CHAPTER 14

Constantine wondered, more than once over the following days, whether he, too, had panicked. Faced with the impossible; staring at that which could not be, yet clearly was; his mind twisted up by multiple simultaneous, conflicting perceptions of it; had he panicked? He could still remember clearly the sensation that had gone through him when he had realized it was standing there, behind her. It had been an ancient feeling, a blood-curdling alarm ringing out of the deepest, most primordial instincts of his being.

“I understand you’re mad,” said Sing’s voice from the phone’s speaker.

“You’re God-damn right I’m mad. This fuckin’ thing killed her right in front of me.”

“I know. But you said it yourself. She said it. She panicked.”

Constantine pressed his lips together so hard that his nose began to curl up.

“I’m sorry,” said Sing. “She was a good agent. I liked her. But we still need to be able to make contact with these people.”

“People? You think these are people? That thing was not a fucking person.”

“Okay,” said Sing. “Can you tell me what it was? Do you… no longer believe it to be a man in a suit?”

“I don’t know,” said Constantine, clenching his eyes shut in frustration. “I don’t know. Maybe? But you weren’t there, Roy. This thing… it was huge. And it’s too damn fast. And looking at it is like… it drives your brain crazy. You say she panicked. I… I fuckin’ understand why. You can’t imagine what it’s like, to be looking at something that can’t be there, and yet it’s right fucking there. You feel like you’re about to be killed and like you’re going crazy, all at the same time. It’s… it’s fuckin’… it gets in your head.”

“I’m sure that’s one of its design intentions.”

“What?”

“Was it physical? Is it a physical presence? Or is it more like a ghost?”

“Oh, no, it’s fuckin’ physical all right. It hit her so hard that it bent her plate. She hit me hard enough to knock me down clean. And I saw the cuts it left in that door on its way out.”

“The doorframe. Yes, I have the photos here. I also have the coroner’s report and your medical exam. It looks like you were both shot several times.”

Constantine took a deep breath. “I don’t remember that. I remember… I remember seeing her go—like, I could just feel it. She was already in bad shape from what we had seen in there, and when she saw it, and it was right over her, she lost it. I remember her trying to shoot it. I tried to shoot before it could move, but I was too slow. I remember it hit her, and I tried to take another shot as I fell—we fell. But I missed. Then it was gone. I don’t remember anyone else shooting. It didn’t have a gun or anything. I don’t remember getting shot.”

“Several very-small caliber projectiles, it says,” relayed Sing. “High velocity, they estimate around ten or fifteen caliber. Less than point-two inch. They penetrated through her abdomen below the plate, and through you. Nonfatal wounds in all cases, though you’re lucky you did not take one to the heart or brain.”

“Yeah, I got the report. Nonfatal didn’t do her much good. Did you read the description of what it did to her when it hit her?”

“Yes, I read it. And you just said. It bent her chest plate.”

“What hits that hard, Roy? Huh? You tell me what fuckin’ human thing hits that hard.”

“Jack hammers. Pneumatic rams. Machines.”

“So you still think this is some kind of suit, huh?”

“I do.”

“Well… fine. What do you want me to do? I think they’re pretty much done here. You got all the take from the site, right? The documents and computers and shit?”

“Yes. We’re going over those now. You need to get back here and link up with TF again. We’ve got more work, uh, in that vein. There’ve been other developments.”

“What? What other developments?”

“The AI. We got that listener online, and we’ve been tracking this thing for the past few days. It’s enormous. It’s… well, I can’t talk about it. Come back to the office and I’ll fill you in.”

“Fine. I’m on a plane tonight.”

“Good. Rob…”

“Yeah?”

“I’m sorry about Agent Raines. I really am.”

Constantine nodded his head, though Sing could not see him do so. “Yeah. I’m fuckin’ sorry, too.”

“I’m sure she’ll get all the right honors when she gets home, but we can make sure. We can do that for her.”

“We owe it to her. She was legit.”

“I’ll start making calls now.”

“Thanks.”

“It’s the least I can do,” said Sing. “Fly safe, Rob. We’ll talk soon, and I’ll update you on what we’ve found.”

