“It’s making decisions?The programis choosing people and sending out hits?” Nicole looks totally terrified as I nod.
“Are you tellin’ me the robots are deciding who lives and who dies?” Mac asks, dead serious despite essentially summarizing the plot of several excellent sci-fi movies.
“With some human input initially, but yes. Essentially,” Wesley says. “Someone programmed the criteria to use; the program is filtering their massive amounts of personal data to find targets and sending them out to an approved list of hitmen. The AI handles payment when the job is complete.”
Mac shivers. “Well, that’s fuckin’ terrifying.”
“All the things that didn’t make sense about how the General acted and made decisions, all those behaviors we couldn’t account for… it’s because they weren’thumanbehaviors. The motive was just to reduce crime—it wasn’t a man trying to benefit from the death, or someone who had a personal vendetta. There was never any urgency or disorder to it. It was a computer. It didn’t havedesires;it had a pattern.”
“Until me.”
He looks at me. “They must have programmed it to protect its own secrets. When you stole the data, you triggered a fail-safe protocol.”
“Yeah,” I agree.
“How long has the AI had full control, do you think?”
“I don’t know. They’ve probably been testing it for years. You might have always been working for the AI.” I exhale long and slow, looking around the room at the serious, concerned faces. “SmarTech is launching this tech soon. Next week, I think? The launch party is on Saturday. They probably already have buyers.”
“We can’t let it get out. We have to stop it before it goes live.”
“Did these assholes learnnothingfrom movies? You never give the machines the power to kill,” Mac growls. “What do we do?”
I turn and am shocked to be at the center of attention. “We…” I falter under the weight of everyone’s anticipative stares. Are they all expectingmeto know? “Uh… I’m just the devastatingly beautiful, brilliant mind who put it all together. I’m not the ideas guy. Wanna take this one, SpyderMan?”
He frowns and sits back, steepling his hands, deep in thought. “We need… to find where it’s being kept. Before they start releasing the project to any buyers, they’ll be holding it in a private server. If I were them, I wouldn’t use the cloud for backups—too unsecure—but we can’t rule it out. If we can get in and get onto a network computer that would have access to the confidential software files, I’ll be able to determine if there’s a cloud backup.”
“And once we’re in, we can delete the source code, overwrite the backups, corrupt critical dependencies,” I suggest.
He nods, excitement growing. “And even if we can’t get access, it would have a kill switch. They’d never release it without some kind of failsafe.”
“You’re right,” I realize. “This program could potentially be a danger to them as well, so they’d never release it without some ability to control it internally…”
“Are you getting a word of this?” Nicole stage-whispers to Dimitri.
Dimitri’s answer is a grunt.
But I’m staring at Wesley. Watching him think out loud—having a front seat to his incredible mind doing its thing… well, if I weren’t so caught up in the moment and my excitement at figuring it out, I’d probably drop to my knees and unzip his pants right here and now.
Fuck me, he’s hot. I press my thighs together, squeezing to give that dull thrumming in my blood the pressure it’s craving.
“Fred would know,” I assert confidently, finishing his thought. “Even if it runs itself, it’s still his project. He should know all the details, or at least have access.”
“Then we need to have a little chat with Fred Harvey.”
“Right, about that…” Mac cuts in. “We’ve been following him for a few days now. Short of nabbing him from the parking lot—”
“Which is a terrible idea,” Dimitri interjects, making me think they’ve already had this exact conversation.
“—the guy is never alone. Always protected, always with his phone in his hand. It’s like he knows we’re after him.”
“He might,” Wesley observes. “He knows Madison’s alive—he might assume she would come after him.”
“Or he’s paranoid as a side effect of being a terrible person,” I add, grumbling.
“You said there’s some kind of launch party?” Mac asks, excited like he’s got an idea.
I grin. “Yup.”
