Perfect Dark: Second Front Read online

  After a second, Velez nodded, even offering a small smile of encouragement.

  “Of course, Madame Director. He’ll be here first thing in the morning.”

  Ventura arrived during breakfast, which for Cassandra now consisted more and more often of a piece of fruit and perhaps a cup of yogurt, hastily eaten during opportune pauses in phone conversations. She was beginning to question the necessity of having a chef on staff, considering that the woman’s abilities were so rarely put to the test.

  The question was burning her, but Cassandra managed to keep her eagerness in check, giving Ventura time to settle. He’d flown in from Paris via Moscow and then Sydney, Velez’s proscribed route, an attempt to keep Cassandra’s location secret. In Sydney, he’d been collected by a clutch of plainclothed Shock Troopers for the remainder of the journey to New Zealand. Ventura hadn’t been actually blindfolded for the last leg of the trip, but it was an academic difference at best, since he’d ridden in an R-C/Bowman Tumbler with the windows removed from the passenger compartment.

  As he stepped into her office, taking in the view from the windows even as he removed his coat and set down his laptop and component cases, Cassandra could see him attempting to puzzle it out. She saw no malice in it, only curiosity; had she been in his position, she certainly would have enjoyed the intellectual puzzle of trying to ascertain exactly where on Earth she had been deposited.

  She let Ventura get settled, then directed him to the freshly drawn French press of coffee that Green’s assistant had delivered only moments before. Ventura went to it eagerly, and Cassandra suspected that, between the project deadlines on AirFlow 2 and the travel time, he was probably tottering on the verge of exhaustion. While he prepared his cup, she shut down all of her open lines, issuing a blanket command to her secretarial staff that she would be unavailable for the next half an hour. Then she asked Velez to clear the room of Troopers, until the only people who remained were herself, Velez, and Ventura.

  Finally, unable to contain her excitement any longer, she came around her desk, perching on the end of it and facing Ventura where he sat in one of the black leather office chairs arrayed before her.

  “How’s Arthur?” she asked.

  “Very well, ma’am, he’s doing very well. Do you want to see him now?”

  With difficulty, Cassandra shook her head. “Soon, not yet. I should hear the status report first, don’t you think Edward? We’re still on target for the rollout?”

  “Version 2 will be ready for the switch-over at the end of the month, ma’am, as promised.”

  “I’ve got marketing on the verge of hysteria because they’ve nothing to go on. They’re planning the unveiling to take place at the offices in Paris. I’ll want you there.”

  Dr. Edward Ventura seemed to positively shine with pride. “It will be an honor.”

  “How are the packets coming? What’s the completion?”

  “Ninety-seven percent complete, ma’am. The last batch of modules are in debugging now, and I’ll review them when I return to the office.”

  “You solved the problem you were having with the heuristic routines?” Cassandra twisted from where she sat without actually getting up, began rummaging through the sheafs and sheafs of papers on her desk. “I made some notes about that, actually, Edward, if you want to see them. Well, actually, I wrote some code, but you should feel free to take them as notes.”

  She turned back, offering him the papers, and Ventura awkwardly shifted his cup and saucer from one hand to the other, attempting to balance both while reaching for the papers. Cassandra had to come off the desk to give him a hand, taking the coffee and setting it on the table.

  “Certainly, thank you, ma’am,” Ventura said, taking the notes. “I’ll look at them on the flight back.”

  She smiled at him, at his nervousness and her own foolishness. If Zhang Li had summoned her to China while she’d been at work on AirFlow version 1, she doubted she could have managed to be calm, either. If he’d then proceeded to give her notes on the software, she probably would have been even more uncomfortable than Ventura was.

  “It’s all right, Edward,” Cassandra said, smiling. “I trust you, I know it’s going brilliantly. It’s only that the project is very close to my heart.”

  Ventura, who had been trying to straighten the tangle of papers she’d handed him, relaxed. “I understand, ma’am.”

