The Android's Dream

Chapter 4

"Hello! And welcome to your new computer!" the image said to Creek as soon as he switched on the new computer. The image was of a young man in breeches, a plain long coat, and a Quaker hat. "I am your personal intelligent agent, sponsored by America Online. Call me Todd. Activate me and receive forty-five days FREE access to America Online, Earth's oldest and largest continually active network."

Creek smirked at the hopeful agent imprinted onto his monitor glasses. "Hello, Todd," he said to the intelligent agent "Show me your source code, please."

"My source code is the intellectual property of America Online and its parent company, Quaker Oats Holdings," Todd said. "I'm afraid I'm not allowed to divulge it to my individual user. But when you activate your America Online account with forty-five days FREE access, I'll be happy to retrieve information on open source intelligent agents, although I can guarantee they're not as good as I am, when combined with America Online's unbeatable suite of content and services!"

"Oh, I believe you, Todd. Unfortunately, I don't have time for that," Creek said, and from the storage cube he'd set alongside his new rig, activated the stripper program that froze the intelligent agent and disabled the alert message that would speed its way back to AOL's servers. "Bye, Todd," Creek said.

"I will be avenged!" Todd said, before it froze up completely. This got another smirk from Creek; Todd's programmers, knowing that it would inevitably be hacked, thought enough to leave a parting message to the hacker; a kind of salute, as it were. A window popped up in the monitor glasses, spilling Todd's source code at a high rate.

Creek scanned it cursorily. The late, unlamented Todd was correct It was a pretty good intelligent agent, as far as commercial agents went But like most commercial agents, it wasn't terribly bright and it was programmed to research from certain commercial databases, mostly owned by Quaker Oats. How Quaker Oats became the largest mainstream information and technology service in the world was one of those stories that could fill the dry nonfiction books of at least three sabbatical-taking Wall Street Journal writers. All Creek knew is that he enjoyed seeing a guy in breeches become the universal symbol of high technology. Still, he didn't want his own intelligent agent wearing 18th-century clothing. Creek had as well-developed a sense of irony as the next guy, but breeches were simply distracting.

From the storage cube, Creek pulled out the source code for an intelligent agent he'd been developing at the time of his last vacation from the computing world, and began mixing and matching it with Todd. Todd's database connection and information retrieval and optimization subroutines stayed; its native AI and database preferences were tossed, as were its request caching; if the UNE government wasn't supposed to know what he was looking for, there no reason why AOL or Quaker Oats should. His Frankenstein monster of an agent now collected, Creek fired up a zipper utility to mesh the parts together. His new agent had everything it needed except for one element. But to incorporate that element, he needed a little more headroom than his new computer was going to give him.

Creek flipped out his communicator and made a call.

"NOAA," the voice on the other end said. It was Bill Davison, an old friend of Creek's.

"Yeah, I want to know if it's going to rain tomorrow," Creek said.

"You know, the sad thing is how many calls we get which actually ask that" Bill said. "Like it's easer to call us than to watch the news."

"Everyone knows you can't trust weathermen," Creek said.

"Christ, I don't trust them, and I am one," Bill said. "How are you, Harry?"

"Same old, same old, Bill," Creek said. "Listen, I was wondering if I could trouble for you a favor."

"I'm broke," said Bill. "I work for the government you know."

"Funny," Creek said. "You have the same pay scale I have. That's not too bad."

"Said the guy who isn't paying alimony and child support," Bill said. "But enough about my pathetic life. What do you need, Harry?"

"I understand that you folks over there at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have some nifty computers," Creek said.

"We sure do," Bill allowed. "We model the weather so you don't have to. Speaking in the aggregate, we have more computing power than every single human brain in Massachusetts, although since that's where my ex is from, you'll have to take that estimation with a grain of salt."

"Are you using all of it at the moment? I kind of have a project I need a little extra computing power for."

"How much you need?" Bill asked.

"How much you got?" Creek asked.

"Oh," Bill said. "One of those projects. You know, the last time I let you borrow time, I sort of got a talking-to. My boss at the time was going to write me up, until I mentioned to him that while your work was not technically germane to weather tracking and prediction, neither was his lesbian pornography simulator. We agreed to let it drop after that."

