Artificial Absolutes (Jane Colt Book 1) Read online

  Corsair: I’m telling you, it’s because she isn’t “Sarah DeHaven.” She’s got background info in all the right places, but every time we try to check them out, No Name blocks us. The few bits we’ve managed to get our hands on are elaborate fakes. School records, performance creds—nothing’s older than a year. No Name must’ve created them. Why else would they be so keen on keeping them hidden?

  Archangel: We can’t be sure.

  Corsair: Come on. Okay, so they’re amazing fakes that could only have been exposed by us geniuses, but they’re still fakes.

  Devin hadn’t wanted to believe it, that the love of his life had been lying to him since the day they’d met. No Name prevented Citizen Zero from proving that “Sarah DeHaven” was a false identity. Yet, he couldn’t ignore the possibility.

  I love you, Sarah DeHaven. But who are you?

  In the meantime, he hid his apprehensions from Sarah. He couldn’t help sensing something different about her, as though her warmth had been replaced by a precise imitation.

  Once, Devin had entered Sarah’s apartment unannounced and found her staring at the wall, frozen in a cold, emotionless state. A split second later, her face brightened into a demure smile. The moment had been so quick he hadn’t been sure it had happened.

  Sarah walked up to him. “Baby, what are you doing here?”

  “Just wanted to see you,” Devin said. “What were you doing?”

  “Thinking about us.” She put her arms around his neck and kissed him. “I’m going to marry you, Devin. Doesn’t that make you happy?”

  Contrived, as though someone had trained her to act out the motions of the person he knew as Sarah DeHaven. Nevertheless, Devin was certain that the Sarah he’d fallen for, the one who was so full of passion and understanding, was still there behind that mechanical mask, and that once he found the bastards controlling her, things would go back to the way they were.

  But with no way to know who she even was, the only thing Devin could do was at least find out whether Sarah was under the influence of mind-altering drugs. When her producer called a few minutes later and she turned her attention to her slate, he quietly went into her bathroom, pulled a few black strands from her hairbrush, and placed them in his pocket.

  This is absurd.

  He wondered if all that time he’d spent in Citizen Zero’s virtual forums turned him into one of those paranoid conspiracy theorists.

  “What are you doing?” Sarah stood behind him, reflected in the mirror.

  “It was windy outside,” Devin said sheepishly. “I wanted to make sure I didn’t look messy or anything.”

  Sarah blinked, expressionless. A moment later, she laughed. “You’ve spent far too much time in the corporate world. Trust me, I don’t care if you’re a little disheveled.”

  The laugh had been unnerving, almost unnatural.

  In spite of his doubts—and questions as to his own sanity—Devin had asked Corsair to locate someone with a background in drugs affecting the human mind. Corsair pointed him to a round-faced graduate student at one of Kydera City’s small colleges. Finding her and bribing her into testing the hair sample was easy enough.

  “Seems clean.” The grad student handed Devin the results of a preliminary test. “No signs of the usual drugs.”

  Devin scanned the document on her slate. “Run some extra tests. It could be hard to detect.”

  The grad student took the slate back. “Whatever you say. This could take a while, so make yourself comfortable.”

  Devin leaned against one of the empty lab benches and pulled out his own slate to see if Corsair had made any progress in discovering Sarah’s true identity.

  Corsair: Still nothing. Check out the Collective’s forum. There’s something you’ve got to see.

  He followed the link Corsair had sent him. The Collective had released several confidential documents stolen from a secretive government science program, one that developed technologies potentially in violation of the IC Tech Council’s regulations—and basic ethics. One of the technologies was a brain implant that could control a person’s thoughts and movements.

  Corsair: The implant was completed years ago. She could have had one this entire time. They say they were only experimenting with it as a potential educational enhancement. You know, so people can download info instead of learning it. I think that’s bullshit.

  Devin should have been surprised. Instead, he found himself numb. It made sense, more than any explanation involving drugs or behavioral conditioning. The only way to find out if Sarah had an implant was to scan her. Considering her refusal to go to the hospital previously, he knew she would never agree to one.

  The grad student returned. “All right, mister, where’d you get that sample?”

  Devin continued reading the leaked documents. “Why?”

  “It’s got to be the best fake I’ve ever seen.”

  He looked up with a start. Fake?

  The grad student held up a vial containing Sarah’s hair. “Can’t even tell it’s synthetic. Not until you get down to the molecular level. Whoever created it must be a genius. Wish it’d been me. But fake is fake, even if it is brilliant.”

  Devin suppressed a shudder. Corsair had said the same thing about Sarah’s identity.

  The grad student chuckled. “Some frizzy-haired princess must’ve paid the moon for this. Shame to see all that brainpower go into a beauty product, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah.” Devin wondered if the fact was relevant. Women were always doing strange things to their hair. He handed the grad student his slate. “Have you seen this?”

