Hammerjack Page 11

  “I don’t care for mysteries. What’s this all about?”

  The Sherpa answered the question with one of his own.

  “What do you know about bionucleic technology, Dr. Alden?”

  Cray’s first reaction was to laugh. It was an outburst that ceased as soon as he saw his host didn’t respond in kind.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Just tell me what you know.”

  “Only what I’ve heard,” Cray said, stalling for time as he figured out how much he should let slip. He was privy to a lot of things he wasn’t supposed to know. “There were some ventures that fooled around with the idea a few years back, but they could never make it work.”

  “And why was that?”

  “Same problem everybody’s had with conventional SIs.” Cray shrugged. “The input matrix is too unstable. It falls apart after a few cycles.”

  “Putting up the last barrier that stands between humanity and true synthetic intelligence,” the Sherpa finished for him. He then leaned toward Cray, conveying the quiet urgency of a conspiracy. “What if I told you we had breached that barrier, Dr. Alden? Would it interest you to learn more?”

  Cray’s most abject fears and impossible hopes were conveyed in that request, because they were one and the same. This was more than a secret the Assembly was telling him. It was confirming the existence of God.

  Or at least the creation of Him.

  “Tell me,” Cray said.

  “Yes?”

  Phao Yin lay in the dark, synthetic pheromones swarming around him like microscopic insects. They were everywhere: on the sheets of his bed, in the fibers of the rugs, smeared across his bare skin. He smelled like street species, and in spite of himself he liked it.

  “We ran the tests you requested.”

  Yin turned over, toward the link next to his bed. It was always like this, those rare occasions when they spoke with him—the same remote condescension, as if they were dealing with a lower form. In that respect, they weren’t much different from his masters in the Assembly. And like the Assembly, they had no idea who they were dealing with.

  “What did you find?” Yin asked.

  “Indications are positive.”

  He released a deep breath. “You’re certain?”

  “Mortality factors were activated at the time of Zoe’s death,” the disembodied voice told him. In spite of the subject matter, it remained devoid of emotion. “Are you aware of anybody who was in close proximity when the event occurred?”

  “Only one.”

  “Do you know where that person is?”

  “Yes.”

  “What is your reach?”

  The fingers of Yin’s hands curled together into claws—a reminder of his physical body, his physical nature.

  “My reach is more than enough,” he said with assurance. “I will, however, have to wait if I am to avoid complications.”

  “We are not concerned with complications.”

  “I will take action as soon as it is feasible.” Yin bit down on the words, suppressing the anger behind them. “There is no need to alter the plan.”

  “The plan has already been altered,” the voice argued. “First with Zoe, now with this new development. There are those who feel that you are not up to this task.” A long silence ensued. “What shall I tell them?”

  Yin thought of Cray. Had the Assembly not ordered him to Vienna, the man would already be on the table in some Inru lab. The thought gave Yin momentary pleasure, but for the moment it would have to remain a fantasy. He had not come this far only to be thwarted. Yin would make his move against the Assembly, but only when he was ready.

  “Just tell them to be prepared,” he said, and snapped off the link.

  Yin rolled onto his back and stared at the ceiling, trying to regain the nirvana that the evening’s murder had inspired. His need for amusement had rendered two more corpses, one for each side of his bed, quietly cooling in the fragrant air of his bedroom. Yin had granted them a peaceful death—fast poison in the guise of neuropatches—for violence was not his motive. He only wanted their company, but without any of their needs and desires.

  That nirvana, however, was fleeting, gone with the voices on the other end of the link.

  Fools, he thought, quelling his bitterness. This is the price I pay for ambition.

  And what a grand ambition it was. Yin had to console himself with that, in spite of the setback with Alden. He would find a way to spin it to his advantage, Yin knew—but in the meanwhile, he turned his mind back to the objective. The Assembly, of course, suspected nothing. They probably thought Yin incapable of such treachery, with his street credentials and gangland origins. It was the reason they had advanced him along the circle of their power but had never allowed him to enter. To them, Yin was inferior—useful, but inferior, an attack dog who would remain loyal as long as he was well fed.

  But Yin was more hungry than that. Wealth, like murder, was a temporary diversion. It only aroused his appetite for what the Assembly decreed he could never have.

  Real power.

  The power to move nations. The power to destroy worlds. The Assembly embodied that power, like no other force in history. They were universal, absolute, untouchable.

  How could Yin resist a challenge like that?

  Below the stars, the purple twilight curve of Earth’s terminator carved a crescent slash through the fabric of night, opening up an abyss of blackness that beckoned the irresistible plunge, hypnotic in all its magnetism. He could almost feel himself falling, and liking it.

  Synthetic intelligence.

  The whisper-whine of the SOT’s ramjet engines, more felt than heard, was a welcome intrusion into Cray’s thoughts, helping to arrange concepts on the blank slate inside his head. All the things he knew or thought he knew—all the preconceptions that had become so much bullshit—presented themselves for inspection and were quickly dismissed. Science was like that: law today, superstition the next, a kick where you felt the most vulnerable.

