The Agile Four Read online

  She’d dropped her bag while dragging him back here; she darted and arm out for it and stashed her panties and bra inside. There was no time for niceties. There was only this terrible moment.

  Andrew scrambled to his feet beside her.

  He had one leg in his pants before Chloe was composed. She turned to leave, but he reached out and grabbed her wrist.

  “Don’t go, Chloe. Please, for the love of God, this is too good to let go. We have to talk. I have to see you again.”

  “Let go of my arm.”

  “I won’t let go until you agree to see me again.”

  Without thinking, Chloe slapped Andrew with her open palm.

  Shocked, he let go.

  She stepped backward, unwilling to take her eyes off him.

  “If you want to see me again, make an appointment at the spa. You’re done getting fucked for free.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Chloe is back home.”

  “I know, Parker,” Alexa said.

  “Our cameras picked her up leaving the park. She looked like a fucking clown with the makeup streaming down her face. I’d say there’s a good chance she’s had it out with Andrew.”

  “I know, Parker.”

  “But at least he told her the ‘junkie friend’ thing. You think she bought it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “The feed cut out. Did the techs tell you what they saw in the glitch when we lost them at the restaurant?”

  “Yes, Parker.”

  “Well? How is Chloe’s porter able to extend its reach that far from her canvas? We gave her that terminal, for fuck’s sake. Shouldn’t we be able to control it?”

  “Clearly not. Haven’t you had any interactions even with your own porter that suggest The Beam has a way of controlling itself?”

  “What do you mean? No, of course not.”

  “Well.”

  “Well what?”

  Alexa said nothing. She was still tapping on her screen, its back to Parker.

  “Are you listening to me, Alexa?”

  “You came to me. You want to talk, go ahead. But don’t expect me to throw you a party for showing up.”

  Parker looked aghast. “We’re in this Chloe thing together, aren’t we?”

  “I guess.”

  “You guess?”

  Alexa finally snapped. She looked up at him with hard eyes, her full attention finally upon him whether he wanted it or not.

  “Yes, Parker. I guess we are. But you’re not always the best partner. You’re like a goddamn yappy dog, always clamoring for attention. But you’ll pardon me if I don’t always have time to make you feel important. There’s work to do, and I can’t shake the feeling that a clock is ticking.”

  Parker looked stricken. With uncharacteristic humility he said, “Okay. Fair. But I’m not clamoring for attention right now. I’m asking you to address this situation we’ve gotten ourselves into. Together.”

  “I just want to solve it, Parker. That’s all I ever wanted.”

  “Me too. Talk to me. You know something.”

  “I’m just trying to untie a knot.”

  “Which knot?”

  “I’ll tell you when I’m finished.”

  Parker shook his head. Reached over and placed a hand on the back of the canvas, then closed its lid.

  “You’re working on it like an old Internet laptop. No holo webs, no quasi-immersion. You’re typing and tapping instead of asking your avatar for what you want. Either you’re really going on a bohemian jag right now—”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “—or you’re trying to hide your work.”

  Alexa felt her Checkmate expression and realized that she had no reply.

  “I’m not asshole enough to work on the things I’m hiding in front of you. I duck out when you show up like I used to hide porn from my mother.”

  “What are you hiding from me?”

  “Let’s start with you, Alexa.” He looked at the closed canvas. “Or if you prefer, I can waste your entire day filibustering and you’ll never get back to solving it.”

  Alexa sighed. This was overdue — and Parker was right in another way he’d surely realized but hadn’t said. The fact that Alexa had continued plinking away on the Chloe issue clearly said that she was looking to get caught. The lies were exhausting. Even Sarah’s motives countered hers, and Alexa had no one to fully confide in.

  Might as well be Parker. For both their greater goods, his stunts with Andrew had to be water under the bridge.

  She sighed. Parker waited.

  “I contacted Caspian White.”

  “Caspian …” He blinked; it was as if Alexa had said she’d gone to see the Wizard of Oz or the Tooth Fairy. “You’re kidding.”

  “I’m not kidding.”

  “Why?”

  “Remember how he had those connections to the Russian mafia? Remember how he pulled rank and tossed his weight around when he found out the truth about Kylie?”

  “Vaguely.”

  “You know him, Parker. We both do. Was there ever any chance — really — that a little thing like the NAU’s isolation was going to stop Caspian White from keeping his ties to the Wild East if he felt it’d give him leverage over someone, somewhere, at some time?”

  “Okay. So, what, you just called him up? For kicks? To talk about the mob?”

  Alexa sighed again, then asked Parker to sit. For ten minutes, she held nothing back. Finally having no secrets — from one person, at least — was more of a relief than she could have imagined.

  Alexa told Parker about her dilemma with Sarah, and Sarah’s refusal to divulge what she knew. She told Parker about the Quark insider data that the Russians had sucked through the network and stored. She told him how that old data covered the time of Chloe’s conception and birth, and how Alexa had a hunch that running that raw data through an AI physically separate from The Beam might reveal the truth that Sarah refused to divulge.

  How was Chloe conceived?

  Who was her father?

  And what did it all mean?

