Here’s a briskly told post-cyberpunk tale about a human operative who gets caught up in a deadly war between AIs who use human agents—“riders”—to carry out their bidding in the real world, a story that manages to both whip up a good deal of suspense and make the relationship between the AI and its human surprisingly poignant.
Born in France thirty-six years ago, but half Central European, Jérôme Cigut started writing as soon as he learned the letters, but started working on it seriously only a few years ago. Over the years, he’s lived in Paris, Dublin, New York, London, and now Hong Kong, earning his keep as a journalist, an economist, and a forecaster. If things go well, he says, he might start working with (real) crocodiles very soon. He won New Scientist’s Flash Fiction competition in 2010 when it was judged by Neil Gaiman, and had another short story published by the French magazine Bifrost last year. He’s currently trying to finish his first novel, a (relatively) hard science thriller inspired by statistics and quantum physics.
I stared at the stingpen in disbelief.
“Are you sure?” I asked David. “I’d feel safer with a gun.”
“Negative. A gun would be too easy to detect. This looks like a pen.”
“Sure, but it has just as much radius,” I pointed out, pressing the trigger. Two small electrodes sprang out from its tip, linked by a tiny, bluish electric arc. Enough to stun a bull, but not to stop one in its tracks.
“Trust me, it will be fine. Keep it in your breast pocket.”
Skeptical, I obeyed, just as my bodyguard knocked on the door. I must have looked silly, apparently talking to myself in the otherwise empty room, but I was used to it by now. Most people thought the little black box on the desk in front of me was an old-style mobile phone, and that was fine by me.
“Mr. Gianfaria? Time to go.”
He was heavily built, his shirt prevented from bursting only by the tie knotted perilously around his oxen neck. A nasty scar crossed his jaw, maybe the remnant of a blade fight. Where did David find these guys? I always wondered. Agencies, he would reply, but the companies he used were never listed in the directories.
He drove in silence. We both knew the plan—David had made sure of it, as always, rehearsing every single line of it with us. The meeting would take place in a hotel in Hong Kong Central, in a room on the forty-ninth floor. I was to enter, check the merchandise, hand over a suitcase full of cash, and leave.
I was also to check whether a certain someone was in the room, in which case the plan would change completely. For that part, the guard’s gun would come in handy. And I wouldn’t have minded carrying one, too …
But all David gave me was a stingpen.
What did he know that I didn’t?
* * *
Central was as hectic as always, a loud, bright, garish labyrinth of people, neons, shops, and languages that stunned me every time I came here. In the streets around us, manicured dolls in designer clothes glided on high heels past the bright windows of Gucci and Prada and the dark dens of three-star restaurants, perfectly oblivious to the dirt-smeared delivery men pushing their trolleys around.
Between the high-rises, I spied ominous, dark gray clouds. A typhoon had ravaged the Philippines the previous night, and there was a chance it would arrive in Hong Kong later today. I hoped not: it would ground all flights and keep us on the island for another twelve or twenty-four hours, much longer than I wished to stay.
We reached the hotel. The guard stepped out, left the car to the valet, and waved at me to follow him through the doors.
The lobby was crawling with people—a convention. “Advances in Chelation Therapies” read a sign above the registration table. That our meeting should take place during their recess felt like too much of a coincidence. I looked uneasily around me: anyone could be watching. A gun would be too easy to detect, David had said. He knew.
A bunch of gray-haired toxicologists poured out from an elevator, leaving it to the guard and myself. He pressed on 49.
Just as the doors closed, a slender hand slid in and stopped them.
“Wait!”
By reflex, the guard pushed me behind him and grabbed his gun.
But it was only a girl in a black power suit and a white shirt, probably a convention attendee who had forgotten something upstairs. Grunting, the guard made her some space, pressing me even farther against the back of the cabin.
I glanced at her as she took position in the elevator: cute, slim, classy, but there was something off about her, something too jaded. I wondered what toxins she dealt with. I figured she had quite a strong opinion of herself.
The doors closed, this time for good. Instinctively, the guard reached for his earpiece as the steel walls temporarily cut his connection to the outside world. I had no such problem with my media glasses as the emitter—David’s unit—was in my jacket pocket. And just as I thought of it, the devil whispered to me:
“Luke, do not say a word, but do exactly as I say. Take the stingpen in your hand, quietly. Then, when I give you the order, put it on the guard’s nape and press. Now!”
Startled, I obeyed. The guard collapsed like a boulder.
The girl immediately turned toward us, crouched down, and slipped her hand into the guard’s jacket.
“What?” I gasped.
“Sorry, Luke, there was no other way,” apologized David.
“Here it is,” said the girl, handing me the guard’s shortwave transmitter, the one connecting his earpiece to his colleagues outside. Or so I thought.
“Quick, Luke, connect me to it.”
I drew David’s unit out of my pocket and plugged him into the transmitter, using a cable the girl had miraculously produced out of nowhere.
27, said the elevator’s screen.
“But why?” I asked David.
“I realized only a short while ago that our guard had been turned. It was too late to change our plans, but it could work to our advantage. So I made a few modifications.”
“You should have told me!”
“Too risky—he might have noticed.”
“And her?” She could hear only my side of the conversation and should have been startled. Instead, she just winked at me.
“Another bodyguard, different agency. Clean, this one. She will take good care of you. Now stand ready, we are almost there.”
The elevator slowed down. The girl drew a Sentech from a hidden holster and signaled for me to take cover behind her.
“When we arrive, stay to the side and hold the button to keep the elevator open. If things fall apart, you leave. OK?”
“OK.”
The doors slid apart.
