The Genius Wars

  Saul and his wife exchanged long-suffering glances. Nevertheless, they both moved forward until they were standing directly behind Cadel’s chair.

  ‘I wanted to find a pattern, and I did,’ he continued. ‘There’s a shiny half-sphere in every scene. Every single one. I mean, what are the odds?’

  ‘Cadel –’ Saul began.

  ‘No, wait. Just listen.’ Dragging his fingers through his tousled curls, Cadel took a deep breath. ‘I don’t think this is Prosper at all,’ he announced. ‘I think this is a piece of malware.’

  As he’d expected, the reaction was one of total incredulity. Even Angus turned to gape at him. It was Fiona who finally broke the stunned silence.

  ‘What on earth is malware?’ she asked.

  ‘An illegal computer program.’ Saul was shaking his head. ‘Cadel, that’s impossible –’

  ‘What is?’ said Fiona. ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘It wouldn’t be impossible. Not if you had the right skills. Not if you were good enough.’ Cadel began to argue his case. ‘It makes perfect sense. Why else would Prosper always be wearing the same clothes? Why else would there be a shiny ball in every scene?’

  ‘Coincidence,’ Saul rejoined.

  ‘Or protocol settings.’

  ‘Cadel,’ snapped Fiona, ‘could you please slow down! You’re not making sense. What’s so important about these shiny balls, anyway?’

  ‘Nothing. Unless you’re doing visual effects.’ Cadel paused for a moment, his mind racing. Thank God, he thought. Thank God I read all that online Siggraph stuff. ‘I only know this because I like to keep up with the latest programming breakthroughs. There’s a lot of amazing mathematics that goes into computer graphics these days.’ Realising that Fiona was in no way enlightened, he changed tack. ‘You must have heard of digital doubles,’ he said. ‘They’re fake people that you stick into real scenes. Computer-generated people.’

  ‘Wait a minute.’ Suddenly the penny dropped. Fiona’s voice became shrill. ‘Are you saying that all those pictures of Prosper English are computer generated?’

  ‘I’m saying that they could be,’ Cadel replied. ‘If you want to create a realistic digital double, you need a light map of the whole scene. And for one of those, you have to use a shiny chrome ball.’ His heart sank at the prospect of explaining High Dynamic Range Rendering to someone who didn’t know what malware was. ‘I’m not sure how it works, exactly,’ he admitted. ‘You’d have to talk to an expert. But a chrome ball gives you the real-world lighting data for a specific environment. Without understanding how the light falls, you can’t make it fall properly on your digital double.’

  ‘Except that he’s not a digital double.’ Saul nodded at the computer screen, where Prosper’s grainy likeness had been caught in mid-stride. ‘If that guy was a fake, he wouldn’t be interacting. He’d be walking through walls.’

  ‘Not if he was programmed properly.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘This is all about programming,’ Cadel insisted. ‘You can have a thousand people in a scene, and they can be programmed to interact with each other. They can be programmed to fight each other, or run away from each other, or respond to variables like walls or hills … it depends what you want them to do.’ As the detective chewed on his bottom lip, Cadel leaned forward. He felt that he had to make Saul understand. ‘I don’t quite know how you’d pull this off. Like I said, I’m not a computer graphics expert – and neither is Dr Vee. But suppose he’s teamed up with someone who is, and they’re both working for Prosper English? I mean, Vee’s worked for Prosper before. They could have got together and created a security-camera bug.’

  All eyes immediately swivelled towards the monitors nearby. There was a brief, tension-filled pause.

  Then Saul cleared his throat.

  ‘It’s a bit of a leap,’ he said, though he sounded shaken. ‘Are you sure – that is, can we prove it?’

  ‘I dunno.’ Pulling at his bottom lip, Cadel considered the matter. His gaze drifted from the troubled faces looming above him to the computer screen sitting in front of him. ‘If it was me,’ he reasoned, thinking aloud, ‘and I was designing this program, I’d have it infiltrating streams of CCTV data where they pass through an Internet traffic point. So you wouldn’t see any evidence left on the actual cameras. But there would have to be a whole library of really obvious specifications in the protocol, before the program could insert Prosper English. You’d have to specify the height of the camera, and the angle, and the tilt, and the type of lens. And you’d have to specify a shiny half-sphere, and maybe something standardised – something that would give you scale. Like a power point, for instance. Or a manhole cover.’ He turned back to Saul, inspired by the idea of a protocol checklist.