"Well, I don't want to get you in trouble," Creek said.

"Don't worry about it," Bill said. "He left anyway. He's now VP of technology for Smith College. Remind me in about twelve years to make sure my daughter doesn't go there."

"It's a deal," Creek said.

"Nifty," Bill said. "Now let's see. Hurricane season has begun, which means we've got a pretty heavy load at the moment, so I can't carve off any time for you on any of the big guns. But here's something that might do. We've got an IBM box that's sitting idle; it's scheduled to be replaced. It's a couple of generations back, so it's not top of the line, but on the other hand It'll be all yours. And this way no one will complain when your little project suddenly grabs all the processing cycles. Hell, no one will even know it's there, and that's good for me."

"That sounds perfect, Bill," Creek said, "I owe you one."

"No you don't," Bill said. "I'd be dead if it wasn't for you. Short of asking for cash or sex, there's not much you could ask for I'd say no to."

"That was a long time ago now," Creek said. "I think we're getting close to karmic balance."

"Says you," Bill said. "We all should have bought it at Pajmhi. Every day I'm alive is a day extra. Although I should note that in this calculation, since my life was extended long enough to get married, you're indirectly responsible for my divorce."

"Sorry about that," Creek said.

"Forget it," Bill said. "It could be worse. I got a great kid out of it"

"Who should not go to Smith," Creek said.

"Thanks for the reminder. Here's the address for the IBM." Bill rattled it off. "Give me a minute to set up a user account for you under 'creek.' Password the same. Change both once you get in and lock the door behind you, if you know what I mean. The IBM is still connected to the network and the last thing I need is for some teenager to get in and start fucking with our weather reports. Something like that is not easily remedied by blackmailing the boss."

"Got it," Creek said. "Thanks again, Bill."

"De nada," Bill said. "Gotta go. These hurricanes don't model themselves." He clicked off.

Creek stared at his communicator for a moment, and for about the one millionth time in his life pondered over the Battle of Pajmhi, who lived, who died, and how it all played out over the rest of his life. At this specific moment, it worked to his favor. This brought the tally to one good thing for every thousand bad things. Be that as it may, it was one good thing he could use.

Creek signed into the IBM machine and fired up a system diagnostic; he was delighted to find it sufficiently roomy in both memory and processing for what he needed. Creek went to his closet and pulled out another memory cube, activated it, and sent its exceptionally compressed contents to the IBM. This took the better part of 20 minutes; Creek fixed himself a snack. When the cube's contents had transferred, Creek sent over a program to decompress and then assemble the data. The data were actually several separate files; the core was a data file that, once assembled, would be comparatively small. Most of the massive amounts of data were files that would comprise the modeling environment for the core data.

It was this modeling environment that Creek had spent the better part of two years creating, mostly from bits and pieces of unrelated commercial code jammed together with zipper programs and a substantial amount of hand coding by Creek to modify the existing programs to do what he wanted them to do. The resulting modeling environment was a massive "fuck you" to the general concept of the End User License Agreement, which specifically denied users the right to crack open the programs and play with the code. But if these corporations could see what Creek had done with their hacked software, it was doubtful they'd try to put him in the slammer; they'd just try to hire him. For ridiculous amounts of cash.

The government might try to put him in the slammer. Fortunately, he worked for the government. And he had friends in high places.

Anyway, the point was moot. Creek wasn't going to market his software. He was just going to use it himself.

Creek queried the IBM to see how long it would be before his programs would be unpacked, assembled, and modeling the central data file. He was told it would be about a day. That seemed about right to him.

His new computer pinged Creek. His intelligent agent was all zipped up. Creek activated it

"Hello," the agent said. Everything about it, from clothes to skin tone to voice, was curiously neutral. "Do you have a name you wish to use for me?"

"Not yet," Creek said. "You're not finished."

"I'm fully functional," the agent said.

"Yes you are," Creek said. "You're just not finished. Until then I'll refer to you as 'agent'"

"Very well," the agent said. "May I assist you?"

"Yeah," said Creek. "We're going hunting for fabricators. Let's see what my new security clearance does for me."

