Read Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict Online
Authors: Thomas T. Thomas
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #science fiction, #High Tech, #Hard Science Fiction
She knew many women her age—and even a decade or two younger—who had turned to medical solutions to retain their beauty. They smoothed the wrinkles with
botulinum
toxin and collagen injections. They tightened sagging eyelids, cheeks, jaws, and throats with cosmetic surgery. They let the doctors trim, stretch, and pull at what was left of cheekbones and noses. But Wells could always spot these women and describe for herself exactly which procedures they had bought. To Wells, they didn’t look young and girlish but instead seemed pinched and severe, with faces pulled ever so slightly out of alignment, with narrowed eyes and tight, angry mouths. Witchlike, if not indeed simply frozen and lifeless. She wanted none of that.
But now she was also going to be a mother, for the first time, and at almost seventy years of age. True, the boy would come from her body only through reference to her DNA, and not even from one of her own eggs. But he would know Antigone Wells as his mother, gaze up into her face, and call her “Mama,” while everyone looked on and tried to smile.
“And I will look more like his grandmother,” she whispered to the mirror. “Not good, Antigone. Not good at all.”
* * *
On one of his rare visits to the Sansome Street headquarters, Brandon Praxis stopped by the cubicle where Penny Winston ran the technical end of the business from three console screens, a keyboard, and a microphone headset that clamped down on her curly brown hair. When she turned away from work to answer his knock he saw that, wonder of wonders, she was not wearing her usual jeans and vaguely subversive tee shirt. This morning—and maybe for a while now—she wore a navy-blue, polka-dot dress with a high neckline, a little white belt, and flouncy skirt. She also wore nylon stockings and matching, dark-blue pumps. She looked like an Iowa teenager heading off to church.
Her eyes brightened and she smiled when she saw him.
“Do you want to go get lunch?” he asked.
“Gosh, is it noon already?”
“Just about.”
“Sure!”
She took off the headset, ruffled her hair with her fingertips, and stood up from her desk chair. The dress swirled around her knees. She picked up a light jacket—one without camouflage—and joined him in the hallway. He noticed she didn’t bother to close down any applications or switch off any devices. Then he remembered that she did not actually run the computer system so much as collaborate with it.
“Where do we eat?” she asked.
“By now, you know this neighborhood better than I do.”
“Okay. Um … do you like vegetarian Chinese?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Are you a vegan?”
“Not normally.” She grinned. “But it’s the only kind where they don’t chop up the meat with the bones still inside.”
Brandon grinned in return. That summed up his feelings about truly ethnic Chinese cooking—the only kind you could get this close to Chinatown. “You lead,” he said.
As they had settled into the booth at the Jade Garden, Brandon suggested Penny order for both of them. Instead, she discussed choices from the menu and gave him veto power, which he found the most satisfactory solution. When the waiter brought a pot of black tea, she picked up a plastic chopstick, opened the lid, and stirred at the leaves inside.
“You know …” she said, then pinched her lips together.
“What?” he asked. She seemed suddenly shy.
“Never mind. It’s not your concern.”
“No, you started to say …?”
“Well, I guess you should know, as head of security.”
“Are you having trouble? Is someone harassing you?”
“Nothing like that. Just … I think you’ve got a ghost.”
“I don’t understand. You mean, in the building?”
“No, in your computer. Kind of a presence.”
“What does it, um, look like?” he asked.
“I haven’t actually
seen
it!” she said.
“How do you know it’s there?”
“Because Rover says so.”
“Does he … tell you … what it looks like?”
“He hasn’t actually seen it, either. But he senses something. Sometimes bits of data will appear in a database and then, when he tries to run a trace, they suddenly go missing. It’s as if he’s growing a little … forgetful.”
“Can that happen to an intelligence?” Brandon wondered.
“Not with the six terabytes of extra capacity we built into him.”
“Then could it be another intelligence? Maybe one playing games?”
“Not in the same system. That would be … oh, schizophrenic.”
“Well, I’m not sure what I can do about this. Have you talked to Callie?”
“Not yet. I don’t have more than a notion—just Rover’s suspicions.”
“Please tell me when you’ve got something solid. I work better with a target.”
“And you’re good at cleaning up things,” she said with a grin.
“Hush, Penny!” he whispered. “That’s gotta be our secret.”
Still grinning, she twisted her fingers in front of her lips and then brushed them off—locking her mouth and throwing away the key—just as the waiter came to take their order.
