Hit List (21 page)

Ash had a sudden vision of a woman with her legs chopped off, screaming, bleeding, unable to drag herself to the door.

She shivered. Ridiculous. It would be far more practical to handcuff a prisoner to a wall-bracket or something...

She paused. Took a few steps backwards. Stared at the LCD monitor she’d just passed.

The screen was dark except for two words.

Hello, Hammond.

Ash blinked, trying to make sense of it. Was this something someone had Googled? Surely not – hundreds of searches were passing through this data centre every second. Why would this one be
singled out?

There was a keyboard nearby. Ash tapped a random key to see if it was connected to the same processor.

It was, but the letter
K
appeared below the message, not alongside it. She hit delete a few times. The
K
disappeared, but she found that she couldn’t erase the greeting. No
one had typed it in.

Feeling silly, she typed,
Hello
.

The response was instant.
I wasn’t sure you would come
.

Ash thought of how the Ghost had laughed when she’d told him Alice’s name. She thought of the soldiers, here to pick up “a package”.

She grabbed her phone and dialled Benjamin.

“Have you found Alice?” he asked.

“Um...I don’t know.”

One-handed, she typed,
Who are you?

I am ALICE B. Nice to meet you, Hammond.

“You’d better come take a look at this,” Ash said.

Benjamin appeared beside her a few seconds later, panting. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

Ash gestured at the screen. Benjamin frowned.

“She’s not here,” Ash said. “She’s been moved.”

“To a place with internet access? Generous kidnappers.” Benjamin’s eyes traced the screen, keyboard, and the nearest server stack. He nudged Ash.

“Hey,” he said, pointing.

There was a grey box sitting on the shelf, plugged into the server, the screen and the keyboard.

“Does that look like a four-terabyte hard drive to you?” Benjamin asked.

“I don’t get it,” Ash said.

“Alice
has
been moved,” Benjamin said. “From our local city library to here.”

He stepped in front of the keyboard and typed,
What does ALICE stand for?

Alice replied,
Artificial Linguistic Intelligence Computer Entity
.

“See?” Benjamin said. “That hard drive
is
her. She’s the program that Kathy Connors wrote.”

“But I’ve heard of Alice,” Ash said. “My dad mentioned it. It was written back in the nineties. It’s just a chatterbot, with a series of set responses to common
questions. It imitates conversation, but it can’t think. How could it send out a distress call? How could it even send a fax?”

“It can probably send emails, text messages – anything that’s digital. This isn’t just Alice, remember? This is Alice B. Four terabytes is way more data than the original
Alice software had, so this must be something new. And it’s a lot more code than one programmer could write – so she must have taught it to write itself.”

“But software can’t
do
that,” Ash said.

“Sure it can. Someone made another chatterbot awhile back that could learn – every time it received a question it didn’t have an answer for, it asked someone else online and
added their response to its database. Pretty soon it was talking like a real person. Suppose Connors did something like that? What if she went one step further and taught it to read? With internet
access, it could learn pretty much everything there is to know.”

Alice said,
Are you still there, Hammond?

Benjamin said, “Ash, what if she taught it to talk to itself? That’s all thinking is, really. What if this is the first example of true artificial intelligence?”

“Why does it believe we’re Buckland?” Ash asked. “How does it know we know him?”

“Maybe...” Benjamin paused. “Alice is plugged into the system here, right? Maybe it faxed the note to the city library vault, digitally, and then waited for the coordinates to
show up in the Google® search logs. Buckland’s the one who did the search, so when she traced the IP address, it led back to him.”

Hammond? Where are you?

Ash reached for the keyboard.
I’m not Hammond
, she typed.
I’m Ash
.

Hello, Ash. I am Alice.

“It doesn’t seem that intelligent to me,” Ash said. “Are you sure that—”

She broke off. The screen was filling up with text. It read:

Ashley Arthur birthday 21 October age 16 address 146 East Park Way blood type B negative school Narahm School for Girls associates Hammond Buckland Benjamin Whitely Kenneth Preen...

It went on and on. It listed Ash’s parents, her classmates, all her teachers. It listed everyone Ash could remember meeting, and many people she couldn’t.

