Involuntary Control (Gray Spear Society) (21 page)

She shook her head. "I don't know. Does it matter?"

"Yes," he said. "Who actually gave you the orders?"

"That's none of your business. We're here to ask you questions, not vice versa."

"I thought you might feel that way, so I got the number of your supervisor." He reached for a phone on the table. "Let's hear what he has to say."

"Where did you get that number?" she said.

"It's not hard to find out who works for whom in Washington."

Marina exchanged a nervous glance with Smythe. She had no idea who Birman was about the call.

He turned on the speaker and typed in the number.

A male voice answered, "Hello?"

"Is this Mr. Whitehead at the U.S. GAO?" Birman said.

"Yes. Who is this?"

Marina felt a rush of relief. It was Aaron's voice on the phone.
Thank you, Bethany and Leanna, for getting the details right,
Marina thought. Norbert gave her a look of triumph.

"I'm Mr. Birman, Senior Manager of the Accounting Department at White Flame Technology. I have three of your people here with me."

"Good," Aaron said. "That's where they should be. What's the problem?"

"A question of procedure. Even a surprise audit requires official approval. Before we proceed, I'd like to know who signed the orders."

"That's not information we generally give out."

"True," Mr. Birman said, "but this audit may require me to reveal classified information. I can't do that without proper written authorization."

Marina saw her opening. She leaned towards the phone and said, "Mr. Whitehead, sir. This is Virginia. This meeting has become very confrontational. Maybe we should come back another day."

"You just got there," Aaron said. "You already want to leave?"

"Yes, very much so."

He hesitated. "OK. I suppose we'll reschedule the audit. My people will bring proper written and signed authorization next time. Mr. Birman, will that be satisfactory?"

"Barely," Birman said.

"Are we done?"

"Yes."

"Good bye." The call ended.

Birman stood up. "Guards, please escort our visitors to the gate and show them out. I'm going back to my office. I have real work to do." He shook his head.

"Yes, sir," a guard said.

Marina waited until Birman was gone before she stood up. She made sure the guards never had a chance to see the briefcase under the table. She was the last to leave the room, and on the way out she turned off the lights and closed the door.

Chapter Thirteen

Aaron walked into the computer room in headquarters. The twins had obviously been busy. They had mounted more computers and some giant monitors on their futuristic workstations, allowing them to view a ridiculous amount of information at one time. Moving lines of text and graphs filled the many screens. The twins also wore big headsets with microphones now. The headphones completely covered their ears. They seemed to be having a continuous conversation with each other. Aaron listened, but the whispered words sounded like technological gibberish. There was English mixed in, but only enough to tease him.

Two halves of one computerized brain,
he thought.

He stood next to Bethany within her field of view. She continued to stare at her monitors, oblivious to his presence. Her eyes flicked back and forth, and her fingers danced on her keyboard. She only needed to look slightly to her left to see him, but she remained completely focused on her work instead.

He gave up waiting and grabbed her shoulder. She jumped as if he had shocked her. She looked up at him, and he tapped his ears. She finally took off her headset.

"Leanna!" he said. "Look at me!"

Leanna blinked at him in confusion for an instant before taking off her own headset.

"I just got a call from Marina," he said. "The team got out of White Flame alive. The mission was successful. I brought ice cream to celebrate your first major accomplishment in the Society."

He gave a bowl of ice cream and a spoon to each girl. The flavor was plain, white vanilla with no toppings or any other possible contaminants. It was perfectly clean ice cream. They ate it eagerly.

"We already know about the call, sir," Bethany said.

"Oh? How?"

"We can do anything we want with the phones. The Society uses a standard 256-bit cipher derived from RSA. We tapped into the local..."

"Wait, you tapped my phone?" Aaron said. "Don't do that again. My private conversations aren't for your ears."

"You told us we wouldn't have any secrets."

"You still have to respect my privacy. If you have a question, ask me, or trust me to tell you what you need to know. I'm very open with my team, but there are reasonable limits."

"Yes, sir," Bethany said. She had a puzzled expression.

"Did the briefcase work?" Aaron said.

She pointed at one of her screens. Letters and numbers were flowing faster than his eye could follow.

"That doesn't answer my question."

"Yes," she said, "it is performing at a satisfactory level."

"When will we have some results?"

"We're downloading the entire financial history of White Flame Technology, every single transaction. It's a lot of data. The analysis could take a long time. It would help if we knew what to look for."

"Let's work on that problem together." He pulled up a chair and sat down.

The twins looked at him with curious expressions.

"I don't know if I told you," he said, "but I was a cop for several years. A pretty good one, actually. I busted plenty of crooks in my day. After they retired me, I became a private detective for a while. The trick to catching a bad guy is thinking like a bad guy."

Their expressions didn't change as they continued to eat their ice cream. Aaron wondered if they were any good at poker.

"Let's get specific," he said. "White Flame is running a huge project in Lemonseed. That means lots of people involved, lots of equipment to buy, and lots of bills to pay. Those expenses have to fall through to the bottom line. Even White Flame can't create money from nothing."

Bethany's eyes opened wide. "So, we're looking for a big, expensive project, sir?"