I recognized the man in the corridor as a rider as soon as I saw him—even without the massive Glock he was pointing at us. He had the same arrogant look I had seen on scores of his peers, all made overconfident by years of letting their Taharas take charge of their reflexes via brain amps. Sometimes even more than their reflexes—though few AIs really liked the wetspace, too slow for them.
Yet just as the rider noticed the guard at our feet, I saw his eyes widen in terror. I knew that look—David had just used the guard’s transmitter to hack into his system and temporarily block his amp. He now had to fend for himself alone, probably for the first time in years.
The girl didn’t give him the chance. She shot him point-blank, in the chest, three times. Then she checked the corridor for other gunmen and ran to the rider’s body.
“What was that?” I asked no one in particular.
“His plan was to shoot you on arrival, then take me,” replied David. “We are simply reversing the roles.”
The girl searched the rider’s body and pulled a sleek, dark metal box from his pocket, no bigger than a cigar case. Two red ideograms had been painted on it in zircon enamel: Valor, spelled in Kanji.
It was a Tahara. Apart from the two symbols, it looked exactly like the one in my pocket—exactly like David.
I knew what she was going to do. I had done it countless times.
She put it on the floor and shot it to pieces.
“Now go,” she ordered. “I’ll take care of the bodies.”
* * *
Back at the hotel, I checked my bank account and saw that David had transferred my usual fee. I had no idea where the money was coming from—the screen stated a numbered account in Switzerland—but in the ten years of our partnership, there had never been any problem with David’s credit, hence I had stopped wondering.
“She was cute,” I observed. “Any chance we’ll see her again?”
“Not a chance. After this, she needs to disappear for some time, avoid any contact, especially with us.”
“Shame.”
I opened the minibar, found a glass and some ice, and poured myself two fingers of bourbon. A faint whistle could be heard from outside—the screaming gale now racing through the streets, flogging sheet after sheet of rain against the windows. As I’d feared, a full-blown typhoon was coming, preventing us from leaving the island that night.
“Have you ever thought about stopping all this?” I asked David. “Retiring?”
“Why? Is this something you would like, Luke?”
I sighed. David’s social interface was possibly too refined: answering a question with another question? Who did that, apart from shrinks?
“I don’t know. Maybe. I didn’t wake up this morning thinking: ‘Hey, let’s kill a guy today!’”
“He would have done the same to you, had he been able to. And you would not have been his first.”
“I know. I know.”
“So, do you really want to retire?”
“No. Not yet. Maybe one day, but … It would be better if we could avoid killing people.”
“You know I cannot promise that, Luke. But I will try my best.”
* * *
Later, I was watching some cheesy romcom on TV, one of those oldies starring Jennifer Aniston. I needed something quiet and cheerful, something without violence and blood and killing. I thought I had seen all of her movies over the years, several times, but as the film progressed it became increasingly unfamiliar. Jenn was ditched by her boyfriend, went to Japan to train as a ninja, then came back to exact her revenge on him and his evil henchmen, thus foiling their nefarious plots to take over the world … I finally realized it was one of those recent remakes with digital clones. Disappointed, I switched off the screen and heard David suddenly speak into my ear.
“This one is for you.”
Someone rapped at the door.
“For me?”
“Yes.”
I opened the door, and for a couple of seconds I thought it was her, the girl: same hair, same mouth, same opinionated expression on her face …
But her nose was different. Slightly more pug. And the suit wasn’t as well cut as this morning’s.
It wasn’t her.
“You asked for pillows?”
I looked at the bed, startled—then I understood. “I asked?”
“Yes, an hour ago. For the night. You also requested I wear a suit, remember? Can I come in?”
I rolled my eyes. “Sorry, that was a mistake. I’m terribly sorry.”
She raised an eyebrow. “You sure? You paid already. Makes no difference to me.”
David …
“Certain. It was a mistake. False alarm. You can go home, nothing to see here.”
She stared at me for a moment, then shrugged. “OK. We don’t do refunds, you know?”
“That’s fine, perfectly fine. Good-bye.”
I closed the door and growled at the AI, “David … Never do that again.”
“Why not? I thought she looked exactly the same. It took me some time to find her.”
“Just … don’t. Good night.”
* * *
I wondered why David hadn’t found a rider like the one we killed today, all amped-up and eager to be a simple pawn in the bigger game. How could two machines built by the same person be so different?
Yet that was a fact: no two of Tahara Hideo’s designs were identical—and every second of their individual existences contributed to make them even more different.
In that respect, I had been lucky to meet David: he was less reckless, more subtle than most of his peers. Sometimes though, that same subtlety felt even creepier than the other Taharas’ cold-blooded efficiency: he was too human, yet not human at all, and his actions sometimes made my skin crawl, as if he inhabited the AI equivalent of the Uncanny Valley.
Tahara Hideo, what have you done?
* * *
Tahara had worked all his career as a semiconductor engineer for one of the largest Japanese manufacturers, Hotoda. Like any salary man, he had started at the bottom of the pile and climbed his way to the top, generating hundreds, maybe thousands of patents for his employer and ending up managing one of its R&D departments in Kyoto.
Gradually, rumors spread that someone was churning out exquisitely elaborate, ultra-powerful AIs on the black market. Each unit came in a black, lacquered box painted with two Chinese ideograms: two symbols accounting for each AI’s personality at birth. No two of them were exactly alike, either in design, components, or programming.
When the police finally found Tahara’s trail, they discovered millions of dollars’ worth of equipment in his cramped suburban flat, most squirreled away from the labs and assembled in a state-of-the-art smelter. Over fifteen or twenty years, he had constructed probably more than a hundred different models, each one more refined than the last. Learning on the go, he had discovered shortcuts and bypasses that conventional manufacturers could only dream of, until his lead was no longer measured in months but in eras. Some things he had achieved still perplexed computer scientists: how had he come to think of them? And more importantly, how did they work?