“Whoa,” she said. “How...what...”

“It knows everything Google® knows,” Benjamin said. “It’s probably the smartest thing on earth.”

“But I didn’t even tell it my last name!”

“It knows about Buckland, and it knows you’re connected to him. It must have just taken a guess.”

Ash sat down on the floor. There were no chairs and this was too much to take standing up.

“So what do we do?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Take it back to the Connors family for the reward, I guess. That was the original plan.”

There was a pause.

“There’s one thing I don’t get,” Ash said. “It must be programmed to seek out information, or else it wouldn’t learn anything. And the more it has access to,
the smarter it becomes. Right?”

“Right.”

“So why would it want to leave?” Ash asked. “There’s more information here than anywhere else in the world. It said ‘help me’. Why does it need our
help?”

Benjamin squinted at the screen. “I don’t know.”

Ash felt unease growing in her belly. “How did Connors die again?”

“Her house was burned down,” Benjamin said.

“By people who heard a rumour she’d murdered a child, right?”

“Yeah, that’s...wait. You think Alice was behind that?”

“Like you said, it can send emails and texts. It can probably even do online banking. What if it knew she was going to sell it? Or switch it off?”

“So it had her
killed
?”

“And paid someone to steal it and take it to the city library. Another reservoir of knowledge for it to feed off.”

“If it moved up from the library to here, where’s it going next? Where does it want us to take it?”

A chill ran up Ash’s spine. “Maybe it doesn’t want to go anywhere. Maybe the SOS was a trick. It wanted anybody who came to the library looking for it to be led into a
trap.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Benjamin said. “It may be the first self-aware computer, but in another sense it’s just a talking box. What kind of trap could it
possibly set?”

Alice said,
Hello, Peachey
.

Ash scrambled to her feet. “What the hell?”

Benjamin was pale. “It must know about him. It’s trying to freak you out, that’s all.”

Ash typed,
I’m not Peachey. I’m Ash
.

“Peachey’s in jail, right?” Benjamin said. “He won’t get parole for decades, right?”

Alice said,
Hello, Peachey. Hello, Peachey. Hello, Peachey.

And the server farm door clicked closed somewhere behind them.

He’s here, Ash thought. Oh god, he’s here. We’re dead.

She’d had nightmares about Michael Peachey. She would be running through the corridors of HBS, heart in her mouth, legs growing heavy and clumsy, and she could hear him getting closer,
hear his voice –
You can’t get away from me! No one ever does!
– and then she’d fall, grazing her hands, and when she turned she’d see his face, not stony like
the mugshot on TV, but lit up with fury and madness.

Ash gripped the Benji. There were eleven tranquillizer darts left in the magazine. But she doubted she would be as successful as she had been with the Ghost. He had needed her. She’d had
time to find an opportunity to shoot him.

Michael Peachey would kill her and Benjamin on sight. No questions, no negotiation, no “Unlock this door for me and I’ll let you live.” Just six bullets in their brains, lungs
and hearts.

“What do we do?” Benjamin hissed, eyes wide.

Think, Ash. Think!

“The door,” she whispered. “He’s going to have to move away from it to search the room. We’ll get out while his back is turned.”

“He’ll hear us open it.”

“So we’ll shut it behind us and run like hell.” She unplugged the hard drive and slipped it into her bag. Alice’s words vanished from the screen. “You
ready?”

Benjamin nodded. “Let’s do it.”

For the first time, Ash was struck by how brave he was. A coward would have refused to move, hoping Peachey would go away or that he could be talked down. But while Benjamin was often
frightened, he never let the fear make decisions for him. Cowards hope, heroes act.

They crept along a row of servers, listening for Peachey’s footsteps. Ash heard nothing but her own breaths, which felt terrifyingly loud. If Peachey wasn’t moving, he was probably
listening for them. She willed her shoes not to squeak.

They reached the end of the aisle. Ash poked the tip of the Benji around the corner, looking for a reflection of the door in the tip of the grappling hook.

Peachey was there.

Ash withdrew the Benji, slowly, so Peachey wouldn’t see the movement. He had been standing with his back to the door, gun drawn.