Constantine hung up, and then he finished packing his belongings. The local officials had offered to get him to the airport, but he had declined. A taxi would suit him fine, and he could bill it to the Agency later. A taxi let him be alone with his thoughts, at least in the sense that he wouldn’t be riding with some police officer who would insist on commiserating with him. Constantine did not want to converse on the subject of Special Agent Raines or who—or what—had killed her. It couldn’t be human.

It couldn’t be a suit. It was something more. But if Sing was right, if it was just a very clever machine, then that would make Constantine’s task so much easier. One way or another, he was going to kill it. He was going to find it and he was going to kill it.

Not even for Raines. Well, partially for Raines. But, more than that, because it needed killing.

He had seen it first-hand, had experienced it, and he knew down to his bones that it could not be allowed to live, to go about freely in the world. Someone had to hunt down and end that thing, and Constantine was the man in a position to do that.

When he finally returned to the office, he had squared away his mind. Having resolved himself in his purpose, he felt better, felt more in command. He felt as though, perhaps, next time, he would be able to face it coldly, like a proper (“God-damned”) professional.

“So what’s the latest, Roy? What’d your computers find out?”

“Before that,” said Sing, swiveling around in his chair to face his computer, “this.” He clicked on an icon, which opened his browser to a video on a major news site.

“Are aliens among us?” asked a pretty, blond female anchor. “That’s the question on a lot of people’s minds after the release of this truly remarkable video captured by an officer’s body-cam…” She prattled on, and Constantine did not hear another word of it. He was staring at a still-frame of… it. The entity, caught in the beam of the policeman’s weaponlight as it passed by in a streak. The complete clip was short. The officer was approaching a doorway in a dark building, advancing carefully. Through the door, his light illuminated Constantine—unrecognizable in full kit, but Constantine knew himself when he saw himself—standing with his weapon leveled but his left hand up, showing his palm to something off to the right, not visible through the doorway. The officer—“That damned policeman,” Constantine thought—was easing his way carefully to the left as he approached the door, incrementally working his way toward a better view of whatever Constantine was looking at, when suddenly Constantine fired and then a flying body bowled him out of frame. The officer’s perspective leapt forward, as he had leapt to intervene, and was in the next instant nearly run over by “it,” the apparition, the demon-like shadow figure, as it stormed past the doorway. The officer stumbled back, firing a few errant shots into the ceiling, and that was it. The clip ended.

Someone had cut it and leaked it to the press. The single frame that had captured the thing well, blurry as it was, was nonetheless stunning. It was like something out of a movie, a CGI effect. Thinking of it as real made one’s blood run cold.

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“That little fucker, God bless him,” said Constantine. “I didn’t even see him there. That’s how fuckin’ scope-locked I was. I had no idea he was there.”

“Well, God bless him indeed. It’s the best photo we’ve got—really, the only photo. But this means our mystery entity has now gone prime-time. No one’s commenting on what or who it is, but their government is making no bones about the idea that it attacked ‘their officers.’—You can at least thank them for your continued anonymity. Good job wearing a local uniform.”

“Yeah, sure. This helps our case, right? It’s going to be harder for the thing to hide now that everybody has to admit it’s real. More witnesses will be able to come forward.”

“Yes, that’s true,” said Sing, “but the messaging is not great. It’s been painted as hostile, which means it’s going to be that much harder to make contact with whoever’s operating it. This basically plays perfectly for whatever secret cabal has hacked our entire God-damn internet.”

Constantine looked down at Sing. “Okay, you want to tell me about that?”

“Yes. This AI? It’s everywhere. It’s in literally everything. Okay, not literally everything, but it’s a hell of a damn virus. The process it runs it tiny, just like she said. Most neurons are relatively inactive—you know how they say we only use ten percent of our brains?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, the truth is more like we only use ten percent of it at a time. All of it gets used, sooner or later; it’s just that different parts get used for different tasks. So the neuron process this thing puts out there—any given process, on one node—doesn’t activate all that often, and when it does, it’s very small in terms of resource use. It pretty much does a single operation and sends, like, one packet out to one of its neighbors in the network. So it’s tiny, it mostly goes unnoticed, and the virus they use to distribute it is apparently, to hear Josh Carrington tell it, like nothing he’s ever seen. They’ve discovered several new major OS vulnerabilities just by studying how it works.”

“Some kind of super-virus? What does it do to the computer?”

