She sat and thought for a while, then climbed back up the ladder. She peeked out the door to make sure there was still no one watching, then climbed out of the cement box. It only took her a few moments to find a big enough rock.
Christabel only had to hit it a few times, then the little sticking-out-piece on the bolt suddenly tipped down and she could slide the whole thing back and forth. She pulled it as far back in its slot as it would go, like Mister Sellars had told her, then clambered back up the ladder toward the afternoon sunlight.
Pleased with herself for being brave, and for successfully doing the first thing the funny old man had asked, she stood beside her bike and stared at the cement box. It was locked again and the key was back in her pocket. It was a secret thing that only she and Mister Sellars knew about. It gave her a tickly, excited feeling. Now there were only two more jobs left to do.
She put on her Storybook Sunglasses for a moment to read Mister Sellars' list again. She looked at her Otterworld watch—Pikapik the Otter Prince was holding the numbers 14:00 between his paws, which meant she had fifteen minutes to get to the next place. She checked the grocery bag in her bike basket to make sure the bolt cutters were still there, then climbed onto the seat and pedaled away.
Except for the tip of his nose and the tops of his cheekbones, Yacoubian's face had gone pale with fury, a full shade lighter than his normal olive complexion.
"Say that again. Slowly. So I can tell your next-of-kin what you looked like just before I tore your face off and ruined any chance for an open-casket funeral."
Young Tanabe showed him a cool smile. "I'll be happy to say it again, General. All non-Telemorphix personnel going into the lab—all—will be searched. Period. By orders of Mister Wells. If you have a complaint, sir, you should take it up with Mister Wells. But you aren't going into this lab complex any other way. Sorry, General."
"And if I don't consent to a search?"
"Then you either wait here, or if you become too disruptive, we have you escorted out . . . sir. With respect, I don't think you want to mess with our security people." Tanabe casually indicated two very large men standing beside the doorway, who were listening to the conversation with a certain professional interest. That part of their bulk was due to the rubberized electro-catalytic body armor under their casual suits did not lessen the effect. "In fact General, here at TMX we've got at least a half-dozen security men who are veterans of your command. You would recognize the quality of their work."
Yacoubian glowered, then seemed to make a visible effort to disengage. "I hope you enjoy this. Go ahead."
Tanabe summoned the guards with a flick of his head. While they made a quick and thorough investigation of the general's person, Wells' assistant stood back, arms folded. "Enjoyment has nothing to do with it, sir. I have my job, just like your men have theirs."
"Yeah, but I can have my men shot."
Tanabe smiled again. "Maybe my boss will give you an unexpected Christmas present this year, General."
One of the guards pulled Yacoubian's gold cigar case from his pocket. "Not this, sir. Unless you want to wait half an how while we have it and its contents checked out."
"My God, is the crazy old bastard even afraid to have an unlit cigar in the same room with him?"
Tanabe took the cigar case. "Your choice, General."
Yacoubian shrugged."Jesus. Okay, little man, you win. Take me in."
Wells waited with some amusement until Yacoubian had finished swearing. "I'm sorry, Daniel. If I had known you'd be so upset, I would have come out and searched you myself."
"Very funny. After all this bullshit, it'd better be worth it." The general's hand strayed to his pocket, but finding no cigar case, retreated like a hibernating animal wakened too early. His scowl deepened. "What could you possibly have ready after only a couple of weeks? I mean, come on, Bob. Even your brainboys can't be that quick."
"Boys and girls, Daniel. Don't be so antediluvian. And, no, we haven't done it in two weeks. More like two years—but we've put in thousands of work-hours altogether during these last two weeks to finish it" Something chimed softly inside the wall. Wells touched the top of his desk and a drawer slid open before him. He withdrew a dermal patch and placed it carefully in the crook of his elbow. "Just my medication," he apologized. "So if you've calmed down, I'll show you what we've come up with."
