Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict Read online

  “What about treatment?”

  “We can give you an alpha blocker, which relaxes the smooth muscle in there and lets the urine flow. Or you can take a hormone inhibitor, which treats the cause of the enlargement in the first place—but that can also damage your sex drive.”

  “And what else can you do?”

  “We can grow you a new gland, of course.”

  “Of course,” he said, thinking of his old pal the Tin Woodman, whose body was slowly taken over by replacement parts.

  “That’ll take a couple of weeks,” Mills said. “Maybe less, because we already have samples of your stem cells on ice and your genome programmed in the cooker.”

  “I suppose the replacement surgery will hurt?”

  “Oh, like a son of a bitch,” she agreed.

  * * *

  After her most recent late-evening call to Uncle Matteo, Callie Praxis sat up in bed for a couple of hours, cradling the now-disconnected phone handset, staring at the bedroom wall, and thinking bad thoughts. If she were still a smoker—a vice she gave up in her twenties when she was just out of college—she would have been halfway through a pack by now.

  The old man was actually out when she called, off on some early morning errand, and she had to talk with his son Carlo. She then made the mistake of trying to do her business through him. But really, she reasoned after her third imaginary cigarette, it wouldn’t have gone any better with Matteo himself.

  She had tried to be reasonable. “Given the amount of trouble your Ms. Kunstler has sown around here—” And when Carlo didn’t grasp the word sown, she had to interrupt herself and try again with spread and scattered. “—I think it’s best we cool our business relationship for a little while.”

  “She was working for you, Contessa,” he insisted, repeating his father’s line. “Certainly, if you did not have adequate controls …”

  “I thought she was honest. I thought your father and I had an honest relationship, an understanding. I was merely pointing out business opportunities—”

  “For which you were collecting a finder’s fees, yes?”

  “Well, yes,” she said. “But that was—”

  “Over and above the value in construction work that our investments enabled your company to obtain. Is this not one hand washing the other?”

  “Well, technically, but you—”

  “With us, it is no different. We cannot survive simply on the percentage returns from those investments. On the interest paid. There must also be incentives, gratuities—what do the English say? ‘Emoluments.’ Mariene was our agent to arrange and collect those emoluments.”

  “But in the United States—excuse me, the Federated Republic—such incentives are called ‘graft.’ They make everyone nervous. They involve the police and the courts. The head of my Legal Department is now investigating, and she’s a straight-arrow type, squeaky clean—not at all Italian in her outlook. So I need you to back off on the entitlements. And I need to stop bird-dogging your investments. I can’t take any more finder’s fees, because—well, because it looks bad.”

  The cell signal was quiet for a moment. The younger man’s face appeared frozen on her screen. “It is too late to put the genie back in the bottle, Contessa.”

  “You must trust me on this. We have to cool it while Mariene’s little stunt at bid rigging goes to trial and gets resolved.”

  “You don’t understand,” Carlo said. “Things are already in motion. We have hooks set all over the West Coast. You are merely the bait fish. You can’t swim away now. We own a piece of you.” With that, the carrier cut off and her earpiece went dead.

  So Callie sat up brooding and stubbing out imaginary cigarette butts, wondering how she could extricate herself from her dealings with the di Rienzis, or at least shield her company from the toxic side effects.

  * * *

  Antigone Wells was following her morning makeup routine at the dressing table. After carefully dabbing on foundation and powder, smoothing in blusher, lining her eyelids, brushing in shadow, and applying mascara to her lashes, she leaned in toward the mirror, turned her lips out in a tiny pout, and dabbed on her favorite hot-pink lip gloss. On the third pass with the applicator stick, her face suddenly changed before her eyes.

  The familiar, everyday face she knew and had been cleaning, moisturizing, and cherishing for years disappeared as if a mist had melted away. Her real face, the everyday face she wore to the public, the skin she was wearing now, became stunningly apparent. It started with the area around her mouth. Her lips radiated a network of tiny wrinkles. The corners of her mouth disappeared against two deep folds that started up around and along either side of her nose. Her eyes looked out of deep pockets whose underside failed of being lined and livid only because of the concealer and powder she used. Her cheeks sagged. Her jawline slumped into the beginnings of a double chin.

  Age has finally caught up with me, she thought sadly.

  Wells had known for years—really, for a couple of decades—that she could no longer pass for a fresh-faced girl of twenty or even thirty. But still she had accounted herself a handsome woman, needing only a touch or two of color and gloss to bring back the image of the girl she once was. Now all that greasepaint and powder looked thick and garish, hiding nothing and instead calling attention to itself, like a mask, like a clown’s makeup.

  It was true that John seemed to like her face well enough. When he looked into her eyes, she saw no hint of speculation, disappointment, or remorse. But would this present face be enough to hold him? She remembered that, at the beginning of their relationship, he would occasionally by mistake call her “Tippi”—confusing her with a film actress popular in the nineteen-sixties, during his own childhood. When Wells had looked up that woman online, she saw the resemblance immediately. She also noticed that the actress had perfect, flawless skin. One day John would wake up to her real face—an aging, sagging face, just as she was seeing it now. And what would he do then?