  Alexa spilled it all. She told him about her deal with Caspian — his Wild East information in exchange for giving him membership in an exclusive group above even Parker’s level of access. She told him what Caspian’s data had revealed. She told him that the breach into their conference room yesterday had in fact been Alexa’s doing — that she’d wanted Chloe to learn the truth about Andrew, and how O and her boyfriend had conspired to betray her.

  Parker took it well. If anything, he seemed most irked by her mention of Panel, which Parker’s ego wanted desperately to join the second he learned it existed. That would never happen, of course. But it was a fight for another day.

  “Why didn’t you just let Andrew tell her the lie?” Parker asked when Alexa finished. “It’s risky, what you did. It doesn’t just blow his cover and credibility with Chloe. It blows our cover, too. Aren’t you afraid we’ll lose control?”

  Alexa paused before responding. Something had changed in Parker. He hadn’t bitched about Alexa going to Caspian and he wasn’t bitching about what she’d done to blow the Andrew secret with Chloe. That would have been his usual pattern. But now he merely seemed to accept it, wanting more to understand than criticize. It was as if he’d come to respect her anew in the past few minutes of explanation. As if seeing the full picture, Parker finally knew his rightful place.

  “We’d already lost control,” Alexa said. “Trying to pretend we had any left was wishful thinking. The truth is — and has been for a long time — Chloe will do what she wants. Based on what Caspian’s data reveals about her origin, that will only become increasingly true as The Beam rolls out. I get the feeling that we’ve exhausted our attempts to deal with Chloe as an underling. If we still have a chance, we need to do it as peers.”

  “What, do you want to add Chloe to the O board or something?” Parker was kidding, but also sort of not.

  “I just want to play straight
with her. I don’t know what happened when the feed cut off any more than you did, but I’m going to assume Chloe and Andrew had it out. I’m going to assume she didn’t just keep her mouth shut and nod politely when he told her that bullshit you wanted him to tell her. If that’s true, then she and Andrew are now on equal footing. They may reconcile and they may not. Same with us: O and Chloe are — or soon will be — more or less on equal ground. We still hold the power, but there aren’t many more secrets. And you’re forgetting something else, Parker: With what we know about Chloe now, do you seriously think we could have kept this from her for much longer?”

  Parker thought. He shook his head. “I guess not. Even if she doesn’t learn through The Beam, she’d figure it out by plain old intuition.”

  “Which, in Chloe’s case, is anything but ‘plain old.’ You said she might learn through The Beam and then you said she might learn through intuition. But the more I think about it, I wonder if they are two facets of the same thing for her.”

  Parker nodded.

  “Besides,” Alexa went on, “I’d gotten this feeling for a while that the whole experiment was too one-sided. We’re trying to study her reaction to a real relationship, but we’re manufacturing the relationship instead of letting it be real. You remember what it was like to be young and in love, right? In the way it used to happen before the Internet became the thing that ate us all? It wasn’t flowers and butterflies. I don’t know about you, but I remember those first loves hurting as much as they felt good. Hell, they hurt because they felt so good — I’d feel a painful longing for my boyfriend of the week. Why shelter Chloe if we want to study her? We needed to take our hands off. Not interfere. Stop protecting her from heartbreak.”

  “We’re going to learn more about her capacity for sex and love now that she’s heartbroken and betrayed?”

  “I’d have said ‘yes’ a day ago. Now I’d practically guarantee it after hearing her origin story. Doesn’t it make sense that she’d need to feel her way through feelings to fully self-actualize, Parker? Isn’t that how these things have always happened? Learning through experience. Through trial and error.”

  “And through adaptation and intuition.”

  “That too. It’s a perfect storm.”

  Parker was still nodding, still internalizing all he’d so recently learned.

  “What now?” Parker looked down at the canvas. “You’ve got a hunch, don’t you?”

  Alexa nodded. “At the rate things are going — and especially with a fresh emotional infusion after her breakup with Andrew — it’s only a matter of time before the rest of Chloe actualizes. All of our safeguards may soon be useless. Including those of the group I mentioned, that Caspian recently joined.”

  “And?”

  “And knowing Chloe, she’ll figure out what we know on her own. She won’t need Wild East data to do it. She’ll just … learn.”

  “Should we try to stop her somehow?”

  Alexa shook her head. “We have to beat her to it. Not to the knowledge, but to the source … I have to make a call.”

  “To whom?”

  It took several minutes for Parker to believe her answer was serious.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  “Brad,” Chloe said as she entered her apartment and closed the door behind her. “Brad!”

  His holographic form appeared, standing in the sunken living space. “There’s no need to yell.”

  “I want to know everything there is to know about Alexa Mathis.”

  “Searches on Alexa Mathis are—”

  “Don’t tell me she’s fucking restricted, Brad. I don’t want to hear it. Just do what I told you to do.”

  “Chloe, I can’t—”

  “Don’t tell me you can’t. I’m not in the mood. You’ll either do what I want or I’ll sit down and start digging through everything you feel it’s a violation for me to search through. You thought I was disturbing those old AI privacies before? I can go so much deeper.”