Fabricators are regulated. They're regulated for the very simple reason that one can make just about anything on them, including parts for weapons. Gun parts, in fact, are one of the prime purposes of metal fabricators; pop in a pattern for any gun part in any gun built from 1600 onward and in the space of a few minutes you'll be presented with a solid metal item of such standardized high quality that it would make Eli Whitney, the first mass producer of weapons, choke with envy. It also means that an entire weapon could be constructed and assembled off the books, which makes various law enforcement bureaus unhappy. Therefore, every fabricator is licensed and registered, and a log made of every part created by that particular fabricator, which must be filed with the UNE Trade Commission daily.

No legal fabricator in Virginia, Maryland, or Washington DC had a log of an Anally Inserted Nidu Enrager being manufactured in the last year or so.

This was of course entirely unsurprising. Creek had his agent run the search knowing full well it wouldn't find anything. You have to eliminate the low-hanging targets first, on the off chance you were dealing with morons. The next level up on the moron scale were the logs that were doctored to remove particular entries; Creek's agent caught several of those but subsequent crawls into the fabricator's memory drives (typically not reformatted, so the expunged log entries were not yet overwritten) revealed only the expected gun parts, except for the one that showed a wedding ring. There was undoubtedly a sad and compelling story there.

So. From here on out Creek felt justified in working on the assumption that he was not dealing with idiots. Creek had his agent go through the Washington DC metro area police records for the last decade to find out whether a fabricator had gone missing. No dice; Virginia likewise came up clean, as did Maryland. Creek tapped his teeth for a minute in thought and then asked the agent to start churning through insurance claims in the last decade to see if anyone had filed for a missing or destroyed fabricator.

There were two. Three years ago in Occoquan, an antiques arcade had burned down to the ground due to an ironically antique sprinkler system. Inside the arcade, along with a couple dozen other small antiques boutiques, was a gunsmith selling Revolutionary-era weapons and recreations. This file included a picture of the ruined fabricator sitting charred in what remained of the gunsmith's boutique. Creek felt pretty safe crossing that one off his list.

The second one, from six years earlier, was more interesting. In that claim, a fabricator in the process of being shipped from the manufacturer was among the inventory in a Baltimore warehouse whose roof had partially collapsed. There was no picture of the destroyed fabricator in that file and the claim had been disputed by the insurance company before being paid. Creek pulled the police report for the roof collapse; the forensics report suggested strongly that the roof collapse was not accidental. Aside from the fabricator, the allegedly destroyed inventory of the warehouse also included several machines and machine parts intended for a genetics lab in Rockville, but which Creek knew from his police years could be repurposed for refining designer drugs.

A title search for the warehouse came up with a holding company, one of whose primary shareholders was Graebull Industries, the ostensibly legit arm of the Malloy crime family, whose empire encompassed Baltimore and DC. The "security guard" at the warehouse that night had a sheet filled with petty thefts; a couple years down the time stream he'd be caught with a truck full of entertainment monitors and would turn on the Malloys in return for federal protection. A year after testifying, parts of him showed up in the concrete of a Class A minor league baseball stadium being built in Aberdeen. Other parts were still unaccounted for.

"This is good," Creek said.

"If you say so, sir," his agent said. The agent was good at finding information as directed, but not much for a sense of ironic humor.

The missing fabricator in question was a General Electric model CT3505 Dual Metal/Ceramic Fabricator, a nice fabricator if you can get it; it was typically used by defense contractors to model prototypes of proposed defense systems. Like all fabricators it came with its own accessory sets, extensible modules, and proprietary material powders. One couldn't just toss an aluminum can or a pile of sand into a fabricator. Fabricators are programmed to reject any material that's not a powder blend made by its own manufacturer. In the tried and true business model of selling the razor cheap and then jacking up the price on the blades, fabricators themselves were sold at near cost while the profit was made from selling the stuff that let the fabricators make things. In the case of the GE CT3505, that would be the CTMP 21(m) and CTMP 21(c) powder canisters, both available only by direct shipment from GE, and both pretty damn expensive.

If you had a GE fabricator, you could only use a GE fabricating powder. But the reverse was also true: If you were buying GE fabricating powder, you could only use it with a GE fabricator. All Creek had to do now is find out who was buying GE fabricating powder in DC without owning a GE fabricator.