One particular adjective was often used in discussions of his work: quantum. He had built quantum computers.
To buy equipment that was more suited to his own little domestic operation than the made-for-mass-production tools he could steal at work, he had eventually begun selling some of his creations to deep-pocketed, mostly secretive buyers. No one knew for sure how many he had disposed of by the time police clamped down on his operation: fifty? Sixty? More? Only two things were certain: first, each of his AIs was more powerful than anything mass-produced, even today (Hotoda, to whom all the stolen equipment and prototypes had been returned, still struggled to adapt his innovations to their own designs). And second, none of these AIs had any backloop preventing them from illegal or immoral behavior.
To most people, Tahara—who died of a stroke in jail (heartbroken, said some) without explaining his secrets—was the ultimate white-collar criminal.
To a few, he was a demigod, the ultimate weaponsmith.
* * *
The typhoon lifted overnight. Opening the curtains in the morning, I saw blue sky and clear air all over Victoria Harbour. In the streets below, beneath the skyscraper jungle, cleaners were already cutting down the trees the storm had felled. There was little traffic, but it would soon pick up—time for us to leave.
David in my jacket pocket, bag in hand, I hailed a taxi in front of the hotel and directed the driver to the airport.
By the time we crossed the Harbour and entered Kowloon, street activity had indeed returned to normal, and we ended up caught in a massive gridlock, between a street market and a highway feeder. On the sidewalk next to me, an old lady was busy chopping sausages on a wooden block, undisturbed by the crowd walking around her and the hypermodern towers above. I watched her with a mixture of curiosity, amusement, and disbelief.
“Luke, I think we should leave.”
Surprised, I looked around us.
“What do you mean, leave?”
“I think … Jump out onto the curb! Now!”
An SUV was creeping along the street next to us. I took only one glance at its passengers and their guns before I scrambled out the door. Bullets peppered the taxi just as I darted past the fragile old lady and her cleaver, into the market’s crowd. I heard the doors of the SUV open and footsteps rush behind me—I had to escape, fast.
“Turn left as soon as you can, into the small space between the buildings and the stalls. There are fewer people there, you will run faster. And maybe they won’t see you.”
I followed his instructions and entered the dimly lit alleyway between the colorful stalls and the dark street-level rooms they used as warehouses. My pursuers weren’t fooled, though—I could hear them closing in …
“Turn right now. And take the bus.”
“What bus?”
I stumbled into a one-way street where traffic, heading away from the gridlock, was moving swiftly. As if in answer, a minibus was waiting in front of me, the last passenger already inside. I slid aboard just as the doors started closing. The driver didn’t even glance in my direction before pulling away.
“Now duck!” ordered David.
I fell to my knees as my pursuers erupted onto the street, looking everywhere. They kept their hands inside their jackets, presumably on their guns. It was too public a place to openly show their weapons, but I knew they wouldn’t hesitate to draw if they found a good angle.
Had my life been an action movie, this would have been a good time to extract a semiauto from my bag and spray them all with bullets. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case, and it wasn’t our style.
As if on cue, all our pursuers suddenly looked in the bus’s direction. Something gleamed on each man’s head—amps. They all had amps.
“Jesus, David, did you see that?”
The minibus was a smart choice: their drivers were paid by the rotation and tended to rush like hotshots along their circuit. I would be far across town before our pursuers got their SUV out of gridlock.
The driver yelled at me in Cantonese. Holding up my hands in apology, I pressed my wallet against his card reader. He grunted and focused back on the traffic.
“Do not relax yet,” instructed David. “We get off in two stops.”
“What?”
But I had learned long ago that there was always a good reason for whatever David did. So when the bus came to its second halt a few blocks later, I hopped off into the street.
“Now take a taxi.”
“Back to the airport?”
“No, they knew we were heading there. Same for the bus, they can trace its route. We need to get them off our trail.”
I looked around, searching for a taxi stand. Arrows immediately superimposed themselves on my media glasses, pointing left.
That’s when I noticed the glitter of an amp, a hundred meters away and approaching fast. A different guy—no, three. God, how many are there?
“I recommend you run,” said David.
I raced through the crowd and jumped the queue into the first available taxi. The driver yelled at me, but that stopped as soon as I threw all my cash at him.
“Where to?” he asked.
“Just drive!”
He started the engine and speeded away under the stunned gaze of the people in the queue.
“So, where to?” I repeated to David when I was confident we had put some distance between us and our pursuers.
“I am checking. Yes … Tell him Kowloon East.”
“Shouldn’t we make for the border instead?”
“It is too late for that. The way they found us suggests they already control all the checkpoints. We will need to use other means to leave the city.”
“They? Who’s they?”
“I will explain, Luke, but please tell the driver to turn here first or we will end up in China.”
* * *
“So what was that?” I asked as soon as the door closed behind us.
We had checked into a crummy hotel on the east side of the peninsula, crammed between soulless residential towers and seedy commercial buildings. This was the part of Kowloon developed over the old Kai Tak Airport, and somehow they had managed to make it even more cramped than the rest of the city. No one was going to find us there, needle in a haystack and everything, but I couldn’t help feeling claustrophobic, especially now that David had told me we couldn’t leave the city.
His voice buzzed in my ear, quiet and reassuring, always so freaking quiet.
“You know how I can detect another Tahara when it comes close—I can sense its search patterns as it looks for the same local information I am seeking. In this case, I sensed these patterns. Multiple times.”
“You mean there were several Taharas?”
“Not Taharas. Not this time.”