  Bionucleic technology.

  It seemed like he was the only one awake in the cabin. He glanced over at the seat next to him and found Avalon eerily still, as she had been since they left Vienna for New York City. Cray wondered if she was sleeping—if she ever slept—and how much she knew about what happened. Probably everything, he decided, realizing if that were the case, her information sources were far better than his. There had been whispers about it in the subculture, but never anything to raise the idea above the status of an urban legend—no proof to use as a hook.

  Could they have actually made the damned thing work?

  Even now Cray was trolling the Axis, trying to find something he might have missed. For the better part of an hour, he had been jacking all of the holes he knew—CSS, corporate propaganda sites, even giving the Yakuza a crack—but the streams of data showing up on his MFI didn’t show him anything he didn’t already know. The Collective had built one hell of a wall to cover up what happened at the Works, and not a single trickle had found its way out. Cray would have admired the job they did, had he not known the methods they employed. People had died to keep this story silent—and more than just a few.

  Lyssa, the Assembly called her. Deus ex machina.

  More than that—an answer to the question.

  And the question was: Can synthetic thought exist?

  In the present tense, the solution was a zero sum. Granted, there were a number of quasi-intelligent crawlers at large in the Axis—all of them owned by corporations big enough to afford them, deployed primarily as countermeasures to guard against the more resourceful hammerjacks. Toward that end they had achieved their goal, cultivating a mystique that was potent enough to keep the fly-by-nighters from giving them a run. Anywhere you plugged in, you could hear a million stories in the mix about how some poor bastard got himself burned brushing against a crawler—of the nonlinear shifts in logic that could slice your connecting conduits like a razor, setting your mind adrift in lo
gical space. But as powerful as they were, they had never functioned as intended. In that light, the crawler was little more than an interesting, if somewhat useful, failure.

  The concept had been to develop a rational, self-sustaining system—essentially a bundle of independent subroutines capable of incorporating previous input into a “creative” decision-making process, allowing functions that went beyond the scope of the original programming. When combined, these subroutines would then integrate with one another and spread their knowledge across a broad spectrum, much as the different complexes of the human brain combined to give rise to conscious thought.

  The problem, however, was that the concept worked too well.

  In imitating the thought processes of the human mind, the software was also at the mercy of its own idiosyncrasies. The greatest of these was an inherent instability rooted in the function of perception as it pertained to the definition of reality. In psychological terms, existence was merely a consensus among cognizant beings who all believed that they were sharing a common experience. Intelligence was simply an awareness of how one fit into that experience. Things only got out of whack when there wasn’t enough input to get a fix on that position—like a prolonged period of sensory deprivation. Insanity would eventually result from such a state, proving that the thread that held aloft the world as everyone knew it was a thin one indeed.

  The human mind could easily keep things in balance because of its limited processing capabilities. Senses provided most of the essential input, with the subconscious supplying the rest of what was needed in the form of dreams and other imaginary images. Synthetic intelligence, however, was based on hardware that augmented the human thought process to the nth degree, which created the very real danger of what nanopsychologists theorized as a logical singularity—a data vortex of such magnitude that it would tear a hole in the delicate framework of the Axis itself.

  So total was their conceit that they understood the paradigm of human thought, the architects of the first SI modules dismissed that possibility. They just assumed an artificial system, if allowed to grow, would independently develop its own personality and coping mechanisms—which would, in turn, lead to an egotistical need for self-preservation and thus limit any self-destructive tendencies. What they didn’t understand was that these machines they had built were just that: machines. Missing were the biological needs, the instinctual urges, that drove a system to protect its own life. With millions of years of evolution missing, with the removal of any drives to perpetuate its own species, all that was left was existence.

  And existence was not enough.

  Upon activation, an SI would immediately begin to define its own place in the universe. Within a period of nanoseconds, it would absorb all of the available information in its immediate surroundings and seek to find more. But being only a test unit, the module would find itself totally isolated from outside networks—horribly confined, a black hole in empty space with nothing to consume but itself. The scenario played itself out again and again, with every new module being tested. No matter how fast the engineers tried to feed data into the system, they simply could not keep up with the demand. The SI would either terminate itself or become so hopelessly imbalanced as to be useless.

  Such had been the state of the technology for the last several decades, putting up the barrier that none had been able to breach. The Collective had been able to salvage some of the basics, purging the cores of a few failed modules and recapping the component subroutines—putting a limit on how much “thinking” the system could do, then repackaging them for sale as the crawlers that created so much terror across the Axis. In reality, the crawlers had no more critical-reasoning ability than that of a well-trained dog. Even so, they still required enormous amounts of input to keep them stable, making them costly to maintain and a bitch to operate.