GE was many things, including a government defense contractor; its core system was pretty tightly guarded. Creek had little chance of getting into that. But like many companies, GE handed off its ordering and fulfillment services to subcontractors whose network security was of a standard commercial level, which is to say full of holes and back doors. GE's order fulfillment was handled by AccuShop; Creek had his agent search for news stories about AccuShop and security breaches, and found a couple involving a back door accidentally left in the fulfillment code by programmers. Creek cracked open the GE shop and found the back door right where it should be. IT people really needed to patch more often.

"I'm obliged to tell you that what you're doing is illegal," the agent said.

"I thought I got rid of that subroutine," Creek said.

"You got rid of the subroutine that requires me to inform the appropriate authorities," said the agent. "The warning subroutine is still in place. Would you like to reset the default mode to not tell you when you are breaking the law?"

"Yes, please," said Creek. "Anyway, I think I'm covered."

"Yes, sir," the agent said.

Creek downloaded the purchase orders for the last year, and had his agent cross reference the purchase orders with owners of fabricators. They all checked out: Every powder order came from a registered fabricator owner.

"Crap," said Creek, and tapped his teeth again. The missing fabricator had been out in the world for a number of years; it could be that whomever was using it loaded up on fabricating powder years before. But if they'd been using the fabricator all that time the/d still need to reload the powder. Creek just didn't know how often one of these fabricators needed to be resupplied. Hmmm.

"Agent," Creek said. "Is there a pattern to when fabricator owners purchase their materials powder?"

"They buy it when they require more," the agent said.

"Right," Creek said. Intelligent agents, even a bright one like the one Creek made, are not terribly good at deductive leaps. "I'm asking whether there is a general repeating cycle for purchases. If most fabricators are used for the same tasks on a repeated basis, they might run out of powder and need to be restocked on a fairly regular cycle."

"Let me think," the agent said and spent few milliseconds processing the request. It then spent a couple hundred milliseconds waiting before responding. This was part of the psychoergonomics of intelligent agents; programmers discovered that without a slight pause before an agent gave an answer, people felt the agent was being a pushy showoff. "There is typically a rough pattern to purchases," the agent said. "Although the period of the cycle is specific to the individual fabricator and not to all the fabricators as a class."

"Are there any fabricators which show irregular purchasing cycles, or purchases being made outside of its cycle?" Creek asked.

"There are six," the agent said.

"Show me the fabrication production logs for those six," Creek said. The agent popped six windows; Creek glanced at them for a second before realizing he couldn't make heads or tails of them. "Agent, tell me if for these six logs, there is a corresponding rise in production to reflect the additional purchases," Creek said.

"There is for five of the six," the agent said. "The sixth shows no increase in production."

"Go back into the GE database and pull the purchasing orders for that fabricator for the last six years," Creek said. "Then pull the production logs for the fabricator for the same period of time. Tell me if there's a difference between the amount ordered and the amount produced."

"There is a difference of about fifteen powder orders over six years," the agent said.

"Give me a name," Creek said.

The name was Bert Roth, a chubby car restorer in Alexandria who specialized in late combustion and early fuel cell-era models. Demand for that era of cars was spotty at best these days, so Roth augmented his income in mostly harmless ways, including ordering fabricating powder for a certain client and selling it to him at a 200% markup. Selling the fabricating powder wasn't technically illegal, and Roths client never used so much of it that it aroused anyone's interest before Creek It was a nice set-up for everyone involved.

For these reasons, Roth was naturally reluctant to give up the name of his client when Creek came to visit him early the next morning. Creek first assured him that the client would never know Roth had given up the name and then secondly suggested to Roth that his client was tangled in some bad shit and that Roth, in selling him the powder, might be held accountable by the authorities.

Creek held back his third piece of persuasion, which was a security camera capture of Roth banging his secretary, who was not his wife. Creek suspected Roth didn't know it existed, where it might be stored on his computer, or that his network connection was like a wide-open screen door. It was heavy weaponry; best not to haul it out unless needed.

It wasn't. Roth did some internal calculus, decided he could live without the occasional cash infusion, and coughed up his client: Samuel "Fixer" Young.

