Lone Wolf, page 35
“Okay,” she said, when she was done. “Say something.”
“I can’t.” Jayla’s hands flew to her mouth. She’d spoken the words in her own voice. Her eyes were brimming and her face was contorted and then she shook out her hands as if flinging water from them. “I can’t … I can’t believe it.”
She sounded just as she had on the TikTok video Joey had found, her voice husky, textured, singular.
“This is what your father was working on at the throat-cancer ward at Carnegie Mellon,” Joey said. “For your mom.”
Jayla’s face trembled.
“Most tracheoesophageal prostheses have crappy sound,” Joey said. “That’s why he was combining technologies and rendering voices with AI. I took yours from the videos you posted and it extrapolated from there.”
“How … how is this possible?” Jayla’s hands were in front of her mouth, as if to catch the words as they came out.
“It reads vibrations of your throat like an electrolarynx and anticipates from the movement of your facial musculature how you’re shaping words with your lips.” Joey tapped the choker gently. “It’s your own voice. No one should ever take that away from you.”
Jayla hugged her. When she pulled away, she started to sign from habit, caught herself, and spoke: “Best Thanksgiving present ever.” Her words were tentative, her voice still on training wheels. “Thank you … friend.”
Joey’s lower lip wobbled, so slightly that no one in the world could have caught it. Except Evan. She hardened her face, held herself together. Took an extra beat before speaking.
“The future’s gonna be amazing,” Joey said. “Don’t let anyone scare you into thinking otherwise.”
Evan noticed that he had receded a few steps, as he often did when emotion got palpable.
His shoulder brushed the alarm pad, jostling it from its uncertain perch on the wall mount. When he caught it, the plastic casing came apart. He held the pieces in his hands. It had cracked open to reveal something within.
A hard drive.
No doubt containing Dr. Hill’s perfect deepfake code, the IP he’d stolen back from Allman. It had been right there all along, the perfect hiding place.
The sight of it stole Joey’s attention immediately. She stared at it, her face serious, and then held out her hand. Evan looked at Jayla. Jayla took the hard drive out of Evan’s hands. And set it in Joey’s.
“I’m ready now,” Jayla said, her cadence finding a more natural rhythm. “To be here.” She looked surprised every time she heard herself talk, and she paused to grin, the effect charming. “Because of you.”
Evan didn’t like this part, when gratitude was aimed at him, making his face sit heavy on his skull like a mask. He struggled to receive it.
“How can I possibly thank you?” she said.
This was the part he didn’t mind, when he asked them to pass the baton and in doing so to complete their transition from being pursued to searching out another human in desperate need.
“Find someone else facing the level of trouble you were in, someone being terrorized by another person, and give my phone number to them—1-855-2-NOWHERE.”
Jayla’s long lashes flared wide. “And then what?”
“And then I’ll help them. Like I helped you.”
“That’s it? That’s all you want?”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t seem like much.” Her voice, it still sounded like a miracle. “I mean, to repay you. For everything.”
“You can see what I don’t. Different kinds of people, vulnerability, suffering. That’s what I need.”
“That’s an awful thing to need.” She said it with no judgment. Just empathy. “But I will. I’ll do it.”
He nodded.
It was. It was an awful thing to need. An awful thing he required to be what he was.
Joey tapped the hard drive against her knuckles, supremely distracted by what she held in her hands. When Jayla glanced down to text her aunt on the phone, Evan slipped away with Joey.
They crossed the street, started down the opposite sidewalk.
He said, “What you did for her back there—”
“I’m gonna get on this right away,” Joey said, waving the hard drive.
She looked worn out. Her eyes were lowered, her manner curt. It had taken a lot for her to decipher and navigate a situation like the one with Jayla. In some ways it was easier for her to give Jayla her voice than to find her own, and he felt a sudden fierce vicarious loneliness for what Joey could manage for others versus for herself. And a pride for her trying.