  She knew many women her age—and even a decade or two younger—who had turned to medical solutions to retain their beauty. They smoothed the wrinkles with botulinum toxin and collagen injections. They tightened sagging eyelids, cheeks, jaws, and throats with cosmetic surgery. They let the doctors trim, stretch, and pull at what was left of cheekbones and noses. But Wells could always spot these women and describe for herself exactly which procedures they had bought. To Wells, they didn’t look young and girlish but instead seemed pinched and severe, with faces pulled ever so slightly out of alignment, with narrowed eyes and tight, angry mouths. Witchlike, if not indeed simply frozen and lifeless. She wanted none of that.

  But now she was also going to be a mother, for the first time, and at almost seventy years of age. True, the boy would come from her body only through reference to her DNA, and not even from one of her own eggs. But he would know Antigone Wells as his mother, gaze up into her face, and call her “Mama,” while everyone looked on and tried to smile.

  “And I will look more like his grandmother,” she whispered to the mirror. “Not good, Antigone. Not good at all.”

  * * *

  On one of his rare visits to the Sansome Street headquarters, Brandon Praxis stopped by the cubicle where Penny Winston ran the technical end of the business from three console screens, a keyboard, and a microphone headset that clamped down on her curly brown hair. When she turned away from work to answer his knock he saw that, wonder of wonders, she was not wearing her usual jeans and vaguely subversive tee shirt. This morning—and maybe for a while now—she wore a navy-blue, polka-dot dress with a high neckline, a little white belt, and flouncy skirt. She also wore nylon stockings and matching, dark-blue pumps. She looked like an Iowa teenager heading off to church.

  Her eyes brightened and she smiled when she saw him.

  “Do you want to go get lunch?” he asked.

  “Gosh, is it noon already?”

  “Just about.”

  “Sure!”

  She took off the heads
et, ruffled her hair with her fingertips, and stood up from her desk chair. The dress swirled around her knees. She picked up a light jacket—one without camouflage—and joined him in the hallway. He noticed she didn’t bother to close down any applications or switch off any devices. Then he remembered that she did not actually run the computer system so much as collaborate with it.

  “Where do we eat?” she asked.

  “By now, you know this neighborhood better than I do.”

  “Okay. Um … do you like vegetarian Chinese?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Are you a vegan?”

  “Not normally.” She grinned. “But it’s the only kind where they don’t chop up the meat with the bones still inside.”

  Brandon grinned in return. That summed up his feelings about truly ethnic Chinese cooking—the only kind you could get this close to Chinatown. “You lead,” he said.

  As they had settled into the booth at the Jade Garden, Brandon suggested Penny order for both of them. Instead, she discussed choices from the menu and gave him veto power, which he found the most satisfactory solution. When the waiter brought a pot of black tea, she picked up a plastic chopstick, opened the lid, and stirred at the leaves inside.

  “You know …” she said, then pinched her lips together.

  “What?” he asked. She seemed suddenly shy.

  “Never mind. It’s not your concern.”

  “No, you started to say …?”

  “Well, I guess you should know, as head of security.”

  “Are you having trouble? Is someone harassing you?”

  “Nothing like that. Just … I think you’ve got a ghost.”

  “I don’t understand. You mean, in the building?”

  “No, in your computer. Kind of a presence.”

  “What does it, um, look like?” he asked.

  “I haven’t actually seen it!” she said.

  “How do you know it’s there?”

  “Because Rover says so.”

  “Does he … tell you … what it looks like?”

  “He hasn’t actually seen it, either. But he senses something. Sometimes bits of data will appear in a database and then, when he tries to run a trace, they suddenly go missing. It’s as if he’s growing a little … forgetful.”

  “Can that happen to an intelligence?” Brandon wondered.

  “Not with the six terabytes of extra capacity we built into him.”

  “Then could it be another intelligence? Maybe one playing games?”

  “Not in the same system. That would be … oh, schizophrenic.”

  “Well, I’m not sure what I can do about this. Have you talked to Callie?”

  “Not yet. I don’t have more than a notion—just Rover’s suspicions.”

  “Please tell me when you’ve got something solid. I work better with a target.”

  “And you’re good at cleaning up things,” she said with a grin.

  “Hush, Penny!” he whispered. “That’s gotta be our secret.”

  Still grinning, she twisted her fingers in front of her lips and then brushed them off—locking her mouth and throwing away the key—just as the waiter came to take their order.

  * * *

  After the required nine months, plus or minus two weeks, Antigone Wells returned with John to collect their new son. They were met at Parthenotics, Inc.’s offices by their first counselor—now their case worker—Ashley Benedict. She had a folder of paperwork for them to sign and final payments to arrange.

  Among other things, Benedict produced a certificate from the City and County of San Francisco attesting that Alexander Wells Praxis—they had settled on the first name to honor John’s immigrant grandfather, the other two so that their family names were conjoined—was “the biological offspring and adopted child of one Ioannis Mixalis Praxis, a widowed man, and Antigone Leigh Wells, an unmarried woman,” that the baby had been born within geographic confines of the county, and that he thus had full citizenship rights in the State of California, Federated Republic of America. He was as legal as could be.

