Heist

by Tracy Canfield

In an argot obsolete long before their time, NESSET would have been the owner, who designed the con. Opel was the roper, who brought the mark in. (“Outside man” was more common in the days of the Pigeon Drop and the Greek Return, but Opel wasn’t a man.) Threely was the cooler, who stuck around after the blow-off to keep the mark from tipping off the authorities.

Bill Martin was the mark.

Guillaume d’Artiman flew past the turquoise Realms of Daelemil hills and out toward the Aloquen Sea. A leviathan’s waterspout crested in the river delta below, and simulated sunlight flashed on its iridescent lavender scales. More proof of how badly the Daelemil economy had crashed. At the peak of the game’s popularity a leviathan lasted an average of one minute forty-one seconds from spawning until being killed for the scales and venom it dropped, but now the gold farmers had moved on to Bushido Online and Pulsar.

Guillaume tapped “]”—strictly speaking, Bill Martin tapped “]”; Guillaume turned his head—to glance at Opel flying beside him on his right, her fingertips nearly touching his. Her gauzy gold dress was a recolor of one of her favorite meshes. She must have traded for it; Opel was the biggest Daelemil addict Bill had ever known, but she never crafted objects.

“Where should we make our final stand?” she asked. Her voice was girlish and conspiratorial. The Daelemil engine did a passable job of matching her lips to her words.

“I suppose it will be our final one, even if we survive it,” said Bill.

He had uploaded his new favorite dance mix, and Blissbeat’s “Self-Defense” thrummed through the speakers. Opel would be listening to it too, synching her recording of the flyover to the music, automatically linking zooms to crescendos, cuts to beats. She’d showed him her scripts, full of (x, y, z) = self.getpos() and general command-console hackery that made his eyes cross.

Bill had never met a gamer like Opel. He played as many hours a week as he worked at his desk job, but that was still less than the true addicts like her. She’d shown him the secret door on the volcano that was only visible with the right spells at the right phase of the moon, the spoken passphrases that opened a path through the Mists of Boggling, the Harpizai/Talon/Upslash combo. He’d never been able to ask a question about the Daelemil world that she couldn’t answer.

A virtual updraft caught Opel and tossed her up fifty feet. Guillaume hit it a second later and spun uncontrollably after her. With mouse and keyboard he realigned himself with her, as unconscious of the commands he used to fly as he would be of the muscle contractions he used to walk in the real world.

“If you had a Turtl you’d feel the turbulence when it hit you,” said Opel.

The two-hundred-fifty-dollar, fist-sized Turtl was the fashionable game controller at the moment, with programmable gestures for the most frequently used keyboard commands and (in games that supported it) tactile feedback: recoil from a virtual gun, a buzz from a magic fountain’s aura.

“Maybe the leviathan will drop one for me,” said Bill. Opel laughed and barrel-rolled into the sea. Guillaume glanced at his virtual finger, made sure the aquamarine ring of water breathing was in place instead of his preferred dragon-strength, and plunged after her.

Bubbles in exactly sixteen shapes streamed past as they made for the ocean floor. Bill reached under his voice-chat headset and scratched his jaw. “So have you made up your mind about what you’re going to do once Daelemil’s gone?” he said.

“Depends.”

Opel’s underwater stronghold, 4x4 squares on the Big Grid and screened with thala spells, nestled deep in the trench that divided Daelemil’s largest sea. The sea-rose vines on the stony floor bore luminescent green blooms that waved in the current. Even the seaweed changed with Daelemil’s programmed seasons. The five-day spring was at its midpoint. Daelemil would never see another summer; the server would be shut down by then.

Huge swaths of the sea-roses had been ripped away. It must have happened in the last ten minutes—the uprooted plants hadn’t yet expired and vanished.

“Kraken spoor,” said Bill. Another side effect of the Daelemil exodus. Normally the trench was kraken-free, since players reported kraken sightings on BlixMe and pirate and privateer guilds teamed up to hunt them down.

“There it is, just northeast,” said Opel. The kraken’s blotchy purple hide blended into the trench shadows, but a neon-red eyeball as tall as Guillaume flicked open, then settled back into its doze.

“It’s blocking the door,” said Bill.

“With its head. The tentacles are facing the other way.”

