Death Drive

Chapter 14

Lucas looked around in the waiting room, but as the virtual lobby was just an empty space with a text box informing him that Mr. Routh was busy, there really wasn't anything to see. He slumped deeper within his living room sofa where his outside body was located and sighed.

"Just like a bigshot CEO to first demand a meeting with just a few hours' notice and then leave one waiting," he thought, adjusting his VR helmet slightly. "Must be a power move."

A synthetic bling sounded and his surroundings changed, an opulent room materializing around him, a blur at first but quickly becoming clear, like someone finding the right focus setting on a camera. He realized he had no idea what the etiquette in such a meeting was and stood up just to be sure. When surrounding details emerged he found himself standing on an intricate Persian carpet. To his right an enormous bookshelf commanded the wall and to his left a massive fireplace with ornate carvings dwarfed him with its towering design. But most impressive was the vista opening before him, a wall composed entirely of a window looking into Earth as viewed from the orbit. A man sat behind a large desk in a veritable throne, his back to the stunning view. He must have played with the settings on lighting since the only thing he could make out of the shadow was his silhouette and the piercing blue eyes whose attention was focused entirely on him. He instantly wished the wait had gone on for longer. His virtual avatar mimicked his motions, and consequently the heroic figure lowered his gaze to the ground, standing awkwardly with tense and drawn-in posture.

The figure behind the desk kept up his scrutiny for a few silent moments more before leaning away from the shadow and speaking. "Lucas Bennett. Do you know why I've called you here?"

"My work?" he asked. He could barely lift his gaze to the man's virtual salt-and-pepper goatee, let alone his dauntingly rendered eyes. His hair was black and short.

"Yes, or the caricature thereof. The more I read your reports, the more I am convinced you have no idea what you are doing."

Lucas stammered something incoherent in reply. The helmet he was wearing was suddenly clammy and constricting, and he had to fight the urge to pull it off. The CEO of Ampere went on, either ignorant of his plight or disregarding it.

"I mean what is the deal with these series of images you keep pulling from the Intelligence subroutines? Fish? Clowns? What could they possibly have to do with how the system comes to its conclusions about the worth of a given individual?"

"Code," he blurted.

"What?"

"I believe the images are coded messages for the Intelligence's own purposes." The words tumbled quickly from his mouth as he had repeatedly thought about the perfect sentences to explain his findings. "Take the fish, for example. Species, length, width, color, the amount and shape of scales... One could express a multitude of different variables with a single image, if one knew how to read them. And then there is the fact we are talking about a rapidly changing video. Just a second of it could contain more information than we could analyze in a lifetime."

The man steepled his fingers. "You have access to the system. If what you say is correct, you should be able to find the values linked to these images and read them just as easily as the Intelligence does. But you—or any of the separate groups of software engineers I have working on this job—have been able to find nothing of the sort."

"They could be buried somewhere we haven't looked yet," he explained. "Or concealed behind a separate code of some kind."

"Or," Routh drawled the word and paused for emphasis, "your tools are rubbish and you are wasting time looking into some junk code that has nothing to do with anything."