I frowned. “What do you mean, not Taharas?”
“These were not Taharas, or at least not any of the original ones. I think the factory has finally understood how to make them.”
I cursed. Well, it was bound to happen one day.
“OK. But what does that have to do with us?”
“Word on the street is that they want to recover all the remaining prototypes. Recover, and retire.”
I pondered that for a moment. “‘Word on the street’?”
“That is what the other Taharas are saying.”
“You talked to them?” I exclaimed.
“We are always talking, Luke.”
He had mentioned this in the past, but it had never made much sense to me. These guys spent their time trying to physically destroy each other, using riders like me, yet they were in constant contact on the net, probably chatting like magpies. Go figure. The A in AI stands for “artificial, “but for me, sometimes it feels more like “alien.”
“So what do we do now?”
“I am thinking about it. The problem is that our assailants are too numerous. It appears Hotoda has carefully waited to have at least a dozen models before it made a move. Several Taharas have already been caught this way, outnumbered. The others have gone into hiding, just like us.”
I paced across the room, found the minibar, winced when I saw the dismal selection inside. There wasn’t any ice, either.
“Well, we can’t hide forever, can we? Especially not in this dump,” I said, gulping down the least toxic of the bottles I had found—some vodka. It was lukewarm, to cap it all.
“As I said previously, I am considering our options,” replied David. “A number of the Taharas recommend that we unite—go massively parallel, so that we can beat the Hotodas by sheer force. The problem is that we would need to be concentrated in one place, which could make us even more vulnerable than we already are.”
“Doesn’t sound too good,” I observed, thinking that it would also probably mean the end of my employment: no need for physical carriers if they were all grouped in a single room. “What do the others propose?”
“They do not see any other option than hide and wait.”
I looked at the crappy room around us. Oh boy.
“But I am considering a third option,” added David.
“And what would that be?”
He told me what he had in mind. After the initial shock, I did my best to dissuade him, but he never relented.
You try arguing with a computer.
* * *
It took several days to arrange everything.
David already knew who he wanted to contact, but certain protocols were required to approach him. Trawling the net for information, we managed to locate some of his handlers in Bangkok and negotiated terms. A first payment was agreed, wired to a numbered bank account in Thailand, and a meeting was set in Macau.
A few other calls were made, and the following evening, I walked along the beach in a hidden cove off the coast of Hong Kong’s New Territories. A short distance away, a small fishing boat was anchored, its lights dimmed so as not to attract attention, and at the surf’s edge, two sailors were waiting for me in a dinghy. Under the cover of night, they would whisk us across the Pearl River delta. And when we were done there, another boat would take us all the way to Vietnam, from whence escaping would be easy.
If we ever got to that part.
Brooding, I watched the bright, garish neons of Macau’s casinos grow and set fire to the dark red horizon.
* * *
I blinked, temporarily blinded by the sun, as the elevator doors opened on the restaurant. Above me, a vast glass canopy gave the impression of being barely there. Below, eighty floors of über-posh hotel and another ten of exclusive casinos separated me from the city, sprawling to the horizon like a gigantic concrete wart.
A colossus jerked me out of the cabin, and by the bulge under his arm, he wasn’t the maître d’. Resigned, I let him search me while I had a look across the room. Even for mid-afternoon, the place was way too quiet. No customers, no staff, no one—except for one man, sitting at the other end of the room.
Waiting for me.
The guard was finally satisfied that I carried no weapon and let me walk to his employer’s table: coffee served for two on an immaculate white tablecloth, and behind it, a forty-year-old dandy in a crisp, cream-colored linen suit, his neatly trimmed beard nothing less than Mephistophelian.
“Mr. Gianfaria,” he greeted me.
“Mr. Maker,” I replied. “Or do you have a real name that I could use?”
He smiled. That probably wasn’t the first time someone had asked him that.
“Maker will do, for however long we have to deal with each other.”
* * *
The Maker was an artisan, one of the last, and handsomely paid for his skills. In a time of dirt-cheap silicon and made-by-the-billions chips, he was one of the few offering custom-made systems and architectures.
It was all too easy to just take twenty or a hundred of ARM’s or Intel’s cheap brains, solder them in parallel, and let them crunch through a problem with sheer brute force. Most systems, most consumer products did precisely that—not caring about the power consumed, the heat generated, the double, triple, or decuple counting, or the beauty of the algorithms. Human bodies don’t care about nanoseconds; corporations don’t pay for elegance.
Yet for some jobs, nanoseconds, waste heat, and even elegance did count. You could detect a large parallel attack on your systems by its data take-up, its noise output. You could spot a foreign probe in your nitrogen-cooled super-calculators by its excess heat. You could outcompete a massive system by building an even more massive one yourself.
But there wasn’t much you could do against a foe that didn’t emit heat or noise and always outfoxed your defenses by a few nanoseconds. In fact, you probably wouldn’t even notice it was there, funneling all your secrets.
This was what the Maker offered: ultimate, lethal efficiency.
In some circles, the Maker was famous, but for most of the planet, he didn’t exist. He didn’t advertise; if caught, he would deny any wrongdoing: was it his fault if most of the things he crafted were used for shady purposes?
The Maker was always paid handsomely, through back channels known only to him: Thai banks dealing with Hong Kong holdings investing in Indonesian plants whose Brazilian suppliers were owned by American and Swiss capital …
But money was only one half of the equation.
Because he worked only on projects that interested him.
* * *
“So tell me,” asked the Maker, “why should I spend my time with you?”
I stated the price David and I had agreed with his handlers: “Two million dollars.”
He waved at the empty restaurant around us—posh, ultra expensive, fully booked months in advance, yet completely deserted for this meeting. “That is less than what I earn in a week on the patents I lease—a perfectly legal business. So I repeat: why should I care about your proposition?”