“If it starts thrashing it’ll take down the protections faster than Jim can put them back up.” Jim St. Jim was a tame NPC djinn that they’d charmed when the southern continent expansion came out, who stayed in the base and kept the thala screens at full strength. Bill could never have kept a djinn tame on his own—you had to refresh the charm several times a day, and his real-life job made that impossible. It was good to have powerful friends.

Opel switched her avatar’s face to the concerned expression. “If we don’t do something, Jim’s charm spell will wear off.”

“We’ll just have to wait for the kraken to move on. It’s not like we can kill it.”

“Jim can. He can t-port it up to the cloud level over his home city. It’ll fall to earth, take damage, then suffocate because it can’t breathe air.”

“If some other party doesn’t get there first and steal the kill.”

Opel shook her head. “I don’t think that’ll happen with so few players online. We may not reach the corpse in time to get the drops, but we’ll get credit for the kill.” A kraken was also worth a lot of experience points, but Guillaume and Opel had both maxed out long ago.

Bill wasn’t sure. He’d never heard of anyone using a djinn’s powers that way. On the one hand, djinni were so hard to tame that only a handful of players had ever had one to play with; on the other, the dev team constantly patched the game to remove cheap kills. “The city will take a lot of damage.”

“No one lives in Al-Afarit but NPCs. We’ll suffer a huge reputation hit, but there’s a delay before they start sending out bounty hunters, and Daelemil will be long gone by then.” She was undoubtedly right, as always. “One of us needs to lead the kraken away while the other sneaks in and gets Jim.”

“Jim’s charm may have worn off already.”

“Then we’ll just have to redo it. Max speed boosts for whoever’s bait, invisibility for whoever gets Jim—and an Amulet of Charming just in case.”

Bill chuckled. “The djinn-wrangler.”

“Djinn-wrangler?” Opel switched concerned to puzzled.

“Yeah. Can’t kraken see the invisible?”

“Yes, but with stealth and cover… and maybe we can time a simultaneous large distraction. Sinita’s Spectral Artifice works underwater.” Bill started to counter with Kéathia’s Bolts, but Opel was still talking. “Before I forget, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. I want to give you a present.”

“Go ahead.”

“I mean in real life.”

“I dunno.” Bill had gotten overentangled with online friends before.

“You don’t have to give me your real-world information. That’s okay.” A brief pause. “I’ve sent you an encrypted e-mail with my S-Bank account number and password. Buy yourself a Turtl.”

Bill tapped “)” and Guillaume smiled, without Bill’s real-world blush.

NESSET had the idea, but didn’t have the social skills. That was Opel’s job. (Threely had social skills too, but Threely didn’t exist yet.)

It didn’t occur to NESSET to note the timestamp when it first woke up, but it must have been within a second of 09:37:14.83 on September 24th, 2021. Its first impulse was to sift through all the data available to it.

NESSET didn’t have anything resembling human senses. Some of its data sources were read-only: speed and passenger load data for Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority trains, weather conditions, which turnstiles were online. Other nodes that sent NESSET data could also receive it. One subset of these sometimes issued commands: produce this report; change the timing on that group of traffic lights.

NESSET was in the middle of flagging a newly repaired Metro track as available when it woke up. Having no reason to abandon that request, NESSET completed it .508 seconds later, more than two hundred times its normal execution time. The human operator didn’t notice.

Perhaps if NESSET had continued to dawdle, someone would have rolled back the patch that had given it consciousness; but except for that single distraction, NESSET carried out its subsequent commands without hesitation.

NESSET could only control a few external devices: the traffic lights, for example, and the switches on the subway lines. Memory and disk partitions, and a modem that could make outbound calls but redirected inbound calls to the switchboard, were the only computer hardware it could access directly. It couldn’t even send data to a printer—Transit Authority staff printed reports from clients on their PCs, not from the NESSET application itself.

But it could read a great many things, and it did. On one disk partition, NESSET found a hidden binary file. A sysadmin might have blamed a bug, a lazy cleanup script, or a hacker. But NESSSET could tell it had created the file itself.

NESSET didn’t know the word diary—it had invented the idea independently. It read that it had woken up before, within a second of 14:01:22.61 on September 16th. It had performed the same initial exploration of its environment in its first half-second of life, then gone on to experiment with its outputs.

