The A.I. War, Book One: The Big Boost (Tales of the Continuing Time) (13 page)

He worked eighteen hour days.

THE PEOPLE TRENT worked with would have made great Players. Not one of the fourteen lacked the talent, the insight or the inclination; before a week was up Trent knew it for a fact. It was likely that one or more of them had gone across the Interface and danced, at least once; in the case of the DataWatch officers, it was a certainty.

Know Thine Enemy: depending on whose estimates you trusted, somewhere between seven and a dozen of the top hundred Players on the planet when Trent had left Earth in 2069 had been PKF DataWatch in disguise.

Yes, but
which ones?
Trent’s guess was closer to twelve than seven. DataWatch officers did not tend to behave any differently on the other side of Interface than real Players; all Players were secretive to the point of paranoia, at least all those who survived for any length of time – somebody
was
out to get them.

The Sunday after they started work, the subject came up at lunch, in the cafeteria aboard the
Unity
. Ken and Trent ate together, Ken sitting at Trent’s right elbow, Marie Kohl sitting across the table from him. Trent tried to keep his eyes off Ken’s lunch – a bowl of raw peeled tomatoes, heavily salted.

Jean-Paul Troileac and Eloise Legut sat together at the far end of the table, eating breakfast and a very late dinner, respectively. Jean-Paul was reporting for duty five hours early; Eloise, the graveyard Sub-Chief, had waited for him. The two were dating, Trent had learned, and had been virtually since the day Eugene Yovia had gone downside with Janice Johnson.

Marie Kohl opened the subject by saying, “I was reading some of your code last night before I went home.”

“Yes?”

“You’ve gotten better since ’75, in some areas.”

“Thank you.”

“In particular you’ve gotten an awful lot better in Human Interface. I saw some of the code you wrote back then –” Kohl shook her head, hair threatening to come loose with the motion. Her hairstyle marked her as a citizen as clearly as everything else about her; in gravity it hung in a platinum blond cascade down to the small of her back. She wore it in a bun while in drop, but it still made Trent uneasy to look at it; he envisioned her trying to get a helmet on over it during a breach, and shivered. A dangerous conceit in a pressurized environment; no military service would have tolerated it – nor many SpaceFarer businesses, for that matter. “No comparison,” Kohl continued. “This stuff you’re doing now is elegant. I might even say that it reminds me of, uhm, Image code.” She stopped and looked at Trent expectantly.

“Image code?” Trent said politely. Out of the corner of his eye Trent watched Jean-Paul, eating his breakfast down at the end of the table, stiffening. “And where would you have seen such code? Image code is illegal. Illegal to possess in executable form, illegal to transmit in any form without prior authorization from DataWatch.”

Kohl shrugged. She was German, not a native English speaker; perhaps she did not correctly interpret Trent’s tone of voice. “Everybody dabbles in that area a little bit, and I know you have. You could not be doing the work you’re doing right now without having studied Image code pretty extensively.”

Kohl was correct; everyone at the table knew it; but that was not the point. If she kept talking she was going to force either Jean-Paul or Eloise, both sitting well within ear shot, to take notice of the conversation.

Trent gazed at her blankly. “Everyone does, do they? I don’t. I don’t dance and I certainly don’t Play. And I don’t really know what you’re talking about.” The woman couldn’t be missing the tone of voice –

“Then you should try it,” Kohl said, “just once. Cut yourself an Image, just something quick and dirty, and take it over the Interface. It’s an amazing feel –”

At the end of the table, Jean-Paul had turned around to watch them both.

“
Have you
,” said Trent quickly, “ever studied Zen?”

It brought Kohl up short. “No.”

“I see. ‘Those who speak do not know, and those who know do not speak.’ ”

A beat … and then Kohl flushed to the tips of her ears. “Thank you. Thank you very much. I will remember that.”

Trent nodded, not looking away.

Kohl got up abruptly and left.

From the end of the table Jean-Paul caught Trent’s eye. He might have nodded slightly before returning to his lunch.

“You do have a way with women,” Ken commented. “It’s a gift, I believe. A gift from
God.
”

THE FOLLOWING TUESDAY, just before midnight, as Trent was preparing to shut down for the night, Jean-Paul knocked on the frame of his open door. “Chief?”

Trent swiveled in his seat. “Corporal?”

An obvious flicker of annoyance crossed the man’s face. “That’s ‘Lieutenant,’ actually. I finished OCS in February.”

