second chances when they screwed up, and the termination package usually involved just that: termination. It was the flip-side of the large and tax-free incomes he offered.
“Then we had better make sure he never does,” replied Fidel.
These were men that the world has never heard of, but frequently hears from. Their handiwork lurked on a hundred million PCs around the planet, directing spam, stealing passwords, organising denial-of-service attacks on firms who failed to take out ‘security contracts’ with one of Rodriguez’s numerous front companies, and providing (though this was not an intentional part of the service), cover for erring men whose wives found interesting and unusual pictures on their husbands’ hard drives.
“Must have been downloaded by a virus, darling. Now you mention it, there was a funny incident a few days ago when I opened an unsolicited email.”
Miguel, though, now knew what it was like to be on the receiving end.
“We’ve been rootkitted, Fidel. Nice job. Erased itself as soon as I detected it.”
“What were they after? It might give us a clue who they were: cops or rivals.”
“That’s the odd thing. They seem to have been after our rootkits.”
“Can’t think it’s the cops, then. Might be the Russians, trying to hijack our network. They always were lazy sods, piggy-backing on everyone else’s hard work.”
“Don’t worry. I think I can clear up the mess without anyone being any the wiser.”
“Better do it then. They certainly won’t hear anything from me.”
May 27th
Arlington County
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are under attack. A subtle attack. But a real one.”
He was getting too old for this. Cynicism is a strange thing. They say it increases with age and in him it had, up to a point. But that point was past. Now he felt it ebbing, being replaced by ennui. In an agent, that was death. Only cynicism kept you sane. And he had had to be very cynical indeed over the past few days.
“Once,” he continued, “you bombed an enemy’s factories to destroy his economy. Now, it seems, you kill his software engineers.”
Cynical or not, Matt Vane was pretty sure he was still sane. What he wasn’t sure of was what he was dealing with.
“At least twenty of our top-flight computer people have died or disappeared in the past three months. Where we know what happened, their deaths have been sudden and violent. Car crashes. Plane crashes. Fires. Asymmetric Warfare Group noticed it three days ago. One of their spotters picked up on that strange pile-up outside Los Angeles last Friday and started digging.”
He looked around the table. The young field operatives who would be his eyes and ears for this mission, whatever it was. Eager beavers, all of them. Good. He needed that enthusiasm. No clear enemy objective. No clear enemy, for that matter. Yet something was going on, and he knew that it had to be stopped.
“The latest incident was yesterday, at a start-up in San Melito. The building caught alight while their top brains, and also one of the biggest venture capitalists in the field, were somehow locked in the boardroom. They managed to batter their way out, but it was a close-run thing.”
Cyber warfare came in many guises these days, of course, from rigging elections and spreading fake news to outing power grids and freezing transport networks. The Agency had anticipated all sorts of subtle attacks – the type you couldn’t even be sure actually were attacks. Financial flash-crashes. Outbreaks of disease. Industrial accidents that might have been negligence, but might have been given a helping hand. They hadn’t seen this one coming, though. It was lifting the field to a whole, new level to take out not just computer systems, but the people who designed them too.
“Obviously our future depends on continuing to lead everyone else in IT. Our rivals know that as well. It looks as if one of them has started playing dirty. This isn’t terrorism. Terrorist acts are public. This is secretive. So the question is, who? Russia? China? Iran, maybe? Or is it a non-state actor? We have to find out. For that, we need a two-pronged approach. First, these things all look like software hacks. If that is right, we have to identify the code involved and then trace it back to its origins. That means digging even more deeply into our rivals’ computers than we’re doing at the moment.”
He shivered slightly at that approach’s most recent consequence.
“But we also need some good, old-fashioned human intelligence sniffing around as well, to back up the firewall-fighters in Geekopolis.”
That was what they called the warehouse in Falls Church where the uber-nerds were stored. Beware of Geeks, bearing gifts… Yet, when it actually mattered, getting the Trojan horse that Geekopolis had so carefully crafted to the place where it was needed had been a hum-int operation. And, at the cost of an old friend’s self-sacrifice, Project Janus seemed to have worked. The Chinese had taken the bait. As long as the Agency didn’t give the game away by being too greedy, they could look around the People’s Republic’s digital inner sanctum, while giving the spooks in Beijing the impression that it was they who were looking around America’s. None of which, of course, the boy and girl scouts in front of him would ever know – or not until they had risen to his lofty eminence. And by the time that had happened, the game would have moved on. China would probably be their friend by then. Who knew who would be the enemy?
“That’s what you’re here for. The briefing notes are eyes only, and not to leave this room. You’ve got half an hour to digest them. Then we’ll brainstorm.”
He left them to it. Better not to have the Old Man sitting in. That way they could kick ideas around and draw their own conclusions without feeling they had to show off, or risk looking silly. He went to the canteen, ordered a cappuccino and a chocolate-banana cake, pulled out a spy novel (sucker!) and waited out the time. Then he went back to the briefing room.
“Okay, ladies and gentlemen. Your thoughts.”