  It was clear, however, that he’d left his audience far, far behind.

  ‘You’ve lost me,’ Saul confessed. And Fiona mumbled, ‘What was that about a library, again?’

  Cadel felt himself deflate. He realised that he was no Richard Buckland, able to clarify and simplify difficult concepts. Angus looked frankly dazed, as if he’d been knocked on the head with an iron bar.

  ‘Okay, look.’ Speaking very slowly and clearly, Cadel made one more attempt to hammer his message home. ‘There are all kinds of different cameras wired up to the Net,’ he declared. ‘But if Prosper only shows up on one kind of camera – and if you always see particular things in the shot with him – then it’s got to be suspicious. Don’t you agree?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Fiona.

  ‘Definitely,’ rumbled Angus, who by now was completely absorbed in the discussion.

  Saul flashed him a sharp glance.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be watching those monitors?’ the detective growled, before addressing Cadel once again. ‘So according to your theory, some rogue computer virus is pasting film clips of Prosper English onto random bits of CCTV footage. Is that it?’

  ‘Umm … more or less.’ Cadel decided not to complicate matters by objecting to the terms ‘virus’ and ‘film clip’, though they weren’t really very accurate. ‘I’m not absolutely certain,’ he allowed. ‘I just think it’s possible.’

  ‘And worth looking into,’ Saul muttered.

  ‘Definitely.’

  ‘But why?’ asked Fiona. When everyone stared at her, she must have realised how ambiguous her question had been. So she expanded on it. ‘I mean, why would Prosper English want to pop up all over Sydney, and cause a commotion? It seems so pointless.’

  Cadel could hardly believe his ears.

  ‘It’s not pointless. It’s tactical,’ he replied. ‘He wants us to think he’s in Sydney because he’s not in Sydney.’ As Saul opened his mouth to deliver some cautionary remark, Cadel cut him off. ‘Which means that I can go home, now. Which means that I’ll be safe back home.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said the detective, who seemed reluctant to commit himself. Cadel, however, wouldn’t be silenced.

  He had everything worked out.

  ‘I’ll be safer at home than I am here,’ he said. ‘Prosper might not be in Sydney, but he’s obviously got into a whole lot of IP surveillance systems. What if he’s monitoring this one?’

  ‘Oh my God.’ Fiona sounded horrified. ‘Do you think he is?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ Saul stressed. He was trying to keep things calm. ‘This is just a theory –’

  ‘Which fits all the facts.’ Cadel was growing impatient. Why did Saul have to be so stubborn? ‘I don’t want to stay here. It’s networked. It’s vulnerable. There are too many cameras.’

  ‘Cadel –’

  ‘I want to go back home. I’ll be safe, at home.’

  These simple words were enough to convince Fiona, who fixed her husband with an anxious, pleading look. Cadel did the same, widening his enormous blue eyes as he stuck out his bottom lip in mute appeal. (It was a dirty trick, and he was slightly ashamed of himself, but he was also desperate.)

  Ambushed on two fronts, Saul quickly
buckled.

  ‘Oh, all right,’ he said, reaching for his mobile phone. ‘Just let me make a few calls, and I’ll see what I can do.’ Bip-bip-bip went the keypad, as he jabbed at it with one finger. ‘But I can’t promise anything,’ he warned. ‘You know that, don’t you? This is going to take a while.’

  Cadel nodded. Then he smiled at Fiona. Then he spun around to face the computer screen, because Prosper was still pinned there like a moth on a specimen board.

  I’ll have to tell Sonja, he decided. She’ll have to turn off the cameras at Judith’s house.

  As far as he was concerned, they would need to start taking some very serious precautions.

  FIVE

  By noon the following day, Cadel had been released from protective custody.

  He had finally been granted permission to sleep at home, and to attend his computer engineering classes. But the rest of the world was now off limits. He wasn’t even allowed to do anything on his own; wherever he went, someone else was supposed to go too. And that someone couldn’t be just anyone.