He started to say something, but she cut him off again: “I’ll let you know once I’m in.”
She walked away.
He stood a moment watching her go, the sun warm against his face. Way up the street a FWIP rattled along, skillfully circumventing a battered gray tent stuffed in a doorway, a homeless man’s abode.
Movement drew his attention back to the town house. Jayla on the porch, greeting her aunt. The woman had arrived with plastic grocery bags lining her arms, elbows bent to sustain the weight. Jayla made a move to help but the woman shook her off, wobbling past her niece into the house.
Jayla hesitated on the doorstep, fingertips touching the choker in seeming disbelief. She hadn’t shared her voice with her aunt, not yet. Right now it was hers and hers alone.
Her eyes lifted and she caught sight of Evan across the street. Traffic had picked up between them, but they could still see each other clearly through the flow of cars.
Jayla flattened her fingers, touched them to her mouth, and then tipped her hand toward Evan.
He signed back: You’re welcome.
Jayla spun gracefully on her toe, a dancer’s turn that reminded him of Sofia, and eased back into the town house. The door closed behind her.
Lost in thought, Evan walked the seven blocks back to his truck. There it was in the shadows of an alley, parked next to a dumpster.
An ugly little dog with stiff hair and crazy eyes stood with his grimy little paws submerged in a puddle. He sniffed twice at the ground, rat nose quivering, then looked directly at Evan.
Holding the stare with his bulging eyes, Loco lifted a hind leg and urinated on Evan’s tire.
64
A Place He Didn’t Belong
Brianna’s apartment smelled of turkey and mashed potatoes and gravy and green beans and rolls and pumpkin pie. The cornucopia of scents hit Evan halfway down the hall as he marched with Loco tucked beneath his arm.
The dog alternated between licking himself and trying to bite Evan’s face.
He reached the door and knocked twice gently.
Loco’s lips wrinkled back from his snaggled teeth and he nipped at Evan’s chin.
Bri opened the door. Her penciled eyebrows rose up toward her hairline and stayed there. “Really?” she said. “Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness.” Then: “Sofia!”
Scampering footsteps, and then Sofia careened around the corner from her bedroom and Loco caught her scent and clawed viciously to escape Evan’s clutch, scraping his stomach. He dropped the dog, who fell and landed with feline grace, the first blip of elegance Evan had seen from the creature. Then Loco rocketed to Sofia, scaled her leg, scrambled into her arms, and froze beneath her chin as if he had suddenly fainted and been delivered into nirvana.
There was crying and hugging and kissing and licking and all order of cloying emotions. Evan lifted his shirt to examine the puffy red claw marks that had been raked across his abdomen. Watching her daughter roll around on the floor with the dog, Brianna held a tissue to the edges of her eyes and shook her head with grateful bemusement.
“That stupid mutt,” she said to Evan. And then again: “That stupid mutt.”
Finally the celebration wound down and Sofia got up, Loco nestled into her arms, snoring audibly.
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “You found him.”
“He found me.”
“Cause for celebration,” Bri said.
Sofia chewed her lip and looked down at her bare feet, her mood shifting.
Evan said, “What?”
“Dad’s missing again.”
He looked over at the dinner table laden with food. Three place settings waited. Now he understood the aura of punctured hopefulness.
“Want me to find him?”
Sofia shook her head, then dipped her face to kiss Loco. He snarfled and went back to sleep. The tip of his tongue stuck out, a pink tab against his wiry beard. She set him down and he staggered over, asleep on his feet, and collapsed by the ridiculous shrine that had been erected in his honor.
“But…” Sofia looked across at the dinner table.
Evan thought: Please don’t ask.
“There’s a extra seat,” she said. “You could use it.”
He felt the familiar tightness in his chest, a cramping of walls closing in, the age-old challenge of holding himself intact in a place he didn’t belong, a place that he’d always thought hadn’t wanted him any more than the man in that double-wide in Blessing, Texas, had.