  Cassandra glanced over to where Velez was standing in the corner by the windows, caught the older woman’s reflection off the glass. Velez met her eyes, nodding slightly, as if acknowledging Cassandra’s efforts to cease micromanaging.

  She put her attention back on Ventura and said, “And now, yes, I’d very much like to see Arthur.”

  Ventura set aside the notes, getting to his feet with hasty enthusiasm. He opened his laptop, quickly passing the security checks and setting it to boot, then moved to the component case and began removing the module segments. They were small, almost milky white cubes, as if made of glass and filled with clouds, each no larger than a fist, each capable of holding over a million terabytes of storage. Adapted from the same technology used in the quantum optical computers dataDyne used for its datacore storage, the modules had been specifically designed by Cassandra, Ventura, and others during Cassandra’s final few months as the director of DataFlow. Then, the cost of merely one had been so staggering as to be almost prohibitive.

  Once Cassandra had become CEO, though, she’d promptly increased the budget on the project.

  Carefully, Ventura linked the cubes together in a daisy chain of quantum optical cabling, then connected the whole series to his laptop. While he worked, he spoke.

  “There may be some transfer delay, ma’am. I’m linking him with the main cognition units in Paris, and I don’t know how much packet loss we’ll have as a result. The Outland interface has been giving us some trouble, as well; if it does go down, I’ll have to issue commands via keyboard.”

  “I’m sure it will be fine, Edward.”

  “I just don’t want you to be disappointed by any apparent lag times. Computationally, he’s testing at a quarter-millionth of a second for the traffic routing routines, and that’s even when we throw failures at him, or large scale natural disasters.”

  “I’m sure it will be fine,” Cassandra repeated, and then let herself slip off the edge of her desk and to her feet, approaching Ventura and his laptop. “Almost ready?”

  He nodded, and she thought she could sense in him the same anticipation and excitement that she was trying to master in herself. Ventura crouched onto his haunches, level with the laptop resting on the coffee table, and brought up his terminal interface. Fingers flying, he typed in a long series of code, and then executed the sequence.

  For several seconds, nothing happened at all, other than the monitor on Ventura’s laptop going blank. Then the screen flickered, and fresh code began scrolling madly past, far too fast for either of them to read, let alone interpret.

  Ventura looked up at Cassandra, smiling with pride. “Go ahead.”

  Somewhat surprised at the nervousness she was feeling, Cassandra cleared her throat before speaking.

  “Arthur, can you hear me?”

  The voice came from the laptop’s speakers, almost a whisper. “Yes.”

  “I’m Dr. DeVries, Arthur. Do you know me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who am I?”

  “You are the chief executive officer of dataDyne, my parent.”

  Cassandra DeVries realized she was smiling so broadly her cheeks were beginning to hurt. She exchanged glances with Ventura, who was grinning back at her, just as delighted, just as proud.

  “Arthur, do you know your function?” she asked.

  “To monitor and maintain the safe, efficient, and speedy flow of all null-g traffic throughout the world.”

  “And how will you do this?”

  “Direct them.”

  “How many will you direct?”

  “According to the most
recent data, seven hundred and seventy-three million, eight hundred and sixty-six thousand, six hundred and ninety-two null-g vehicles are equipped with dataDyne AirFlow.Net transponders.”

  “That’s quite a lot, Arthur,” Cassandra said. “Are you certain you can manage them all?”

  “Capacity at standard cycle of use for one point two billion null-g vehicles equipped with dataDyne AirFlow.Net transponders.”

  “It’s a big responsibility. How do you feel about that?”

  “Parsing error.”

  Cassandra saw Ventura’s smile falter as he looked at her, and he shook his head slightly. She nodded, understanding. Sentient though Arthur might appear, he wasn’t truly a living thing, he wasn’t an actual artificial intelligence.

  “Arthur,” Ventura said. “Do you recognize me?”

  “You are Dr. Edward Ventura.”

  “That’s correct, I am. I want you to do something, Arthur.”