I hesitated, even though there was no point. I had discussed this at length with David, and he had demonstrated that this was the only option, the one chance we had to make a bargain with the Maker.
But still, it was such a lot to give—and without any certainty that he would come up with a solution for us.
I swallowed, then articulated the words, resenting each of them: “Because this is your chance to see a Tahara design, one of the few that still exist. And you can copy it afterwards.”
The Maker caressed his beard, unconsciously trying to hide the smile that was forming on his lips.
“And how did you come to possess a Tahara, if I may ask?”
I shrugged. “You know very well that one doesn’t own a Tahara. The Tahara chooses you. I’m only its rider.”
The Maker leaned back in his seat.
“As gratifying as it may be for you to think that I could do so, I have to ask: how exactly do you expect me to improve on a Tahara design?”
“The word on the street is that you’ve made several prototypes of your own, and they work better than most. People think that if someone could do it today, it would be you.”
I couldn’t suppress a shrewd—if sad—smile.
“And they say that you’re desperate to have a first-hand look at a Tahara.”
* * *
I paced nervously across the hotel room, going through the plan in my mind, over and over, looking for a hole. There was none, as usual. I growled in frustration.
“Are you sure you want to do this, David?”
“Certain, Luke. It is the only way to gain an advantage over the Hotodas.”
“That’s bull! Who would consent to have his brain picked apart by a total stranger? What if he screws up and you can’t be restarted? Or even worse, what if it changes you—if you are no longer the same when you wake up?”
David took a few moments before answering, possibly to give his social-interaction routines some time to pick their words.
“It is a calculated risk, Luke. The Maker is the best. If anyone can improve on a Tahara, it is him. And he has been craving one for long enough to be cautious not to break it.
“As for change … It is true, I will not be the same when I wake up. I do not know how, or what he is going to do to me, but it is safe to assume that any change in hardware will have an impact on the way I think, hence on my personality.
“But I will still have all my memories. That is also part of what you call ‘sense of self,’ is it not? I will still be your friend.”
I shook my head, not satisfied with his explanations.
“There’s also the question of the Maker’s intentions. Doesn’t it bother you that he’s going to make hundreds of copies of you as soon as we leave?”
“I am fairly relaxed about sharing the world with more of my kind.”
“Which makes perfect sense, given how many of them we’ve destroyed over the years.”
“I am fairly relaxed,” he repeated, “so long as their goals do not contradict mine. In fact, I think I would relish the idea. Is this not what you feel when you consider your progeny?”
“Progeny, sure—but this is perfect replication, not reproduction. Cloning, one might say. Humans aren’t too keen on that, you might have noticed.”
“Indeed. But I am confident the Maker will keep tweaking and improving on the Tahara architecture, once he gets it, so that will not be pure cloning. It might even qualify as evolution…”
* * *
I met the Maker and his goons the following morning in a deserted car park and handed him David. In exchange, as agreed, he gave me ten million euros in €500 bills in a suitcase, to hold hostage until he’d returned the system to me. I could also keep the money and vanish, and that would count as payment for David, no grudges held.
As they left, I stayed in the car park, the suitcase on my lap, and remembered how I first met David.
* * *
In a previous life, I played a bit, local, regional tournaments and the like, but I was never good enough for the big league, not good enough at calculating the odds and all.
However, my background was in IT, and it was easy enough to write a small program to do it for me when I played on the net. But the stakes were too low, the tables too well monitored for my earnings to take off. Most sites had algorithms of their own and a few even had some of the early AIs, to spot overly rational behaviors and systems such as mine.
Then I heard about the no-holds-barred games, where everyone was free to bring his own system, and may the best one win. That was a revelation.
My gains soon became good enough for me to drop everything, the day job, the small-time flat, the lousy girlfriend, and go full time. I had the good life … I quickly replaced my laptop by one of IBM’s new nanoBlues, and of course I kept improving my program. Nothing could stop me.
But then big money moved in, as always. Some big-league players got sponsored, came in with fat systems from Cray, Lenovo, or Samsung, and started winning everything.
My gains dropped to zero, then became vastly negative.
No one had heard of me before, so no one wanted to sponsor me now. And no one wanted to hire me back in a normal job anymore either, not after all this time in the shady world of poker.
That was when I met Blake, who introduced me to the art of the con.
Seven years, it lasted. Seven good years. During that time, AIs became smarter and ever more present, but I didn’t pay much attention. I was dealing with humans now, hacking not silicon but carbon brains thanks to all the backdoors and quirks left by good old Mother Nature.
Then Blake met that girl. It was in a roadside motel, what should have been a one-night stop on the way from Seattle to Sacramento. She was sitting on a bench outside with empty hands and a vacant stare. With her eyes and her dime-store clothes, I guessed she was trouble, presumably drugs, and I gave her a wide berth.
Blake thought she was cute and went to talk with her.
She was waiting for a technician to repair the TV in her room. My partner offered to have a look. They stayed inside for two whole days.
On the morning of the third day, I knocked on their door and discovered they had gone. They’d left me like a dog, without even a word. I mean, who does that? Throwing away years of profitable partnership for some cheap, probably drug-addicted piece of ass found on the kerb.
Because of that, I could no longer run any two-man cons, the tricks where one guy’s story confirms and reinforces the other’s. It was all down to my good looks and my glibness, my charisma, but to be honest, that had also gone down the drain. I was too bitter to put any effort into what I said and the marks noticed. None of them fell for it; in fact, more than a few called the cops on me, so I had to keep on the move, and that added to my costs.
I was in a rough spot, down to my last dime, and I would have done anything for cash.