What if there’s no one to fix anything? he’d heard Jack ask. Except you.
Sofia stood with her feet pushed heel to toe at ninety degrees, dancer’s fifth position. Despite her perfect posture, she was nervy with anticipation, humming beneath the skin.
Evan forced the decision, gave the slightest nod.
Sofia’s eyes found a kind of light he hadn’t seen in them before. It had taken so little to give her so much. People could be shocking in their simplicity.
She raised her tiny fist, aimed the knuckles at him. “Uncle?”
He thought of the man who was his father staring at himself in the mirror, flicking his hair this way and that, trying to hide his thinning spots.
He thought of the man who was his father saying, This is where you tell me who your mom is.
He thought of the man who was his father.
And then he didn’t.
He stared at Sofia’s proffered fist a moment longer.
And then bumped it.
65
Together
Joey had the windows open in her apartment, but still it smelled like a convenience store—candy and soda, the afterglow of microwaved burritos. Dog lay sprawled across his luxury bed, his head flopped onto the floor at a strained uptilted angle as if he were a heron swallowing perch. Except for the regular thwaps of his tail against the wall every time Evan made eye contact, he looked dead.
Evan stood inside Joey’s circular desk beside her gamer’s chair. Scattered across the surfaces were speedcubes solved and half solved, wireless keyboards, Big Gulps at various life stages. Spread across the stacked monitors were the contents of Dr. Hill’s hard drive.
The hard drive itself hadn’t been named. In place of a disk name were emojis of the three monkeys of lore—see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Symbols for willful blindness, deafness, and muteness seemed appropriate in the face of the power that the code could unleash.
Deepfakes perfect enough to bend reality.
He and Joey had been at it for at least an hour. Weighing what to do, flip-flopping positions, devil’s-advocating themselves into a Prince of Denmark standoff.
“Who the hell are we to make the choice to hold it back?” Joey asked again.
“As good as anyone else,” Evan said.
“They’ll just re-create the tech,” Joey said. “Someone else’s gonna get it perfect. Youtopia is only a few months behind and from what I’ve seen there are at least three dozen other entities pushing toward indistinguishable skinlifts.”
At Evan’s behest, she’d opened the project, broken it down into its separate components, and readied its release onto open-source repositories across the dark web.
With one click of the mouse, he could send it out into the world.
Or drag and delete the files forever.
He thought about heads of state making declarations of war. Spouses screaming incriminating information. Children stripped down for whatever use anyone wanted to make of them. A perfect deepfake was a genie unbound. It made anything possible.
In the past he’d collided with a Silicon Valley visionary who’d designed a digital conscience able to make decisions to kill in order to remove the moral burden from soldiers—as if the moral burden wasn’t the last damn thing tethering humanity to the cost of killing. Now he’d stared face-to-face men like Allman and Friedhoff who dared to nudge AI into full sentience. Creating conscience and sentience made them—truly—Godlike. But Evan saw nothing in them approximating the wisdom of Gods in any creation myth he’d read from any culture that had survived long and well enough for their origin story to reach him.
Highlighting the software, he dragged it over the virtual trash can.
Hesitated.
“At a minimum, this’ll delay it getting out,” he said.
“What’s the point?” Joey said. “Doesn’t it have to get here and fuck everybody up for anyone to learn what to do about it?”
“Maybe a few years of peace.”
“Months,” Joey said.
“Even so. Maybe, I don’t know…” He laughed.
“What?”
“Maybe humanity’ll get wiser in the interim.”
Joey cocked her head, looked up at him over the bulge of her shoulder, amused. To the side of the mouse pad, her phone chimed, and without breaking her focus on him she reached over and shut it off. “I know, right?” she said. “This shit is weighty, X. Along with the rest of everything else that’s coming.”
“Yes,” Evan said.
“But in the face of it? We can’t only be cynical. That’s just another cheap trick.”