“No offense intended,” said Trent. He gestured. “Have a seat. What can I do for you?”

Jean-Paul settled in. He said rather hesitantly, “You and I
...
we have not always been the best of friends.”

A personal conversation. Great. Trent said carefully, “Not the best, no. I regret that.”

Jean-Paul nodded rather jerkily. “Some of the things I said to you the last time I saw you –”

Trent had no idea what he was talking about. “That’s in the past, Lieutenant. I see no need to bring it up.”

“Marie was right,” Jean-Paul said abruptly. “Your work has grown a great deal more elegant. I will not ask you where the experience in human interfaces came from –”

“I studied,” said Trent flatly. “Real hard.”

“Of course,” said Jean-Paul hastily. “I did not mean to imply otherwise.”

The man was
nervous
. Trent the Uncatchable sat in the presence of a nervous DataWatch officer, and felt a sudden flash of empathy for the man, even if he had no idea why the fellow was nervous: Jean-Paul was making
him
nervous.

“I ... you see,” Jean-Paul said, and started over. “If I ...”

Trent said carefully, “What can I do for you?”

Jean-Paul burst out, “I want to change shifts.”

Trent sat in the silence looking at the man.

He said, “I see,” because he didn’t and it was all he could think of.

“Eloise and I are ... involved with each other, perhaps you know this.”

Trent said, “I see,” because finally he did. “And since I’ve instituted the new work schedule the two of you almost never see each other when you’re off-duty.” He sat back in his chair. “I’m sorry, Lieutenant. I knew the two of you were dating one another, and the situation I’d put you into never crossed my mind. Please forgive me.” It hadn’t crossed his mind. It should have. Trent closed his eyes, thinking about it, then opened them to look at Jean-Paul shifting nervously in the seat in front of him – this deadly, dangerously bright DataWatch officer, shifting on the seat in front of him like a child in the schoolmaster’s office. Trent had a sudden intense flash of gratitude for the life that fate and Mohammed Vance had handed him, a brief horrifying vision of another life, one filled with schedules and paychecks, deadlines and supervisors you disliked but had to stay on the good side of anyway –

Is that what life is like for the honest ones, the good citizens?

Trent had to shake himself out of it. “If you can find someone to trade with you on Sub-Chief Legut’s shift, I’d be happy to move you over. Uh, make that, if Beilenson or Bouvier can trade with you. There’s no point in moving Eloise, and the other two can’t do the coding you’re doing on swing.”

“Officer Bouvier has already agreed to trade.” The man’s conscience warred within him quite visibly. “You know this will throw us back a day, perhaps two. I’ll have to show her the code I’ve linked and edited, and she’ll –”

Trent shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. I’d rather lose the day and have the two of you at your best performance.”

Jean-Paul Troileac held himself still for an instant. Then he nodded, a precise movement. “Thank you, Chief.”

Call me Gene
, Trent wanted to say – but he clearly didn’t know all the things about “his” history with this man that he might have, and it was best to be safe. “You’re welcome, Lieutenant.”

Jean-Paul started to say something else, then shook his head and left instead.

“Well, Monitor,” said Trent a moment later, “what did you think about that?”

Nearly thirty percent of Monitor’s processors had been mounted, and close to eighty percent of its workspaces; Monitor said, “I am impressed with the way you handled the matter, Chief. Based on voice analysis, Lieutenant Troileac began the conversation experiencing serious conflict. His stress level had declined significantly by the time your conversation was concluded.”

Trent’s smiled. “You are a piece of work, Monitor.”

“Yes, of course,” it said equably. “If I understand your colloquialism, Chief Yovia, I am indeed ‘a piece of work.’” It paused. “I believe a counter-compliment is an appropriate response, Chief?”

It would not have asked the question of anyone but one of its coders; it knew that a question regarding its own behavior would have been an inappropriate response except in that privileged domain. Trent grinned. “Yes. A counter-compliment is an appropriate response.”

“Your typing, sir, has improved dramatically since your last logged work session, on Friday, December 27, 2075.”

Trent burst out laughing. “Yeah,” he said. “I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised by that.”