  In the absence of an armed police escort, the job of protecting Cadel would fall on his old friend, Gazo Kovacs.

  ‘Gazo has a built-in defence mechanism,’ Saul explained, when asked to justify his choice. ‘It’s more effective than tear-gas, and he doesn’t need a permit to use it.’

  He was referring to Gazo’s peculiar genetic disability: a stench so overwhelming that it could knock people out. Once upon a time, Gazo had been unable to control his mutant body odour. When Cadel had first met him, at the Axis Institute, Gazo had been wearing a sealed suit that was designed to prevent him from harming his teachers (or fellow students) whenever he became badly stressed. Since then, however, he had learned to manage whatever surge of hormones triggered this unfortunate response, so that it rarely took him by surprise and would only occur when he wanted it to. Regular massages, a change of diet, and an array of special breathing techniques had helped him to live a normal life – as had his job with a firm that specialised in campus landscaping. Gazo now worked three days a week at the University of New South Wales; he was therefore well acquainted with every nook and cranny of the university grounds, and knew quite a few of the staff there, too.

  ‘He’s familiar with the layout, he has the means to protect you, and he hangs around with you quite a bit anyway,’ Saul had told Cadel. ‘In other words, he’s the perfect bodyguard. No one’s going to wonder why you’re with Gazo.’

  Cadel wasn’t so sure about that. Eyebrows would certainly be raised when he rolled up to his Advanced Programming lectures with Gazo in tow. Even if questions weren’t asked, people were bound to wonder – especially if Gazo was identified as one of the men who mowed the campus lawns, and clipped the campus hedges.

  However, it was pointless trying to argue. Saul was too busy to take time off work, and it wasn’t as if Cadel had a better idea. All in all, Gazo’s companionship would be preferable to that of a stone-faced, shaven-headed body-builder in a pinstriped suit and sunglasses. Cadel could only imagine the sort of effect that someone like Angus would have on a class full of computer geeks.

  Not that Angus was available. Not any more. He and his colleagues had been reassigned; it was their job to protect people who had been classified as ‘likely targets’, and Cadel no longer fell into this category. He didn’t qualify for round-the-clock police protection, any more, because Prosper had ceased to pose an immediate and probable threat.

  That was the official theory, anyway.

  It was based on Cadel’s own hypothesis – which had been right all along. Prosper’s reappearance was nothing more than an online hoax. This was now proven beyond all doubt, thanks to a very fortunate programming error. While prowling through various CCTV networks, the police had stumbled upon yet another shot of Prosper English. In this one, however, he appeared to vanish halfway across the scene, leaving a black, Prosper-shaped hole. Various visual effects technicians had ruled that the hole was a ‘dropped frame’, and that the malware responsible for it had failed to ‘render the lighting’. Clearly, some kind of bug was at work, though who had planted the thing was anyone’s guess.

  According to expert opinion, the person behind the program had to be really, really skilled, because he’d created something revolutionary. But there were many highly skilled people in the computer graphics business – and they were scattered across the globe.

  ‘For all we know, he could be in Russia,’ Saul admitted, upon relaying this information to Cadel. ‘It’s an international industry now, thanks to the Net.’

  ‘But what makes you think this guy’s working on his own?’ asked Cadel. They were driving towards the university so that he could attend an afternoon seminar; Saul had agreed to meet up with Gazo at the Barker Street entrance. ‘I mean, this is a breakthrough piece of programming. If one person put it together, without any kind of help, why wouldn’t he sell it on the open market and make a fortune? Why would he just give it to Prosper English?’

  ‘Maybe he didn’t give it to anyone,’ Saul replied. ‘Maybe Prosper paid for it.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Cadel doubted very much, however, that Prosper English had enough spare cash squirrelled away in secret bank accounts to cover the full cost of something so cutting edge. It would take a great deal of money to compensate a bona fide, unsung programming genius for the loss of world domination in HDR environment mapping. ‘Or maybe Vee helped to design it,’ Cadel went on. ‘Maybe there’s a whole bunch of people involved, and they can’t go public because everyone on the development team is a fugitive of some kind. Like Dr Vee.’ After a moment’s reflection, he added, ‘Then again, maybe Prosper had nothing to do with any of this.’