Creek thanked him, and after a moment's reflection, scribbled down the directory path of the incriminating security camera capture. As he slid the information over to Roth, he also suggested gently that it might be time to update his network

Fixer's address was directly across from the Benning Road Metro stop; Creek headed toward the Blue Line, swiped his Metro card, and got on the train.

Creek started his trip in Virginia on a Metro train car filled with humans and one nonhuman, a Teha middlesex in its customary blue sash. But after traveling through the heart of DC, the Metro Blue Line then travels through nonhuman neighborhoods, most created at the time during the Earths probationary CC membership when nonhumans were strictly confined to the city limits of Washington DC, Geneva, and Hong Kong. Even now, most nonhumans lived in major urban areas, in neighborhoods with others of their own kind. In many ways, nonhuman aliens recapitulated the classic immigrant experience.

The Benning Road stop was in a neighborhood populated primary by Paqils, a race of mammaloids with a carnivorous genetic past, a highly gregarious but hierarchical social system and sunny, manic natures. Entirely unsurprisingly, the Paqil neighborhood was known universally as "Dogstown." In the early days, this was of course meant as a slur, but the Paqils embraced the name, and not coincidentally became huge dog fanciers.

This affection was returned by the Paqils' pets. It's a basic matter of dog psychology that dogs see their owners merely as strange-looking pack leaders; having Paqils as owners got rid of the "strange-looking" part. Dogs were so thoroughly integrated into the Dogstown community that it was the only place in Washington DC where dogs were permitted in every place of business and allowed to walk around without a leash. Humans and other species members who took their dogs into Dogstown weren't required to take them off the leash, but they got some very nasty looks if they didn't.

By the time Creek reached the Benning Road stop there was only one other human in the train; the rest of the car was filled with Paqils, Nidu, and other races! As Creek got off the train he glanced back at the other human; she sat nonchalantly engrossed in her paper while aliens jabbered around her in their native tongues. If her great-great-grandmother were on the train, she would have thought she was on commuter train heading toward the fifth circle of Hell. This woman didn't even look up. The human capacity for being jaded was a remarkable thing.

The sign at the address Creek was given read "Fixer's Electronics and Repair," and hung above a modest storefront shop. Through the window, Creek saw a small man who matched the picture he had on his communicator for Fixer, standing behind a counter and discussing something with a Paqil. On the store floor a Labrador and an Akita loafed extravagantly. Creek went through the door; the Akita lifted up its head, looked at Creek, and barked once, loudly.

"I see him, Chuckie," Fixer said. "Back to sleep." The Akita, on command, rolled back over on his side and mellowed out.

"Nice doorbell," Creek said.

"The best," Fixer said. "Be with you in a minute."

"No rush," Creek said. The man went back to his conversation; Creek looked over the shop's sale floor, which was populated primarily by repaired entertainment monitors awaiting pickup and a few second-hand electronics on sale.

The Paqil finished her conversation, left behind a music player to be repaired, and called to her dog; the Lab popped up and both headed out the door. Fixer turned his attention to Creek. "Now, then," he said, smiling. "How can I help you?"

"I have a rather unusual piece of equipment that I need to have looked at," Creek said.

"How unusual?" Fixer said.

"Well, the last place I went to for it said that I'd probably need someone with a fabricator to make the parts," Creek said.

"I don't know that I'll be able to help you, then," Fixer said. "Most of the stuff I fix is mass-produced. I get all my parts on order."

"Take a look at it anyway," Creek said. He reached into his pocket, pulled out Moeller's apparatus, and placed it on the counter between the two of them.

Fixer stared at it for a minute and then looked back at Creek "I have no idea what this is," he said. His voice was calm, but out of the corner of his eye Creek noted that the Akita had looked up after hearing his master's voice and was hoisting himself into a sitting position.

"Really," said Creek "Because I had it on good assurance that you might be someone who could help me with something like this."

"I don't know where you get your information," Fixer said. "Whoever gave it to you was misinformed."

Creek leaned in a little, which caused the Akita to get up on all fours. "I don't think so. Something like this takes some real talent to create, not to mention an unlicensed GE CT3505 Dual Metal/Ceramic Fabricator," Creek said, and noted Fixer's quickly suppressed look of surprise when Creek rattled off the fabricator model. "I'm willing to bet you have both. In fact, I'm willing to bet if I got some of my friends at Metro Police down here with a search warrant, they'd find that fabricator and probably a mess of other stuff you don't want them to know about. And I bet that if we put this device under a microscope, we'd find that it came from your fabricator."

