They walk down the street under red and black drones forming kanji that cast shadows in the fall of snow.
“It’s beautiful,” Philip says. “Probably the most reactionary propaganda, and viciously racist to boot, but even so, beautiful, no?”
The kanji pulse, dissolve, re-form. The city seems older now. No one is watching. She links arms with her friend, brushes snow from the shoulders of his overcoat. She feels a sense of impending relief, as on the last stage of a journey.
*
A frozen cloud has settled over the street which makes nearby things look like distant abstractions, and the air is so cold it burns her lungs and then Philip looks up from the map and says, “This is it.”
Before them is a blank facade encrusted with snow, and at first glance its featurelessness reads as sinister but actually it’s just functional, the kind of nameless structure she’s been ignoring all her life.
Philip leads her into an alley floored in dirty, fragmented ice and half-interred beer cans. The building’s side is as blank as the front except for an unmarked door. It’s like the secret entrance to a monumental tomb in industrial vernacular. She remembers the ziggurat Cromwell plans to raise in Magda’s honor. Philip does something with his phone—the door’s lock clicks.
“The locks here are easy,” Philip says. “Probably because no one really steals. Suckers.” He opens the door for her, her gentleman companion bowing her into the abyss.
She steps into a blackness absolute except for geometrically precise grids of winking green lights. It’s a server farm, she realizes, as her eyes adjust; the lights are from computers in their wall-mounted racks.
Corridor upon corridor and all alike. No windows and the only sound the humming of machines. She checks her phone’s GPS—they’re almost at the node’s latitude and longitude, but still fifty feet too high.
There’s an elevator but it’s key-card access. Philip says, “Might draw attention. Better not.”
She finds what looks like a closet door opening onto a metal spiral staircase, going down. It’s cramped, steep, barely wide enough for her shoulders, probably to make space for more servers, a function of the stratospheric prices of Tokyo real estate.
The stairs lead down to a second floor identical to the first one. More stairs, more floors, and she starts to feel she’s in a nightmare of repeated rooms and useless motion. The last staircase opens onto a concrete tunnel lined with still more racks of servers.
“Looks like a civil defense tunnel,” Philip says. The echo confirms her budding claustrophobia. “From when they thought the U.S. was going to nuke them again. A friend of mine found one under his house and turned it into a wine cellar.”
Phone in hand, she trails a fingertip over the servers’ uniform black chassis. Even colder, down here—she wishes she had gloves. The altitude is right, and then the latitude is right, and then she finds the one.
The node, the famous node, seems to be a server like any other. She scrutinizes it closely but finds nothing, wonders if she’s been wasting her time. No way you could run an AI on it—all the servers in the building would barely be enough for a toy one.
“That’s it?” Philip asks. “It doesn’t look like much.”
“I was thinking the same thing.”
“Hmmn. Let’s have a look at the network traffic.” He makes passes on his phone, cursing quietly at first, then with ardor. “Done. It’s oddly proactive about looking for new wireless networks, and, Jesus fuck, the bandwidth is really high. No matter … There’s a lot of traffic but it’s hard to interpret. Have a look.”
He hands her his phone. Data trickles by on the screen so she ups the resolution and now it comes in a rush, faster than the eye could follow but all written into her other memory, and as it accumulates she sees it’s encrypted but she shrugs off the encoding and stares into the flow of revealed static for a long moment before her perception starts flickering and she know what she’s seeing.
“It’s glyphs,” she says. “It’s sending and receiving glyphs. It really is an AI.”
Philip regards the server skeptically. “That seems like a stretch. They could be recorded. Want me to open it up?”
She nods and he produces a multi-bit screwdriver from inside his coat, the same Calatrava he wore to Fant?me. His hands explore the server’s hull with a deftness she remembers. “It’s been a long time since I’ve been this hands-on,” he says. “God, it’s cold. Reminds me of the old days of theft and poverty. Ah, youth.”
He sets aside the top half of the server’s case. “Christ,” he says. She looks over his shoulder, sees an ordinary-looking motherboard and on it a lump of metal the size of a golf ball, gleaming bluely in the dim light, its surface slightly crystalline. It’s wired directly to the power supply.
“What is that?” she asks.
“A gross manufacturing error, I’d say, in other circumstances. As it is, I can’t imagine.” He touches it gently with a fingertip. “It feels wrong for explosives, so that’s something.”
“Wait,” she says. “I know what this is. I saw it in Cromwell’s office. He said it was a kind of computer, but the one he had didn’t work—he said it was an improperly assembled prototype. The AI must be running on this.” It crosses her mind that this is, in some sense, the AI’s soul, and how fitting, for such an ethereal being, that its soul is purely material. “Can I borrow your phone?”
She can see Philip formulating objections, but he says nothing, gives her his phone.
She taps in her soldier’s number.
It’s evening in California. He answers on the first ring.
“I’m going to create an opening,” she says.
“When?”
“Probably the next ten minutes.”
“Very good. We’ll get in position.”
She remembers what happened with Cloudbreaker, wonders what she’s getting into. “If you see an opening, go. Don’t hesitate. I might be unavailable.”
“Acknowledged. I’ll attack as opportunity affords,” he says, sounding detached now, like he’s already subsuming himself in his function.
She hands the phone back.
“Here I go,” she says.
“Are you sure this is a sound plan?” Philip says. “Cromwell is rational. It seems obvious that this is bait, and that he’ll be exposing himself. Okay, so he likes Magda, but there are other women.”
“Maybe so, but would you do it for me?”
He says nothing.
“I’ll be as quick as I can,” she says. “Keep an eye on me, okay?”
“Okay,” he says.
She turns on her implant’s wireless.
62
Flaw in His Vision
Kern waits for dawn on the black ship’s deck.