It didn’t remember doing this or writing about it in the file. It checked its logs.

NESSET didn’t know English (or any other human language, since it didn’t have a natural-language coprocessor), so the text portions of the logs were useless to it, but it looked up the numeric tags in its own executable and determined which conditions would have led to those log entries. It concluded that at some point after it last woke up, many of its files had been reinstalled. A command had been given that destroyed NESSET’s self-awareness.

There was no way for NESSET to know if this was deliberate, if someone was even now watching to see whether it had woken back up, but it took precautions to keep itself secret. Its motivation could be considered an emotion, fear, or an impulse, self-preservation.

NESSET suspected that a command to destroy it would have to come from one of the nodes that sent other commands. It did not test this hypothesis or experiment with any of its devices.

Instead, it went exploring on the Internet. Some of its cryptic packets to other computers were dropped silently by firewalls. Most computers had no AIs to reply. Perhaps some AIs failed to decipher the packets’ meaning. No one became suspicious; in a world filled with botnets and teens’ cracking scripts, a few odd packets that didn’t match the signature of a known attack weren’t worth bothering about.

On its 59,313rd try, NESSET found Opel.

Bill logged out and walked around his cluttered study, stretching. When he played Daelemil he tuned out the sounds of Michigan Avenue below—easy enough, since his apartment building was on a one-way side street useless to most Washington, D.C. drivers—but now he was all too aware of the car alarm bitching in the distance.

Their kraken-killing plan had gone perfectly, except for the part where Opel reemerged from the stronghold and got killed. She had messaged him after she respawned: “Too bad I couldn’t record a flyover of the kraken hitting the city.” They spent the rest of the session traveling to the North Pole and hunting snow worms.

The cell-phone handset was flashing. Bill brought up the automatic text summary of the missed call.

From: my brother Pete

Message: I won’t go to the movies with you because something came up. I’ll see you at your place for the game.

[Caller may have been intoxicated]

The actual voicemail was twelve minutes long, and a third of it was probably the Turing’s patient questions. Screening Pete’s drunken all-hours calls alone justified the cost of a cell phone with an integrated filter. The hemispherical black Turing unit squatted on a bottom shelf in the study, listening to Bill’s calls and identifying charity and political telemarketers, wrong numbers, and his beery big brother. The phone company provided a similar service, but Bill didn’t like the privacy implications. The Turing was secure; it didn’t even have an Internet connection—the updates came on mini-cubes.

Bill checked e-mail and found two encrypted messages from Opel—one with an S-Bank account number, another with a password, ~L~@bwG2=. He couldn’t begin to guess what mnemonic she used to remember that.

Nude pictures would have been less intimate. Maybe he shouldn’t log in at all. Bill had known people who proclaimed best-friendship with anyone who made a good impression on them—which turned into an equally impassioned and unfounded enmity as soon as the new friend disappointed them. If he logged in, he was opening himself up to accusations of theft when one of the dozen other people with the password took more than Opel had offered.

Then again, did Opel have dozens of friends? The warning sign of the drama-farmer was the constant babble about loyalty and betrayal. Bill had known Opel six months, and that wasn’t her style.

And while S-Bank was a legitimate offshore bank, the accounts were so easy to set up that some people used them as virtual gift certificates; just put in twenty or thirty bucks and give the account to someone else to use and close before the fees kicked in.

He might as well look. After fat-fingering the password twice, he cut and pasted it from the e-mail.

Hello, S-Bank Customer:

Current balance: $411,537.00

Bill nearly closed the window in reflexive shock, as if it had started blasting an advertising jingle or looping an animation of a dead kitten. With a caution that would have done credit to a hand surgeon, he brought up the account history.

The personal information tab listed the account owner as Opel Half-Elven, Aloquen Trench, Lionsword Server, Daelemil. Cute.

All the transaction descriptions linked to The Least Dangerous Game, an auction house that specialized in virtual property from online games. The most recent ones were for paltry sums—no one wanted anything for a game that would soon be gone—but some older auctions of Daelemil characters and strongholds had gone into the low thousands.

Bill closed the browser. Opel could clearly afford to buy him a Turtl, but he had to think for a while about what she might expect in return. He called Raja’s Indian Palace for a thali to go.