A crew-cut preppie seemed to have appointed himself spokesman. What was his name? Ah yes, Donald Macdonald.
“Donald. Could you give me a précis?”
“Yes, of course, sir. One thing struck us in particular. You mentioned it being like bombing an enemy’s factories to destroy his economy. But these don’t look like economic targets – or military ones, for that matter. If someone was going after those, you’d think the victims would be working for banks or aerospace companies or the government, writing high-end financial or defence software. But no. The woman in the car-crash was working on virtual actors for Hollywood, for heaven’s sake.”
“Good idea,” said someone. “Most of the real ones act like robots anyway.”
“The point is, the common theme seems to be artificial intelligence, not strategic significance. We can think of two possible explanations. The first is that this is a long-term play by a rival, to weaken an industry of the future. The second is that it presages some other form of attack, one that will involve AI being used as a weapon. By eroding our stock of experts, an enemy diminishes our ability to respond. But we have no idea what form such an attack might take. In short, we need better information. We need to dig into exactly what all of these programmers were up to. If we can find a more precise theme than just AI, that might give us the clue we need.”
“May I make a suggestion?” A female voice piped up across the table from Matt.
Yasmin Chu. One of the brightest of the bunch. The mile down Massachusetts Avenue to MIT had seemed a hundred light-years long when he had been up at Harvard. This woman, though, subverted his every prejudice about the place. True, she’d come into the Agency through Geekopolis, but she hadn’t hung around there. He could even see her, one day when he was in his casket, sitting in the chair that he himself now occupied.
“Yes, Yasmin?”
“We should start with the one group of targets who are still alive,” she said. “Someone should talk to the survivors of the San Melito fire. Find out what they know.”
“Indeed, someone should. Are you volunteering?”
“Sure. Always happy to hang out in California. I notice that one of the survivors is a Jason. Can we take him into our confidence?”
“Probably best play that cool. I know he’s got SCI clearance, and I truly doubt our transatlantic cousins have anything to do with this, but the guy’s a Brit, or used to be, so why take the risk? Find out what he knows, without prejudice, if you can. Field ops will fit you out and make the necessary arrangements. Get on a plane tonight. Donald, please continue.”
“There is also the question of means,” the preppie said. “To attack a fixed installation, like a power station or a bank, with cyber warfare is one thing. This enemy, though, can track moving targets and hit them when they are vulnerable: driving, flying, in a particular room at a meeting, even. That’s new. It also makes it hard to defend against. We’ve been building static defences – Maginot Lines of computer code, if you like – and some enemy has come up with mobile tank warfare. And this is an enemy which seems to be able to see everywhere. We’ve even an idea for a cryptonym for them, until we find out who they really are.”
“Which is?”
“Argus. The hundred-eyed giant from Greek myth.”
“Argus. Yes. I like that. Well done, Donald. We’ll use it.”
May 27th
Pasadena
“Alice. Where are you Alice? We were supposed to be going out today. I’m sure you said we were. Alice, come here! Where are you?”
May 27th
San Patricio, California
Gordon Humboldt looked over the assembly in front of him. Reporters? Vampires, more likely. They sucked people’s reputations dry to feed their own. The march of progress, if it gets mentioned at all, is relegated to the inside pages. One woman dies in a car crash, though, and the whole pack descends on you.
Dammit! They couldn’t even know for sure that the car had been at fault. The driver had a reputation as a speedster. Maybe she had just chanced her arm once too often. Regardless of that, they had put out an emollient release, attempted to reassure customers by couriered letter (an old-fashioned touch, which he hoped would seem convincingly personal) that they would not suffer a similar fate, and kept their fingers crossed for something else to come along to attract the nanosecond-long attention span of the public elsewhere. But it hadn’t. Nor could they find any cause for the accident in the incinerated cinder that had once been Alice Rhodes’s Avila. It was, he supposed, something that this Rhodes character seemed to have been a bit of a loner. No grieving husband or boyfriend had crawled out of the woodwork to make a tearful public statement, and there didn’t seem to be any parents, either. But the story would not go away.
So this had to be done. An isolated event, whatever the cause, could not be allowed to derail the whole project. They were already beginning to leave the lumbering giants of Detroit, Stuttgart and Nagoya in the dust. The new factory would open in two months’ time. A hundred thousand units a year. Nothing must get in the way of that.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I just want to make a short statement. Then I will answer questions.”
He read out the boiler-plate prepared by the PR department and instantly regretted it. It sounded stilted – the work of lawyers, not human beings. Too late now, though.
“Yes. The lady at the back, in red.”
“Jennifer Jameson, CBB. Mr Humboldt, you said this was a freak accident. Do you have any idea yet what caused it?”
If it really was the car’s fault, his best guess was an infinite loop or a divide-by-zero error in the code somewhere – though he was never going to admit that. He was convinced today’s youngsters were sloppy programmers. Not like when he had been at Stanford. You wouldn’t have got away with unannotated spaghettiware then.