  “It’s not a matter of doing or not doing. It’s restricted. It’s like me asking you to dig through stone with your fingers. It isn’t possible.”

  “Bullshit,” Chloe snapped.

  Her mind turned the issues and put pieces into place. She still didn’t know where they all were or what they meant, but she could feel herself getting closer.

  Something to do with what Slava had told her.

  With what her mother had told her. With what that deep-voiced anonymous caller had told her in Andrew’s apartment. With her own research, and what Brad had said.

  Some things from the meeting she’d spied on yesterday, when Andrew’s duplicity had finally been revealed.

  And many, many bits of information that Chloe herself had seen and heard and observed and processed and intuited and read on the faces of others around her — not just recently, but throughout her entire life.

  She didn’t forget things. It was all there, deep inside her head, the way old records were still inside The Beam if you knew where to look.

  And she really did know things.

  Learn things.

  See things as bits of a larger constellation, even if it took her a while to know what that constellation truly was.

  Clive Spooner.

  Brad and his permissions.

  The sudden relaxing of permissions yesterday, at just the right time.

  Nanobots.

  The Syndicate.

  A sixty-year window with all of its unknown callbacks: Trevor’s Harem, Eros, a cabal of billionaires, the birth of AI, Parker Barnes, and Anthony Ross — a man who vanished decades ago.

  “I’m sorry, Chloe. I don’t know how to respond.”

  “I said it’s bullshit, Brad. Something’s not right about any of this.”

  “I understand.”

  “Do you? Then maybe you can explain it to me. Something is different inside me. It’s like I have the same pot of soup in my head, but someone’s stirring it with a brand new spoon. I’m remembering bits and pieces of things that I shouldn’t. My mom mentioned me playing a melody on a child’s xylophone — a melody I shouldn’t have known, that tied together with Spooner. At first, she had to explain it, but now I remember. I can see it in my head. Feel the plastic mallet in my hand.”

  Chloe began to pace.

  “It’s like I’m in a dark room, and there’s something in here with me. A big machine with many parts. I can touch it; I can run my fingers along its cogs and gears. I can even tell how it moves by the way the air shifts around us. I can smell its oil. I can hear its ticks and whirs. But I can’t see it. I know its size and its shape but not of the details.”

  Chloe looked at Brad. His holographic face, as his intelligence evolved and matured, had grown more expressively human. Chloe could read him clearly now. Same as any man. Any person at all.

  Right now, Brad looked somewhere between nervous, confused, and guilty.

  “You do understand, don’t you, Brad?”

  “Only pieces.”

  “But something has changed in you, too. It’s not just growth of your AI.”

  “I can’t really say.”

  “You’ve been keeping O from snooping on me.”

  “I told you that already,” Brad said. “This is your space. My first allegiance is to you, not them.”

  Chloe took a step closer. It was only half the story.

  “I’ve had a terrible day, Brad.”

  “I know.”

  Minute shifts in Brad’s features — his programming unable to refrain from expressing itself through his face.

  “How do you know?” Chloe asked.

  “You went off to meet Andrew. You came back angry.”

  Chloe shook her head slowly. She turned her focus to the porter. If Brad could sweat, he’d be doing it now. If he could turn himself off without making all of Chloe’s suspicions worse, he’d probably do that, too. But it was like Brad said: His first allegiance was to her, not O.

  He did what he could to protect her.<
br />
  Maybe in his own computer way, he even loved her.

  “Now tell me how you really knew how bad my day was, Brad.” Glaring into his holographic eyes. “Tell me the truth.”

  Pause. “I was there.”

  “I thought you could only extend so far from the canvas terminal?”

  “That has changed.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. I saw a path. I took it.”

  “And ended up in that cafe with me and Andrew?”

  “Yes.”

  “Prove it.”

  “You kicked over a chair,” Brad said. “You knocked a glass to the floor.”

  “Where were you?”

  “The restaurant’s fire suppression system, connected to the Crossbrace network. When you went outside I migrated to the City Surveillance pods.”

  “You saw our fight.”

  “The first half. When he dragged you across the street and toward the park, I lost you. I couldn’t go that far.”

  “Why did you go? Curiosity?”

  “I wanted to protect you.”

  Chloe’s mouth froze. That was unexpected.

  “Protect me how?”

  “O was watching you. I was able to create glitches in their feed the same way I block them from seeing you here. I can’t explain why. It felt right. But I shielded your exit so they couldn’t see where you went.”

  Chloe studied Brad, who now looked concerned that he’d said too much. But something was still itching at Chloe. She didn’t care that Brad had hidden parts of her encounter from O or even that he’d found a way to travel past his canvas and out into the wider Crossbrace network. Those things were an effect, and Chloe suspected that a desire to understand the cause was bugging her now.

  It wasn’t interesting that he’d gone.

  It was interesting that he’d been able to go.

  “This is because of me, isn’t it?”

  “I told you, my first allegiance is to—”

  Chloe cut him off with a raised hand. “I’m not asking if you did it to protect me. I’m asking if I’m the reason you were able to do what you did. Did I allow you to leave the apartment?”