Protocol 7 Read online

  Simon took it automatically and weighed it in his hand. It was about the size of an old-fashioned paperback, but denser, more carefully bound.

  He suddenly realized what it was. “It’s a diary,” he said, almost to himself. “My father’s diary?”

  Jonathan gave him a sad smile. “In a manner of speaking,” he said.

  Simon opened the book and found a series of diagrams—notations that looked oddly algebraic but made no sense, grids of black and white boxes with figures and numbers squiggled inside, all in his father’s unique handwriting.

  “It’s a chess journal,” he said to himself, more than a little taken aback. “My father’s chess journal.”

  Oliver had been an avid chess player. He’d taught Simon how to play when the boy was barely old enough to reach the table, and they had spent endless hours together, at war on the black-and-white battlefield. But Simon had never known him to keep a chess diary. Even the idea of it seemed strange and slightly alien to him.

  And now it was the only thing he had to remember his father. That, and an odd video message he somehow knew was a lie.

  Jonathan took a small black memory card from his pocket and laid it on an illuminated patch of the tabletop. He touched a few glowing keys, then lifted his face and spoke to the household AI again. “Fae, did you record that feed?”

  “Of course, Jonathan.”

  “Then erase it, please,” he said as he picked up the black card. “Then erase it again, and then frag the sector. Make it completely unrecoverable. Then lift the Poindexter field. If you leave it on too long, it might be noticed.”

  “All right.” The AI didn’t argue for a change; it simply did as it was told.

  Jonathan’s fingers flew across the virtual keyboard. Simon watched as his old friend erased the video file, dissolving the black diamond that had been hiding in the treasure chest, and then dissolving the chest as well.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Crashing ItzyBitzyVille for a few hours. Don’t worry, it’ll come back. Wouldn’t want to traumatize the little ones.” It happened quickly, in little more than a dozen keystrokes.

  “Haven’t lost your knack for hacking,” Simon observed grimly.

  “Necessary tool of the trade, believe me.” When Jonathan was finished, the cube fell back into the black strip, and then the strip itself faded into the end table’s wood grain. It was gone in moments, as if it was never there.

  As if the message itself had never existed.

  “Mission accomplished, Jonathan.”

  “Thank you, Fae. I always knew you’d make a fine operative.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  Jonathan turned to his old friend and held out the black card. “This is the one and only copy of his message to you. It’s not recorded anywhere else, not in the cloud or on a hard drive. Touch the corners of the card here and here, and it will project the holo in a meter-wide cube. Touch the other corners, like this…then confirm…and you’ll destroy the file forever. Real Mission: Impossible self-destruct stuff. Clear?”

  Simon had been watching very closely. He nodded. “Clear.”

  “And I don’t have to tell you not to send it over the net or try and make a copy.”

  Simon shook his head. He felt numb from head to toe. “No, you don’t.”

  “Didn’t think so.”

  Jonathan stood and moved briskly, retrieving his raincoat and shaking out his hat, still damp from the downpour.

  Simon got to his feet as well, surprised and a little chilled. “You’re leaving?”

  Jonathan gave him a wry smile. “At the risk of sounding cliché…I was never here.”

  “Where are you supposed to be?”

  “Washington,” he said briefly. He wasn’t inclined to give details.

  “Then what?”

  He looked frankly at his old friend, his deep brown eyes glittering. “To tell you the truth, Simon…I really don’t know.”

  He tightened his belt and turned away. “Walk me to the door,” he said.

  Neither man spoke as they crossed the apartment. Simon knew better than to mention the video, not with the possibility of being overheard.

  “I hope you’ll come back for a real visit soon,” he said as he put his hand on the front door.

  “I will. At least, I’ll try. I just hope I was…helpful.”

  Simon offered up a tiny, sad smile. “To quote a wise man, Jonathan, I really don’t know.”

  Jonathan nodded. “Fair enough.”

  He gave him a brief, heartfelt hug. “Soon, Simon.”

  “Soon, Jonathan.”