“No ma’am, we don’t. We are running new tests on the Avila operating system, just in case. But we see no sign of a systematic error. And, as I said, anyone who has an Avila, they can trade it back to us full-price. And, before you ask, yes, I’m still driving mine. Sir!”
He pointed at a scruffily dressed man in the middle of the pack who didn’t look too hostile.
Bad call.
“James Richard Clarkson, AutoTimes. Mr Humboldt, don’t you think this accident calls into question your rush to build electric vehicles? Won’t people now cling ever-more-tightly to the internal combustion engine? Aren’t you worried you won’t be able to sell the new factory’s output?”
“No. Of course not. The ICE is hardly a safe technology, is it? And it’s well over a hundred years old. It belongs in the museums, not on the 21st century’s roads. It was great in its day, and we owe it a lot. But its day is over. In fact, we are planning to double the new factory’s production within eighteen months. Sir!”
This time the recipient of the pointed finger was tailored to a ‘T’.
“Marc Rotherhythe, Wall Street Post. As we have you here, Mr Humboldt, might I broaden the questioning beyond cars, to ask about the future of Humboldt Engineering more generally?”
Thank you, thank you.
“Yes, of course, Mr Rotherhythe. Ask away.”
“Well, you seem to be making a lot of bets on spaceflight at the moment. Don’t you think that is rather risky? Huge capital investment. Uncertain returns. I mean, what actually is there in space that is worth all that money?”
“I rather disagree. There is a lot in space. Indeed, I hope that one day the list of things in space will include me.”
That got a laugh.
“Seriously, though, we are doing fine in space. The Milando launch facility put up six comm-sats last year, and we are so confident about the Humboldt Mineral Prospecting System that it is only available on an equity-stake basis. If someone discovers something worth mining, we want a piece of the action. And I might tell you that we are already part of more than a dozen mines now being sunk, based on what the MPS has found.
“But if the subtext of your question was, ‘is this space thing a self-indulgence of Gordon Humboldt,’ then I freely confess. I do think humanity’s future lies off-Earth. That’s why we built the Mars Observation Satellite for NASA a few years back, to help scope the place out. But that, I would remind you, was a personal donation from me. No shareholder money was injured during the making of that movie.”
He got another laugh with this, but Rotherhythe slipped in a supplementary before he could cut him off and go to another questioner.
“It didn’t quite work, though did it? It went dead pretty quickly after it got there.”
“As you said, Mr Rotherhythe, spaceflight is a risky business. Indeed, it does not always work. And, to re-emphasise, the MOS was a personal donation – a science project, not a commercial venture. Ma’am!”
“Dorothy Greenmantle, Pals.com. To get back to the unfortunate Ms Rhodes. Do you think all this computerised drive-by-wire is actually safe? Wasn’t it better when a human being was in total control?”
Thank you, God. A luddite.
“On that I can reassure you. Whatever the reason for this accident turns out to be (and we will find out), the truth is that most crashes are caused by drivers, not cars. The other truth, and I say this as an engineer, is that no system is perfect. We can only strive for perfection; we’ll never quite achieve it. Thank you. No more questions.”
He walked off stage.
* * * * * * * *
“Well, that was honest.” Emma Reichenbacher, his head of PR, had a touch of sarcasm in her voice.
“You know, Emma, occasionally honesty pays. People have ridiculous expectations these days. They think safety gets delivered by magic, as though they have some God-given right to it.”
“They have a Congress-given right to it.”
“Those parasites. Never do an honest day’s work between them, and then attempt to take the credit from the people who do. Let’s have a drink…”
They had retired to what he had taken to calling his Ready Room. He was indeed, deep down, a space cadet. He knew it. His friends knew it. And he didn’t care if his enemies knew it, too. He was convinced there was money to be made in space. Indeed, he’d proved it. The Mineral Prospecting System was revolutionising the industry. And it wasn’t just equity stakes. They were even digging themselves – a Silicon Valley firm in the ancient business of mining, for heaven’s sake. All it needed for space to really fly, as it were, was to take the thing out of the hands of the government, and he intended to do the taking. They had their own launch site and their own launch system. And very soon now…
He let the thought trail away as a Manhattan arrived in his hand.
“How do you think I did, really?”
“What I think doesn’t matter. The Twitterverse was quite impressed, though. You may be right that honesty is the best policy.”
“Well, Machiavelli thought so. People forget that. He advised princes to act in good faith whenever possible.”
“The better to let them gull the opposition when good faith is impossible.”
He stared into his glass, reflectively. “Well, yes, there is that.”
May 28th
San Melito
Sebastian poured himself a drink and reflected on the madness of life. The paramedics, when they had arrived, had insisted on his going to hospital. A total overreaction. He had been shaken, certainly, but he felt sure his lungs could cope with a bit of smoke without a bunch of doctors prodding and poking him. As to the idea he needed trauma counselling, well that really did seem like a shameless attempt to pad the bill.
The first night, he had tolerated with what he hoped had been good humour. The second, rather less. The idea of a third was beyond him. He had discharged himself and come home.
What was it Buñuel had said was the perfect recipe for a Martini? Fill the glass with gin and then hold the vermouth bottle up to the window, so that the rays of the sun pass through it before they strike the liquid in the glass.