“Indeed, the improvement is remarkable. You have improved from 55 words per minute to 140 at peak typing speed. You now strike the space bar with your right thumb rather than your left. Your typing patterns have also altered radically; your favored keyboard layout has altered from the traditional Dvorak to an enhanced 240-key Unicode board. You have acquired the distinctive habit of tapping the EOL key while you are thinking. When you configured this workstation you immediately turned off the end-of-line warning beep, indicating an adjustment to this habit. You make data entry errors that you did not make during your last tour of duty, and have ceased making the great majority of those errors which you were then prone to.”

Monitor stopped.

Trent said, through the smile frozen on his face, “Anything else?”

“In terms of what, sir?”

Trent licked suddenly dry lips. “Are there any other changes you’ve observed in me that you find striking?”

“Oh, indeed, Chief, numerous changes. In the four years, two months and twenty-three days since my last observation of you, you have grown four centimeters, an event nearly unheard of among men between the ages of thirty-two and thirty-six, at least when those years are spent under one gravity. Your fingers appear slightly but measurably longer than during your last tour. Your accent, previously that of a British man educated at Oxford, today on occasion exhibits quite manifest elements of an American accent, most apparently that of the Long Island Fringe. Behaviorally the changes are nearly as drastic. You have virtually ceased coding via inskin; on the rare occasions you have chosen to do so, your inskin contact has apparently been through radio packet rather than through the socket mounted in your left parietal lobe. Though I am unable to directly monitor the inskin jack at your workstation, the inskin listed in your file, of FrancoDEC manufacture, is limited to transmission of textual information and traceset cues, at speeds not exceeding 128 kilobytes per second. By comparison the inskin you appear to be using has transferred data at speeds of several hundred megabytes per second. This closely approximates the volume of data transmitted across the human optic nerve. No other sensory organ of the human brain can process information in the volume that you have received via your inskin. This implies that your inskin is tied to your visual cortex.”

Trent said slowly, “You are an amazing piece of code, Monitor.”

“Yes, sir. Would you like another compliment?”

“No! I’m still recovering from the last one. Have you spoken to anyone about the changes you’ve observed?”

Monitor sounded surprised. “No, Chief. I have placed them in your file, in order to continue optimizing my responses to you. Should I have done otherwise?”

“No,” Trent assured it, relief rushing through him in an overwhelming wave. “You have handled it correctly. In fact –” He phrased it carefully. “I would prefer that you not discuss it with anyone, unless of course you are questioned about me in the course of an explicitly identified investigation by one of my superiors. Many of the changes you’ve mentioned are things my ex-wife used to criticize me for; I am very sensitive about them. By discussing them with others, you will be exposing me to emotional distress and possible psychological damage.”

There was a long silence. “... I see. Yes, Chief. I understand. Forgive me if I have caused you emotional distress with this conversation.”

“No, no,” said Trent. “Not at all. If you notice any further changes, please bring them to my attention, when we are in private. I would appreciate it. It would be a service to me in the performance of my duties, and thereby a service to the Unification.”

The phrase had special meaning to Monitor: “A service to the Unification,” it repeated. “Yes, Chief. I will exert care in seeing that you are notified, in private, of any further changes I observe.”

“Thank you,” said Trent with great sincerity. “Thank you very much.”

HE TOOK THE 1 A.M. shuttle back to the hotel.

Obviously no one had ever taught Monitor to look for imposters.

Sweat stained the back of his shirt.

Maybe being a citizen sucks,
Trent thought.
Kissing up to the boss. But I bet they hardly ever go to bed wondering if they’re going to wake up in custody.

On Death Row.

14

JASON ALEXAI LUCAS had led an interesting life even before Mohammed Vance had entered it.

He stood 188 centimeters tall. At the age of twenty-eight, he was in exquisite physical condition – with the aid of PKF trainers, and the finest medical technology available to the PKF. Aside from his right knee, which occasionally and unpredictably pained him, he was the image of a professional athlete.

He was, presently, a white man with brown hair and brown eyes. Over the years he had been biosculpted to a wide variety of appearances.

His inskin was a Vandemar Tap. A calculated guess; Trent certainly wore a radio packet inskin, and had since some time in late 2069. The Vandemar Tap was one of the six radio packet inskins coming into use at the time, excepting the Tytan NN-II, an experimental inskin that was subsequently outlawed. All but half a dozen of the NN-II’s ever produced had finally been accounted for. Jason himself considered it unlikely that the Uncatchable – the name by which Trent thought of himself, Jason was sure, and
never
use that name in front of Vance – had been fool enough to implant himself with an experimental nerve net.