  He pulled away and ducked into the rainstorm. It had only grown worse since his arrival a bare hour earlier. But just before he saw his friend disappear into the night, Simon had a sudden thought. He threw himself into the darkness, ignored the pelting rain, and followed his friend into the drive.

  “Jonathan! Wait!”

  He caught up to him as he was opening the door to his anonymous black car. Jonathan turned to face him with an oddly guarded expression; one that said ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.

  “Just one thing,” Simon said, barely able to hear his own voice over the roar of the rain. “Where is Victoria Land?”

  Jonathan grinned in spite of himself and shook his head. “Geography never was your best subject, was it?” He focused his dark eyes on his oldest friend in the world. “Antarctica, Simon,” he said. “Next to the Ross Ice Shelf.”

  Then he got into his car and drove away.

  Simon stood in the storm for a long moment as the car drifted down the drive, taillights flaring as it turned and surged silently into the night. Then he turned and looked back at his apartment building.

  It was one of four flats in an odd little two-story building—pink stone, white cornices, and a circular turret at each end for his octagonal dining room, all windows and wood. Fae had left the porch light on; he could see the flickering fire of the study in the window far to one side and the warm glow in the dining room in the windows of the turret. There was a twisting blue light coming from a window on the far side as well: his neighbor, Mrs. Ellingsworth, was still watching her “telly” late into the night. The multi-colored glow of the display twinkled against her rain-spattered window.

  It should have been a comforting sight. He had come to love his digs; his apartment had become a true home for him—not an easy thing to accomplish for a childless, single man in his mid-thirties.

  But it didn’t matter to him. Not now. All he could see was the image of his father, smiling stiffly, hiding something horrible behind his eyes. Ha. Ha.

  He had to do something about it. He had to.

  THE ROOM WITH NO WINDOWS

  An Undisclosed Location

  The man who called himself “Blackburn” stood in the exact center of the room he had commandeered for his private communications. It was a perfectly cubical space; its walls were made of featureless, nearly translucent modules. It was absolutely silent in the room; this far below the surface, not even the movement of the air itself made a sound.

  He was staring at a frozen holo-display floating in the air in front of him—a single, motionless image, no bigger than a dinner plate, captured hours earlier by a mobile security cam roaming London. A slice of features belonging to the only human in the image was barely identifiable by facial recognition software that tagged the subject’s identity and forwarded the information to Blackburn, immediately and automatically.

  It was an image of one of the many people Blackburn kept tabs on at all times. The man in question was that important—and that dangerous.

  “Jonathan Weiss,” he said aloud.

  Mr. Weiss was a clever man. That cleverness had made him very useful to Blackburn for quite some time. But now…too clever by half. Too clever for his own good.

  The camera had caught him sprinting back to his anonymously rented car in the middle of a cloudburst, fleeing from an odd and lovely British apartment building
, complete with red brick turrets and fire-lit windows. It was the home of one Simon Fitzpatrick—a man that Jonathan Weiss had been ordered to avoid at all costs. Another dangerous man—but dangerous in an entirely different way.

  Internal audio of their meeting was unavailable; thread interrogation had failed as well. But that didn’t matter to Blackburn. The image itself was enough, because Weiss wasn’t supposed to be in London. He wasn’t even supposed to be in that hemisphere. And his presence there—his meeting with Fitzpatrick, no matter the reason—was absolutely forbidden.

  Blackburn sighed bitterly. He hated to admit it, and it had taken an unusually long time by his exacting standards, but Jonathan Weiss had finally outlived his usefulness.

  Without moving from the exact center of his windowless room, Blackburn touched his right ear and initiated a call to one of the very few people who had direct contact with him. It took only moments to convey his wishes. It took even less time to receive confirmation.

  The instant the command was given and accepted, he put it aside. He had far more important things to attend to. Things that would change the world.

  This, at least, is settled, he told himself.

  He was wrong.

