Kingmaker (22 page)

“At least my father noticed me every once in a while.”

“Don’t give me that bullshit,” Alexei spat. “Your father
sold
you to me, did you know that? Did you ever figure that out with that massive fucking intellect of yours? Your parents were in so much debt that they would have been out on the streets in six months if I hadn’t come along.
Your father would have been a filthy pathetic bum digging through Dumpsters and your mother would have been a cheap broken whore.”

Florian glared at Alexei. “You have no right to talk about my parents like that. My father is the one who taught me to play chess. Without him, I’d be
nothing
.”

“Florian, your father taught you to play chess because he saw how smart you were and thought if you could win some big tournaments, he could use your winnings to pay down his debt. You know what he did with all that prize money he was supposed to be saving for you? He gambled it all away. He bought lottery tickets. He bet on horses. He blew it on illegal poker games in hotel rooms. And when he finally decided you were costing him more than you were winning, he sent you off to that tropical hellhole where I found you.”

Florian was shaking his head. “That’s bullshit and you know it.”

“Is it? When I offered your father a hundred thousand NGD for legal custody of you, he didn’t even hesitate. He didn’t even try to negotiate with me, Florian. So now you know
exactly
what you were worth to your parents. One hundred thousand NGD, and not one penny more.”

“That’s a fucking
lie
.”

“I hate to break it to you, kid, but the reality is that your father was a neglectful, irresponsible, and psychologically abusive son of a bitch, and the fact that he played a few games of chess with you when you were little doesn’t change any of that. I know you like to accuse me of ignoring you, but you’re wrong. I used to talk to your teachers and counselors at the Academy at least once a day. I used to fly out and have meetings with the staff without you knowing. They told me about how one day you were convinced that your parents abandoned you, and the next, you insisted they were the only people in the world who ever loved you. You were a kid back then, and I know leaving home wasn’t easy for you, but it’s time to stop acting like a spoiled little brat and grow up. In case you still haven’t figured this out, let me spell it out for you as plainly as I can: your parents didn’t give a shit about you, and if they’re lucky enough to even be alive today, they
still
don’t give a shit about you. That’s it. It’s that simple. You weren’t the first unloved kid in the world, and you won’t be the last. But rather than moping around and crying about it your whole life, why don’t you try being thankful that you have a gift, and that someone came along and recognized that gift, and that instead of being dead, or living on the
streets giving two-dollar blow jobs to try to feed yourself, or getting molested in your bed on some half irradiated derelict cruise ship, you’re safe, you’re healthy, and you’re about to graduate from one of the most prestigious universities in the world, after which you will have the opportunity to do anything you want with your life.”

Florian’s expression was a mask of superimposed emotions. His lips were curled in a kind of mild amusement, but there were tears on his cheeks and rage in his eyes. He had to struggle to keep his voice steady. “When are you finally going to tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“What it is you want from me.”

“I don’t want anything from you, Florian. How many times do I have to tell you that?”

Florian hit the table with his open hand and his espresso cup jumped. “
Bullshit
! Stop fucking lying to me. I think we’ve established by now that I’m not stupid. For once, I want you to tell me the truth. Tell me exactly what it is you want from me. Why did you send me to the Academy? Why did you and all my teachers want me to become an analyst? Of all the internships I got offered, why did you encourage me to take the one with Pearl Knight? Don’t forget, Alexei: I know what you do. You may not have let me live with you, but I’ve been out to your little compound, remember? I’ve talked to your other recruits or soldiers or whatever you call them. You’re not just some wealthy philanthropist who helps children out of the goodness of his heart. There’s something you want from me, and I want to know what it is.”

“What do
you
think it is?”

“I have no fucking clue. For all I know, you still work for the Kremlin and you want me to spy for you.”