He nodded. “We’ve been here before. Humans.”
“Not here here.”
“Right. But in just as stark a place. It’s not like Hitler had AI technology. Or Stalin. Or Mao Zedong. And they had their people brainwashed and locked up. To break free?” He shrugged. “It’s the same challenge. No matter the era. No matter the technology. It just comes down to the man.”
“Or the woman.”
“The individual.”
“So that means…”
“We give it to them. Democratize it.”
Joey nodded. “Crowdsource the countermeasures.”
“At least everyone’ll have the same fighting chance.”
He moved the files back to the desktop.
Hovered the mouse over the UPLOAD button.
“Are you sure?” Joey asked.
“Of course not.”
He thought about what Jack would do. Tommy and Candy. What Aragón’s slant on it would be—and even Luke Devine’s, though he mostly detested the man. Then he closed his eyes, exhaled deeply, and scattered their voices to the wind. There were no rules for this, no commandments.
At the precise moment he’d made up his own mind, Joey rested her hand atop his on the mouse.
Together, they clicked.
EPILOGUE
No Please
Evan had entered a rare pure phase of mindfulness meditation. Cross-legged on his floating bed, eyes veiled, a full awareness of every last—
DONCHA WISH YER GIRLFRIEND WUZ HAAAWT LIKE ME?!
That goddamned alert.
Half drunk with endorphin release, he grabbed the RoamZone from the comforter beside him and asked “Do you need my help?” before realizing it was not a call but a text.
forgot 2 tell u i left a gift 4 u in the vault
* * *
Okay, he texted back. And then: Change my ring and text alert remotely.
kewl kewl i’ll dig thru some classic Menudo 4 u
I don’t know what that is but no please.
He slid from the bed, set his bare feet on the poured concrete, and stretched deeply, feeling his back pop. Then he padded through the bathroom, passing through the secret door in the shower and into the Vault.
Vera III was floating.
Just like his bed, her tiny white pod had been hoisted magnetically. Above a small electronic base she rotated, a perfect rosette atop her multicolored glass pebbles. Her fleshy leaves splayed outward in a roller-coaster display of fun. She looked like she was having the time of her life.
He walked over to his L-shaped desk and sat before her. She spun and spun, free of gravity and earthly concerns.
Her floating bed delighted him. The perfect gift.
He was rising to go when he saw a new alert for his account: the.nwhr.man@gmail.com.
The email was from Melinda Truong. The subject line read: FINALLY SOURCED KARISSA LOPATINA’S ORDNANCE SUPPLIER.
Crouched a few inches above his chair, he felt it come on at the base of his spine, premonition tightening into dread.
And somehow he knew.
He sat.
Melinda’s words returned to him from back when they were first building a profile on the Wolf. French Gendarmerie revolvers and Dragunov SVDs. Whoever’s putting the steel in her hands might as well be pulling the trigger themselves.
Instinctively Evan’s hand had moved beneath the sheet-metal desk to the saw-toothed piece of metal he kept resting atop the computer tower by his right knee. His fist clenched around the memento as he stared at the unopened email projected on the wall before him.
The information was coming to him whether he wanted it or not and more senses than he had were telling him that this was not information he wanted. He saw everything with a sudden horrid clarity, the identical weaponry, how the man had literally fallen out of his chair when Evan broached the topic with him. It felt inevitable, yes, but also as shocking as anything he’d encountered in his three decades and counting.
The metal piece was biting into Evan’s palm. He pictured its missing half, lit by the fire pit: NO GREATER FRIEND.
Loosening his fist, he stared down at the half-moon of the roughly cleaved challenge coin: NO WORSE ENEMY.
Broken and shared many years ago. Call and answer, two parts of the same whole, equal sides of a balanced equation.
He set down his half of the coin on the mouse pad. Stared at the unopened email with its unwavering subject line promising the name of Karissa Lopatina’s ordnance supplier.