  When they were done with the business end of the transaction, a female attendant in hospital whites brought in an articulated crèche/carrier basket and set it on the conference table.

  Wells stood up and peered into the carrier’s recesses. A pale, chubby face nestled among the folds of a light-blue blanket shifted and looked up into the shadow that her head was casting. She stared into his eyes—they were dark blue and quite self-aware. She studied his nose. She opened his blanket to count fingers and toes. She even pulled the tabs on his diaper and examined his tiny penis, which had already been circumcised.

  “He’s perfect,” the attendant said happily.

  It seemed so. All the parts were there. Everything had the correct form, for a newborn. Wells didn’t know exactly what she had expected. Talons? Cloven hooves? But still … She was haunted by those thousand other embryos—or “parthenotes”—tiny proto-Alexanders, down to his pearly, shell-like fingernails, who had failed to survive, who had not made “the first cull.”

  “Is anything wrong?” John asked. “You’re frowning, like you’re worried.”

  “No. No. … He’s perfect,” she answered, consciously echoing the attendant.

  John bent his head over the carrier. “Hello, baby boy. Welcome to the family.”

  4. Retribution

  Wearing special goggles that let her view code actions from several perspectives at once within the system, and with a lagging time scale that allowed for her limited human senses, Penny Winston watched as Rover dealt with his spasms of forgetfulness. What she saw reaffirmed the claim of the AI’s original programmer, that his software was more than a collection of canned responses, that it was truly intelligent and could reason, plan, and learn. She also concluded that Rover must have been assembled with a few engrams traced from feline neural systems.

  Because Rover could not both spot a new piece of data when it appeared in any of a number of random databases and then trace it when it immediately disappeared, he quickly figured out a way to bait a trap. Working from the partial data structures and code fragments he retained from his nano-second captures of the disappearing objects, he fashioned a bogus entry of the same shape and size from one of Callista Praxis’s old expense reports. Penny hoped Rover would have the good sense to track down and kill the false data later, or else it was going to play hob with the company’s monthly and annual accounting rollups.

  Rover dropped the bogus entry into one of the databases that seemed to be compromised. Then, like a cat at a mouse hole, he watched that database. Whole seconds passed—a lifetime on the time scale at which the system worked, and long even at the speed shift built into Penny’s goggles. But after almost a minute of waiting, a retrieval order came and took the prize. Rover was paying full attention, tagged the order, and followed it back to the originating application.

  When he identified the culprit for Penny, she sat up in surprise. That piece of software was operating way outside its parameters, entering databases that had nothing to do with its original function. And she knew for a fact, seconded by Rover’s appraisal, that it was not supposed to be intelligent—not by five sigmas.

  Penny did not want to take the news to Callista or John Praxis, or not just yet. For one thing, she wasn’t sure about her position with them: both the president and the chief executive officer—older people who were set in their ways—seemed to have taken a dislike to her manner or her style or something. Maybe they just weren’t comfortable around creative people. For another, Penny understood that they shared some secret about the origins of the malfunctioning piece of software—it actually met her definition of malware—and she wasn’t sure how an accusation in that corner would sit with them.

  But she did trust Brandon Praxis. Despite his seriousness and his bad-boy aura—ex-military, extra-legal, and with the hint of death and danger about him—she had felt a bond growing between them. They also shared a secret, one that made them bot
h vulnerable. Brandon wouldn’t turn on her, even in a family matter.

  She called him on his smartphone and suggested they have lunch again.

  “Is this like, our second date?” he asked. She could sense him grinning.

  “If you want …” she said coyly. Then she sobered. “No, really, it’s follow-up to the problem we discussed the last time. I think I have a target now.”

  “Oh, good. What is it?”

  “I don’t like to say over the phone.”

  “Is somebody there with you? Somebody listening?”

  “No, but voice packets go through the system. And this has to be verbal—sound waves only and through the air.”

  “Lunch in the same place?” he suggested. “Say about an hour?”

  “Let’s do barbecue instead.”

  * * *

  Brandon Praxis watched in fascination as Penny licked sauce off each fingertip, sucked the pad of her thumb, wiped them on a paper napkin, and picked up another rib. She waved it in the air before she started speaking again.

  “So Rover followed the fetch order back to its send point,” she said. “And what do you think he found?”

  “Nothing good, I imagine,” Brandon said.

  “Bingo! The order came from a fifth-generation version of the Stochastic Design and Development package, installed by Tallyman Systems.” She bit a chunk of fat meat out of the rib and chewed it, waiting for his response. “Ring any bells?” she finally prompted him.

  “Vaguely. It has something to do with building sewers or transit systems, doesn’t it? I really don’t know much about the engineering end of the business.”

  “Right! It has everything to do with sewers, subways, and anything else that grows like a vine or a root system and responds to pressures like demographics and usage patterns. But it has no business looking into the company’s accounting system and personnel files. But that’s not the weirdest part.”

  “Which is …?”

  “It comes with its own mother-ass big database—freeform structure, not related to any of its programmed inputs or outputs, and three times larger than the app’s deepest stack. Dimensionally, it’s way more overhead than the SD&D software needs. But that’s still not the reason I called you.”