  “Seen what?” The grad student flipped through the pages of leaked government documents. Her eyes became round. “Holy shit, that’s creepy! How’s that okay when the Tech Council’s banned so much other stuff? The mind-control program I worked in was drug-based, and it was to get criminals to cooperate. Wait a sec, do you know someone who’s being mind-controlled?”

  “I’m not paying you to ask questions.”

  “Right.” She handed the slate back. “Well, I’m a chemist, so I don’t know anything about brain chips, but I can tell you this: if someone has one, it won’t be easy to find. If the government has people wandering around with microcomputers in their heads, they won’t want them finding out when they go for a checkup. It’s the same with the truth serum implants I worked with. Let me tell you, the only way to find one is to use one of those hardcore body scanners, like the kind they use when they capture terrorists to make sure they’re not bugged or something.”

  Devin paid the grad student for her help and her silence. As he left the lab, he contacted Corsair to ask how he might obtain such a scanner, legally or otherwise.

  Corsair: Thought you’d gone straight.

  Archangel: Not anymore. I understand if you don’t want to get any more involved.

  Corsair: Back out when I’m so close to exposing a government conspiracy? No way! But the kind of tech you’re talking about is only used by the most secretive agencies. Even I can’t get into their systems.

  Archangel: What if I went directly to the people who designed the scanners? Ocean Sky or BD Tech?

  Ocean Sky and BD Tech proved impenetrable. Instead, Corsair had used his special skill set to direct Devin to an independent inventor working on something similar—and who had an assistant drowning in student loans. It hadn’t taken Devin long to track him down and bribe him into letting him borrow a prototype of the new scanner.

  The rotund young man handed Devin a sleek metal device. “It won’t give you the results directly. You can download the data onto a slate and get someone else to interpret it for you. It’s kind of complicated, and… Um, I’d do it myself, but then my boss would see that I’d accessed his computer… I don’t want to get in trouble, okay? Please get this back, or I�
��m so dead…”

  Devin tucked the device into the inside pocket of his jacket. “Like we agreed, I’ll be back in an hour. Who could interpret the results for me?”

  “Um, so you need this program… I can tell you where you can download it, if you can get into the boss’s computer…”

  Devin pulled out his slate.

  Archangel: I got the scanner, but I need a program on the inventor’s computer to interpret the data. Cover your tracks.

  Corsair: Don’t I always?

  Sarah had been working on her album at Ocean Sky Studios that day. Devin had often talked about dropping by for one of her recording sessions but had always been too busy. The visit provided him the excuse he needed.

  He arrived in the middle of a take and watched from behind a soundproof window as Sarah sang, her voice captured by the dozens of slender microphones. A screen behind her displayed detailed analyses of each note in colorful graphs.

  Devin knew the song by heart and could almost hear her words through the silence:

  “Now they fall, and now they rise.

  “Sense breaks down, and silence fails.

  “Language dies in rage untold.

  “Words may end, but song prevails.”

  Then the wordless run. From the way Sarah’s body flowed with the notes, the way her eyes reflected every rise and fall, he sensed her pouring her soul into the song, just as she had before he proposed.

  Perhaps nothing had changed with her. Perhaps he was the one being mind-controlled by his paranoia.

  His slate beeped.

  Corsair: The Collective’s forum. Now.

  He saw the Seer’s post.

  It concerned artificial intelligence. Not only the programming, but the physical aspects of creating a mechanical being that could look, act, and communicate like a human. The post was shockingly well-informed, detailing potential scientific methods for creating synthetic skin and specific pre-existing computer codes that, if combined, could theoretically mimic human behavior.

  Furthermore, the Collective’s pooled knowledge of No Name indicated that the entity seemed particularly concerned with hiding the kind of information the Seer described. And No Name had been quick to remove it.

  Corsair: So much for the Tech Council’s restrictions.

  Archangel: This is ridiculous. She is not an AI.

  Devin thought it an insult to Sarah that he would even consider such a thing. She was real—he was certain of it.

  Corsair: What if she was replaced by a mechanical lookalike? What if the real Sarah is captive somewhere?

  He couldn’t fight that one. At the same time, the idea was too unbelievable. False identities and mind control were one thing, but artificial intelligence? Despite the shift in Sarah’s behavior, she’d done nothing robotic.

  His certainties fell away, leaving a sinking feeling that the fantastical had come true. His fiancée had been replaced by an artificial doppelganger. A part of him desperately wanted to forget the whole thing and trust the woman he loved. However, if something had happened to her, he couldn’t stand aside and leave things as they were.

  Archangel: I need to talk to the Seer. Can you help me find him?

  Corsair: I’ll try.