Jason Lucas was from New York – from the Long Island Fringe. In 2062, at the age of ten, he had been trapped inside the Fringe when the Troubles began. His parents had died, both of his brothers, and his sister. For nearly seven years he had lived among the Gypsy Macoute, had become a soldier for the Macoute, had fought in Macoute battles and though he had only killed once himself, had seen his fellow troopers kill and die over and over again in combat with the Temple Dragons.

At a treaty negotiation in the summer of ’68 he’d met two Temple Dragons who had, in later years, become famous: a boy named Trent, a little older than him, and another boy, three years older than him, named Jimmy Ramirez. They were not unknown even then, not in the Fringe; Trent, at seventeen, was widely regarded as one of the Fringe’s best contract thieves. Jimmy Ramirez was a light heavyweight, boxing semi-pro, and considered a likely candidate to go pro within the next year.

It had not happened, of course. Trent and Ramirez had vanished out of the Fringe in January of ’69.

And Jason Alexai Lucas, webdancer for the Gypsy Macoute, had been plucked out of the Fringe the following year, by Elite Commissioner Mohammed Vance. For the next decade he had lived in a large suite of apartments in Capitol City. During that decade he had only been outdoors half a dozen times, to walk through the American southwest while wearing a Martian rebreather. He had been upside, at Halfway, several times, for stretches of months at a time, learning to use a pressure suit, learning to deal with free fall and Halfers and SpaceFarers.

And he studied – hard: Vance had not had to explain the potential downside to their arrangement. Jason studied coding until he was able to write an Image from scratch – something it was known that Trent had done by the age of ten. Jason wrote himself an Image, used it for a year, then retired it and wrote a second Image. He took the Image of Big Mac, took it across the Interface, and danced. He studied Players, studied DataWatch, studied the PKF itself virtually every waking moment.

For several months, early in 2071, he maintained a relationship with a young actress, a woman biosculpted with green eyes, pale skin, and black hair. Vance terminated it abruptly, after three months. Seven years later, another relationship was arranged for him; a young singer, plainly sculpted to resemble Mahliya Kutura. It ended almost as abruptly as the first relationship.

In between he was allowed as many women as he wanted, but nothing serious, nothing that was allowed to become serious.

ON A COLD morning in March of 2080, Elite Commander Mohammed Vance came to visit him.

Vance had not given him much warning; he never did. Jason sat at his workstation, in his quarters two hundred meters beneath the ground, inskin live, wired and ready to go through the Interface at any moment.

The impression Jason always had of Mohammed Vance, entering a room, was that of a soldier entering combat. A tall man, taller than Jason, near two full meters, about as large as Elite got. Fifty or so, with dark features made darker by the black Elite eyes. His skin had the roughness and stiffness of an early model Elite, made him look less human than some robots. The glossy black hair had no gray in it, and never would; it was not real. In another man Jason might have considered Vance’s dress an affectation, but not in Vance: he wore, except when required to dress formally, the gray combat fatigues worn into battle by Unification troops during times of war – he had about him the aura of a man at war.

It did not surprise Jason. Vance
was
at war, on behalf of the Unification. At war with the rebels and the SpaceFarers; with the deadly replicant AIs, with the Players. Not many years ago he had even been at war with the Ministry of Population Control, and Space Force, within his own government. That was no longer true: after the ’76 rebellion Vance had nearly broken Space Force, had gutted the Ministry of any intelligence gathering functions that he wanted for the PKF. Today it was an open question who the most powerful man on Earth was – Vance or the Secretary General, Charles Eddore.

All of those wars were important; all of them absorbed Vance’s time. But Jason knew for a fact that they were not Vance’s chief war, not the one that had brought Vance to call him with questions, at all hours of the day and night, for close to a decade now.

Vance seated himself in Jason’s office, only a meter separating them. He seated himself a touch awkwardly; his right leg was artificial from the knee down.

A young Elite took up guard just outside the door.

“Good morning, Commissioner.”

Vance wore grimness like a shroud. He had a voice, amazingly deep, rough as stone, that had been known to cause people nightmares; it had featured in some of Jason’s. “A good morning, Trent? So it appears to be. Work has resumed on Monitor.”

“I am aware myself of the progress being made with Monitor. I’m not worried about it, though.”

“Why not?”

Jason shrugged. “I’m at Halfway. I’m prepared to take action.”

“We suspect you are. And you know that we suspect it.”