  OXFORD, ENGLAND

  Oxford University, College of Robotics

  Simon knocked on the wooden door as hard as he could. Nothing happened. Thirty seconds later, he knocked again. Still nothing.

  Oxford’s College of Robotics was housed in some of the university’s oldest buildings—quite a statement for a university that was almost nine hundred years old. In fact, it was actually a collection of cottages and low-slung warehouses, some erected centuries ago, some put up as recently as a year ago. In the middle of the confusion was a two-story stone-and-plaster house with a wood-shingle roof: the office, home, and laboratory for one of the most respected and least liked experts in the field, and one of Oliver Fitzpatrick’s oldest friends.

  And Simon needed to see him. Now.

  He knocked a third time, waited an impatient ten seconds, then turned the knob and pushed his way in. Of course it’s not locked, he told himself. It never is.

  It looked as if a small bomb had exploded in the entryway: papers strewn everywhere, teetering stacks of old books, data chips scattered like snack food. The furniture—what he could see of it—was almost as ancient as the house and remarkably ugly. The tiny-paned windows were blurred with grime, and most horizontal surfaces were dull with dust.

  “Hell of a housekeeper,” Simon muttered to himself, and stumped down the hallway to the basement stairs. “Hayden!” he shouted as he dodged the debris. “HAYDEN!”

  A high-pitched, young female voice with a pronounced Liverpool accent called up from below. “Down here, Dr. Fitzpatrick!”

  Oh, great, Simon thought. She’s here, too.

  He was careful going down the stairs—at least two of the steps were dark with rot and cracked from end to end. As he descended, the quality of light changed from the dim reflected sunlight of the untended rooms above to the blue-white glow of the workspace. It made his eyes hurt even though he knew what to expect.

  He had to step over an upturned stool to completely enter the lab. The room was huge compared to the space above, at least three times the floor space and twice the height, slightly too cold to be comfortable and absolutely without scent or shadow. It was almost inhumanly tidy as well: every piece of equipment was in its place on a labeled shelf, every worktop was clear and clean. Even the piles of printouts on the desk (and who other than Hayden still used printouts, Simon wondered idly) were stacked with geometric precision. None of that was the work of Hayden’s brilliant but disorganized mind, he knew. No, that was someone else’s doing entirely.

  The robot responsible for the extraordinary organization turned part of its jumbled face-panel toward him as he entered. “You usually call ahead,” its female voice emanated from somewhere near the center of its seething metallic mass. “You did not think that was necessary on this occasion?”

  “Lovely to see you as well, T.E.A.H.,” he said acidly.

  He stopped short when he saw what his father’s old friend and his prize robot were doing. They were facing each other, hunched over a small rectangular panel, heads down, in deep contemplation.

  Chess, he thought, and smiled to himself. I should have known.

  “Why do you do that, Simon?” Hayden grumbled. “Call her by the full designation? You know it just sets her off. Just call her Teah.”

  Simon blinked innocently. “Does it?”

  Hayden sighed deeply. “Oh, for pity’s sake…”

  Something and whirred in Teah’s sensor array. “Your pulse is slightly elevated, Professor,” she said to Simon. “Subcutaneous capillary action is above average, and detectable encephalic activity is accelerated as well. What is bothering you so?”

  “I don’t believe that’s any of your business, Teah,” he said.

  “Ah. Apparently I have exceeded the social paradigm assigned to casual conversation,” the robot said stiffly, “though why you would withhold such unimportant situational data begs a host of other even more significant queries—”

  Simon swept up the walnut-sized AI relay that connected Hayden to his robot regardless of distance—their little dedicated intercom/cell phone. He dumped it unceremoniously into a cup of cold coffee that sat at the edge of a table.

  “What the devil?” Hayden said, sitting up straight for the first time.

  “That was rather pointless,” Teah said, sounding more puzzled than upset. “Now you will simply have to buy another relay.”

  “And I will have to shout to make myself heard if she’s a room away! Damn it, Simon!”

  “I’m terribly sorry,” he said with complete insincerity. “How clumsy of me.”