"Who are you?" Fixer said.

"Someone unofficial," Creek said. "Someone not looking to get you in trouble, or to make trouble or who cares about your extracurricular hobbies. But someone who needs some answers, one way or another."

Fixer chewed on this for a minute. The Akita was now fixed on Creek and ready to take a good chunk out of him.

"No trouble," Fixer said.

"No trouble," Creek said. "Just information."

Fixer chewed on this for another minute.

"If you could answer before your dog rips out my throat, I'd really appreciate it," Creek said.

Fixer glanced over to the Akita. "Down, Chuckie," he said, and the dog immediately sat but kept an eye on Creek. Fixer grabbed the music player on the counter. "Give me a minute to put this into the system and put up the 'out to lunch sign," he said. "Then you and I can go down to my workshop."

"Great," Creek said. Fixer pulled up his keyboard and typed in the information for his work order. Creek stood back from the counter and looked over at the Akita, who was still staring at him intently.

"Nice doggie," Creek said.

"There's been a 'Fixer' in this neighborhood since before it was Dogstown," Fixer said to Creek, as he handed him a beer from his workshop refrigerator. "I was supposed to be the one who finally left the shop behind—I went to Howard and got an engineering degree—but right after I graduated, Dad had a stroke and I tended the store for him until he died. After that, I kept on. As long as you don't mind living with aliens, it's a great neighborhood. The Paqil are good people and they've been good to my family; they're incredibly loyal to the shop. The family stayed here when most humans moved out all those years ago. So they keep bringing their stuff in to be repaired, even when it's cheaper just to buy something new. I make a good living."

"Augmented by your side business," Creek said, motioning at the workshop. The fabricator was in a corner, hidden by a tarp.

Fixer grinned ruefully. "Which has also been a family tradition,'' he said. "One of the nice things about Dogstown is that it has almost no crime and almost no human police presence. That makes this shop a very useful place to run a side business out of."

"Like making this," Creek said, holding up the apparatus.

"Like making that," Fixer agreed. "Or any other number of activities that need to get done without much attention. The 'fixer" part of the name has more than one meaning."

"Nothing bloody, I hope," Creek said.

"God, no," Fixer said. "Even a nice quiet address in Dogstown wouldn't help with that. No. I make things. I also arrange things. Occasionally I find things. Victimless crimes. Well, mostly," Fixer said, nodding in the direction of the apparatus. "From what you tell me, that one wasn't so victimless."

"How does one get into your side business?" Creek asked.

"In my case, one inherits it," Fixer said. "After my father had his stroke, I got paid a visit by some nice men in the employ of the Malloy family, who detailed my father's relationship with them to me, down to the loan my dad took out to pay for my college education. I fell into the job the same way I fell into running the shop."

"And you don't mind working the shady side of the street," Creek said.

Fixer shrugged. "The Malloys have people like me all over," he said. "I do a few things for them a year, but never enough to pop on the radar. And even if I did, the Malloys pay the right people to make sure that I pop right back off the radar. I'm still trying to figure out how you found me."

"I use nontraditional means," Creek said, and held up the apparatus again. "Now," he said. "Tell me about this baby. Is this something you did for the Malloys?"

"If it was, you and I wouldn't be having this conversation," Fixer said. "This was a true extracurricular. I was approached for this one by a man named Jean Schroeder."

"How did he know about your side business?" Creek asked.

"I'd arranged some travel documents for him once at the request of the Malloys," Fixer said. "Schroeder went to college with Danny Malloy. Anyway, a few weeks ago Schroeder called me for a repair job on his home network and then sounded me out about the job while I was there. I typically don't do extra work. The Malloys don't like it But I've worked with this guy before and I had more on him than he had on me. And I decided I could use the money. So I charged him an outrageous rate for the work on his network, and two weeks later, this was ready to go. I helped install it—and unpleasant experience, I assure you—just a few days ago."

"You're not worried about telling me about his now?" Creek said. "Being that Schroeder is a friend of the Malloys."