Yacoubian stood. He was quieter now, but there was a tightness to his posture that had not been there before. "This whole thing was your idea of a joke, wasn't it? Keeping me waiting, then that search thing you knew would piss me off."
Wells spread his hands. Despite the ropy muscles and prominent bones, they did not tremble. "Daniel. That's a little wild."
Yacoubian was across the office and into his host's body-space in a moment. He pushed his face to within an inch of Wells' own, then reached down and lightly finger-touched Wells' hand as it trailed toward the desktop security alarm, arresting its progress. "Just don't ever dick me around . . . Bob. Remember that. Our relationship goes back a long way. We've been friends, even. But you don't ever want to find out what kind of enemy I can be."
Yacoubian stepped back, suddenly smiling, leaving Wells groping for the support of a chair arm. "Now. Let's go see this little toy of yours."
The general stood in the middle of the darkened room. "Well? Where is it?"
Wells gestured. The four wallscreens blazed with light. "This is a lab, Daniel, but it's not the Frankenstein kind. We work with information here. The 'toy,' as you called it, isn't the kind of thing I can put on a table and point at"
"Then don't be so damn theatrical."
Wells shook his head with mock-regret. "My people have put a lot of time into something we can't show anyone outside the company. Surely you won't begrudge me a little bit of showmanship." He waved his hand and all four screens darkened. A hologrammatic display of small white dots formed in midair in the center of the room. They seemed to move randomly, like fast-motion bacteria or superheated molecules. "I'll feel more comfortable if I can give you the context, Daniel, so I'm going to explain a little bit of the history of this project. Feel free to stop me if I tell you too many things you already know."
Yacoubian snorted. "Stop you? How? Your security boys took my gun away."
Wells favored him with a wintry smile. "The problem seems straightforward on the surface. The Grail Project is at bottom a simulation environment, although wildly more ambitious than any other thus far. As part of the experimental procedure, a subject chosen by our chairman—we'll call the subject 'X' for convenience's sake, since we still haven't been told his real name—was placed into the simulation." Wells gestured. An image of a coffinlike metal cylinder festooned with cables appeared momentarily displacing the dots. "It hasn't been easy getting any information about the subject, by the way—the Old Man is playing everything close to the vest—but apparently X was subjected to various conditioning techniques to alter or efface his memory before they delivered him to us."
"Conditioning techniques!" Yacoubian's laugh was short and harsh. "And you civilians make jokes about military euphemisms! What did they do, give him a bad haircut and an excessive shampoo? They pithed his mind, Wells. They goddamn well brainwashed him."
"Whatever. In any case, about a month or so back there was a disruption of the monitoring equipment and a triggering of the splitting sequence—we still haven't been able to say decisively whether this was accident or sabotage—and contact with X was lost. Contact with his mind, that is. His body is still here on the premises, of course. About fifty feet beneath where you're standing, to be precise. But that means his submersion in the simulation network is ongoing, and we have no idea where in the matrix he is."
"Okay, now you've finally gotten to something I don't know," Yacoubian said. "Why can't we find him? How hard can it be?"
"Let me show you something." Wells gestured again. The glowing white dots reappeared, then froze into something resembling a three-dimensional star map. Well
s pointed; one of them turned red and began to blink. "The old-line simulations were very simple—everything was reactive. When the subject looked at something, or touched it, or moved in a direction, the simulation responded."
The red dot began slowly to move. The white dots clustered most nearly around it resumed their earlier motion, but all the other dots remained frozen.
"Everything occurred in relation to the subject. When there was no subject, nothing happened. Even with a subject involved, nothing happened beyond the edge of that subject's perceived experience. But this kind of simulation, like the early experiments in artificial intelligence it resembled, made for a very poor version of what it tried to simulate—real human beings don't think in a linear series of 'if-then' statements, and real environments don't stop changing if there's no human observer. So, artificial intelligence experimentation shifted toward 'artificial life' instead around the end of the last century. People started to create environments that evolved. The artificial organisms in these new environments—although very simple at first—evolved as well. An 'A-life' experiment continued all the time, with the various artificial organisms living, feeding, reproducing, dying, whether any scientist was watching them or not.