  “You seem to think sarcasm is beyond the range of my sensors,” Teah said with a tone that sounded remarkably like condescension. “I assure you, it is not. I am well aware of your low opinion of me.”

  “And yet you continue to speak to me. How thoroughly…inexplicable.”

  Hayden stood up, groaning. “Aaaaaallll right, enough, enough. Teah, would you be kind enough to prepare tea and bring it in for us?” He cocked a bushy eyebrow at Simon. “Or coffee? A shot of Glenfiddich?”

  “Tea is fine, Hayden, thank you.”

  “It would be my pleasure to serve you, Doctor,” the robot said, then slithered and clanked away from the makeshift chess table to the doorway that led deeper into the underground complex. When she was well out of sight, Hayden turned to regard his younger friend. “Well?” he said gruffly. “What is your problem?”

  Hayden was skinny and tall with a scruffy beard that seemed to cling precariously to his leathery face. His white hair badly needed a trim; it fell in flat, straight, silvery wings on both sides of his high-browed forehead.

  Simon was glad to see him; though Hayden was only ten years older than Simon himself, he had always been one of the few friends of his father that he actually liked. And he also happened to be one of the most brilliant thinkers in the UK. He reveled in his role as a curmudgeon. He did not suffer fools gladly, and though he rarely smiled, he had a sense of humor as sharp as a scalpel. As far as Simon was concerned, his only real flaw was his attitude about AIs. He loved them—more than humanity itself—while Simon, on the other hand, could barely stand sharing the planet with them.

  “I don’t think she likes me,” Simon observed, casting an eye at the doorway where Teah had retreated.

  “Oh, Teah likes everyone,” the scientist said, waving it away. “Except you, of course. Now what’s up?”

  Before Simon began to explain what he had come for, he asked, “Hayden, why don’t you have our Industrial Designer at least give her a facelift? She’s one of the most complex forms of robot out there but still looks like something from a bad sci-fi movie.”

  Hayden ignored the comment. “Go on,” he said.

  Simon had been thinking about how to broach the subjec
t for hours—ever since he’d left his own flat. He still wasn’t quite sure how to begin. But he opened his mouth, took a breath—

  —and a gawky, slightly disheveled grad student rounded the corner, appearing from behind an eight-foot pile of equipment, staring at a floating readout and completely unaware of Simon’s presence.

  “Scan’s all done, Hayden,” the grad student chirped. “No bugs. Not a one.”

  Hayden scowled. “Well, shit,” he said. “I was hoping…”

  The student stopped short, suddenly aware of the new arrival. A moment later, he grinned in happy recognition. “Professor Fitzpatrick!” he said. “Cool!”

  Simon recognized him immediately. “Andrew?” Andrew was the epitome of a perpetual grad student—a happy-go-lucky fellow well into his twenties who had never quite grown up: a tousled mass of blonde hair, thin shoulders and thinner hips with barely a hint of muscle tone, bright green eyes, and a sharp British nose. But appearances can be deceiving, Simon told himself. No one would guess that this young man was the single brightest student that Oxford’s College of Robotics had seen in more than twenty years. Hayden thought so, and Simon’s own experience with the boy had proven him right. They were more than happy to let him stay on for a few extra years, just to enjoy the benefits of his remarkable brain.

  “Never mind then. Andrew, take a seat. Simon, you’re here for a reason. I know that. Now sit down and spill your guts.”

  Still, Simon hesitated. He didn’t want to look Hayden straight in the eye, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to mention this all in front of Andrew.

  As usual, Hayden anticipated him. “You can trust him,” he said, tilting his head toward the grad student. “I do. And trust me, there’s plenty to trust him with around here.”

  Simon thought about it for a moment as he stared at the chessboard, then came to a decision.

  All right then, he told himself. Then he looked at his father’s best friend and said, “Hayden, I think Dad is still alive.”

  Hayden lifted his sky-blue eyes and looked directly into Simon for the first time. Those eyes had always terrified him a little. They could see so much—too much, actually.