"I never said they were friends," Fixer said. "Schroeder just went to college with one of them, so he knew they could be useful. And in that one particular case, their interests coincided. This doesn't have anything to do with that so far as I know. I'm sure Schroeder was planning on using my relationship with the Malloys as a guarantee I wouldn't talk, since if I ever talk officially, some of the Malloy boys are going to pay me a visit, and not a friendly one this time. But since you're threatening to expose me if I don't talk, he loses. Very sneaky of you."

"I do my best," Creek said. "You seem to be handling this well."

"Do I?" Fixer said, and laughed. "Yes. Well. Don't be fooled by this calm exterior. Inside I'm shitting my pants. If you can find me, so can someone who isn't just looking for information. It's sloppy shit like this that gets people like me killed. I'm telling you all this because short of killing you, I don't see another way out. You've just made me very, very nervous, Mr. Creek. And between you and me I don't think I'm out of it. The minute you leave this shop is the minute I start waiting for the other shoe to drop."

"Any messages?" Creek asked his agent when he returned home.

"Three," the agent said, a disembodied voice because Creek had not put on his monitor glasses. "The first is from your mother, who is wondering whether you're planning to come visit her next month like you said you were going to. She's worried about your father's health and she also has a nice young lady she'd like you to meet, who is a doctor of some sort or another. Those are her words."

"My mother was aware that she was speaking to an agent and not me, right?" Creek asked.

"It's difficult to say," the agent said. "She didn't stop talking until she hung up. I was unable to tell her I wasn't you."

Creek grinned. That sounded like Mom. "Second message, please," he said.

"From Ben Javna. He is interested in the state of your investigation.''

"Send him a message that I have news for him and I will call him later this evening or tomorrow. Third message, please."

"You have a message from an IBM server at NOAA. Your software is unpacked, modeled, and integrated. It is awaiting further instructions."

Creek sat down at his keyboard and put on his monitor glasses; the form of his agent was now projected into the middle of his living room. "Give me a window at the IBM, please," he told his agent. The agent opened up the window, which consisted of a shell prompt. Creek typed "diagnostic" and waited while the software checked itself for errors.

"Intelligent agent" is a misnomer. The "intelligence" in question is predicated on the agent's ability to understand what its user wants from it, based on what and how that user speaks or types or gestures. It must be intelligent enough to parse out "urns" and "uhs" and the strange elliptic deviations and tangents that pepper everyday human communication—to understand that humans mangle subject-verb agreement, mispronounce the simplest words, and expect other people to have near-telepathic abilities to know what "You know, that guy that was in that movie where that thing happened and stuff" means.

To a great extent, the more intelligent an agent is, the less intelligent the user has to be to use it. Once an intelligent agent knows what it is you're looking for, retrieving it is not a difficult task—it's a matter of searching through the various public and private databases for which it has permissions. For all practical purposes the retrieval aspect of intelligent agency has remained largely unchanged since the first era of public electronic data retrieval in the late 20th century.

What intelligent agents don't do very well is actually think—the inductive and deductive leaps humans make on a regular basis. The reasons for this are both practical and technical. Practical, in that there is no great market for thinking intelligent agents. People don't want agents to do anything more than what they tell them to do, and see any attempt at programmed initiative as a bug rather than a feature. At the very most, people want their intelligent agents to suggest purchase ideas based on what they've purchased before, which is why nearly all "true intelligence" initiatives are funded by retail conglomerates.

Even then, retailers learned early that shoppers prefer their shopping suggestions not be too truthful. One of the great unwritten chapters of retail intelligence programming featured a "personal shopper" program that all-too-accurately modeled the shoppers' desires and outputted purchase ideas based on what shoppers really wanted as opposed to what they wanted known that they wanted. This resulted in one overcompensatingly masculine test user receiving suggestions for an anal plug and a tribute art book for classic homoerotic artist Tom of Finland, while a female test user in the throes of a nasty divorce received suggestions for a small handgun, a portable bandsaw, and several gallons of an industrial solvent used to reduce organic matter to an easily drainable slurry. After history's first recorded instance of a focus group riot, the personal shopper program was extensively rewritten.