"And that's what the new generations of simulations do, too . . . at least the high-end ones." Wells finger-flicked again. The red dot disappeared, but all the white dots leaped into frenetic motion again, some moving slowly, others fast as bullets; some traveled in groups, other lone dots roved on what seemed purposeful paths. "Whether there is a human participant or not, the various components of the simulation—artificial living things, artificial weather, even artificial entropy—continue. They interact, combine and recombine, and through this interaction their individual simplicity begins to approach, and perhaps in some situations even surpass, the complexity of real life." He chuckled. "Or 'RL,' as we used to call it."
Yacoubian watched the sparkle of apparently random movement in the middle of the room. "That still doesn't tell me why we can't find this X bastard."
Wells summoned the red dot again. He froze the throng of dots, then turned to the general, eyes mild but intent. "Okay, Daniel, I'll show you the old-fashioned simulation first, the kind that only reacts to the human participant. Let me just hide the subject." The red dot turned a steadily-glowing white. "Now I'll turn the whole thing on." The dots sprang to life again, or at least a few of them did, a pulsing swarm that seemed to travel slowly through the mock-constellation like a funnel cloud while the dots on either side remained static. "Which one is the subject?"
Yacoubian leaned forward. "Got to be one of those in the middle there. That one. No, that one."
The cloud froze and a single dot turned red. "Close, Daniel. I'm sure you would have gotten it with just a little more observation. Now we'll try it with a simulation model that's more like the Grail network." The red dot turned white again, then all the dots began to move at once.
"I . . . I've lost it."
"Exactly." Wells pointed and the hologram faded. The wall-screens lit up in a muted gray etched with an almost invisible shadow of the TMX logo. "When simulations behave as much like real life as ours do, there's no easy way to discern which seemingly living object is a human participant and which is just part of the pseudo-life."
Yacoubian looked around. Wells, anticipating, clapped his hands gently; two chairs rose from recessed slots beneath the floor. "But it's our goddamn simulation network!" The general dropped heavily into one of the chairs. "Why don't we just turn it off? You can't tell me he'd still be running around in there somewhere if we jerked out the cord!"
Telemorphix's founder sighed. "It's not that easy, Daniel. If we simply freeze all the simulations on the network, we don't change anything. X is going to look just like an artifact in whatever simulation he's in, and artifacts don't have individual histories that can be checked. They just . . . exist. We don't have enough processors on this planet to keep records of everything that's happened in the Grail Project since we went gold with it. And as for actually pulling the plug—Christ, Daniel, do you realize how much time and money the people in the Brotherhood have put into growing these environments? Because that's what they are, grown, self-created by evolution, just like a real environment. Trillions! They've spent trillions, and invested almost two decades' worth of high-speed processing as well. The complexity of this whole thing is almost incomprehensible . . . and you want to just pull the plug? That would be like going to the richest neighborhood in the world and saying, 'There's a cockroach loose around here. Do you mind if we burn down all your houses to drive it out?' It's just not going to happen, Daniel."
The general patted his pocket again, then scowled. "But you've got a solution, huh?"
"I think so. We've built an agent." He gestured and the wall-screens began to fill with text.
"Agent? I thought there were already agents to do this kind of thing! King Tut or God Almighty or whatever he's calling himself these days said he already had state-of-the-art agents involved."
"Ah, but there's the rub, you see. Not that we know much about those either—his people have pretty much controlled that part of the project, and up till now I've stayed out of their way. But chances are that any agents he has in there, whether human or artificial, are going about their search in the old-fashioned way."
"Meaning?"
"Hunting for similarities. My people have found out what they could—it's hard to keep anything completely secret in a shared scientific environment—and as far as we can tell, the Old Man's team have been tracking X since he was put into the network. Which means that they've developed something like a behavioral profile—a map of how X has acted in several different simulations. So, whatever agents or tracking gear they're using now probably compare that map against the behavior profiles of all the units within the network."