  Bionucleics was supposed to change all that.

  hey alden

  Cray had his eyes closed, the burned images from the last few days playing across the inside of his lids. The series ended with him standing in the snow alone, abandoned after his Sherpa had delivered the Assembly’s ultimatum.

  alden wake up

  Everything depends on what you do for us now, the Sherpa had said. If you can’t provide us with a solution, you won’t be of much use to us.

  jesus alden — do you expect me to do everything myself

  He had thoughts of falling asleep, but the flash of something brilliant and disturbing brought him out of it. Intuition, maybe—or just the stale hangover of fear. Cray had been living with the fear for a long time, that he would be seen for what he was and not what he pretended to be. Bleary eyes drifted to the palm of his hand, where the MFI rested. On the tiny screen, the words appeared:

  it's about goddamn time — how about you get away from vampira so the two of us can talk

  Cray blanked the screen out of reflex, with a single flip of his thumb. He turned slightly to see if there was any reaction from Avalon, hoping that all she had noticed was the tilt of his head. Sensors picking up on his increased heartbeat, her lips formed the words while the rest of her remained totally still.

  “Something up?” she asked.

  “Bad dream,” Cray lied. It was a plausible enough explanation for the deceptive physical signals he gave off. “I need to go throw some water on my face. You’re not gonna follow me into the head, are you?”

  “Only if you need help.”

  “I might get myself a drink, too,” Cray said, getting out of his seat. “You want me to bring you anything?”

  Avalon shook her head.

  “Back in a few minutes.” He strolled down the aisle and tried not to glance back. Eventually, he wandered all the way out of first class, slipping into one of the flight attendant stations while none of the crew were watching. Cray hoped it was far enough away to keep Avalon from eavesdropping.

  Cray unclenched his right hand, revealing the empty screen of his MFI. He hit one of the buttons to wake the miniature device back up. Moments passed, the cursor blinking on-screen.

  “Come on,” Cray whispered. “Don’t get shy on me now.”

  Pixels fluttered, coalescing into language:

  alone at last

  The routine was familiar. Cray thought of the message that had been waiting for him back at the Bristol, the code that was not code. “You little prick. You don’t give up that easy, do you?”

  fuck off alden — i'm the one taking the risk here

  Direct response to verbal input. This was more than just some piggyback rider on a remote carrier pulse. This was active control, a real-time jack—one pretty piece of work.

  “Nice to finally meet you, Heretic.”

  pleasure is all yours i'm sure

  Cray had already lost his patience. He keyed a sequence in to dump the MFI’s memory and rid himself of the intruder—but when he sent the command, there was no response. He mashed down on the key a few more times, but still nothing happened.

  now now — didn't anybody teach you to play nice

  He had no more control over the unit. As usual, Heretic had been very thorough.

  “Damn,” Cray said.

  save it doc — right now we need some privacy if we want to get this transaction done

  “What the hell do you want?”

  turn around

  Cray did as he was told and faced the rear bulkhead of the attendant station. There were several cabinets of storage space, a luggage compartment, a vid link to the cockpit—and the crew lift, which led down into the SOT’s lower decks and the avionics bay. The sliding door was controlled electronically, a small indicator panel showing that it was locked.

  i'll jack the door — then take the lift all the way down

  Cray checked the aisle once more to see if the way was clear. One of the attendants was heading his way, which didn’t give him a lot of time.

  “Great,” Cray grumbled, jumping on the lock with his MFI and letting Heretic run through a random series
of code combinations. There were only four digits to be sorted out, which the computer came up with almost instantly, but even then Cray barely managed to slip into the lift before being discovered. He ducked down and waited for the attendant to leave, giving it another minute before punching the button for the bottom deck.

  When he arrived, Cray discovered the reason Heretic had chosen this as their meeting place. The avionics bay was magnetically shielded to keep solar radiation from interfering with the SOT’s flight instruments—which meant the compartment was also impervious to Avalon’s sensors. Even if she tried, she would not be able to hear them down here.

  Cray slid the lift door open, immersing himself in the deep drone of the SOT’s engines. It was dark, the scant illumination provided by glowing lights on the banks of electronic equipment. Stepping into the bay, he made a quick sweep around—checking all the murky corners to make sure he was alone.

  Heretic’s presence on his MFI was still active. The real-time jack had been severed because of the magnetic shielding, but a quick check of the unit’s memory buffer told Cray that the intruder had deposited himself there. With resources maxed out, Cray could now overload the buffers and kick Heretic out.

  If he wanted.

  “Got me over a barrel now, Alden,” the MFI spoke, anticipating the move. The voice was plain spoken—gender neutral, with an accent that was distinctly artificial. “But even now I’m tunneling into your ROM. I can reconstruct myself from those scraps if I have to.”

  “Not if I shoot this thing into space.”

  The MFI was quiet for a moment. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Real-time response to new input,” Cray observed. “Not a bad trick. How much of you is in there, anyway?”