“I can’t.” Jayla’s hands flew to her mouth. She’d spoken the words in her own voice. Her eyes were brimming and her face was contorted and then she shook out her hands as if flinging water from them. “I can’t … I can’t believe it.”
She sounded just as she had on the TikTok video Joey had found, her voice husky, textured, singular.
“This is what your father was working on at the throat-cancer ward at Carnegie Mellon,” Joey said. “For your mom.”
Jayla’s face trembled.
“Most tracheoesophageal prostheses have crappy sound,” Joey said. “That’s why he was combining technologies and rendering voices with AI. I took yours from the videos you posted and it extrapolated from there.”
“How … how is this possible?” Jayla’s hands were in front of her mouth, as if to catch the words as they came out.
“It reads vibrations of your throat like an electrolarynx and anticipates from the movement of your facial musculature how you’re shaping words with your lips.” Joey tapped the choker gently. “It’s your own voice. No one should ever take that away from you.”
Jayla hugged her. When she pulled away, she started to sign from habit, caught herself, and spoke: “Best Thanksgiving present ever.” Her words were tentative, her voice still on training wheels. “Thank you … friend.”
Joey’s lower lip wobbled, so slightly that no one in the world could have caught it. Except Evan. She hardened her face, held herself together. Took an extra beat before speaking.
“The future’s gonna be amazing,” Joey said. “Don’t let anyone scare you into thinking otherwise.”
Evan noticed that he had receded a few steps, as he often did when emotion got palpable.
His shoulder brushed the alarm pad, jostling it from its uncertain perch on the wall mount. When he caught it, the plastic casing came apart. He held the pieces in his hands. It had cracked open to reveal something within.
A hard drive.
No doubt containing Dr. Hill’s perfect deepfake code, the IP he’d stolen back from Allman. It had been right there all along, the perfect hiding place.
The sight of it stole Joey’s attention immediately. She stared at it, her face serious, and then held out her hand. Evan looked at Jayla. Jayla took the hard drive out of Evan’s hands. And set it in Joey’s.
“I’m ready now,” Jayla said, her cadence finding a more natural rhythm. “To be here.” She looked surprised every time she heard herself talk, and she paused to grin, the effect charming. “Because of you.”
Evan didn’t like this part, when gratitude was aimed at him, making his face sit heavy on his skull like a mask. He struggled to receive it.
“How can I possibly thank you?” she said.
This was the part he didn’t mind, when he asked them to pass the baton and in doing so to complete their transition from being pursued to searching out another human in desperate need.
“Find someone else facing the level of trouble you were in, someone being terrorized by another person, and give my phone number to them—1-855-2-NOWHERE.”
Jayla’s long lashes flared wide. “And then what?”
“And then I’ll help them. Like I helped you.”
“That’s it? That’s all you want?”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t seem like much.” Her voice, it still sounded like a miracle. “I mean, to repay you. For everything.”
“You can see what I don’t. Different kinds of people, vulnerability, suffering. That’s what I need.”
“That’s an awful thing to need.” She said it with no judgment. Just empathy. “But I will. I’ll do it.”
He nodded.
It was. It was an awful thing to need. An awful thing he required to be what he was.
Joey tapped the hard drive against her knuckles, supremely distracted by what she held in her hands. When Jayla glanced down to text her aunt on the phone, Evan slipped away with Joey.
They crossed the street, started down the opposite sidewalk.
He said, “What you did for her back there—”
“I’m gonna get on this right away,” Joey said, waving the hard drive.
She looked worn out. Her eyes were lowered, her manner curt. It had taken a lot for her to decipher and navigate a situation like the one with Jayla. In some ways it was easier for her to give Jayla her voice than to find her own, and he felt a sudden fierce vicarious loneliness for what Joey could manage for others versus for herself. And a pride for her trying.
He started to say something, but she cut him off again: “I’ll let you know once I’m in.”