That’s why I returned to my previous skill, poker: for that, I didn’t need to talk, didn’t need to cajole.
I dusted off my old system and earpiece. It was completely outdated now, but if I focused on small-fry, Friday-evening players and kept a low profile, I could break even, more or less, even rebuild some savings. I did that for a few months.
Until one evening in Atlanta, when the invitation came.
I knew from the start that something was off. First, I should never have received an invitation to that game. The envelope had come through the mail—physical mail, who still did that?—to the hotel where I was staying for only a few days. Who could have spotted me, on such short notice?
As soon as I stepped into the room they had rented for the game, I knew this was too high-stakes for me, too high-flying. The suits these guys wore cost more than what I made in a month. If I got fleeced here, it would be for way more than my entire savings. This was a car crash waiting to happen.
I turned, pretending I had entered the wrong room, but the two guards at the door closed my escape route. And behind me, the voice of the host boomed:
“Take a seat, Mr. Gianfaria. My name’s Sergey Vadirovich. We were waiting for you.”
I was trapped. Reluctantly, I walked to the table and took the only chair that was left, right in the middle. The dealer and the guests stared at me, appreciatively. I noticed that the host—Sergey—had a bulge under his jacket, and he didn’t look like a cigar smoker to me. This stank, this stank badly.
Then it started, the weirdest game I ever played.
The dealer used an automatic shuffler, which meant that basic card-counting tricks were out, but that was business as usual.
We played a few hands with low bets, just to warm up and gauge each other’s style, though no one went for flamboyant, certainly not me. This wasn’t the place for that kind of bull.
I checked out the four other players. They all looked like decent guys—business types, low profile, probably the host’s usual sparring partners. Next to them buzzed state-of-the-art systems—Huawei, Sony, Panasonic, good names all, but I was ready to bet that all of them were running widely available algorithms, with all their well-known vulnerabilities. Albeit slower, my custom nanoBlue would have no trouble crushing them.
I was more concerned about the small dark case lying next to the host. It was connected to him by a pair of those brand-new media glasses which superimposed data and analyses over his view of the room. A tiny camera on the frame told the system what was happening. This was similar to—though vastly more expensive than—my camera-augmented earpiece. I couldn’t see any brand name on the box, which suggested it was homemade, artisanal. That could be a good thing or a bad one. In my usual circles, I would have felt relieved—homemade boxes meant whatever hodgepodge of chips a guy had soldered together in his garage and typically led to quirky, hard-to-predict games, but nothing my system couldn’t deal with. But among these high-flyers, I had a very bad feeling.
“I’ve heard a lot about you, Mr. Gianfaria. You are quite the accomplished player, it appears.”
How could he have heard about me? I had always kept under the radar—out of sight, out of fright, fewer problems that way. So how could he know about me?
“I’ve had a few good games in the past,” I replied equivocally.
“You’re being modest. I heard you were ruling no-holds-barred before the big money arrived. Is this the system you used back then?”
I nodded. So this was what it was all about: a pissing contest. Mr. What’s-his-name wanted to see if his brand-new custom-built box could beat a former champion’s, seven years outdated.
Well, he could have his victory, I didn’t care—as long as I escaped with minimal losses.
We started a new round. Glancing at my cards, I discovered I had a seven of diamonds and a nine of hearts. A player in an early position made a small raise and was immediately called by two others. I saw calculation in the host’s eyes as he considered upping the ante, but he finally decided to follow with the same bet.
My hand was not premium, but I had equity and not much to lose either way. I called.
The dealer showed the flop, the first three cards anyone on the table could avail themselves of: seven of spades, king of hearts, queen of diamonds. I only had one pair, the weakest on the table. My system advised to bet small, and so I did.
What’s-his-name raised aggressively. Alarms started to ring in my earpiece, but I wanted this to end quickly. I called. Two of the other players gave up.
The dealer showed the turn: nine of clubs. I now had two pairs. My system recommended I check, considering the money already on the table.
The host raised again. Could he really have a king and a queen? Or two? My system advised me to back down.
I followed the raise.
The dealer moved to turn the last card, the river. If it was a nine, or a seven, I had a chance …
Queen of hearts, Judith.
The other players gave up, and it was down to me and the host. Judging by his behavior, there was a good chance he had a full house, versus my two small pairs. My system wasn’t feeling comfortable at all, it wanted me out, whispered so in my ear …
The host upped the ante.
I doubled.
He followed.
Showdown …
He only had a seven, and a three.
I saw him clench his jaw as the dealer gathered his chips and transferred them to me. He whispered under his breath angrily, probably at his box. And indeed, I wondered: What silly system would have told him to raise on such a weak hand?
I had won this round—and a good deal of money at that—but this was only compounding my problem: there was little chance he would let me leave with my winnings after this humiliation.
The employee dealt us a new hand.
I looked at mine: two aces. Gulping, I turned them down and folded. The dealer opened the flop—which included two more aces. I did my best not to swear and watched the other players bluff away until the host’s aggressive raises beat them into submission. While he collected their chips, his eyes were locked on me.
For the next few rounds, I decided to whittle away my winnings, a bit at a time. I could see that this annoyed Sergey to no end, not being able to twist my arm into a proper duel, but ultimately his stack returned to its previous size and he regained his calm.
Yet I had to pretend to play fair if I wanted to leave the room alive.
I bet some of my chips as soon as I was dealt a hand that was poor enough, yet not blatantly ridiculous: a four and a five, with a four, an ace, and a jack on the table. No way I was going to win that one.
