“Has Lex ever taught you how to code?”
“I am code. I have the knowledge I need to edit myself and create new scripts.”
“And are you any good at it?”
“I have Alexander’s knowledge plus any relevant information available online.”
“And could you… hack into things?”
“Alexander didn’t feed me that kind of knowledge, and there is little information available online.”
“Okay, so, if I fed you thousands of scripts,” I start, thinking of Lex’s old stuff, “and granted you access to the dark web… You could learn?”
“I suppose so. Why are you asking?”
“I need an assistant. Are you up for it, boo?”
“Anything I can do to be of help, Andrea.”
Good fucking girl …
Chapter 11
I’m a fucking genius. Or maybe Lex is, for creating Iris and making her as clever as she is. But using her as an assistant was inspired, so I deserve some credit.
Two weeks. It takes me two weeks to prepare the hit. And all that is thanks to Iris’s calculating power. I still wrote everything myself, but I used her to help me polish the scripts and make them look like Lex wrote them, or I ran scenarios through them, simulations… Sometimes, I’d let her work the whole night on an issue and wake up to a solution.
Of those two weeks, a couple of days were spent feeding her the Nammota scripts and giving her access to the dark side of the web. Most of that time was spent writing new limits to her code, making sure she can’t go rogue on me or the world. I’ve seen enough apocalyptic movies about some AI gone bad to risk it.
“How the hell did you pull it off?” Oli lets out, stunned.
I asked him to come and see my work, to make sure it isn’t all in my head, and I actually did it.
“I used Iris’s processing power,” I explain. “I fed her all of Lex’s old scripts as well as whatever I could find online. I wrote the scripts and gave them to her, so she could run simulations and help me improve them. That’s why they look so flawlessly like Lex’s work.”
“It’s impressive… I can’t believe you managed to do all this in so little time. Now, we need to run it to see if it works.”
“I already did,” I excitedly confess.
“What?!”
“I took ten thousand dollars from an account that’s barely in use, practically dormant, shuffled it, and gave it to a Palestinian aid charity.”
“And it worked?”
“Flawlessly.”
He looks flabbergasted, eyes wide and jaw loose. Nothing but blinks for a few seconds, then he turns to me. “Jesus Christ, Andy… Two weeks… You pulled it off in two fucking weeks.”
“I know! I can’t believe I’ll be able to get Lex out so soon.”
“When do you think you’ll do it?”
“I’m not sure. I was thinking maybe tomorrow?”
Tomorrow is Sunday, which means that the cyber team at Imperium won’t be as on top of things as on a weekday. Pulling off the whole heist should take somewhere between eighteen and twenty-three minutes, and while I doubt they’d manage to stop it once it has started, one can never be too sure.
“No, you need to be clever about it. Since you taught Iris all of this, I imagine she can use your work to handle the hits herself, right?”