  Saul flashed him a startled look – just as the vehicle in front of them stopped, suddenly. For one horrifying split second, Cadel was afraid that they were going to collide with the back end of a tourist coach.

  But Saul stamped on the brake, so hard that Cadel nearly bounced off the windscreen. And nothing regrettable happened after all.

  ‘You can’t be serious,’ Saul protested.

  Cadel shrugged.

  ‘Prosper’s a notorious criminal,’ he said. ‘If I was some crazy hacker with a grudge, and I wanted to get even, I might consider playing a trick on the police.’ He didn’t like to mention it, but this was exactly the sort of thing that he himself might have done, once – with Prosper’s encouragement. ‘It would get everyone all worked up over nothing,’ Cadel finished, ‘and waste valuable resources. Never underestimate what people will do for kicks.’

  Saul frowned. He was crawling along by this time, stuck in heavy traffic on Anzac Parade. The sun was glinting on tinted glass and chrome bumper bars. The bus ahead of them was belching clouds of black smoke from its exhaust pipe.

  ‘No,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t buy that. One of the computer guys we interviewed was talking about a scan – about running some kind of scanner over a person, to get his exact measurements for a digital double. You couldn’t do that with Prosper unless he was in the room with you.’

  ‘I guess not.’

  ‘You’re probably right, though. About this bug being engineered to distract us. Prosper might want us to think he’s in Sydney so that we won’t look too hard at what he’s really doing.’ Saul seemed to be thinking out loud. ‘I wonder if we’re getting too close for comfort? There’s a whole team of investigators on this case. It’s a global effort. I wonder if he feels like somebody’s closing in on him?’

  Cadel grunted. He could see the Barker Street intersection coming up, and didn’t want to discuss Prosper English any more. Prosper had a tendency to dominate your life, if you let him. He was hard to shake off even when he wasn’t around.

  Cadel knew that he shouldn’t be speculating, or theorising, or drawing conclusions about Prosper’s activities. The trick was to appear perfectly harmless – and that would be impossible if Prosper ever deduced that Cadel was helping the police.

  ‘Did you tell J
udith to switch off her security cameras?’ Cadel asked, changing the subject as Saul turned left.

  The detective nodded.

  ‘Yeah,’ he rejoined. ‘Don’t worry about that. It’s covered.’

  ‘Are you going to pick me up when I’m done?’

  ‘No.’ Saul explained that Gazo would be giving Cadel a lift home. ‘He’ll stay with you there until I get back. Just make sure you check all the entry points before going in.’

  ‘But what if you don’t get back until late?’

  ‘Then he’ll have to eat dinner with you.’ Catching sight of Cadel’s troubled expression, Saul tried to reassure him. ‘You don’t have to worry about Gazo. He’s fine with this. He’s taken the week off.’

  ‘Is he being paid?’ Cadel demanded, hoping that the answer would be ‘yes’. Saul, however, didn’t reply; he had already spotted Gazo, who was up ahead, waiting under a kerbside tree. The kerb itself was lined with vehicles, so there was no point trying to park. Saul simply braked when he reached Gazo, instructing Cadel to hop out.

  ‘If there’s a problem, gimme a call,’ the detective continued. Then he addressed Gazo, who was approaching the car. ‘Thanks for this. You’re really helping me out, here.’

  ‘That’s okay.’ Gazo sounded embarrassed. Instead of his usual overalls, he wore black jeans and a long-sleeved shirt, buttoned at the wrist. His workboots had been replaced by sober black lace-ups, and he had shaved off his wispy goatee. As he leaned towards the driver’s window, a strong smell of aftershave hit Cadel like a siren blast, or a runaway cement truck.

  It was clear that Gazo had tried to dress in a manner appropriate to someone burdened with a grave responsibility. He had even slicked back his hair and slapped on a pair of sunglasses. Cadel didn’t think that the result was entirely successful. If Gazo was trying to look intimidating, his long neck, receding chin and spotty complexion undermined his efforts.

  There could be no doubt, however, that outdoor manual work had done wonders for Gazo’s physique. His weedy frame had expanded, since his days at the Axis Institute. And now that he was sporting a tan – instead of a ghostly English pallor – his spots weren’t nearly as noticeable.