She walked away.
He stood a moment watching her go, the sun warm against his face. Way up the street a FWIP rattled along, skillfully circumventing a battered gray tent stuffed in a doorway, a homeless man’s abode.
Movement drew his attention back to the town house. Jayla on the porch, greeting her aunt. The woman had arrived with plastic grocery bags lining her arms, elbows bent to sustain the weight. Jayla made a move to help but the woman shook her off, wobbling past her niece into the house.
Jayla hesitated on the doorstep, fingertips touching the choker in seeming disbelief. She hadn’t shared her voice with her aunt, not yet. Right now it was hers and hers alone.
Her eyes lifted and she caught sight of Evan across the street. Traffic had picked up between them, but they could still see each other clearly through the flow of cars.
Jayla flattened her fingers, touched them to her mouth, and then tipped her hand toward Evan.
He signed back: You’re welcome.
Jayla spun gracefully on her toe, a dancer’s turn that reminded him of Sofia, and eased back into the town house. The door closed behind her.
Lost in thought, Evan walked the seven blocks back to his truck. There it was in the shadows of an alley, parked next to a dumpster.
An ugly little dog with stiff hair and crazy eyes stood with his grimy little paws submerged in a puddle. He sniffed twice at the ground, rat nose quivering, then looked directly at Evan.
Holding the stare with his bulging eyes, Loco lifted a hind leg and urinated on Evan’s tire.
64
A Place He Didn’t Belong
Brianna’s apartment smelled of turkey and mashed potatoes and gravy and green beans and rolls and pumpkin pie. The cornucopia of scents hit Evan halfway down the hall as he marched with Loco tucked beneath his arm.
The dog alternated between licking himself and trying to bite Evan’s face.
He reached the door and knocked twice gently.
Loco’s lips wrinkled back from his snaggled teeth and he nipped at Evan’s chin.
Bri opened the door. Her penciled eyebrows rose up toward her hairline and stayed there. “Really?” she said. “Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness.” Then: “Sofia!”
Scampering footsteps, and then Sofia careened around the corner from her bedroom and Loco caught her scent and clawed viciously to escape Evan’s clutch, scraping his stomach. He dropped the dog, who fell and landed with feline grace, the first blip of elegance Evan had seen from the creature. Then Loco rocketed to Sofia, scaled her leg, scrambled into her arms, and froze beneath her chin as if he had suddenly fainted and been delivered into nirvana.
There was crying and hugging and kissing and licking and all order of cloying emotions. Evan lifted his shirt to examine the puffy red claw marks that had been raked across his abdomen. Watching her daughter roll around on the floor with the dog, Brianna held a tissue to the edges of her eyes and shook her head with grateful bemusement.
“That stupid mutt,” she said to Evan. And then again: “That stupid mutt.”
Finally the celebration wound down and Sofia got up, Loco nestled into her arms, snoring audibly.
“I can’t believe it,” she said. “You found him.”
“He found me.”
“Cause for celebration,” Bri said.
Sofia chewed her lip and looked down at her bare feet, her mood shifting.
Evan said, “What?”
“Dad’s missing again.”
He looked over at the dinner table laden with food. Three place settings waited. Now he understood the aura of punctured hopefulness.
“Want me to find him?”
Sofia shook her head, then dipped her face to kiss Loco. He snarfled and went back to sleep. The tip of his tongue stuck out, a pink tab against his wiry beard. She set him down and he staggered over, asleep on his feet, and collapsed by the ridiculous shrine that had been erected in his honor.
“But…” Sofia looked across at the dinner table.
Evan thought: Please don’t ask.
“There’s a extra seat,” she said. “You could use it.”
He felt the familiar tightness in his chest, a cramping of walls closing in, the age-old challenge of holding himself intact in a place he didn’t belong, a place that he’d always thought hadn’t wanted him any more than the man in that double-wide in Blessing, Texas, had.