“Nothing. Nothing but install the neuron process, as far as we can tell. It hits quietly, does its work, propagates, and deletes itself with a thoroughness.”

“If it’s that stealthy, how’d they figure out how it works?”

“They caught it in the act. When Josh realized the bot was running on our own systems—”

“Wait, it’s on Agency computers? How many?”

“All of them. Every Defense and Intelligence department computer, as far as we can tell. I’m telling you, if there are systems this thing isn’t on, it’s just a matter of time. The virus is prolific. Josh built up a new machine and put it on our low-side network. They monitored it until it got botted. They said it took, like, forty minutes for the system to be infected. Again, the virus installed the AI neuron process and then wiped itself.”

“High side?”

“Not botted, as far as we can tell, but it may have been penetrated by a similar virus.”

“How is that possible?”

“Remember what started all of this? That we figured out someone has broken level-one encryption?”

“That means they can break into the high-side network, too? Like, just from the Internet?”

“I don’t know the details. I think most of that network runs on its own physical infrastructure. But that infrastructure is laid all over the world. If people have physical access to it, and they can break our best encryption, then yeah.”

Constantine took a deep breath. “So they know everything we’re doing. Like, right now. They know about this project to find them.”

“Almost certainly.”

“Well, fuck.”

“Yeah, it’s not great,” said Sing, “but it’s not the end of the world. Just knowing about something doesn’t mean you can do anything about it. To stop us, they’d have to be willing to start some international incidents, to say the least. Though…” He turned back to his computer and pulled up another browser window with a number of tabs open. He began clicking through them. The theme was immediately apparent: Warships having close encounters with one another. Military buildups on borders, and several more small invasions. Treasury divestments. Oil exports cut off. A small military patrol taken hostage and being leveraged for propaganda concessions. It was all the usual stuff, normal instances in the dynamic and dangerous world of foreign policy—except even Constantine had to admit there were a lot of them.

“All of these have happened recently?”

“All of these have happened in the past week,” said Sing. “The executive is messaging for calm, but the stock market is in a catastrophic free-fall, right now, and more people beyond just the fund managers are starting to ask what’s going on. The truth is, no one knows what’s going on, except…”

“Us.”

“Well, at least we have a theory. I have a theory. Because the other side of this is you don’t see any of the major players taking shots at each other. This is coordinated, and it’s coordinated against us. We’re being isolated, and we’re being cut up. It’s death by a thousand cuts—except I don’t think these cuts are going to kill us. I think they are meant to weaken us, though.”

“For?”

Sing looked up at him. “War?”

“War?” said Constantine. “Are you serious? You think one of these countries is going to go to start a war with us?”

“I think all of these countries are going to start a war with us.”

Constantine raised his hands toward Sing and put all of his incredulity behind his next question: “Why?”

“I don’t know,” said Sing with a shake of his head. “Unless it’s just as simple as they think that they can beat us. Whoever’s pulling the strings on this is moving now, quickly, while his fragile alliance is still in one piece. It’s gotta be volatile as hell, and God knows what he’s gone through to pull it off, so now he’s using it to bring us down while he can.”

“So you think there’s a person behind all of this?”

“A single driving individual, yes. This is too focused to be an evolved thing. Too quick. Someone is doing this to us. Someone, or some very small group of extremely powerful and influential people.”

“That’s hard to believe. They’d have to be a fuckin’ genius.”

“Yes. And have their hands in basically every… every…”

“Everything?”

“Yes,” said Sing quickly. “Everything.” But by his tone it was clear that that was not the thought that had just occurred to him. He was thinking about something else, now, which had derailed his train of thought.

“What?” asked Constantine.

“No,” said Sing. “I just had an idea, but it’s dumb. It’s impossible. Science fiction bullshit.”

“You think it’s this fuckin’ AI.”

Sing took a deep breath. He nodded. “Yeah. That’s exactly the thought that occurred to me. But it’s impossible.”

“Why?”

“Because. AIs like this, neural net programs, are really smart. The more neurons they have, the smarter they can be, as I understand it, about solving problems that seem very, uh, intuitive in nature. But they’re still just a simulation of intuition. It’s all just math. They aren’t really alive. They don’t have will. They just solve a problem, or a set of problems.”

“Okay, but how many neurons does this thing have, if it’s using the entire Internet, as you say?”