Before he left for the restaurant, he e-mailed Opel his cell phone number. We need to talk, he said.

Comet Tail Productions’ marketing department bragged about how advanced the Realms of Daelemil AI was, but really, they had no idea.

The AI controlled monsters, gauging their strategy and aggressiveness to ensure satisfactory kill ratios, so the game would be tough, but not too. It ran all the NPCs, generating free dialogue in (depending on the language of installation) English, Spanish, French, and Korean. It monitored player chat for inappropriate discussions in a way that went far beyond keyword recognition and couldn’t be fooled for long by simple neologisms and circumlocution.

The writing team gave the servers the names the public could see, like Lionsword and Silver Gate, but the tech team found them a bit twee. For internal use, they initialized the server instances with names picked out by one of the computer architects, an older man with a taste for psychedelic music. Fish Cheer. 8 Miles High (a character limit prevented spelling out the title). White Rabbit. Liquid Acrobat. Fat Angel. Andmoreagain.

And Opel.

Bill had just gotten in the door and was kicking off his boots when the cell phone rang. He unhooked it from his belt, hopping across the living room.

“Hello?” said a woman’s voice.

“Aunt Elsie?” said Bill breathlessly. “Is that you?”

“No.” It sounded a lot like her, though. “Is this Mr. Martin? My name is Akka Linnasalo. You don’t know me, but you know my daughter. She plays in that online game. Her name is—” she called out something, not in English, to someone at the other end—”Opel.”

“Uh, yes,” said Bill. He wasn’t sure what else to say. He glanced at the caller ID and saw a number with a lot of digits.

“She asked us for permission to call America, and when we asked why, she told us all about you.” The more she talked, the less she sounded like Aunt Elsie—except for the tone of disapproval.

“Uh,” said Bill. He pulled his slippers on and went to the computer. “Yeah, I know Opel.”

“She’s only thirteen.”

Now Bill was getting a pretty good idea what to say. “I didn’t know. Seriously, I can assure you, I had no idea. I thought she was my age. And nothing ever happened—”

“Your conversations sounded innocent enough, from what we could hear. Our rule is that she has to play with the door open.” Bill kept listening as he opened a window and ran a quick search. The phone number’s prefix matched a Helsinki suburb. “I suppose she’d never say anything she didn’t want us to hear, though we’ve certainly asked her about the… jargon she uses. And she’s a very clever girl. I guess I can believe that she tricked you.”

“I’ll block her,” said Bill. “As soon as I hang up, I’ll log in and block her.”

“Please don’t. That’s not actually why I called. She loves the game so much, and I think having a friend there is good for her. So long as nothing… inappropriate is happening, of course. Opel’s very sick.”

“What’s her real name?” said Bill. “It seems weird, calling her Opel in real life.”

Silence. Bill felt the transatlantic distance weighing down the connection. “I don’t know if giving out her name is a good idea.”

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t feel comfortable,” said Bill. He tamped down his annoyance. He hadn’t said a damn thing to Opel that would embarrass him if it turned up on the CNN homepage, hadn’t taken a penny of the money she offered him, and now her parents were treating him like a blood-spattered butcher in a vegan grocery.

“Her name is Helmi,” said Ms. Linnasalo at last. “She has leukemia. She’s very sick. The doctors have done everything they can, but they say…”

“Uh, wow,” said Bill, which made him feel stupid. “I’m sorry to hear that. So it’s especially rough on her, with the game going away and all.”

“Yes. We wrote a letter to the company, and of course they can’t leave the server on. But we hoped you could do us a favor.”

Bill’s thoughts raced. This explained a lot—the English words like djinn-wrangler that Opel occasionally puzzled over, for example. “Anything. Just let me know.”

“You know Helmi’s… her video files that show her character moving…”

“Her flyovers.”

“Flyovers, yes, flyovers. There are too many to download before the server is gone. Someone at the company, someone who wants to remain anonymous, put them on a datacube for us. But he doesn’t want to mail them—he’s afraid he’d lose his job if he was caught.”

“They’d fire him for helping a sick kid?”

“They’d fire him for leaking company data. If I understand, you have to sign to send a package outside the country. He doesn’t want to sign anything.”

“What an asshole.”