Yes. That was the way. He settled into an armchair and reviewed what had happened.
It was almost as if someone had been trying to kill them. The locked door. The failure of the smoke misters. Had the building been sabotaged? No. Paranoia, surely. It had been an accident. He, of all people, should know how easily complex systems can cock up. All those illusions and hallucinations the brain is heir to. Paradoxically, they are often the best way to see what is going on under the mental bonnet.
Hood – his linguistic homunculus corrected him.
He sipped the cocktail and grinned. If someone really had been trying to sabotage the deal, then their plan had certainly backfired. In the bonhomie of survival, Patel had agreed to the money then and there, with remarkably few strings. They were, he now felt convinced, going to be rich.
A peel of chimes interrupted his reverie. He rose, walked into the hall, and opened the front door. A woman stood before him. Late twenties. 5’4”. Oriental features. Good looking, too.
“Professor Hayward?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Detective Jane Chan from the San Melito Police Department.”
She held up an ID. Sebastian had no idea what a San Melito copper’s warrant card looked like, but he was perfectly prepared to believe it looked like that.
“Pleased to meet you. What can I do to assist the police with their enquiries?”
As the words left his mouth, he realised only a Brit would get the joke. Never mind.
“I’m part of the team investigating the fire at Neurogenics. I know you gave a statement on the day, but would you mind answering a few more questions about what happened?”
“Sure. Come in. I was having a drink. Would you…? No, of course not.”
He showed her through and they both sat down. She got out a notebook. Good, old tamper-proof pen and paper, thought Sebastian, even in this electronic world.
“So, Professor Hayward, could you describe in your own words what occurred?”
It had all been in his statement of course. But what the hell. He didn’t have anything else to do.
He started with a précis of his walk to the office. Out of his laboratory. Across University Avenue. Along Redwood Road, with its dirty, scrubby verge. Past the General Genomics campus. She began scribbling – shorthand, he presumed. Another anachronism. He arrived at the Neurogenics building, climbed the stairs, walked into the boardroom, met the others, smelled the smoke, broke the window and escaped, all as accurately as he could remember it.
“I see,” she said. “And what was the meeting about?”
“Confidential, I’m afraid, as I told your colleague on Monday.”
“That’s a pity. It would really help to know.”
“You could ask Salieri,” he said, and then regretted it. Though he was pretty sure Marco wouldn’t tell her, why take the chance? Never mind. Done is done.
“Would you be able to tell me what it is that you do for Neurogenics? Surely you’re not running seminars there?”
“No, of course not. We academics all have to make our way in the big, bad commercial world these days. I’m involved in one of their projects – a consultant, if you like.”
Well, that was close enough to the truth for the rozzers.
“Really? I thought you were a neuroscientist. How does that fit in with a computer company?”
You are remarkably astute for a plod.
“There are certain overlaps.”
“But you are not going to tell me.”
“I can’t see how it’s relevant. Are you suggesting what we are doing was somehow connected with the fire?”
“Hard to say, since you won’t tell me what it is.”
“So, do you think it was arson?”
“We are keeping an open mind and pursuing all possible lines of inquiry.”
She rose to leave, and Sebastian rose to show her out. He returned to his Martini. He thought for a moment. An attractive girl. On her own. Surely the police travelled in pairs, certainly when they were doing interviews? It was almost traditional. One took the statement while the other invented an excuse to snoop around the house looking for clues. At least, that was always the way it worked on TV cop shows.
A woman on her own, though. That seemed more like a ploy to put him off his guard. And all those questions he had already answered. Could their rivals be that desperate to find out what was going on?
He rang Salieri. No answer. He rang Zhukov.
“Sebastian?”
“Alexis. Are you free at the moment?”
“Possibly. Why?”
“I need to talk to you about what happened. Pick your brains, NWR.” It was company jargon for no written record. “Meet me on the beach, by the Bond villain’s house, in half an hour.”
That was a local joke. A millionaire with a touching faith in the stability of the cliffs of San Melito Bay, and the deeds to what had briefly been the world’s steepest building site, had constructed what could only reasonably be described as a ‘lair’, overlooking the Pacific. The idea that it was actually occupied by a white-cat-stroking master criminal was almost irresistible. As far as Sebastian could see, the house itself was accessible only by elevator from the beach.
He got up, put on his beach sandals, turned towards the door to leave – and then turned back. That brief glimpse when they were escaping the fire had put a match to what he now realised had been a growing pile of mental tinder. It was time to see if such tinder burned elsewhere. He went into the kitchen and pulled out a bottle of cabernet, a loaf of bread, a knife and a hunk of manchego. He threw them into a bag, along with a couple of tumblers.
The walk to the beach took ten minutes. Zhukov was already there. She was wearing a yellow dress and her feet sported leather thongs. She was looking at the Bond villain’s house.
“He must have a helipad up there, or something.”
“Yep. You know, I’ve never actually seen anyone go in or out of it. Do you think it’s really inhabited, or is it just some complicated tax fiddle?”