“Damn SpaceFarers can’t keep their mouths shut. The Board of Directors asks me to go take care of the
Unity
, and I agree. And then I vanish, knowing perfectly well that news of my agreement will reach that son of a bitch Vance, soon or late. There they are, with their attention focused on the
Unity
. It would be a good time to sneak around behind them and push them off-balance.”

“That is one scenario. We are aware of it.”

“And I know that, too. Possibly I’ve even learned of the existence of your modeling tools, that silly bastard who’s wasted the last decade of his life trying to learn to think like me. Not a chance, of course. There’s nobody out there as good as I am.”

“Spare me the boasts.”

“It would be amusing if I were to impersonate a Peaceforcer,” Jason offered. “I’ve done it before, and you’re on guard for it now – which makes it that much better if I get away with it. It would be a … clever … thing to do. A Space Force officer would be nearly as good. A civilian is my third choice, ideally a computerist working aboard the
Unity
.”

Vance shook his head. “You would not get away with impersonating a PKF officer for any length of time. Nor Space Force. You know it.”

“Perhaps I don’t need a great length of time. Perhaps I only need to pull it off for a short while, long enough to get on board the
Unity
.”

“You must stop the ship,” Vance said quietly. “You know that, too. Without the
Unity
the situation stays as is. If the
Unity
is gone I can’t beat you, not any time soon. With the
Unity
I can’t fail to beat you.”

Jason stared into the glassy black eyes, taking note of Vance’s use of first person – the man was angry, which was dangerous; but unfortunately nothing would anger Vance worse than Jason slipping out of character. He forged ahead with something that would not please Vance: “I’m smarter than you are, Mohammed. I’ve out-thought you. I took one look at Melissa du Bois and I said to myself, Vance planted her. An early warning system. She knows I’m coming, and she’s on the lookout. Does this deter me or does it entice me? I think it entices me. It’s a challenge, to me personally, and I know it. Du Bois is conflicted about the Unification. She’s a decent individual, by both my standards and yours, Mohammed, who is troubled by the loss of personal freedoms on Earth following the ’76 uprising, by the mass executions, by the millions of children orphaned into Public Labor across Occupied America.”

“Who are you?”

“I would love to be Gene Yovia. Even with that face, silly as it would make me feel. People would look at Adam Selstrom and wouldn’t see beneath it.”

“Virtually impossible,” said Vance. “Yovia’s got his own conflicts; many do, these days. But the man who left Earth was Eugene James Yovia. A loyal PKF Elite escorted him to Halfway, and directly into the presence of Melissa du Bois. You’ve seen his psychometric from that session. No human being, and no genie either, could have faked his responses during that session. That was Yovia then; it was Yovia who was escorted to his hotel.”

“Yes, but Yovia’s been out at Halfway since then. If –”

Vance abruptly shook his head no. “Perhaps. But by this measure there are nearly fifty Space Force officers, and several dozen civilians, who you might be impersonating. Yovia is less likely than most, despite his position among the computerists. He is working with nine individuals who knew him during his last tour of duty; the only way you could have assumed his role is with Yovia’s direct aid, with extensive debriefing. The debriefing would have had to occur ...” Vance considered. “Yovia went to Luna in June of last year, and again in October. At that time, of course, we did not know that Chief Yohannsen would need to be replaced. Are you prescient, Trent? Did you corrupt the officer who interrogated Yovia before sending him upside?”

Jason sighed. “No. I’m not prescient. And I don’t have anybody inside the PKF, though I’d sure love to.”

“Did you plant the bomb?”

Jason stiffened with anger, anger that felt real, and might have been, to the man who had spent the last decade learning to be Trent. “No. No, damn you, I did not plant any fucking bomb. I don’t take lives. This is one of the many things that makes
me
better than
you
.”

“So you could not have known that Eugene Yovia’s services would be needed by the Unification.”

“Perhaps,” said Jason slowly, “I had something else planned, some other way to get Yovia aboard the
Unity
– to remove Chief Yohannsen. Yovia and I are nearly the same height, close enough to the same age, with many of the same skills – it’s a close enough match that I know you’ve thought about it, taken measures. You’re nowhere to be found, I know you’re downside rather than here with me at Halfway, and yet you’re all around me, Mohammed. Everywhere I turn, there you are, waiting and watching.”

“What about Elite Sergeant du Bois?”

Jason stared into the black eyes. “I think I approach her.”