Kaleidocide (10 page)

“What the hell are you two doing in the backseat?”

It was Arvit's voice from the front, and her face was on the dashboard screen. Korcz and Stephenson both jumped, and then clambered back into the front of the taxi. They looked at each other, each waiting for the other to say something, which made the moment more awkward.

“Listen, I don't want to know,” Arvit said. “Go to the Aegis building, north side, right now.” Korcz spun the converted cab in that direction, as the middle-aged woman continued. “This is the Ponchinello ‘Money' lab we heard about, the one where they produce it and supply it to the employees right in the building itself. Our mole in the lab finally came through with the location, just now. And damn me if my sister doesn't work in that building during the day. Small world.”

Korcz and Stephenson had heard about this case that the day cops were working on, and had been close to breaking for weeks. Money was a designer drug that increased memory, stamina, and other capabilities necessary for “getting ahead” in the Manhattan rat race. Unfortunately it also turned many of its users into psychotics or catatonics after prolonged use. Of course that didn't matter to the people selling it, who in this case were a mob family known popularly as the Black Italians. A few generations back an Italian mob family had united with an African-American one, and like medieval kingdoms of old, their union was cemented by intermarriage. Only this time, in a subsequent flurry of marital concupiscence, many more mixed couples tied the knot, now that it wasn't taboo anymore, and what could basically be called a new race of criminals appeared on the streets of New York. This was all common knowledge now because the genesis and rise of the Black Italians had been immortalized in the long-running net series
Duets.

“The lab is in a hidden room three floors deep in the basement parking garage,” Arvit continued. “I guess the customers pick it up before or after work, or maybe they have it delivered to their desks along with the mail, I don't know. But I do know that we're gonna bust the building supe who knows about it, and anybody else in line, but I need you and the others I'm sending to take the lab before they can clean it out and blow it up.” She paused for a couple seconds. “Do you want to say something? You're looking at each other? No, okay. We're uploading the schematics for the garage now, and the info on your squad. Stephenson, you can make the call.”

“Thank you, ma'am,” he answered.

“Oh, and one more thing,” she added. “Tyra Ponchinello, Tyrone's daughter, is in that lab tonight.” A picture of a pudgy, rather odd-looking woman appeared on the screen. “Don't kill her, bring her in. Understood?”

“We'll do our best, ma'am.”

While Korcz sped through the gray streets, Stephenson put together a plan to approach the lab discreetly. But by the time they joined two other Gotham cars at the big building, that plan was out the window. The criminals somehow knew that the police were coming, according to the mole in the lab, and were already cleaning out the operation. So it was to be a frontal assault, and fast, because once the mob got what they wanted out of the lab, they would most certainly obliterate it with explosives.

As the squads readied their arsenals and prepared to enter the building, the two rent-a-cops were plagued with the images and sounds from Stephenson's dream, so freshly implanted in his mind and so eerily resonating with a ring of truth.

 

11

GHOST STORIES

I didn't talk to Saul's ghost for several months after I became CEO of BASS, first because the emotional wounds from my ordeal were too raw, and I didn't want to reopen them by talking to the man who was at least partly responsible for them. He was also responsible for the good things that happened to me as a result of the ordeal, so my feelings were mixed, but the confusion of not knowing how to classify the old man and his role in my life created some additional hesitation. Another reason was that I was creeped out by the idea of communing with the dead—you could read about it or see it in fictional books or movies, but actually doing it, even in this virtual format, felt something like attending a funeral. And doing it regularly seemed like attending the same one over and over again.

Only one of those problems was alleviated to any degree when I finally decided to access the construct. By the third or fourth time I'd used it, I wasn't as uncomfortable, because the ghost took on a “life” of its own, and I thought of it more as a different version of Saul Rabin, rather than the man himself. But the mixed feelings transferred to this new “person,” whom I was getting to know better than I ever knew Saul himself while he was alive. The more I found out about my former boss's history and perspectives, he became even harder to categorize in my mind. I couldn't prove most of his opinions wrong, but I instinctively knew there was something off about at least some of them. And I just couldn't get my mind or heart around the reasons he had for many things he had done, nor for many things that he advised me to do.

When the Mayor, as he was often called, found out that he was dying of one of the few types of cancer that even great wealth couldn't cure, he resurrected a secret cyberware project that his son Paul had started for the nefarious purpose of controlling people's actions through a chip implanted in their brains. (It wasn't technically a computer chip, but that was a lot easier to say than the scientific name for it.) Saul didn't want to waste all the time and money that had gone into the project so far, but he also didn't want it to continue in that direction. Nor did he even think it would ever be
possible
to control someone else's moral decisions, because he believed in the existence of an immaterial soul—one of the unconventional ideas of his that I was still trying to understand. So he came up with the idea of using the technology to record and preserve his knowledge and experience for future generations, renamed it the Legacy Project, and had the implant installed in his own head.

Saul was nothing if not a visionary, foreseeing that he might be the first of millions to download the contents of a brain, which he called “the physical storage center for the soul,” so that the resulting construct could tell ghost stories of their lives. The idea was that most people didn't have the time or skill to write autobiographies for their progeny, but could do it this way with little effort. However, I thought it was questionable whether it would catch on when BASS was done perfecting it, because the kind of people who had enough money to afford quality wetware were still almost unanimously wary of it. They didn't share Saul's confidence that the seat of the human will resides somewhere other than the brain, and wanted to avoid any outside control at all costs. I myself had once lived under an extreme version of that fear for several days, and I was still thoroughly unwilling to take a chance with it.