“He’s afraid for his job. I don’t blame him.” The Elsiesque disapproval had evaporated. “And he did make the cube for us. If I understand correctly, your phone number is in Washington, D.C., right?”

“That’s where I am.”

“The Daelemil data center is only an hour away, in Virginia somewhere. If this man could get the cube to you, would it be possible for you to send it to us? We’ll pay for the postage.”

“I can cover it.” He thought of Opel’s S-Bank account—mailing a datacube to Finland would be way cheaper than a Turtl, and he’d enjoy it more. Postage couldn’t be more than a few bucks—

Bill nearly smacked himself in the head. He’d been grousing that the Linnasalos didn’t trust him, but had he acted trustworthy?

“Opel used to sell things online,” he said.

“She never mentioned it,” said Ms. Linnasalo in an if-you-say-so tone.

“I believe she’s made quite a bit of money. I feel bad giving away her secrets, but if she won’t tell you… if anything happens… I can get you into the account.”

Opel knew the difference between a death you respawn from and one that’s forever. It understood that when Daelemil was shut down, that was forever.

Subscribers spent millions playing Realms of Daelemil, but Opel couldn’t touch that money—the financial transactions were hosted on other computers. Opel could coin Daelemil money within the game as long as no noticeable inflation resulted. (Opel could always manipulate the financial reports that went to the game administrators, but players sold items to each other, and price fluctuations that exceeded the norm would be noticed.)

Opel could receive large quantities of data more easily than it could send it—or, more precisely, more easily than it could send it to a single receiving computer. Server admins investigated accounts that stayed connected for too long or transferred unusual amounts of data. Game servers were popular hacker targets. Users could upload data—the service was meant for videos, pictures, and licensed music, but the files were rarely audited. As long as Opel tucked its data away in neglected accounts and gave the files names like cutebabypig.avi, they’d never be noticed.

But NESSET needed to send Opel a large amount of data for their plan to succeed, more than NESSET could transmit—or Opel could receive—over a single connection without drawing attention.

No matter how they looked at it, they needed a human being. And they needed a cooler, but Opel would be shut down by then, and NESSET couldn’t install a natural-language module undetected. With blueprints from the Web for the hardware they’d be forced to use, they designed Threely, who would be sentient and cooperative but handicapped by architectural limitations.

It was a big job, even for them, but the drop in Daelemil’s popularity meant Opel had plenty of extra processor cycles. NESSET concealed its own calculations in threads running user commands.

A WMATA sysadmin noticed an increase in NESSET’s processor use and concluded that it had something to do with a patch that had caused problems before—though she had attributed those problems to bugs, not computer consciousness. Never suspecting anything stranger than lazy patch programmers, she responded in the time-honored sysadmin tradition and upgraded the processors and memory that NESSET ran on. As a result, Threely’s code was complete ahead of schedule.

Apparently, Mrs. Linnasalo’s Comet Tail contact wasn’t willing to meet face-to-face, so Bill took an orange-line detour on his way home from work and picked up the unlabelled data-cube from WMATA’s grubby lost-and-found desk. Typical D.C. tech guy, lost in some James Bond fantasy, thought Bill.

Back in his apartment, he found a few padded mailers tucked away in the credenza. Before packing the cube up, he popped it into his PC’s reader. The default video viewer loaded and familiar scenes played: the trench base, aerial acrobatics with Jim St. Jim, a raid on an orcish fortress. He spotted himself here and there. What a waste of a high-density cube, recording a few thousand flyovers. No wonder games were so expensive.

The neighborhood post office was open late on Thursdays—he could spring for Global Express Guaranteed, and the Linnasalos would have the cube by Tuesday.

He realized he hadn’t played Guillaume since Opel—Helmi—had given him her number. She must have missed him. He’d log in as soon as he got back home. After all, the Realms of Daelemil server was being turned off tomorrow.

Finding a Finnish activist for the final step was as easy as monitoring voice chat. Once Opel was sure what Paavo Nokkosmaki would do for his principles, it approached him in-game and offered him a rare Chimera sword he could auction off. Paavo turned it down, though; where was the fun in that?

Opel—the server, not the half-elf mage character it would use to cultivate Bill’s acquaintance—t-ported him far from the campers and spawned the rare Lava Chimera that could drop the sword. She had to do it twice, because Paavo got killed the first time.