"Yeah? Sounds like the right way to go about it." For a third time, Yacoubian patted his pocket.
"It would be on a less complex system. But as I've been trying to tell you for a long time, ours isn't like any other simulation network. For one thing, because there's no tracking of individual units, map comparisons have to be made one at a time, case by case." Wells frowned. "You know, you really should try to stay abreast of all this, Daniel—it's just as important to you as to any of the rest of us."
"Yeah? And how much do you know about my end of things, brainboy? How informed are you on the global security situation? Our use of military infrastructure?"
"Touché." Wells at last sat down. "All right, let me continue. The problem with trying to make a behavioral match in this old-fashioned way is not just the complexity of the network either. More importantly, the behavioral signature of any free agent will change from one simulation to another—not much, maybe, but it will still change. You see, almost all these simulations are designed to be immediately functional for a user. That is, if you don't choose characteristics for yourself before entering, the simulation will assign them to you based on its own logic. Therefore, if X is moving from simulation to simulation, he's probably being changed at least slightly each time by the simulations themselves. In this case, the brainwashing—as you so crudely but accurately put it—is working against us. If he has no memory, his sim is probably being shaped by the simulations rather than the other way around. And there's one last problem. Any old-fashioned agents that can move freely through the network will probably have a certain amount of integrity to them—that is, they won't change much. They'll tend to be easy to spot after a while, and since they need a certain amount of time and proximity to the suspected unit before they can make a match and proceed to the capture, X may be able to stay ahead of them almost indefinitely."
"Shit. So what have you got that's better?"
"We think we have the new 'state-of-the-art.' " Wells quirked his lips. "Am I going to be accused of being overly dramatic again? No? Then here." He snapped his fingers and a cable was extruded from the arm of each chair. "Plug yourself in."
/> The general pulled out the cable and slotted it into an implant behind his left ear. Wells did the same.
"I don't see anything. Just a bunch of trees and a lake."
"That tree there? That's our agent."
"What the hell are you talking about? An agent that's a tree? Have you completely lost your mind?"
"Now see this scene? See the woman at the front table? That's our agent. Next one—and that's our agent, the soldier carrying the flamethrower."
Yacoubian squinted at nothing visible from the outside. "So the thing changes?"
"Blends into any environment. The reason I didn't bring you in and show you some model or drawing or something is because there isn't anything to show. It's the perfect mimic, and thus the perfect tracking device—it can fit into any environment."
"So it's going to blend in—what good is that?"
Wells sighed. "Even if he escapes it once or twice, it still won't be recognized by X, because it will never have the same form or figure. And it will learn as it goes, find more sophisticated ways to adapt and gather information. But more importantly, it's going to sift data at a higher level than the old-style agents, because it's not looking to find matches for a single map. In fact, it's doing the opposite—looking for anomalies."
"So if it finds an anomaly—boom! We got him."
"I should digitize you and make you part of my new-employee curriculum—'Explaining to the Non-Technical.' No, Daniel, it's not that easy. Remember, we started this network with less than a hundred different simulations, but there must be at least a few thousand by now—I mean, I've got about forty or so myself. Add to that the fact that at any given time there must be more than ten thousand real live humans using the simulations—a lot of our junior members are paying for their place on the Grail Project waiting list by letting their friends and business associates rent time on the network. So with constant change in the simulations, living users who are almost impossible to distinguish from artifacts, and . . . well, suffice it to say a few other bits of emergent weirdness that we're still studying, what I'm calling "anomalies' are happening in the tens of millions. But still, our new agent will sift and track faster than anything else, and speed is important. Like it or not, we are in a bit of a race with our chairman. But this baby will be the one to find X, and anyone else we ever want to locate, that I promise." He chuckled. "You know what we code-named the agent? Nemesis."