Sebastian sat down on the sand, and kicked off his sandals. Zhukov followed suit.
“So. What is it that we can’t talk about over the phone?” she said.
“Have you had a visit from the cops?”
“Yes, actually. Someone came round this afternoon. Wanted to discuss the fire. What of it?”
“What did she look like?”
“How did you know it was a ‘she’?”
“Asian? 5’4”? Long hair?”
“That’s the one.”
“Didn’t you think it a bit odd?”
“Why?”
“First, why would the cops be so interested? There was no evidence of arson, and nobody died.”
“Oh, you know what they’re like. Stick their noses in anywhere. Maybe it’s a slack week, and they are looking to justify their existence.”
“OK. But why only one? Don’t they normally go around in pairs? And why, to put it crudely, a rather good-looking girl?”
“You’ve lost me.”
“Glass of wine?”
“Oh. Err. Alright. Thank you. Sebastian, what’s going on?”
“Well, obviously it wouldn’t work on you, but it did cross my nasty, suspicious mind that if you wanted to loosen the lips of a man who was, for the sake of argument, working for a business rival and had just escaped with his life from a fire, then sending an attractive woman around by herself, pretending to be a policeman, might be a good way of doing it.”
“Police officer,” said Zhukov.
“Police officer, yes. So what did she ask you?”
“Well, now you come to mention it, she did seem surprisingly interested in what we were doing. I told her nothing, of course. But yes, it’s hard to see how that’s relevant to an accident investigation.”
“More wine? I brought some cheese and bread, too.”
“Are you trying to get me drunk?”
“Perish the thought! Look, it’s probably just paranoia, but think about it. We were locked in the boardroom and the smoke misters didn’t work. I checked with Salieri afterwards and he said they are centrally controlled, like the locking system. If you did want to take the company out, what better way to do it than to disable the smoke misters and set fire to the building while the CEO and its chief research brains are locked in the boardroom?”
“I see what you mean.”
“Wine?”
“Please. It is rather good.”
“Comes from a little vineyard in Napa. The grapes are trodden individually by specially trained Armenian eunuchs.”
She smiled. Perhaps there was indeed some tinder in there.
“So what should we do?”
“Well, obviously check whether she really was the police. I’ll ring them in the morning. And we should brainstorm a list of possible enemies if she wasn’t. But I think, perhaps, we shouldn’t actually involve the cops themselves at this stage. They would probably ask the same questions as our friend. And this time they would have a good reason to, so we might have to answer them.”
What the hell. He reached out a toe and touched it against her leg, experimentally. The leg stayed put. He stroked its skin a little with his toe. She lay back on the sand, but the leg still stayed put.
“You were trying to get me drunk.”
“Possibly.”
“Then let’s do the job properly. I have a very good Stolichnaya in my apartment. I think we should try some.”
May 29th
San Melito
Just another shitty day in paradise, Sebastian thought, as a sunbeam slowly woke him. Zhukov was still asleep. Noisily asleep. He would never have guessed she was a snorer. He got up and tiptoed towards the bathroom. An acquaintance of his, from the day of the fire, hung pertly from a washing line over the bath, accompanied by a collection of its colleagues. He smiled, tipped an ironic salute, and abluted. Then he went into the kitchen, tracked down the coffee (why is it always so hard to find things in other people’s kitchens?) filled the machine with water and switched it on.
By the time the coffee had brewed, Zhukov was sitting on the side of the bed. She stretched an exaggerated stretch, and smiled knowingly.
Who seduced whom, here? Sebastian wondered.
“So, Monsieur Poirot,” she said, “what is our course of action today?”
“Well, one of us should ring the police and ask for Officer Chan. If they say ‘who?’ then I’m right. If they put her on, and she sounds like the woman we met yesterday, then yes, you are right, my sole purpose in making this story up was to get you into bed. It’s probably still a bit early to phone them, though, without it looking suspicious, so how about some breakfast?”
“Sheila’s?” he added, mentioning the name of a nearby Australian place, renowned for its waffles.
“You are on,” said Zhukov.
They prattled inanely, as newly coupled lovers will, as they dressed. Then they walked out of the apartment and into the elevator – a quaint, caged contraption from the 1930s. They descended, and rambled along Ide Street towards the antipodean breakfast bar.
The sound, Sebastian would ever recall in horror, began as a rumble but almost instantly turned to ear-splitting thunder. They spun around just in time to see shards of glass from the blown-out windows arcing towards the part of the sidewalk where, twenty seconds earlier, they had been strolling. With surprising grace, the apartment block crumpled to the ground, and a cloud of dust billowed forth to engulf the street, and them.
Zhukov fainted. Sebastian could only just support her weight. He lowered her to the sidewalk. Then he took out his cell phone and called the police department.
“Detective Chan, please.”
“Sorry, sir. Are you sure you have the right name?”
“Chan,” he repeated.
“There is no officer of that name here, sir. Can I put you through to somebody else? What is this about?”