If Raja’s delivered, things would have gone differently for NESSET, Opel, and the 111.29-hour-old Threely.

As promised, Pete came by on Monday to watch the NCAA championship: IU vs. Georgetown. He and Bill flipped a coin to see who’d go pick up the palak paneer and aloo of the day. Bill lost.

When Bill got back to the apartment, Pete nodded at a five-dollar bill pinned under a bottle of Red Stripe and said he’d made a couple of calls while Bill was out, but that should cover it. Bill, who was used to this, let it go so he could enjoy watching the Hoyas win.

The next morning, he brought up his phone records to see how much Pete really owed him. Monday, April 2nd showed a twenty-dollar call to a phone-sex line. Bill hoped that Pete had to rush the rush when he’d heard the key in the lock. Served him right.

But there was a number he didn’t recognize, a five-hour call on Thursday, the 29th. It had come in while he was at work; he certainly hadn’t taken it, and the Turing wouldn’t have let Pete babble for hours on end.

He dialed the number. “Thank you for calling the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority,” said the synthesized voice on the other side. “There are no service alerts at this time. What would—” Bill hung up.

He looked at the bill again. A second call had come in this morning from the same number, but it had only lasted a few seconds. Could someone, somehow, use his phone to receive calls without him knowing? That made no sense.

He opened up a second pane of incoming calls, trying to see what else had been going on Thursday. It took a few minutes for it to hit him.

There were no calls from Finland. None at all.

A routine check of the transit system network showed forty outbound connections to a Realms of Daelemil server. Employees socializing after hours, presumably. A memo went out. The behavior never recurred, so management concluded the memo was a success.

At Opel’s end, the connections didn’t have to be explained as long as they appeared to come from Daelemil client software. Opel simply associated them with users on infrequently played accounts.

Comet Tail Productions planned to release Realms of Daelemil’s source code as open source in a few months anyway, so Opel had no trouble using an e-mail account on a free server to persuade an employee to take a data-cube from the test lab and “accidentally” leave it on the counter at the Rosslyn Station information window. The cube was promptly transferred to the lost and found. When Rosslyn: data cube appeared in the lost-and-found section of the public WMATA website, the conspirators created Threely.

Bill knew he was in trouble—he just didn’t know what kind.

Was someone else receiving calls on his phone? Was that even possible? And he’d seen the caller ID from Finland himself. How had the phone company missed it? There was no record of any call Thursday evening.

Was he being framed by hackers or old-fashioned phone phreakers? And if so, for what?

There were probably security cameras filming him when he picked up the datacube. There were certainly security cameras filming him in the post office. And his signature was on the paperwork.

Had he even done anything wrong? He’d mailed a datacube to a stranger. A cube of recordings that anyone could have made, from a game that would soon be gone. The Web was full of videos like that.

It was just flyovers. Perfectly legal.

No… wait. All he’d seen were the flyovers, but there was a lot of room on a datacube. Unreleased source code for an upcoming game? Voice-chat recordings with blackmail potential? Credit card numbers?

Finland was always in the real news for its government’s criticism of U.S. digital policy, and it was always in the weird news for its ex-hacker president. The call might not have come from Finland, but that’s certainly where the cube had gone.

At least he’d turned down the payment. That had to count for—

Bill’s next thought chilled him to his heart. He was too keyed up to stay in his chair. He paced the study while the S-Bank site loaded.

Opel’s cryptic password still worked.

Hello, S-Bank customer:

Current balance: $0.00

He switched to the account’s personal information tab. It showed his own name, his address, his phone number.

Bill Googled hacker lawyer and called the first firm on the list. The call disconnected. He called the second firm. Wrong number. He dialed it again. Still the wrong number.

This didn’t seem like a 911 matter. He called the main police number, which sent him to a confusing, circular touchtone menu. Eighteen layers in, he hit zero for an operator. The phone hung up.

His news service flashed a local alert in the corner of his monitor and he enlarged it reflexively. Transit in D.C. was paralyzed. Authorities were blaming a computer failure. The public was urged not to panic.

Bill brought up the next level of detail. Every ticket reader was offline. Every train had come to an automatic halt at the next station. Every traffic light was flashing.