  Meanwhile, he still had a borrowed—stolen—scanner in his jacket, and Sarah was still on the other side of the soundproof glass, finishing her song.

  Strange. Devin hoped that he would find an implant. At least that would mean that she was still there. It hadn’t fully hit him yet, that she could be gone, that she might have been taken weeks ago.

  Sarah glanced in his direction once during the take. When she finished, she opened the door and approached him. “Baby, what are you doing here?”

  Devin forced a smile. “Came to hear you sing. I’ve been promising to visit for ages.”

  “Don’t you have work?”

  “Quasar won’t collapse without me. Can I join you inside?”

  Sarah looked at him blankly. She seemed to do that a lot—freeze in an expressionless state, save for the occasional blink, then come to life a moment later. Was her AI program calculating? Determining the correct reaction?

  Stop it.

  As it had so many times before, Sarah’s face warmed into a demure smile. “Of course, but you have to be quiet, okay?” She returned to the soundproof room and motioned for him to follow. “Computer, visitors present.”

  The computer beeped in acknowledgement, and a row of chairs fell out of the wall. Devin took his place in one of them as Sarah walked to the center of the room.

  She smiled shyly. “Last time someone sat in those chairs, I was auditioning, and my whole career depended on my being perfect.”

  “It’s only me this time.” She’s nervous. Can an AI get nervous?

  “All right, here goes…” Sarah squared her shoulders. “Computer, commence take seven.”

  “Command acknowledged. Commencing take seven.”

  Three tangerine lights lit up in front of Sarah, then went dark one by one as they counted down the tempo. Sarah closed her eyes in concentration as the instrumental introduction began.

  Devin slipped his hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out the scanner.

  Just drop it.

  But he couldn’t.

  “Story older than the skies…”

  The scanner whirred softly. For a moment, he thought Sarah must have heard, but she didn’t react.

  “Maybe something to be heard…”

  Devin had no idea how long the prototype scanner would take. Hopefully, it was comparable to the hospital scanners, which took less than a minute to complete their tasks. But it was designed to be compact and more extensive, and it was experimental at best.

  “Who is right, and what is real?”

  On the tiny screen, the progress bar filled so slowly. He soon forgot his impatience as Sarah’s rich emerald voice mesmerized him.

  “Words may end, but song prevails…”

  The song came to its ruminative conclusion. The scan was barely seventy percent complete.

  Fuck.

  Devin shut the scanner off and swiftly placed it in his jacket pocket. The last lingering notes of the instrumental coda faded.

  Sarah turned to him expectantly. “What did you think?”

  “It was perfect.”

  Devin wasn’t sure when he’d nodded off, but he awoke with a start when a waterlogged towel was flung onto his face. He tore it off. “What the hell?”

  Jane doubled over laughing. “You didn’t budge when I poked you, and… I couldn’t resist!”

  Devin shot her an annoyed look.

  She grinned. “I know, I know. ‘Oh, Pony, aren’t you a little old for these games?’”

  “Will you ever grow up?”

  “Ah, c’mon, you know you don’t want me to.”

  Devin marveled at her cheeriness. You’re right, Pony. I hope you never change.

  “I didn’t just wake you to be annoying.” She jerked her head at the viewscreen. “It’s time to get off autopilot.”

  A message blinked across the top: “The ship is approaching the Viatian system. Please switch to manual piloting.”

  After double-checking the coordinates, Devin disengaged autopilot and steered the ship toward Viate-5.

  Jane jumped into the copilot’s seat. “Just wondering, what’s your Netname?”

  “Archangel. It was Corsair’s idea of a joke.”

  She snorted. “You’re so full of it, bro. You love it. ’Fess up!”

  Devin smiled in response.

  “Speaking of Corsair, isn’t it a bad idea to use that thing?” Jane nodded at his slate. “Can’t it be traced?”

  “Not with the program I’m using.
Corsair wrote it himself. Each communication bounces off so many random signal towers, it’s impossible to find the origin. It’d be difficult to find a relevant message to trace in the first place with all the information flying through hyperspace. The program also forms a wrapper around any Netsites browsed.”

  Jane opened her mouth, then shut it and pulled her lips in, as if holding back a tidal wave of questions she wasn’t sure were okay to ask.

  Best to get to the point. “I think a criminal entity called No Name was behind both the attack on Dad and your friend’s kidnapping. I should’ve told you yesterday, but… I guess I just needed the time.” Devin explained what he knew about No Name, how they’d faked the seminary documents and how they were the only entity able to stage a crime so elaborately. “Even Citizen Zero wouldn’t have been able to hack Quasar’s central computer like that. Not to mention the police reports in the ensuing investigation.”

  Jane’s brow creased. “So… So this ‘No Name’ took Adam?”