Saul was also nothing if not a private recluse, so he protected his own Legacy files with typical ferocity. They were initially stored in the cyberbrain of the only person he fully trusted, who was Min, until the bodyguard could vet me and other potential heirs. Then they were copied to a Fortress Cloud, the most secure location on the net, and coupled with the alpha version of the personification software being developed by BASS techs. Part of the security strategy was that there would be no connection whatsoever between Saul's ghost and the rest of the net—it would only know what Saul had known by the end of his life, and whatever information was shared with it by the privileged few who had access.

As one of those few, I had to provide voice recognition by speaking into my glasses, DNA validation by pressing my fingertips to the sensors on their arms, and a retinal scan by holding my eyes open for five seconds. Only then did the virtual 3D bust of Saul Rabin appear, suspended in front of a nondescript background and looking almost exactly as I remembered him from his final days: an expensive but out-of-style shirt draped over shoulders that were still broad but slightly slumped from aging, a thick lightning scar stretching from temple to cheek on one side of a heavily wrinkled face, and a receding shock of gray hair. I had asked the ghost about its appearance in an earlier conversation (Why not appear as a younger version?), and it responded with a rather cryptic explanation to the effect that other than his marriage, Saul considered his last decisions to be his best … an answer that elicited in me some of the mixed feelings I mentioned earlier.

“Hello, Michael.” The audio was not as accurate as the video, since human vocal cords and larynx were such a complex organic system. But it captured the basic impression of Saul's cracked voice at nearly eighty years old, and the somewhat impolite, order-barking manner in which he had talked. “Is my empire intact?”

The almost imperceptible grin on the construct's lips was reminiscent of the living Saul, but it could not approximate the amused sparkle that had been in the old man's eye when he said things like that.

“It's fine for now,” I said, “but I could use some advice on how to keep it that way.”

“Well done, Michael.” One of the minor glitches in the programming was that the ghost said my name more often than a human would. “A fool trusts in his own heart, but a wise man listens to counsel.”

“Last time I asked you for advice,” I said, “you quoted Confucius. Before that was Aristotle, and the time before you said the same thing you just said, which I'm guessing is from the Bible. Your programmers should have anticipated this happening more than three times.” I liked to point out things like this, because it reminded me that I wasn't talking to a human, and I felt more in control that way.

“I can adapt,” it said. “Plans succeed with many counselors.” There were pauses before the response and between the two statements, which I had noticed quite often when it talked. I assumed they were built in to make it seem more human, because I knew this kind of high-powered A.I. would definitely not require any time to think.

“What's that one from?” I asked. “The Book of Mormon?”

“Right,” it said. “Spoken in the deformed Egyptian by the angel Moronic himself.”

I squinted at the construct for a moment, because even though I knew very little about Mormonism, that answer didn't seem right to me. “Really?” I asked.

“No, Michael, it's from the Good Book also.” I had heard Saul use that expression when he was alive, and it always struck me as a subtle way to lessen the embarrassment of saying “the Bible,” because it was in such ill repute in our culture. Then the ghost let out a grating laugh that was not exactly like Saul's, but just as awkward. And it added, “I'm programmed to spice up every tenth answer with some humor.”

I squinted again, realizing that it had used humor twice in a row. The ghost was as enigmatic as the man. But I was short on time, and that mystery was too minor to be worth solving right now. So I merely thought about what I wanted to ask next, and as I did the ghost sat in absolute silence with an utterly fixed expression. That was one of its major glitches: unlike a human, it didn't seem to mind an awkward silence, and appeared willing to go on forever without breaking it. A similar glitch was that it had no compunctions about going on forever when given the opportunity to provide pedantic explanations that seemed to come straight out of a book. That hiccup became apparent when I asked it how to survive a kaleidocide.

“No one ever has, as far as I know,” the ghost said. “I don't know what the success rate was in the early days of the religion, when it developed among the rank-and-file soldiers in the Red Army as a way of preparation for battle. Of course, we
do
know that the Chinese have succeeded in every annexation of neighboring territory they have attempted, as well as every ‘police action' they carried out in those territories afterward. But no record exists of the specific rituals by the sons of the
ban lan,
or whatever the groups of soldiers called themselves at the time. They must have been successful to some degree, however, or a rising star like Zhang Sun would never have adopted the religion as a means of personal power. He saw something in those early days that made him believe in it.

“But since Sun adopted the
ban lan jiao,
he has been nothing but successful in his quest for power, specifically in the elimination of his enemies by way of the
ban lan
ritual. This could be simply because none of his targets had a snowball's chance in hell of surviving multiple assassination methods thrown at them simultaneously from a murderer with almost unlimited resources. But we must also consider the possibility that there are actually supernatural forces at work in the kaleidocide.”

I was initially surprised at this, but then realized that the idea was consistent with Saul's belief in an immaterial or spiritual part of life.

“If I were in your position, Michael,” he droned on, and I wondered how he knew that I was the one being threatened, because I hadn't revealed that, “I would hire some outside help and pay them more than they could possibly be offered by the other side, because in every situation we know about, Sun has infiltrated or turned someone against the target. Betrayal seems to be one method that is a part of every kaleidocide … maybe because the supernatural forces are especially fond of it.”

“How can I be sure the outside help won't betray me?” I asked. “Besides paying them a lot?”

“You can't be sure—risks are unavoidable either way. But before you hire someone, see how up front they are about that particular danger. If they are, that's a good sign. The ideal situation would be to surround yourself with only those with whom you have a personal connection, or with those who have had no contact with you before, or both. You want to avoid people with no sense of loyalty to you, Michael, or those who have been around you and may have been contacted and corrupted.” The ghost paused again, for human effect. “And try to get someone who knows what they're doing. There are personal security companies that are good enough that they only work for clients who are in significant danger and can afford an exorbitant fee. Relate to these professionals like you do a doctor: follow their instructions unless you have a really good reason not to, and don't think you can protect yourself better in your own way.”