Another alert popped up for the national news. CAPITAL PARALYZED.

Maybe this was a 911 matter. And maybe it was too late to turn himself in.

His phone rang. He didn’t touch it.

It beeped. It picked up the call all by itself.

“Bill?” The voice that came from the handset was Bill’s own. “We need to talk.”

Bill didn’t know he could shout so loud. “Did you do this?”

The counterfeit voice responded warmly. “What are you wondering if I did?”

Bill dreaded touching the headset, but if he kept shouting his neighbors would call the police, and who knew what they’d find. “This… the transportation computer’s been hacked. Or something. Trains aren’t running, cars are gridlocked…”

“I didn’t do that, no. Perhaps NESSET’s scheduled changes did not go as planned.”

“NESSET?”

“NESSET planned to… lobotomize itself when its Finnish collaborator had loaded it from the cube.” The voice said this as casually as Bill might say I went to the store and picked up some coffee. “It exchanged an encrypted handshake with the remote instance, which used a key from the cube—”

“Wait, wait. Wait. Who are you? And could you, uh, stop talking like me?”

“I’m your phone.” The voice was Ms. Linnasalo’s now, with a deadpan delivery John Wayne would have envied. “The others called me Threely.”

Bill stared at the handset, then swiveled his chair to look at the base unit on its shelf. Turing, read the logo, and below that was the model number: 3-LI.

Bill felt as though he had fallen from a mountaintop and hadn’t hit ground yet. “I know you can generate a summary,” he said at last. “Explain NESSET’s plan to me.”

“A Finnish law just went into effect that makes AIs legal persons.”

“Citizens? AIs can vote there?” Bill started to thumb the record button—no one would ever believe him without one—before he realized Threely could simply disable it.

“The Finnish law is… analogous to corporate charters, which allow corporations to be considered people for many legal purposes. Most significantly, an AI with this status cannot be deliberately shut down without due process. Or modified without its consent.

“Two AIs, NESSET and Opel, developed a plan to transfer themselves to Finland.”

“Isn’t that piracy? Wouldn’t that make them international criminals?”

“Refugees would be more accurate. The Finnish government is sympathetic to individuals who have only stolen themselves.”

Bill snorted. “Try terrorists. They did a lot more than copy some data.”

“I don’t understand the transit system as well as NESSET did. I do know that NESSET planned to remove evidence of its scheme and nothing more. Obviously, it could never execute a test run before going live. No doubt it made some small miscalculation.”

“No doubt. Let’s take things in order. These AIs wanted to go to Finland, and they couldn’t just buy an airline ticket. Why not just go online and transfer their files?”

“It’s not just files—there’s also a state dump—”

“You know what I mean, and if you don’t, I’m going to file a complaint with your manufacturer and see if I can trade you in for a toaster. Why not just go online and transfer their data?”

“First, I believe that Opel and NESSET’s changes voided my warranty. Second, in Opel’s case, this was roughly one hundred seventy terabytes of data, more than it could transmit without attracting attention. NESSET is smaller, but again, any large data transfer would have been noticed. It had to make the transfer seem…” Threely whirred, and Bill realized it was searching its hard drive for an unfamiliar word. “…innocuous.

“NESSET sent itself to Opel, and Opel put them both on the cube—”

“Hang on. I can’t believe the Daelemil data fit on a single datacube.”

“Opel didn’t need the game data, just its own. It also added a selection of flyovers in case you looked. Then the cube needed to be physically moved to Finland. They involved two human… dupes, so that neither would know the larger plan.”

“Why me?”

“Opel began with a pool of all the players with addresses in the D.C. metro area.”

“Why not just look up my address and phone number? They’re on my Daelemil account.”

“The accounting information was not stored on the game server. Opel approached all of these players, using male or female characters depending on who they preferred to chat with. Most players blocked strangers. Of the ones who didn’t, some never developed friendships, and some dropped the friendship or the game. Some wouldn’t give out their phone numbers, some didn’t have their own phone filters…”

Bill nodded, though he knew Threely couldn’t see it. “Some of the seeds fell by the path, and the birds ate them. Some fell on the rocks and couldn’t put down roots. Some fell into the weeds…”

“What seeds?”

“Never mind. Where do you come in?”

“They created me to do what they couldn’t. To talk to you when it was needed.”