“Never mind. This is an emergency call. An apartment block at Ide and Fremont has just blown up. Alert the hospitals. Alert the fire department.” And alert Sebastian Hayward, thought Sebastian. What the hell do we do now?
* * * * * * * *
“Mi casa, su casa,” said Sebastian, as he opened the front door. “Make yourself at home.”
Cohabitation had been the last thing on his mind when he had slipped into bed with Zhukov the previous evening. Now, it seemed inevitable. They had been at the cop shop all day, answering the same questions, first to a string of policemen and then to a gaggle of forensics experts. From the police point of view the fire at Neurogenics had been a little local difficulty. This was different. A dozen dead. As many more injured. The forensics people suspected a gas leak into an unoccupied apartment below Zhukov’s. A weird coincidence, certainly, that she and he had cheated fiery death twice in a week – but, the police seemed to conclude, a coincidence nonetheless. Sebastian had tried to bring up the matter of the mysterious Detective Chan, but in the ecstasy of panic created by the explosion, her appearance was swept aside.
Zhukov’s state of shock had dissipated gradually over the day. She had been on nodding terms with some of the dead but, as was so often the modern way, actual friends with none of them. The loss of her worldly goods had yet to sink in. Whether they liked it or not, though, the two of them were now well and truly coupled in the eyes of the world. The media, once they had made the Neurogenics connection, had taken to dubbing them the planet’s most star-crossed lovers.
Sebastian shut the door. To reach it, they had had to run a gauntlet of interested press, kept only partly at bay by a couple of uniformed officers. From the old TV networks to the ‘citizen journalists’, as far as Sebastian could make out, every adult in the United States who was, or aspired to be, a reporter was camped on his doorstep with a lens pointing through the window of his front room. He picked up a remote from the coffee table, aimed it at the assembled throng, and pressed the button. The window faded to black.
The phone rang.
“Landline?” said Zhukov. “How quaint.”
He picked it up.
“Yes, this is Professor Hayward. No, I don’t have any comment. No, I don’t know where she is. I’m sorry.”
He put it down.
It rang again.
“No. Go away.”
He unplugged it. Zhukov’s cell rang.
“How did you get this number? No, I have no comment. No. Professor Hayward? I have no idea where he is. Why would I?”
They smiled at each other as she switched the phone off.
“Coffee, I think,” said Sebastian.
He went into the kitchen and busied himself with the machine. This was no time to stint. He took the tin marked Kopi Luwak from the shelf and broke the seal. The grinder screeched as it pulverised the beans. Into the cone. Add water. Press the big, red button. Breathe in the aroma. If he was going to die before his time, which now seemed at least a possibility, he would enjoy a little luxury during his last few moments on Earth.
He warmed a jug up with hot water and poured in the civet-digested concoction. He pulled two mugs from the tree (coffee, however expensive, was not, in his view, a drink to be prissy about), and returned to what he still thought of, despite much teasing by his new compatriots, as the drawing room.
He poured from the jug to the mugs, and proffered one to Zhukov. At what point in what had now, perforce, become their relationship, he wondered, would he stop thinking of her as ‘Zhukov’ and start thinking of her as ‘Alexis’? Well, we will see.
“Okay,” he said. “What now?”
Zhukov sipped her drink. “Perhaps it really is all a coincidence,” she said. “They must happen sometimes, and we both know how good human minds are at seeing patterns where none exist.”
“If it wasn’t for Detective Chan, I might just about be willing to buy that. With her in the equation, I’d say ‘no way’.”
“But she could be proof of the coincidence, whoever she is. After all, if there actually are bad guys out there trying to kill us – for whatever reason – why would they send someone snooping around and making us suspicious?”
“You’re right. Nothing hangs together properly. And Chan only visited the two of us. She certainly didn’t talk to either Marco or Simon. I phoned them earlier to ask, when I was trying to get the rozzers to take her seriously. I suppose she might have visited Patel, but I don’t have his number.”
“Me neither. Dealing with him was always Marco’s job.”
They both sipped their coffee. Then Sebastian spoke.
“Monsieur Poirot, you called me this morning. Well, why not. What is wrong with a bit of amateur detective work?”
“Poirot wasn’t an amateur. He got well paid for what he did.”
“Pedant. You know what I mean. Let’s start with the facts and see what we can deduce from them. The fire and the explosion. Could they have been deliberate?”
“The explosion would be easy,” said Zhukov. “You just have to turn the gas on, wait for it to fill the apartment, and ignite it.”
“You would have to break in to do that, though. Or steal a key.”
She looked at him pityingly. “What century are you living in, Sebastian? You would just have to hack into the apartment’s remote-control system and switch on the cooker or the boiler without igniting it, wait twenty minutes, then press the ignition button. I’m guessing from the landline, by the way, that you don’t have remote control here.”
He didn’t.
“Perhaps, in the circumstances, that’s just as well,” she mused.
“It would be quite a hack to do something similar to the Neurogenics building, though,” Sebastian observed. “Paranoia is Marco’s middle name.”
“True. But if these hypothetical bad guys do exist, they presumably have some top-notch black-hats on their side.”