* * *
After the required nine months, plus or minus two weeks, Antigone Wells returned with John to collect their new son. They were met at Parthenotics, Inc.’s offices by their first counselor—now their case worker—Ashley Benedict. She had a folder of paperwork for them to sign and final payments to arrange.
Among other things, Benedict produced a certificate from the City and County of San Francisco attesting that Alexander Wells Praxis—they had settled on the first name to honor John’s immigrant grandfather, the other two so that their family names were conjoined—was “the biological offspring and adopted child of one Ioannis Mixalis Praxis, a widowed man, and Antigone Leigh Wells, an unmarried woman,” that the baby had been born within geographic confines of the county, and that he thus had full citizenship rights in the State of California, Federated Republic of America. He was as legal as could be.
When they were done with the business end of the transaction, a female attendant in hospital whites brought in an articulated crèche/carrier basket and set it on the conference table.
Wells stood up and peered into the carrier’s recesses. A pale, chubby face nestled among the folds of a light-blue blanket shifted and looked up into the shadow that her head was casting. She stared into his eyes—they were dark blue and quite self-aware. She studied his nose. She opened his blanket to count fingers and toes. She even pulled the tabs on his diaper and examined his tiny penis, which had already been circumcised.
“He’s perfect,” the attendant said happily.
It seemed so. All the parts were there. Everything had the correct form, for a newborn. Wells didn’t know exactly what she had expected. Talons? Cloven hooves? But still … She was haunted by those thousand other embryos—or “parthenotes”—tiny proto-Alexanders, down to his pearly, shell-like fingernails, who had failed to survive, who had not made “the first cull.”
“Is anything wrong?” John asked. “You’re frowning, like you’re worried.”
“No. No. … He’s perfect,” she answered, consciously echoing the attendant.
John bent his head over the carrier. “Hello, baby boy. Welcome to the family.”
4. Retribution
Wearing special goggles that let her view code actions from several perspectives at once within the system, and with a lagging time scale that allowed for her limited human senses, Penny Winston watched as Rover dealt with his spasms of forgetfulness. What she saw reaffirmed the claim of the AI’s original programmer, that his software was more than a collection of canned responses, that it was truly intelligent and could reason, plan, and learn. She also concluded that Rover must have been assembled with a few engrams traced from feline neural systems.
Because Rover could not both spot a new piece of data when it appeared in any of a number of random databases and then trace it when it immediately disappeared, he quickly figured out a way to bait a trap. Working from the partial data structures and code fragments he retained from his nano-second captures of the disappearing objects, he fashioned a bogus entry of the same shape and size from one of Callista Praxis’s old expense reports. Penny hoped Rover would have the good sense to track down and kill the false data later, or else it was going to play hob with the company’s monthly and annual accounting rollups.
Rover dropped the bogus entry into one of the databases that seemed to be compromised. Then, like a cat at a mouse hole, he watched that database. Whole seconds passed—a lifetime on the time scale at which the system worked, and long even at the speed shift built into Penny’s goggles. But after almost a minute of waiting, a retrieval order came and took the prize. Rover was paying full attention, tagged the order, and followed it back to the originating application.
When he identified the culprit for Penny, she sat up in surprise. That piece of software was operating way outside its parameters, entering databases that had nothing to do with its original function. And she knew for a fact, seconded by Rover’s appraisal, that it was not supposed to be intelligent—not by five sigmas.
Penny did not want to take the news to Callista or John Praxis, or not just yet. For one thing, she wasn’t sure about her position with them: both the president and the chief executive officer—older people who were set in their ways—seemed to have taken a dislike to her manner or her style or something. Maybe they just weren’t comfortable around creative people. For another, Penny understood that they shared some secret about the origins of the malfunctioning piece of software—it actually met her definition of
malware
—and she wasn’t sure how an accusation in that corner would sit with them.
But she did trust Brandon Praxis. Despite his seriousness and his bad-boy aura—ex-military, extra-legal, and with the hint of death and danger about him—she had felt a bond growing between them. They also shared a secret, one that made them both vulnerable. Brandon wouldn’t turn on her, even in a family matter.
She called him on his smartphone and suggested they have lunch again.
“Is this like, our second date?” he asked. She could sense him grinning.
“If you want …” she said coyly. Then she sobered. “No, really, it’s follow-up to the problem we discussed the last time. I think I have a target now.”
“Oh, good. What is it?”
“I don’t like to say over the phone.”
“Is somebody there with you? Somebody listening?”
“No, but voice packets go through the system. And this has to be verbal—sound waves only and through the air.”
“Lunch in the same place?” he suggested. “Say about an hour?”