What if there’s no one to fix anything? he’d heard Jack ask. Except you.
Sofia stood with her feet pushed heel to toe at ninety degrees, dancer’s fifth position. Despite her perfect posture, she was nervy with anticipation, humming beneath the skin.
Evan forced the decision, gave the slightest nod.
Sofia’s eyes found a kind of light he hadn’t seen in them before. It had taken so little to give her so much. People could be shocking in their simplicity.
She raised her tiny fist, aimed the knuckles at him. “Uncle?”
He thought of the man who was his father staring at himself in the mirror, flicking his hair this way and that, trying to hide his thinning spots.
He thought of the man who was his father saying, This is where you tell me who your mom is.
He thought of the man who was his father.
And then he didn’t.
He stared at Sofia’s proffered fist a moment longer.
And then bumped it.
65
Together
Joey had the windows open in her apartment, but still it smelled like a convenience store—candy and soda, the afterglow of microwaved burritos. Dog lay sprawled across his luxury bed, his head flopped onto the floor at a strained uptilted angle as if he were a heron swallowing perch. Except for the regular thwaps of his tail against the wall every time Evan made eye contact, he looked dead.
Evan stood inside Joey’s circular desk beside her gamer’s chair. Scattered across the surfaces were speedcubes solved and half solved, wireless keyboards, Big Gulps at various life stages. Spread across the stacked monitors were the contents of Dr. Hill’s hard drive.
The hard drive itself hadn’t been named. In place of a disk name were emojis of the three monkeys of lore—see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. Symbols for willful blindness, deafness, and muteness seemed appropriate in the face of the power that the code could unleash.
Deepfakes perfect enough to bend reality.
He and Joey had been at it for at least an hour. Weighing what to do, flip-flopping positions, devil’s-advocating themselves into a Prince of Denmark standoff.
“Who the hell are we to make the choice to hold it back?” Joey asked again.
“As good as anyone else,” Evan said.
“They’ll just re-create the tech,” Joey said. “Someone else’s gonna get it perfect. Youtopia is only a few months behind and from what I’ve seen there are at least three dozen other entities pushing toward indistinguishable skinlifts.”
At Evan’s behest, she’d opened the project, broken it down into its separate components, and readied its release onto open-source repositories across the dark web.
With one click of the mouse, he could send it out into the world.
Or drag and delete the files forever.
He thought about heads of state making declarations of war. Spouses screaming incriminating information. Children stripped down for whatever use anyone wanted to make of them. A perfect deepfake was a genie unbound. It made anything possible.
In the past he’d collided with a Silicon Valley visionary who’d designed a digital conscience able to make decisions to kill in order to remove the moral burden from soldiers—as if the moral burden wasn’t the last damn thing tethering humanity to the cost of killing. Now he’d stared face-to-face men like Allman and Friedhoff who dared to nudge AI into full sentience. Creating conscience and sentience made them—truly—Godlike. But Evan saw nothing in them approximating the wisdom of Gods in any creation myth he’d read from any culture that had survived long and well enough for their origin story to reach him.
Highlighting the software, he dragged it over the virtual trash can.
Hesitated.
“At a minimum, this’ll delay it getting out,” he said.
“What’s the point?” Joey said. “Doesn’t it have to get here and fuck everybody up for anyone to learn what to do about it?”
“Maybe a few years of peace.”
“Months,” Joey said.
“Even so. Maybe, I don’t know…” He laughed.
“What?”
“Maybe humanity’ll get wiser in the interim.”
Joey cocked her head, looked up at him over the bulge of her shoulder, amused. To the side of the mouse pad, her phone chimed, and without breaking her focus on him she reached over and shut it off. “I know, right?” she said. “This shit is weighty, X. Along with the rest of everything else that’s coming.”
“Yes,” Evan said.
“But in the face of it? We can’t only be cynical. That’s just another cheap trick.”