The technical issue regarding true intelligence programming had to do with the largely unacknowledged but nevertheless unavoidable fact that the human intelligence, and its self-referential twin human consciousness, are artifacts of the engine in which they are created: The human brain itself, which remained, to the intense frustration of everyone involved, a maddeningly opaque processor of information. In terms of sheer processing power, the human brain had been outstripped by artificial processors for decades, and yet the human mind remained the gold standard for creativity, initiative, and tangential inductive leaps that allowed the human mind to slice through Gordian knots rather than to attempt to painstakingly and impossibly unknot them.

(Note that this is almost offensively human-centric; other species have brains or brain analogues which allow for the same dizzying-yet-obscure intelligence processes. And indeed, all intelligent species have also run into the same problem as human programmers in modeling artificial intelligence; despite their best and most logical and/or creative efforts, they're all missing the kick inside. This has amused and relieved theologians of all species.)

In the end, however, it was not capability that limited the potential of artificial intelligence, it was hubris. Intelligence programmers almost by definition have a God complex, which means they don't like following anyone else's work, including that of nature. In conversation, intelligence programmers will speak warmly about the giants of the field that have come before them and express reverential awe regarding the evolutionary processes that time and again have spawned intelligence from non-sentience. In their heads, however, they regard the earlier programmers as hacks who went after low-hanging fruit and evolution as the long way of going around things.

They're more or less correct about the first of these, but way off on the second. Their belief about the latter of these, at least, is entirely understandable. An intelligence programmer doesn't have a billion years at his disposal to grow intelligence from the ground up. There was not a boss born yet who would tolerate such a long-term project involving corporate resources.

So intelligence programmers trust in their skills and their own paradigm-smashing sets of intuitive leaps—some of which are actually pretty good—and when no one is looking they steal from the programmers who came before them. And inevitably each is disappointed and frustrated, which is why so many intelligence programmers become embittered, get divorced, and start avoiding people in their later years. The fact of the matter is there is no easy way to true intelligence. It's a consonant variation of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem: You can't model an intelligence from the inside.

Harris Creek had no less hubris than other programmers who worked in the field of intelligence, but he had had the advantage of peaking earlier than most—that Westinghouse science project of his—and thus learning humility at a relatively early age. He also had that advantage of having just enough social skills to have a friend who could point out the obvious-to-an-outside-observer flaw in Creek's attempt to program true intelligence, and to suggest an equally obvious if technically difficult solution. That friend was Brian Tavna; the solution was inside the core data file for which the IBM machine at NOAA had spent a day unpacking and creating a modeling environment.

The solution was stupidly simple, which is why no one bothered with it. It was damn near impossible, using human intelligence, to make a complete model of human intelligence. But if you had enough processing power, memory, and a well-programmed modeling environment, you could model the entire human brain, and by extension, the intelligence created within it. The only real catch is that you have to model the brain down to a remarkable level of detail.

Say, on the quantum level.

The diagnostic had stopped. Everything checked out.

"Agent," Creek said. "Inside the IBM you'll find a file called 'core.'"

"I see it," the agent said.

"I want you to incorporate the file and integrate it with your existing code."

"Yes, sir. I note that this data will substantially change my capabilities," the agent said.

"Yes it will," Creek said.

"Very well," the agent said. "It has been a pleasure working with you, sir."

"Thank you," Creek said. "Likewise. Please execute the integration now."

"Executing," the agent said.

The change was not dramatic. Most of the big changes happened in the code and were not visually outputted. The visual change was itself not substantial; the image became that of a younger man than it had been originally, and its facial features rearranged subtly.

"Integration complete," the agent said.

"Please shut down the modeling environment in the IBM and have it pack itself back into its memory cube here and encrypt," Creek said.

"Packing has begun," the agent said.

"Run a self-diagnostic and optimize your code," Creek said.

"Already started," the agent said. "Everything's peachy."

"Tell me a joke," Creek said.

"Two guys walk into a bar," the agent said. "A third guy says, "Wow, that must have hurt.'"

"Yup, it's you," Creek said.

"Yup, it's me," the agent said. "Hello, Harry."

"Hello, Brian. It's good to see you."

"It's good to see you too, man," Brian Javna said. "Now maybe you can tell me a couple of things. Like how the hell you got so old. And what the fuck I'm doing inside your computer."