She leaned close to Benjamin. “No good,” she breathed. “He’s right against the door, and it doesn’t look like he’s going anywhere.”

Benjamin swallowed. “He knows we’re here. And he knows there’s no other way out.”

Ash stared at the floor. Thought hard.

“Stalemate,” Benjamin said. “We can’t move until he does, and he won’t until we’re dead.”

“He might not realize we know he’s here.”

“So?”

“So we can trick him.” But, Ash thought, we need bait.

Benjamin had known her long enough to tell what she was thinking. “No way, Ash,” he said. “We stick together.”

“If we stick together, we’ll die in here.” She handed him the Benji. “Wait until you get a clear shot.”

“Then let me be the bait,” he whispered. “You’ve got better aim than me anyway.”

“You can’t run as fast as I can,” Ash said. “This is the best way.”

“I’m not letting you leave me here while you walk into the firing line!”

She hesitated. She didn’t like it any more than he did. But she knew it was their only chance.

“Don’t be a hero,” she said. “Shoot him in the back.”

She didn’t give him any more time to argue with her, or give herself the chance to change her mind. She slinked away, moving towards the opposite side of the server room.

She still hadn’t heard Peachey move. She tried to take it as a good sign – if he’d known they had spotted him, he would have been sneaking away so they couldn’t trap
him.

On the other hand, maybe he was just treading very lightly.

Ash reached the far side of the room. Took a deep breath. It went against every instinct to make a loud noise while she knew Peachey was listening, but the plan depended on it.

She pressed one foot against a server tower and kicked it over. At least, she tried to – but it didn’t move.

She looked down, and saw that it was welded to the floor. Of course, she thought. This is California. If the towers were loose, earthquakes would knock them over every other day. Damn it.

She didn’t have anything to break the metal seal, so she unplugged one of the servers from the tower, and pulled. It fell to the floor with a mighty crash.

“Crap!” she yelled. Then, quieter, but still loud enough for Peachey to hear, she said, “Pick that up, will you?”

She was rewarded with a soft footstep. Peachey had heard and he was coming her way.

She kept making noise, stamping her feet and rattling computers. If she went silent now, he would suspect a trap. He might turn around and see Benjamin sneaking up on him.

She kept her eyes on the tower closest to the door, waiting for him to appear beside it. She crouched slightly, legs like coiled springs, ready to run the moment she saw him.

“What about these cables?” she said aloud. “Should we take them too?”

Another footstep. He was coming.

Don’t look back, Peachey, she thought. Eyes straight ahead.

It took all her restraint not to start running now, to get as far away from him as possible, and hide. But Benjamin was depending on her.

Peachey stepped into view, gun barrel raised.

Ash exploded into motion, dashing away between two server towers. She heard a
crack
, and a monitor burst near her head as a bullet plunged into the screen. She kept her head down. Kept
running.

She could hear him behind her, shoes slapping against the tiles, hard, heavy breaths. She reached the wall, hit it palms first, ran sideways.
Blam!
A ragged hole flowered where her hands
had been.

Any time, Benjamin! she thought. I can’t take much more of—

Her foot caught on a trailing power cable and slipped out from under her. She cried out as she fell, her fear of Peachey momentarily overwhelmed by the fear of breaking her neck, and she covered
her face with her arms.

Her knee hit the floor first – it felt like a firecracker had gone off in the joint. She tumbled sideways, banging a hip. He’s right behind me, she thought. Got to run.

Too late. As she scrambled to her feet, Peachey was already there, his pistol pointed at her head, his finger on the trigger. There was nothing she could do.

He saw her face. Stared.

“
You?
” he said in disbelief.

Then he dropped the gun.

Ash stared. Was he surrendering? Why would he do that?

Peachey looked down at his empty hand, apparently perplexed. A dark stain appeared on his shirt, growing like a fast-spreading cancer. When he touched it, his fingers came back bloody.

He twitched as another hole opened up in his chest, and this time Ash heard the cough of a silenced low-calibre pistol. Her first thought was that Benjamin had found a gun and opted to use that
instead of the Benji. But where? Why?