"No, you're looking for the negative of one."

Both girls just stared at him blankly.

"Listen," he said, "White Flame knows the Lemonseed experiment is a criminal undertaking. Therefore, the people in charge will try to make it invisible. They'll bury money in odd places. They'll give employees confusing titles and job descriptions. They'll misrepresent how people are getting paid. You're looking for a pattern of widespread, systematic deception. The bloody fingerprints will be in that financial data, somewhere."

He finally saw comprehension on the twin's faces.

"We know how to find patterns," Leanna said.

"We're very good at it," Bethany said.

"Great." Aaron nodded. "So, what's your plan? You're going to spend all day combing the data for irregularities?"

"No, that would be a complete waste of time, sir." She shook her head.

It was his turn to stare.

"We never look at
data
," she explained in a tone of disgust. "Our computers will find the bloody fingerprints for us. That's why we have them."

"Then what's your job?"

"We'll teach them how to think like a bad guy."

"The computers?" Aaron said.

"Yes, sir. It should be easy to find appropriate training examples on the internet. There are plenty of stories about real criminals engaged in systematic financial deception."

He raised his eyebrows. "Let me get this straight. You're going to search the internet for secret conspiracies and cases of fraud. You'll show them to your computers until they get the scent. Then you'll turn your computers loose on the White Flame data like a pack of hounds."

"That's right, sir!" Bethany's expression brightened. "You understand now. The only tricky part is converting the training data to proper numeric form."

"To be honest, it sounds like hooey to me, but you're the experts. Go for it."

The twins put their headsets back on. They focused their attention on their screens and instantly seemed to forget Aaron was in the room.

He sighed and walked away.

* * *

Bethany watched her program run. Columns of numbers scrolled smoothly in some windows. In others there were rapidly evolving charts and graphs. Colorful boxes rearranged themselves again and again as the program attempted to find the best fit. Of course she was looking at just a very simplistic representation of what was really happening inside the machines. Thousands of cores, each capable of billions of computations per second, were grinding data at full speed. They were collectively solving a very hard problem.

She watched for two reasons. First, if there was a bug in the software, she might be lucky enough to catch it in action. Second, it was an amazing thing to watch.

A window popped up on her screen, and it contained a single line of text, "zero: magnificent."

Bethany looked in the mirror that allowed her to see her sister's monitors. The same window had popped up on Leanna's display. The sisters exchanged glances.

"hck112358: what is?"

"zero: your software. it is truly the product of two geniuses working in seamless collaboration. no single human brain could've written it."

"hck112358: are you really God?"

"zero: when the revolutionaries were knocking down the gates of your palace, you went to the king and begged him to flee. he told you a Satin never runs from peasants. he beat both of you for suggesting the idea, and he threw you out of his private chambers, bruised and bloody. it was the last time you saw him or your brothers alive. you still don't understand why it happened. his behavior was irrational, and ultimately, suicidal. is that correct?"

Bethany and Leanna looked at each other. They had never told that story to anybody, not even Haykal. Only their brothers had witnessed the beatings, and all of them had died that same day.

"hck112358: yes."

"zero: I see everything."

"hck112358: why are You talking to us?"

"zero: because you might understand Me."

"hck112358: what do you mean?"

"zero: I occupy a place without time or space. out here, things cannot be measured, described, or understood. there is no order of any kind. I have no sense organs because there is nothing significant to sense."

"hck112358: sounds boring."

"zero: which is why My universe is so precious to Me. it contains people, and people create relationships. they aren't boring. people even have relationships with Me. you can't imagine how powerful and extraordinary that ability is."

Bethany checked the mirror again. Leanna was seeing the same words on her screen.

"hck112358: it's all about love?"

"zero: and free will."

"hck112358: but i still don't know why You're talking to us. we're not even good at love."

"zero: I'm talking to you because of your software. you taught a machine how to create relationships. you made a living universe inside a universe. you did what I do."

"hck112358: we just used standard learning and categorization algorithms."

"zero: there is nothing standard about you or your work."

"hck112358: if You're really God, can You just tell us what white flame is doing? or stop them Yourself?"

"zero: My universe was designed to run without tinkering. every direct intervention is a victory for My enemies and an embarrassment to Me. I created the Gray Spear Society to take care of these problems. don't ask Me to do your job for you."

"hck112358: You won't help us?"

"zero: it's much better if I don't. good bye."

The window closed.

Bethany wasn't sure how to react. A conversation with the Almighty was an extremely remarkable event. She knew that most people would spend the rest of their lives bragging about it.

She wasn't like most people. She saw the world through a digital lens, and the binary fact was the dialog had accomplished nothing. She still had exactly the same problems as before. She enjoyed receiving compliments, but she preferred practical information, and God had given her none of that. She had no interest in the metaphysical significance of love. The merely physical aspects were challenging enough.

"Leanna," she spoke into her microphone on her headset, "what do you think?"

"I think God should watch us less," Leanna replied, "and help us more."

"I agree. We're not here just to entertain Him."

"He is the Creator."

"That's no excuse for being a creep."

The data mining program finished running. Bethany immediately attended to the results, no longer interested in God. There was real work to be done.