“Let’s do barbecue instead.”
* * *
Brandon Praxis watched in fascination as Penny licked sauce off each fingertip, sucked the pad of her thumb, wiped them on a paper napkin, and picked up another rib. She waved it in the air before she started speaking again.
“So Rover followed the fetch order back to its send point,” she said. “And what do you think he found?”
“Nothing good, I imagine,” Brandon said.
“Bingo! The order came from a fifth-generation version of the Stochastic Design and Development package, installed by Tallyman Systems.” She bit a chunk of fat meat out of the rib and chewed it, waiting for his response. “Ring any bells?” she finally prompted him.
“Vaguely. It has something to do with building sewers or transit systems, doesn’t it? I really don’t know much about the engineering end of the business.”
“Right! It has
everything
to do with sewers, subways, and anything else that grows like a vine or a root system and responds to pressures like demographics and usage patterns. But it has no business looking into the company’s accounting system and personnel files. But that’s not the weirdest part.”
“Which is …?”
“It comes with its own mother-ass big database—freeform structure, not related to any of its programmed inputs or outputs, and three times larger than the app’s deepest stack. Dimensionally, it’s way more overhead than the SD&D software needs. But that’s still not the reason I called you.”
“Okay, why did you call me?”
“Because it has a trapdoor. Two way. Machine keyed. And leading right outside your system into the worldwide open web. Bypasses your security checks, firewall, and everything.”
“I take it that’s not supposed to happen?”
“Damn straight! That’s a pirate operation. Rover pushed on the door, but just a little. He’s discreet, being designed to live on other people’s systems. He knows his limits. But when he heard the echo of empty space out beyond that door, with no guardian protocols to protect it—I’m speaking metaphorically here, you understand—he backed off and reported immediately back to me.”
“But why then bring it to me?” he asked. “Sure, I’m head of security, but that’s more like guarding construction sites and keeping drunks from falling into the cement mixers. Computer stuff is—”
“I know, I should have taken this straight to Callista,” she said. “But I also know, from something she said in passing, who it was that works for Tallyman and installed that SD&D application for your company.”
“My uncle Richard?” he suggested.
“Yeah. And I don’t know if he’s allowed to, or not.”
“Allowed to do what?”
“Take a piece of everything you know. That extra-big database is crammed with stuff—cash flow reports, invoices, bank statements, client lists, contracts, property deeds, bonding agents, expense accounts, salary and benefit records. SD&D has just vacuumed up half your company and prepped it for sending somewhere else.”
“Has it sent anything yet?”
Penny shrugged. “The thing’s been in operation for a while now. I did some raw guesswork, based on how often, over the past two weeks, Rover has been ‘forgetting’ something he’d just seen. That database could have been filled and emptied two or three times by now, maybe four. The safe bet is, someone out there now knows exactly how Praxis Engineering lives and breathes, including what your chairman had for lunch last week.”
“This is bad,” Brandon said.
“So, I’m guessing, Uncle Richard’s
not
allowed?”
“Based on our family history? Hell no!”
“And what are you going to do?”
“Take this to Aunt Callie.”
“I can provide files—”
“No, you come, too.”
* * *
Callie Praxis listened as Brandon and the Winston girl explained their reason for calling an “urgent meeting” with her. When they got to the point about having found “some curious anomalies” in the Tallyman Systems application, she put up her hand.
“I want John to hear this as well,” she said. She knew any complaint against Richard’s company had to come to her father’s ears from the original source. If it was just Callie reporting on their findings, he would probably discount it as her long-standing animosity against her brother. “Would it help if we met at the window wall with the Rover present?” she asked.
“Only if you want to interrogate him,” Winston said. “But what I saw was kind of like looking over his shoulder. He might not give the exact same interpretation of what he found.”
“Are you saying he’ll tell a different story?”
“No, just … He’s very bright, but he doesn’t yet have a suspicious mind. He has a pretty good definition of a system malfunction, but he’s still coping with the idea of evil intention, of malware. So he can put two and two together, but he doesn’t quite leap to four.”
“Huh!” Callie said. “We don’t want to give your darling boy any bad ideas, do we? So we’ll meet in here for now.”
“That’s probably best,” Winston agreed.
When John Praxis came in and took a seat, the report by Brandon and Winston got two more steps into their findings, and then he put up a hand.
“If this isn’t some kind of glitch,” he said, “then it might be a legal matter. I want Antigone to hear this, too.”