“About twenty billion, I think is the number we came up with.”

“Twenty… billion?” Constantine took the extra moment to try to wrap his mind around that notion, and he failed.

“Yeah. And according to Josh, it’s orders of magnitude more powerful than a traditional machine-learning program with the same number of simulated neurons, because it is, in a sense, simultaneously optimizing itself to solve every problem it encounters. It’s… I mean, it’s frickin’ mindboggling, but I still don’t think it’s actually alive. And there’s a chicken and egg thing. Someone had to install it.”

“That’s true.”

“Plus, we’re pretty sure we know what it’s doing.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I was going to tell you a minute ago: we’ve been running Miss Melody’s program, wide. We’ve installed her listener on major backbones all over the world. In fact, it’s been pretty much a mad race to see how far we can spread our net, because the farther we did, the more of this thing we found. That’s how we realized it’s basically everywhere, which was why we started looking everywhere. But anyway, the point is we’ve been listening to it, and we’re pretty sure it’s looking for something.”

“Looking for something?” So much of this was in the realm of science fiction, now, that Constantine had given up on trying to jump to any conclusions. All he could do was listen while sing rambled. “What?”

“Not sure yet. It seems to be—I’m going off Josh’s explanation now, and he’s getting that from his AI experts, who are working off of the info Miss Melody provided them, so we’re all in sort of major catch-up mode, here, but—the way he explained it, it seems to be analyzing basically everything it can find—information, I mean. It’s like it’s categorizing all knowledge, and trying to find patterns in it.”

“What kind of patterns?”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out. We’re not sure exactly what it’s looking for, but I guess it’s making these incredibly broad connections. Like, it’s taking in everything, like ancient poems, and connecting those with modern scientific discoveries and trends in medieval art. The analysis it’s performing is so sophisticated, we don’t have the computing power to figure out why it’s making certain links or connections. We can’t find the pattern in the patterns it seems to think it’s detecting, because we’d need—”

“—an AI the size of the fucking Internet to fucking do it.”

“Exactly.”

“Fuck,” said Constantine. He grabbed a chair and plopped himself down in it. “What the hell, man? What does any of this mean? I feel like I’m a little out of my depth, here.”

“Rob, you gotta understand, man: we’re all out of our depth. Nothing that’s going on right now is remotely within the realm of possibility. Technologies coming to life out of science fiction—” Constantine inwardly rejoiced that he wasn’t the only one who felt that way. “—All of our enemies suddenly deciding to play nice together and set us up for attack all at once. An unfathomably intelligent AI installed on every computer in existence running an associative analysis on the sum total of human knowledge and recorded history.” Sing shrugged.

“Well,” said Constantine. “When you put it that way…”

“Yeah. The entire world is turning upside down all around us, and ninety-nine point nine nine nine nine percent of humanity hasn’t even noticed yet. If I’m right, aside from our little group, no one will even see it until it’s too late. Hell, it might already be too late.”

“Well, I don’t accept that. Even if this is some wizard shit, most of the world is just human beings, and a good man with a good rifle will sort out most of them. Our enemies may all attack at once, but they’re still fuckin’ human, and I’ve got a good rifle.”

Sing laughed. “Well, I’m glad to hear that. That gives me a little hope. Honestly, I feel like I’m going crazy, looking at all of this. But there’s no point in looking at it and going crazy. We can only do what we can do. That’s why I want to keep pressing ahead, and I want you to keep pressing ahead. Keep digging. Find proof, find out who’s behind it. If we can figure that out, then maybe we can take ‘em. I don’t think anyone expected us to know even as much as we know. Thanks to Miss Melody’s project— her team’s project, I guess, which they just happened to put together at just the right time—we can see a dimension of this which I never would have seen by myself. I had my suspicions about an alliance, and about the sudden surge in tech, but I would never even have known to look for this virus or this neural bot net business. No one would have.”

“So we’ve caught a lucky break.”

“Exactly. And I have to believe this AI, whatever it’s doing, is at least tied to the Why behind it all. If we can find out the Who, and we can find out the Why, maybe we’ll have enough leverage to stop it.”

“And in the meantime,” said Constantine, “it gets me out of the house.”

Sing opened his mouth to voice a response and then found he had none. He chuckled.

“Whatever floats your boat, man. Glad to have you on board.”