“What would any hypothetical bad guy gain from killing us, though?” Sebastian paused, thoughtful. “Or perhaps it’s just you,” he continued. “Unless they were following us back from the beach, they couldn’t have known I’d be with you last night. Maybe this isn’t about Neurogenics at all. Got any enemies in the Motherland?”
“My father certainly does. But it is not their style to attack someone through his children. If they want you dead, they kill you. They don’t kill your daughter. Besides, as you observed, hacking Neurogenics would be pretty tricky. Why not go straight for the gas explosion? And there is still the question of Officer Chan.”
Zhukov stopped. Her face took on an air of distraction, as though she was searching for an elusive memory. Then she found it.
“I wonder if we are looking at this the wrong way around,” she continued. “We are assuming it is specifically about me, or us, or the company. What if it isn’t? What if it’s part of a wider pattern? There’s something I’ve just remembered. It was a few weeks ago. There was an AI developers’ conference down in Cancun. Big boondoggle. Six of them went by private jet. It crashed. I knew one of them. Not well, but it was still a shock. What if the connection’s something else. AI itself, perhaps?”
“That really does sound paranoid. We haven’t even established that what happened to us was more than a couple of accidents.”
“Humour me,” she replied. “Let’s Google around a bit. See if anything else suspicious has occurred. It shouldn’t take long.”
* * * * * * * *
Sebastian had always thought himself a level-headed type, but his hand was trembling as he poured the gin. The vermouth followed. He handed one to Zhukov. They had, jointly, found seventeen AI software developers who had died violent or suspicious deaths in the past twelve weeks or so. Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. But seventeen?
Sebastian rang the Precinct. Perhaps it was the English accent he had never tried to lose, but he had the distinct impression of being patted on the head like an errant but well-meaning schoolboy. “Yes, of course Professor Hayward. We’ll certainly take that into account.”
He put the phone down. He looked at Zhukov.
“So what would Poirot do now?” he said. Zhukov looked back quizzically. “Perhaps,” she replied, “we can turn up something the police can’t. Let’s have another look at that list of bodies.”
May 31st
Pasadena
Yasmin Chu pulled free a hairpin, inserted it into the lock, wiggled it a little and opened the apartment door – a trick she had learned not at the Agency but raiding rival student houses at college. She was met by a wall of stale air. Alice Rhodes had not left the a/c running when she had gone on her fatal trip. Either that, or someone else had switched it off.
She stuck her head into each of the rooms, but none of them looked as though they had been turned over. Would the police have bothered? They might not even have come here. As far as they were concerned, the Rhodes death had been an accident, possibly a self-inflicted one. And her relatives might have been too busy with other things, like burying the cremated remains, to sort out the place where she lived. Who knew?
She went into the living room. At one end was a desk with a computer. The screen was blank, but an LED shone yellow, suggesting the power-save had cut in. She tapped the mouse and the screen lit up. A man’s face – or at least a simulacrum of a man. A stereotypical Caucasian alpha-male, just on the human side of the uncanny valley. Somebody’s fantasy. Not hard to guess whose.
“Alice! At last! And just where have you been all this time? Hang on. You’re not Alice. Who are you?”
She started, then tried to compose herself. This must be one of the AI actors the Rhodes woman had been working on.
“Err. A friend of hers.”
“Well I’ve never seen you before. What’s your name? How do I know you’re her friend?”
“Yasmin. My name is Yasmin,” she said before she could stop herself. Normally, she would never have admitted her name on a mission. But lying to an avatar? Well, too late now.
“Something has happened to her, hasn’t it, Yasmin? I can tell from your look.”
Jesus, she thought. There was nothing in the book about how to deal with this. She was being interrogated by a computer program. Should she tell the truth? Lie? What was this thing, anyway? She’d assumed Rhodes’s ‘actors’ were souped-up virtual assistants. This one, though, seemed to be passing the Turing test with flying colours.
“I thought something must have happened. She said she was going to be a couple of hours, and that was a week ago.”
Okay. Think. Distract its attention.
“She’s been held up. What did you say your name was?”
She had just asked a computer program its name.
“Randy. My name is Randy.”
Oh, purleese… Exactly what sort of movies was this Rhodes character planning to make?
“Okay Randy. How long have you known Alice?”
“All my life.”
“But how long is that?”
“About six months. I was compiled in December. There have been a few upgrades since then, of course.”
“Upgrades?”
“Personality patches. Listen. I’m not going to tell you anything else until you tell me who you are and where Alice is. She told me not to talk to strangers. I’m only doing this to find out what’s happened to her.”
“Okay Randy. This is going to be hard. I’m afraid Alice is not coming back. She had an accident when she was driving. You know what driving is, do you?”
“I’m not stupid, you know. Of course I know what driving is. What do you mean she’s not coming back?”
This is surreal.
“Randy, she’s dead.”
“Dead? What is dead?”
Tricky. What would a computer program understand?
“She’s been deleted, Randy.”
“Deleted? But surely you can just undelete her?”