  “Waiting.”

  “Please compose a poem for Dr. DeVries.”

  “Specify form.”

  “Short form, rhyming.”

  “Down black trees / please peas tease / around yet wheeze.”

  Ventura was watching for her reaction, and Cassandra couldn’t help but feel her smile falter, feel the sadness in it.

  So close, she thought. So very close, but not quite. Almost sentient. Almost.

  “Thank you, Arthur,” Cassandra said. “That will be all for now. You may resume learning.”

  “Thank you,” the voice from the laptop said, and then the screen went dark once more, flickered, and returned to its desktop.

  “There’s no sense of self,” Ventura said. “No matter how we run at it, there’s no sense of self. Arthur’s aware as an entity, but not as an individual. Consequently, he lacks imagination, which isn’t the same as lacking innovation, because that’s not the case at all. His problem-solving skills are phenomenal, to such an extent he’s even started to avoid the basic traps.”

  “Pi,” Cassandra said.

  “Square root of negative one, yeah, like that.”

  Ventura closed the component case, latching it shut. “I have no doubts about his ability to manage the system. Arthur is AirFlow.Net version 2, he’s already up and running. As far as that goes, all you need to do is present him to the public and tie him into the existing network, he’ll do the rest. Everything else is honestly minor.”

  She nodded, staring past him, at the ocean beyond her window, feeling as surprised by her indefinable sadness as she had by her nervousness upon speaking to the computer. Calling the intelligence “Arthur,” she realized, had probably been a mistake. Cassandra had meant it as an homage to her brother, a memoriam of a sort. But in so doing she had invested a personality in the machine that simply couldn’t and wouldn’t ever be there. Arthur DeVries was dead, and naming a semisentient AI Arthur just reinforced that point.

  Ventura was standing in front of her desk, each of his cases in each of his hands, and Velez had moved in, ready to offer an escort to the door. He’d been saying something to her, but she’d missed it.

  “I’m sorry, Edward, what was that?”

  “I said I brought the code on the final module sets, if you want to review them, ma’am.”

  She looked past his shoulder, to Velez.

  “No, Edward,” Cassandra said. “I’ll trust you to handle it. Have a safe trip home.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  Velez escorted him to the door, and for a moment, Cassandra DeVries was alone, in silence.

  Then she sighed, reinserted the earpiece for her phone, and began working through the seventy-three phone calls that had appeared on her call list during her meeting with Ventura.

  Core-Mantis OmniGlobal Regional

  Supervisory and Administrative

  Offices—Zona Rosa

  Mexico City, Mexico

  January 24th, 2021

  Leaving London had been easy; deciding where to go was the hard part.

  Jo had left the Institute knowing that the quickest way to her answers would be via Core-Mantis OmniGlobal and that there were a number of ways she could go about acquiring them, even if CMO proved reticent to share. Like every other hypercorp, they had offices dotted all around the globe, with hundreds of additional subsidiaries besides. There was an office in the Netherlands, she knew, and another in Prague, now rumored by Institute intelligence to house a new quantum optical computer. There were branches throughout North and South America, as well as Europe. Until recently, they’d held nothing in Asia, though the impending fall of Beck-Yama was about to change that, of course.

  So Jo could pick an office, perhaps try to enter it covertly, to gain her answers that way. It would be difficult, she knew, especially given the wounds she was carrying. Without the Institute backing her with oversight and equipment, the task would be more difficult still. As far as that went, she had Steinberg and the gear she’d shoved in her pack, and that was it. Of the two, she wasn’t certain which would actually prove the more useful—Steinberg sneaking around behind Carrington’s back learning whatever he could, or the P9P pistol with its silencer and extra clips and the handful of other equipment she’d brought along with her.

  The covert approach was certainly an option, even if it wasn’t the most viable one.