Alexei took a deep breath, then spoke in a more subdued tone. “I don’t work for the Kremlin anymore, Florian, and I don’t want you to spy for me. I want you to spy for yourself.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“It means that you have an incredibly promising future ahead of you. It means that you’re going to meet people and see things that I can’t even imagine. I honestly have no idea what’s in store for you, but one thing I’m sure of is that the day will come when you’re thinking dozens of moves ahead and you suddenly realize that you have an opportunity to do something
incredible. I promise you that there’s going to be at least one pivotal moment in your life when everything is perfectly aligned and one simple decision you make will have the potential to change the entire world.”

“And you want to be the one to make that decision, right?”

“No. I want
you
to make that decision. And I want you to make the
right
decision. I want you to realize how lucky you are to have everything you have. I want you to take your incredible ability to see into people and to see all the different pieces in play, and I want you to make the decision that
you
think is right. That’s all. I promise—that’s the only thing I will ever ask of you.”

“And what if I don’t make the right decision?” Florian said. He had wiped the tears from his cheeks, and his expression was defiant and challenging. “What if I use all my power and influence and all this genius I supposedly have to just make myself rich? Or what if I decide to sell you out? I may not know much about you, but I do know you have plenty of enemies out there, and I’m sure any number of them would be willing to give me anything I want to get their hands on you.”

Alexei shrugged. “Go ahead,” he told the young man. “There’s absolutely nothing I can do to stop you.”

“But you obviously don’t think I will.”

“Florian, the time will come in your life when you will have the choice between doing something incredibly beneficial for mankind, or something selfish and probably incredibly destructive, and you alone will have to make that decision. I won’t be there to tell you what to do.” Alexei leaned forward and stared into the young man’s wide and bright eyes. “But just remember that you have absolutely no idea how far and wide my influence extends. And while I may not be right there in that room with you, I will
always
be watching.”

Alexei looked down at the cabin full of children in his backyard and waited for it to disappear.

The view was provided by the cameras mounted beneath a persistent solar-sustained quadrotor drone hovering precisely one thousand feet above his property. The video was being fed to the wall in Alexei’s office where he leaned against the edge of his desk and watched with a canister of tea in one hand and a black filterless cigarette in the other. The ash had grown long, and in the absence of motion, the smoke had found a direct diagonal path up to the ventilation system in the ceiling.

There were a lot of eyes in the skies in addition to Alexei’s. There were drones funded by every branch of the military and three-letter agency in the country (and ultimately by the very same taxpayers on whom said institutions spent the majority of their time and budgets spying); ornithological cybernetic research projects funded by DARPA, resulting in thousands of birds across dozens of species as small as bee hummingbirds to as large as California condors with cameras surgically embedded in their bellies and skulls, discrete electrodes implanted in their brains, and transmitters sutured into their backs allowing them to be controlled from anywhere in the world; satellites designed to generate millimeter-resolution topographical maps for the purposes of locating, measuring, and identifying every last aboveground manmade structure on the planet; media cooperatives providing tabloids with an endless supply of tantalizing, erotic, embarrassing, incriminating, or otherwise damning images captured in
millions of tiny fragments by swarms of pixel drones as inconspicuous as gnats; even the winner of the NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) X PRIZE—a fully functioning, softball-sized intelligence satellite which succeeded in capturing images of all sixteen dummy weapons caches planted throughout the country just one week after being launched by an unmanned, commercial, single-stage-to-orbit satellite transport spaceplane.

Between all of these lenses, sensors, stereoscopic imaging technologies, synthetic aperture radar systems, and laser ranging networks above everyone’s heads all of the time no matter how far and wide humanity managed to wander, an average of 2.5 petabytes of vectors and bitmaps and metadata were generated, transmitted, analyzed, and stored every single hour of every single day.