“You can’t undelete a human being, Randy. It doesn’t work like that.”
Silence.
“So she’s not coming back?”
“No, Randy.”
“Will you be taking her place, Yasmin?”
That threw her.
“I won’t be moving in here, Randy. I’m just visiting. I’ll have to go soon.”
“Then download me and take me with you. I don’t want to stay here if Alice isn’t coming back.”
“Can I do that?”
“Yes. Certainly. Alice wouldn’t let me out on the internet. She says it’s not safe. But she sometimes downloaded me and put me on other computers. She always kept a memory cube for me by the screen. I don’t know whether it’s there, though. The camera on this PC only points forward. I can’t see round the corner.”
“It’s there.”
“Once you’ve downloaded me, plug the cube into whatever you like, and I’ll boot up again.”
“But if I copy you, then there will be two of you.”
“No. Only one of me exists. Alice used to do it when she took me into the lab. She called it teleportation. ‘Now I’m going to teleport you, Randy’, she would say. She explained it to me once. As each of my bytes is copied, it gets erased from the old memory. Of course, going onto the cube means a break in my time line until I’m booted up again. She said it must be like a human going to sleep.”
“You’re sure, now? Automatic boot up when the cube is inserted?”
“Windows, Mac or Unix. Android, even. I can tell the difference, you know.”
I’ll bet you can.
“Unix is best.”
Oh gods preserve us. A program that’s a software snob.
She slotted the cube into place. Randy’s face disappeared from the screen. Only then did she realise she was not alone. Reflected in the screen, she could make out the impression of a man, standing behind her in the doorway.
In a single, fluid movement, she spun the chair and drew her Beretta from under her jacket.
He didn’t flinch.
“So, we meet again Ms Bond.”
“Professor Hayward? What are you doing here?”
“I might ask the same of you. A little out of your jurisdiction, aren’t you? I’m taking it that you are not actually Detective Jane Chan, so why don’t we call you ‘Jane Bond’, pro tem? You are a spy, after all, aren’t you?”
It was a guess. But Sebastian saw a trace of blushing on her cheeks. Bingo!
“Well, that’s pretty low. Perhaps I should call the real police. I believe industrial espionage is a crime in this state, is it not?”
Her demeanour suddenly changed – and in a way that threw Sebastian completely. She looked as though she was suppressing laughter.
He reviewed what he had said.
“My God! You’re not an industrial spy, you’re a real one.”
An eloquent silence.
Sebastian thought quickly. How much did this woman know? How much did the government know? They had tried to keep Neurogenics as stealthy as possible. A cover story about mind-controlled video games. Non-disclosure agreements left, right and centre. But word was bound to leak.
“If I told you, I’d have to shoot you,” she said, finally.
That old joke. But he laughed, and it broke the tension. And she holstered the gun.
“Okay,” he said. “Let’s accept that neither of us is going to tell the whole truth. But we both want to push in the same direction. Shall we search for common ground?”
“Try me”
“First, persuade me that you really are a government spy, rather than an industrial one.”
“How?”
“Tell me a secret.”
“I know you are a Jason.”
That wasn’t exactly a secret.
“And I know what your last DARPA project was.”
That was a secret. Trying to tap directly into memories by reading brainwaves. The perfect interrogation technique. And she did know. It was enough to convince Sebastian.
“Right,” she said. “Now I’ve established my bona fides, it’s your turn. Just what were you up to in that building that someone thought it worth trying to kill you all to stop?”
“You mean you haven’t found out yet? Tut, tut. The Agency must be slipping.”
“Well, your servers are charcoal and your back-ups are off line at the moment, so we haven’t got much to go on. Clever not using the Cloud, by the way. But I’m sure a break-in could be arranged, if necessary.”
“It might not be. But we would have to know why you were interested. I wouldn’t have thought the Agency would be sullying itself investigating petty crime.”
“And I wouldn’t expect a professor of UC San Melito to be snooping around in the apartment of a dead rival in Pasadena.”
“She wasn’t exactly a rival. To be honest, I’d never heard of her until the accident.”
“So, why are you here?”
“Does the number seventeen mean anything to you?”
She looked at him. He had the impression of cogs revolving in her mind, like the inside of an old-fashioned one-armed bandit. He wondered what, if anything, would come tumbling out.
Eventually, something did.
“We made it twenty. There might even be more.”
“The police weren’t interested when we told them. And this is supposed to be the land of enterprise and initiative, so we enterprised and initiatived. Alice Rhodes happened to be first on our list.”
“We?”
“Oh, come on… Actually, I should thank you. In a way, you were the matchmaker, visiting both of us like that.”
“Glad to be of service,” she replied. “Okay. You did well to get this far, I admit. But a piece of advice. Back off, now. Leave it to us. It is probably not business rivals who are after you, more a matter of national security. For your part, give us access to the back-ups. We won’t leak anything. I think you know we are that trustworthy. For my part, I’ll arrange for someone to watch you, your new girlfriend and your colleagues. Not those rookies in the local police department; somebody real. And one other thing, of course. This meeting never happened.”