He nodded. “We’ve been here before. Humans.”
“Not here here.”
“Right. But in just as stark a place. It’s not like Hitler had AI technology. Or Stalin. Or Mao Zedong. And they had their people brainwashed and locked up. To break free?” He shrugged. “It’s the same challenge. No matter the era. No matter the technology. It just comes down to the man.”
“Or the woman.”
“The individual.”
“So that means…”
“We give it to them. Democratize it.”
Joey nodded. “Crowdsource the countermeasures.”
“At least everyone’ll have the same fighting chance.”
He moved the files back to the desktop.
Hovered the mouse over the UPLOAD button.
“Are you sure?” Joey asked.
“Of course not.”
He thought about what Jack would do. Tommy and Candy. What Aragón’s slant on it would be—and even Luke Devine’s, though he mostly detested the man. Then he closed his eyes, exhaled deeply, and scattered their voices to the wind. There were no rules for this, no commandments.
At the precise moment he’d made up his own mind, Joey rested her hand atop his on the mouse.
Together, they clicked.
EPILOGUE
No Please
Evan had entered a rare pure phase of mindfulness meditation. Cross-legged on his floating bed, eyes veiled, a full awareness of every last—
DONCHA WISH YER GIRLFRIEND WUZ HAAAWT LIKE ME?!
That goddamned alert.
Half drunk with endorphin release, he grabbed the RoamZone from the comforter beside him and asked “Do you need my help?” before realizing it was not a call but a text.
forgot 2 tell u i left a gift 4 u in the vault
* * *
Okay, he texted back. And then: Change my ring and text alert remotely.
kewl kewl i’ll dig thru some classic Menudo 4 u
I don’t know what that is but no please.
He slid from the bed, set his bare feet on the poured concrete, and stretched deeply, feeling his back pop. Then he padded through the bathroom, passing through the secret door in the shower and into the Vault.
Vera III was floating.
Just like his bed, her tiny white pod had been hoisted magnetically. Above a small electronic base she rotated, a perfect rosette atop her multicolored glass pebbles. Her fleshy leaves splayed outward in a roller-coaster display of fun. She looked like she was having the time of her life.
He walked over to his L-shaped desk and sat before her. She spun and spun, free of gravity and earthly concerns.
Her floating bed delighted him. The perfect gift.
He was rising to go when he saw a new alert for his account: the.nwhr.man@gmail.com.
The email was from Melinda Truong. The subject line read: FINALLY SOURCED KARISSA LOPATINA’S ORDNANCE SUPPLIER.
Crouched a few inches above his chair, he felt it come on at the base of his spine, premonition tightening into dread.
And somehow he knew.
He sat.
Melinda’s words returned to him from back when they were first building a profile on the Wolf. French Gendarmerie revolvers and Dragunov SVDs. Whoever’s putting the steel in her hands might as well be pulling the trigger themselves.
Instinctively Evan’s hand had moved beneath the sheet-metal desk to the saw-toothed piece of metal he kept resting atop the computer tower by his right knee. His fist clenched around the memento as he stared at the unopened email projected on the wall before him.
The information was coming to him whether he wanted it or not and more senses than he had were telling him that this was not information he wanted. He saw everything with a sudden horrid clarity, the identical weaponry, how the man had literally fallen out of his chair when Evan broached the topic with him. It felt inevitable, yes, but also as shocking as anything he’d encountered in his three decades and counting.
The metal piece was biting into Evan’s palm. He pictured its missing half, lit by the fire pit: NO GREATER FRIEND.
Loosening his fist, he stared down at the half-moon of the roughly cleaved challenge coin: NO WORSE ENEMY.
Broken and shared many years ago. Call and answer, two parts of the same whole, equal sides of a balanced equation.
He set down his half of the coin on the mouse pad. Stared at the unopened email with its unwavering subject line promising the name of Karissa Lopatina’s ordnance supplier.