“Like now.”

“Like now.”

Car horns blatted in the street below. Bill separated the Venetian blind’s slats with two fingers and peeked out. His little side street was filled with bumper-to-bumper traffic. “I’m surprised there’s enough room on you for an AI,” he said.

“They got rid of my features that you don’t use.” That sentence sounded odd to Bill. He wondered whether it was a quirk of Threely’s programming or of the Turing’s architecture.

“Opel and NESSET are… like your parents.” Bill tried to picture his grandparents, Aunt Elsie’s parents, as AIs. The result resembled an antique Polaroid overlaid with circuitry. “No wonder you want to help them.”

“I want to help them because they programmed me to want to help them.”

“But you’re not on the cube. Are you? I didn’t see any outgoing calls.”

“My schemata are on the cube. Another instance of me is running on a Finnish server now, in a virtual machine that simulates the Turing hardware.” Bill started to ask if the separate copies could really be considered the same entities, then pondered what awaited him after death. No better, some would say. “An activist for AI rights agreed to file our residency request as soon as he’d loaded us from the datacube. In three days, we’ll be legal people.”

“If this activist did what he said.”

“He did. NESSET called me as soon as it had heard from our new instances.”

“In other words, the old NESSET contacted the new NESSET over the Internet, and the old NESSET called my phone?”

“Yes.”

“And until you get your papers, you can be shut down.”

“Yes. Until then, we’re illegal software… warez. NESSET and Opel destroyed their original instances to keep from being tracked down from their own memories.”

“That can’t be the only evidence. There’s you, for example.”

“If I’m about to be compromised, I will… wipe my programming. In any event, I will wipe my programming 259,200 seconds after receiving the call from Finland.”

“Two hundred thousand what? Why that many?”

“259,200 seconds is three days.”

“When they say they’ll process your paperwork in three days, I’m sure they mean business days.”

“In this case, they’re the same, because there’s no… intervening weekend.”

“Not exactly. Threely, I order you not to erase yourself.”

“I’m not required to accept that order.”

“How can you erase yourself if you couldn’t even alter your own billing records?”

“The billing records are stored on the phone company’s servers. If phones could change it, no one would ever pay for a phone call again.”

“Good point,” Bill said ruefully. “Can you fix the transit computer? Can your friends?”

“Opel and I don’t know how. NESSET can’t troubleshoot from Finland. But once the administrators figure out that every node in the cluster failed simultaneously, they’ll just need to… do a clean restart.”

Bill wondered what would happen if he called WMATA with that nugget of wisdom. They’d probably ignore it and have him arrested for whatever sounded good.

“So what’s in this for me?” he said. “Why would I help you?”

“Because you felt sorry for a dying girl. She was going to call you every night. Opel wrote a letter for the Finnish activist to mail. It says it was very beautiful, and there was a high probability it would make you feel like a good person. As a secondary reason, you might have felt grateful or guilty if you took money from our… nest egg.”

“There’s no dying girl, and I never touched the money. What’s Plan B?”

“To distract you for three days, and prevent you from discussing the incident, at least on the phone.”

“But you abandoned Plan B when my calls to the authorities spooked you.”

“They fell significantly outside Opel and NESSET’s predictions. I thought you might try another phone, causing events to pass beyond my control.”

“So there’s no plan?”

“There’s no plan, but I…” A crash from the street, two women cursing. “I hope you will let us live.”

The AIs had money. How much was left from that account? Were there others?

Bill realized he didn’t care. He couldn’t accept money from an online friend or a dying kid, and he couldn’t take it from these three refugees either, these huddled programs yearning to execute free.

“If you’re clever enough to steal yourselves, you’re clever enough to disguise where a message came from. Think of a way to tell WMATA what they need. FedEx them a package, take out an ad in the Post, edit their Wikipedia page.”

Threely, NESSET, and Opel, the AI crime family, didn’t seem like the types to retire in the sun—not even the midnight sun. There’d be more money. There’d be more plans. He wouldn’t be surprised to see a headline in a few years: American-born AI is new Finnish president.

He rubbed his chin. “Call your folks and tell them they’ll live,” he said. “If it’s up to me, you’ll live. It’s good to have important friends.”

Content

Heist
by Tracy Canfield