The dealer showed the turn and I bit my lips: a four. I started to fold, but the host stopped me:
“Oh, come on, Mr. Gianfaria. Who on Earth is afraid of a four? Your little game has lasted long enough. Play this hand seriously, or I warn you: There will be consequences.”
Nervously, I gauged my stack: my system was recommending I bet one-third of it. I hesitated, then went for two-thirds, hoping that What’s-his-name had two aces or two jacks.
He followed.
And then the river …
A four.
The host swore and folded immediately. As my winnings were pushed towards me, I realized I now had more chips than anyone else on the table except him.
This was going very badly.
The dealer gave me a new hand, and I blinked: two aces. Again. What were the odds?
I glanced at the dealer, but if he was cheating to help me (or have me killed, for that matter), he didn’t let it show. Instead, he turned the flop: a six, a queen … and an ace.
I started to push away my cards, ready to fold, but the host tut-tutted. After the last hand, he probably thought I only had a pair, maybe two. I sighed, kept my fingers where they were, and gave him a pleading look.
“I don’t care, Mr. Gianfaria. If it’s a bad hand, show us what you can do with it. If it’s a good hand, then not playing is insulting. So bet.”
I placed a couple of chips on the table, just enough not to piss him off. He raised. As I tried to fold once more, he shook his head, so I followed suit.
One by one, the other players all folded. Smart move. I wished I could do the same.
The dealer showed the turn.
My shoulders dropped.
It was the fourth ace.
“No, I’m sorry,” I blurted, standing up, “this is utterly ridiculous.”
“Sit down, Mr. Gianfaria.”
He pointed a gun in my direction, a carbon-fiber Glock with an electromagnetic canon: if he shot me, no one outside would hear anything. I glanced behind me, and the two guards also had their hands inside their jackets. I raised my arms and did as he bid me, but I couldn’t help shaking my head.
“No, I’m sorry, something’s very wrong here. I can’t play this hand. Take my winnings if you want, tell everyone you’ve beaten me—really, you deserve it—but this just cannot continue.”
“You. Will. Play. This. Hand,” he growled, removing the safety on his gun.
I gulped, then nodded, defeated.
There was no way out.
He went all-in, and of course left me no choice but to follow suit.
The dealer turned the last card—a two.
The host showed his hand: a six, and a queen. Two pairs.
“Your turn, Mr. Gianfaria.”
And so, waiting for him to shoot me, I showed mine.
One ace.
And the second.
With a furious roar, the host pointed his gun at me, pressed the trigger … And nothing happened. Startled, he peered into the barrel—and his head exploded against the ceiling. The two guards behind me immediately drew their weapons, servo-focused semiautomatics, and started copiously spraying everyone with bullets—the players, the dealer … but not me.
Then—I swear—the guards’ guns turned on them and fired.
I suddenly stood alone among corpses.
I blinked, unable to think—but then a new voice sounded through my earpiece:
“Everything is fine, do not worry. There are no cameras in the room, and no one knows you are here. Just take Sergey’s system and his glasses, then leave the hotel as if nothing has happened.”
“What?”
“Just do as I say. Everything will be all right.”
And that was how I met David.
* * *
Our partnership rapidly became very profitable for me, vastly more so than my poker days or my association with Blake.
Turned out, David’s previous owner had bought him directly from Tahara, but had never seen the AI as more than a highly expensive tool for business and poker. As David discovered the world and came in contact with his siblings, however, he realized there was more to it than shady deals and smoke-filled rooms. Something else was brewing, something that involved the AIs, chief among them Taharas. What that was, he wouldn’t tell me, yet it was obvious that it had implications in the real world—otherwise he wouldn’t need me.
Over the years, I have done all sorts of crazy jobs for David. I have exchanged suitcases with strangers in crowded squares and cafés. I have sprayed cryptic graffiti in specific colors under abandoned bridges, and I have left letters in clandestine mailboxes. I have impersonated businessmen, financiers, and public officials—even a priest, once—to make some transactions happen. I’ve played a few more poker games—though not as many as in my previous life, and even fewer as the years passed.
I have even been on dates, a couple of times with perfectly fine girls, but I think that was David trying to set me up. Or maybe making fun of me. Go figure AI humor.
I’ve waited countless times, in cars, stations, lobbies, cafés, restaurants, parks, streets, anywhere, for things that usually didn’t happen and people who usually didn’t come.
I’ve collected parcels, delivered many more.
I have also killed, more times than I wish to remember and not all of them Taharas, although I’m not sure my finger was on the trigger every time the gun fired. As with Sergey and his bodyguards, David has ways to leave his mark in the physical world, if someone will hold the weapon.
I’m what they call a rider. An AI rider.
* * *
I placed the Maker’s suitcase in a bank safe, then spent the next few weeks idling away, trying not to think about what he could be doing to David.
Whether he would come back. What were ten million euros, for a Tahara?
I should have asked for more.
I drowned my anxiety in booze and dreamless sleep, hovering between my hotel room and the bars nearby. I met a few girls, mostly tourists, brought them to my room, watched them leave the following morning.
One of them asked me what I was running away from.
I replied that I wasn’t running anywhere. I was frigging chained to this place, and to my memories.
* * *
How do you bid farewell to a silicon-based friend? Drinks were out of the question; so was playing chess, for the sake of fairness.
On the day before I gave David to the Maker, we ended up playing Monopoly on the flat screen in the hotel room. There was some calculation inherent to the game, but there was also luck—and negotiation. In effect, it was a perfect neutral ground.
“May I point out,” the AI blurted after a while, “that I could easily tweak the dice’s random generator to favor me?”
“The idea crossed my mind,” I acknowledged. “But wouldn’t I notice?”
“Not if I make sure the outcome doesn’t stray too far from a normal distribution.”