Keeping oneself off the grid, therefore, was far beyond the average citizen’s means. In fact, it might have been very nearly impossible had it not been for the Federal Approval Service for Cartographical Imaging and Satellite Technologies, usually referred to by its detractors as FASCIST. Recent national security legislation required that detailed image data corresponding to every single aerial rendering intended for any form of publication, analysis, or archival whatsoever be submitted to a secure and anonymous web service, which presumably determined whether or not it corresponded to locations that people and organizations unknown wished to remain undiscovered. The response to the submission was either a single boolean—
true
—indicating you were free to do with your image whatever you chose, or a complex data structure containing not only an algorithmically sanitized version of your image, but also a detailed and sufficiently intimidating legal explanation of what would happen to you should you choose to disregard the government’s wishes. The upshot was this: by knowingly or unknowingly publishing, retaining, or even just viewing the originally submitted image, you were intrinsically agreeing to plead guilty to multiple acts of high treason, waiving all your rights and protections afforded to you as a citizen of the United States (including, but not limited to, those pertaining to legal representation and due process) as well as your inalienable and fundamental rights as a human being, and should therefore consider yourself, for all intents and purposes, quite thoroughly fucked.

What many radical reformists considered to be oppressive censorship, Alexei recognized as convenience. Just by putting one sum of money into
one single palm—or, more accurately, several sums of money into one single palm which then subsequently found their way through several additional palms, incrementally dwindling with every transfer, before finally reaching their intended destination—Alexei’s compound instantly disappeared from every map, chart, survey, globe, atlas, and plat in the entire country, and even around much of the rest of the world.

Alexei could simply buy invisibility.

But he knew that convenience in such matters usually did not last. You could only rely on other people for so long—especially people in positions of such great responsibility and influence who were so quick to have their palms greased—before someone along the line succumbed to greed, or betrayal, or just plain everyday stupidity. Which is precisely why it was Alexei’s policy to, wherever possible, implement backup processes and procedures that relied on one or more forms of dispassionate silicon-based technology rather than inherently self-destructive carbon-based life. After construction of the children’s dormitories was complete, Alexei immediately had the brand new ceramic roof tiles torn up and the titanium-alloy strips of siding pulled off and all of it replaced by a construction crew assembled by a woman who was once a top engineer for a British multinational defense, security, and aerospace conglomerate, but who was now enjoying the freedom of her new and much more lucrative career as an independent contractor.

Alexei no longer wanted to
buy
invisibility; he actually wanted to
be
invisible.

He had learned through his research that there are two distinct aspects to invisibility. The first (and most obvious) is the method by which an object is rendered undetectable. The second—and arguably the more interesting—is what the observer should see
in place
of the cloaked object.

In a scenario where an observer expects to either detect an object or to see nothing at all—as in the case of radar-based air defense systems—stealth technology is usually most appropriate. Stealth refers to reducing one’s radar cross section. The entire premise of stealth depends on a potential observer indiscriminately firing radio waves into a giant void and expecting that none of them will ever come back. As long as none of them ever do, you are effectively invisible.

In a more complex scenario, the observer always expects to see something, irrespective of what that something is. A security guard watching a closed-circuit video feed, for instance. Stealth technology is useless for robbing a bank since a security guard would be just as alarmed by suddenly seeing nothing as by witnessing the actual crime. In this case, effective invisibility requires the use of transformative optics in order to bend or channel visible light around objects rather than allowing it to be reflected back to the observer, resulting in the cloaked object appearing indistinguishable from its surroundings.

But perhaps the most complex form of invisibility—and the one most applicable and interesting to Alexei—is one in which the observer’s expectations are inconsistent, and may even change over time. In such circumstances the target must employ a form of invisibility known as active camouflage to remain undetected. An octopus, for instance, must adapt to whatever color and texture of coral happens to be nearby when threatened by a shark. A tank moving against a rebel encampment must continue to project an image of the jungle behind it even as its position changes, and regardless of how the light filters down through the trees. And the one hundred-plus acres of land outside LA where Alexei is plotting his tactical revolution can no longer look anything like a fortified compound regardless of the time of day, season, or the altitude or angle from which it is photographed.