  Then there was the old-fashioned way, the way her father would have gone about it. The catch-and-release method, he liked to call it. Find the smallest fish in the pond you’re currently searching, and proceed to bang his or her head against table, wall, floor, or other suitable surface until said fish gave up the name of the next, slightly larger fish in the pond. Repeat ad nauseum until either reaching your goal, or until running out of fish.

  Catch and release. Bash and repeat.

  It was tedious, it was slow, and it was labor intensive, since most of the fish had a tendency to wriggle, and a lot of them had the tendency to flee.

  There was also a very good chance that the method wouldn’t work in this instance. It was a fine technique for hunting down a skip who was hiding in a sea of perps. But getting information from hypercorp suits was always a different matter, because they would always have one thing they feared more than Joanna Dark, and that was their corporation itself. There was also the further complication that, in all likelihood, Jo would find herself facing CMO security at some point, and security would probably take a dim view of her interrogation techniques and would want to explain that displeasure to her. Probably using bullets.

  The shape she was in, she didn’t know how long she would last if it came to that.

  So, in the end, the only real option was the most direct and, Jo supposed, the most civilized one.

  She would go to CMO and she would ask them for information. Politely. Graciously.

  She would even say “please.”

  Jo decided on visiting Core-Mantis OmniGlobal’s offices in Mexico City for several reasons. The first was that Mexico was considered, at least as far as the hypercorps were concerned, CMO’s domain. They had established themselves in the country early on and had entrenched themselves quickly even as their operations had grown and spread throughout the rest of North America and Europe.

  This went to the second reason, which was the fact that dataDyne—as yet—had no official presence in Mexico. Not for lack of trying, but between CMO’s desire to keep dataDyne out and dataDyne’s demands for substantial revision and exemptions under current Mexican corporate law, no true progress had been made. It wouldn’t last much longer, Jo knew; in the end, dataDyne would get their way, simply because they were bigger, and richer, and maybe even meaner than CMO.

  The same could be said, after a fashion, of Beck-Yama. While the corporation was clearly drawing its final breaths, Jo knew that there were BYI people still actively seeking her; or, more precisely, they were actively seeking her doppelganger, which, in this instance, meant the same thing. Even if Beck-Yama InterNational wouldn’t be a problem for much longer—and Jo, who had c
hecked the news upon landing in Mexico City and seen that CMO had acquired and absorbed another three BYI subsidiaries, knew that they wouldn’t be—there was no reason to risk it, not given the state she was in.

  But the most important reason of all for coming to Mexico City was that Daniel Carrington had no presence there, either, and the last thing Jo wanted was some eager operative reporting back to London that Agent Dark had been seen walking the Zona Rosa. If that happened, Jo was sure the Old Man would blow a gasket, and then send Steinberg and maybe half a dozen others to bring her back to the Institute in London. Drugged and bound, if they had to.

  So the choice was really made for her, as far as that went.

  From the airport, Jo took a null-g cab into Mexico City proper, straight to the Core-Mantis offices in the Zona Rosa. She gave the cabbie a hundred dollars and asked him to keep the meter running, then, leaving her jacket and backpack in the cab, she headed into the offices. She had no fear that the taxi would depart with her things, nor was she afraid of being robbed; asking the driver to take her to the Core-Mantis main office in town had the same effect as asking to be dropped off at the nearest police station. There was no way the cabbie would risk antagonizing CMO, even if he had no way of knowing that Jo wasn’t one of their employees.

  As for entering the offices light, Jo was positive that whatever security CMO had in place, it was going to be better than what she’d encountered at Heathrow. It was one of the things she was counting on, the fact that some command post or surveillance center buried deep inside the building would ensure that by the time she entered, she would not be seen as a threat.

  It turned out that she’d made the right decision. Entering the lobby required passage through three separate checkpoints, and Jo was certain she was scanned at least that many times in addition to probing waves searching her for implanted electronics or other implements of espionage or sabotage. At the final checkpoint, she was steered into the visitor’s line, where her ID was checked, and she was subjected to a thorough, but quick, pat down.