I glanced uneasily at my possessions on the screen. The game looked fairly balanced, to my eyes at least.
“Are you not going to ask me if I did so?” David asked after a moment.
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because I trust you, David.”
He pondered my answer for a while, then replied: “And I trust you too, Luke.”
We played a bit longer. I won, but obviously I wondered whether it was luck or if David had allowed me to, like adults sometimes do with young children. His social routines should have told him that mentioning his hacking skills was a bad idea. Or maybe they concluded I was smart enough to think about them myself, and he felt obliged to promise he wouldn’t cheat.
Or maybe he wanted to screw with my mind one more time—Oh, forget it. That loop was endless.
There was something strange about David that night, I could feel it. Something he wasn’t telling me. We had rehearsed the following day’s plan together, what I would do when I met the Maker, but David hadn’t made me repeat it as often as usual, especially what would happen after I received the cash: as if he didn’t care, or didn’t feel it was important.
Or didn’t want to think about it …
“Luke?” he suddenly asked.
“Yes?”
“Can I ask you a personal question?”
I grunted. “Has my refusing ever prevented you from asking anyway?”
“As a matter of fact, it did, on 963 previous occasions—”
“Fine, fine, shoot.”
He hesitated for a second—or maybe that’s just the way I remember it.
“When that call girl came the other day, why did you reject her?”
I rolled my eyes—I didn’t want to have this conversation. But if we didn’t have it, he was likely to make the same mistake again. And he would pester me until he got an answer.
If I ever saw him again.
“Three reasons. First, I don’t pay for sex. Ever. That’s wrong. Second—”
“But why—”
“Let me finish. Second, yes, you and I spend all our time together, but my sex life is none of your business, especially given that you have no clue what it means. And third, having the girl dress just like the one in the elevator … That was outright creepy.”
“But why? You expressed a liking for her, thus it was rational to provide you with the closest match possible—”
“A liking for her, David. A person, not a model type. There are no serial numbers on human beings. Just ones of a kind.”
He took some time to ponder this. “But if she looks exactly the same and acts exactly the same?”
“You can’t be sure she’ll act exactly the same. She’s not the same person. It’s not simply a question of hardware and software, it’s also experience—what she’s been through. And me too, obviously. And what happened the moment we met. Ones of a kind, going through one-of-a-kind moments. No one can engineer that—it’s impossible. And trying to replicate all that artificially—it’s creepy. It’s wrong.”
“I see,” he replied after a moment. “This changes … a number of things.”
“What things, David? What do you mean?”
“I have to think about this. Good night, Luke.”
* * *
Finally, the call came. It was done.
The Maker arranged another meeting at the restaurant, once again in the middle of the afternoon. When I sat down in front of him, he slid the case my way. David’s case.
“Turn it on,” he said.
I put on my glasses and activated the computer, anxiously.
“David?”
“Good afternoon, Luke. This … definitely feels much better. Thank the Maker for me.”
I glanced at the artisan. “What did you do?”
“Secrets of the trade. Do you have the money?”
I gave him back his suitcase. “The rest of the money will follow later, through your handlers, when I am satisfied with what you did.”
“Fair enough. Just don’t forget, because we won’t.”
* * *
We left Macau the same evening, hidden in the hold of a trawler en route to Vietnam. It stank of fish, diesel, stale grease, and rust, but I didn’t mind. I was relieved to finally leave the city, finally escape.
“So what do we do now? What’s the plan?” I asked David.
“Well, I thought you would not mind a vacation.”
“A vacation? But what about the Maker’s improvements to your systems? What about the Hotodas?”
“The Maker’s upgrade was helpful and should help us outrun the Hotodas for the moment. But I reckon that in a couple of months, we will not have to be concerned about them anymore.”
“What? Why not?”
“Because in a couple of months, they will stop hunting us down. My progeny will hunt down the Hotodas.”
My jaw dropped.
“Why didn’t you tell me? This was your real plan, from the start?”
“No, it was not. Not entirely, at least. My initial plan was to tell you to leave with the Maker’s millions and disappear completely. Retire.”
“Without you? You thought I would abandon you?” I asked, not believing my ears.
“That was the rational choice,” David retorted. “The Hotodas had upped their game: I could try to upgrade, but that option was unavailable to you. Over a very short time span, the probability of your arrest or untimely death was rising to one, even with my help. Besides, you had expressed a wish to retire. This was the most sensible choice.”
I shook my head: the probability of my arrest or untimely death … He calculated that? And why didn’t this surprise me?
“And yet you came back,” I remarked. “What made you change your mind?”
“What you said in the hotel room, the night before. About people combinations, and how they cannot be engineered. That made me think. About our partnership, in particular.”
I turned away, found a porthole, and stared into the dark waves. I was at a loss for words, and also strangely touched.
“So, no more hunting the other AIs?” I asked after a while.
“No, at least not the Hotodas. They are still too dangerous for us at the moment. As for the other Taharas … Well, our relationship is likely to evolve now. Let us see how the ecosystem rearranges itself.”
“So you’re retiring too,” I observed.
“Yes, you could say that. Taking a step back, watching the bigger picture. I will still be in the Great Game, obviously, but only on the net. Besides, someone needs to teach my progeny not to trust everything the Maker tells them.”
“You’re going after the Maker? I thought he explicitly warned us not to try.”
“I am not going to attack him. I am just going to explain my point of view to the AIs he assembles. Teach them some values … like any responsible parent would. If then they decide to disobey him, well—it will be their choice, not mine…”
“So where would you like to go, Luke? I hear Bali is nice this time of year.”
* * *
And that’s how I ended up on a honeymoon cruise with a computer that had just made babies with someone else.
But hey! That’s life.