It took more minutes to bring in the Law Department, and she came carrying a gray plastic bassinet that held Callie’s half brother. Antigone set it down by her chair, leaned over to make sure little Alexander was comfortable, cooed at him briefly, then sat up ready for business.
“Shall we proceed?” Callie asked.
“By all means,” Antigone said.
Once again, Brandon and Winston started over from the beginning. Brandon introduced the story about Rover “forgetting” things. Then Winston told about watching him bait a trap with the fragment of a modified expense report.
“Whose?” Callie asked.
“Yours,” Winston said.
“Damn!” she replied.
Finally, together and tripping over each other’s sentences, the two young people explained about the invasion of databases that the Stochastic Design and Development
®
package had no business going into—like employee files and personnel accounting—and then the trapdoor that let it flush everything it had learned out to some database waiting beyond the firewall.
“Is there any way you can clip its wings?” John asked.
Winston stared at him. “You mean, like limit its access and close that back door?”
“Whatever it takes to make the stochastic software behave.”
“Not without—” The young woman whistled. “—pulling apart its entire codebase, examining, excising, and ligating whole command structures, then chasing call prompts and returns through, like, a million lines of binary. And if I got any one of them wrong, the system would crash and you’d need the Tallyman people out here to fix it. That would certainly tip off whoever’s receiving stolen data from the app.”
“I take it your answer is ‘no’?” John suggested.
“More like ‘
hell
no’ … sir,” Winston replied.
“Can you disconnect it?”
“That’s—” She paused.
“Software used to have an off switch,” John said with visibly rising frustration. “And operating systems used to be able to override and delete it—along with all its data files—in just a matter of minutes.” He turned to Callie. “Are we actually employing that Stochastic Design software on any of our projects?”
“Three, Dad. All of them hard at work. And all with use of that program written into our contracts. I’m afraid just pulling the plug is not an option.”
“I see.” He turned to Antigone. “It sounds like Richard and the Tallyman people sold us a bill of goods. They installed a piece of software that’s also, to put it kindly, full of bugs or, rather more harshly, a dedicated robot spy, a piece of malware. Can we sue them?”
“I’d have to read the contract again—really study it this time,” their attorney said. “I can’t think of a reason why that application would go into personnel files and accounting systems not related to its own projects. But such access may be spelled out, or simply implied, in the user agreement. Same thing for the back-door access. It doesn’t seem like the sort of thing we’d agree to. But maybe it has some diagnostic purpose.” She turned to Winston. “Don’t other software systems also have a trapdoor?”
“Sometimes,” the girl admitted. “But they’re more … polite about it. And it’s not good form to bypass the firewall altogether.”
“Still,” Antigone said, “without examining the documentation, I couldn’t say that we did not agree to all this by default or through our own—my own—carelessness.”
Callie lost her cool. “This wasn’t just anyone at Tallyman! It had to be Richard!”
John stared at her. “But he’s a vice president, dear, not a programmer.”
“Dad! He was programming computers before he hit puberty.”
“That doesn’t mean he can just go into a modern—”
“Could we clear the room for a family conference?” she asked.
John raised his eyebrows but nodded. Penelope Winston stood up and headed for the door. Brandon stood up to follow her.”
“You stay, Brandon,” Callie said.
Antigone looked uncertain. “Do you want me to—?”
“You may not want to hear any of this, Counselor,” Callie told her.
Antigone nodded, picked up the bassinet, and left the room.
When it was just the three of them—Callie, John, and Brandon—and the door was closed, she spoke plainly. “Richard attacked and broke this company once. He’s at it again. I want him stopped.”
“Antigone has already said we don’t have a legal position,” John objected. “I could ask her to look into—”
“I don’t mean legally,” Callie said. She looked at Brandon. “Richard himself is the threat. I want that threat eliminated.”
The young man stared back at her. “I’m not sure what you mean by that.”
“Put him in a position where he can’t attack us again.” She decided what she was thinking had to be said out loud. “I want him to stop … breathing.”
John bristled. “That’s my son you’re talking about. Your own brother.”
“Yes, the son who attacked me, who led a coup against you—”
“That was Leonard’s doing,” John said.
“But Richard engineered it!” she stormed. “He turned on us once, and he’s doing it again. You can’t trust him! He’s a rabid dog!”
“He saved my life on the golf course,” John said quietly. “He gave me mouth-to-mouth for half an hour while others just stood by.”
“He still had a use for you,” she said—but she knew that was being too cynical, even for her.
“What do you want me to do, Aunt Callie?” Brandon asked. “As your head of security, do you and Grandfather have an order for me?”
“Kill him,” Callie said coldly.