Chapter 18

Brandt walked into Dan’s office. His body was still sore from the previous encounter with Tremor two days ago. The office was back to normal, dependent on artificial light and devoid of any charm or inspiration. Brandt was thankful that Dan was sitting in his chair again rather than staring ominously outside the window.

“How are you holding up?” Dan said with a smile that was not returned.

“I’ve been better. My shoulder hurts like hell, but I’ll live.”

“Understandably. Have a seat. I’m assuming you want to figure out what PD forensics have on this Tremor guy.”

“That would be a fair assumption. Any word?”

“He’s dead.”

Brandt scoffed. “Of course he’s dead. I’m the one who put him there.”

“No, you don’t understand. He’s been dead for nearly seven years.”

Brandt replayed some of the words uttered by Tremor in his head. I’m dead anyways. We are all dead. The cryptic words felt like they made partial sense, but he had a feeling that they did not paint the full picture.

Dan offered up a folder containing the police department’s findings regarding the beastly assassin. “Here, look this over. It has all of the traces of an underworld criminal. What we can’t determine is if this is really him, or he is imposing on a dead man’s legacy through some type of forgery.”

Brandt removed the folder from the desk. Inside had a plain-as-day picture of his attacker, along with some not so comforting details. Apparently, his real name was Theodore Davey. Brandt could immediately understand the cause for a name change. Born on March 3^rd, 1994, to Australian immigrants. Previous occupation, United States Army. 75^th Ranger Regiment, Fort Benning, Georgia. Died May 19^th, 2014. Cause of death, Improvised Explosive Device. “This sounds like he was…”

“Recruited? Yes, it has a staple of some type of agency recruitment, if he was dead then and alive recently.”

“Has any other agency reached out to assist?”

“No, if it was CIA recruitment or whatever, they are not talking.”

“So, must be left in the dark on this? No help from the supposed team players of the government.”

“Inter-agency cooperation is a pipe dream. We are all supposed to be on the same side, achieving the same goals, but if the information needed does not benefit the other, we are simply at a loss.”

Brandt understood the situation completely. It had been one of the reasons why he was ready to quit this gig altogether. There was always some type of secret, backroom deal, or scheme within the intelligence world. If you couldn’t get the credit to impress the higher echelons of the business, then you kept things to yourself until you could. “So, this is all we have?” Brandt placed the folder back onto the desk.

“It seems so. The fact that he wasn’t identified until now is mind-blowing, really. Whatever his hobbies, and whatever he did for his income, he was careful. Something must have him pretty spooked to come at you so recklessly.”

Brandt nodded in agreement. “What of this Nyx person? Tremor… or Theodore, whatever, mentioned that he was the one who sent him on the mission.”

“Nothing pops up in our database regarding anyone by that name. If he is just as crafty as this Tremor character seemed to be, then we’ll likely never know without some kind of physical evidence to reference.”

“You mean until he personally makes an attempt on my life.”

“It’s unfortunate, but that may very well be the case. We can have agents watching over you from a distance. They may be able to give you some kind of warning before things go south.”

“Forgive me but having agents on my ass is probably not going to do anything but make this Nyx person more careful. Likely leading to no warning at all, just murdering me in my sleep.”

“Look, I understand your frustration. It sounds like Nyx is the head of the snake here. I just hope it’s not a hydra. Without him, we don’t have much else to go on. We don’t know the intentions. Hell, we don’t even know what they’ve already done if these guys are ghosts.”

“It still strikes me as odd in the way he mentioned death. At first, I just concluded that he accepted his fate while lying on that floor. But something about the ‘we’ has me questioning it further. Whether he meant to include me, his group, or maybe something on a larger scale, it’s a question that I keep asking myself.”

“I’m sorry, the only person we actually know of that could answer that is in the morgue. We just need to keep looking.”

“Right. I guess I better go see what those yahoos over at STB have come up with. They wanted me to stop by for more information on the equipment that they recovered. They’re an awkward bunch, but at least they are willing to share some information.”

“Alright, keep me in the loop and let me know if you need anything.”

Brandt got out of the chair, shook Dan’s hand, and walked out of the office. Off to the STB, I guess.

Agent Beckett and Smith looked up from the computer terminals as Brandt walked into the room. The room was rather sterile looking, white with removable tiles for flooring. A mess of cabling and computer racks filled with humming hardware lay just beyond what could be called cubicles.

“Good morning, Agent Brandt,” Smith said as his counterpart looked back down to his monitor, clearly uninterested in conversation.

“Good morning, gentlemen.” Still no reply from Agent Beckett.

“What can I do for you today?” Smith said as he got up from his chair to greet Brandt.

“I came in to see if you guys have made sense of any of this yet.”

“Oh, right. There are a few interesting things here; follow me.”

Brandt followed Smith to a large worktable with dissected computer components strewn about. With a wriggle of the mouse, the computer monitor attached to the wall above sprang to life, revealing a rather disturbing image of a car accident. Brandt immediately took notice. “Uh, what the hell is that?”

“Oh, that. That’s one of the images we’ve recovered from one of Andrew’s RAID arrays.”

Brandt could see Beckett look up from the corner of his eye. When he turned his head toward him, he quickly looked back down to his monitor. Brandt continued. “What’s a RAID array? Remember, I’m not a tech guy.”

“Right. RAID is just a term for combining multiple hard drives… you do know what a hard drive is, right?”

Brandt glared at Smith as if to say, of course, I’m not a complete moron.

Smith continued. “Yeah. Well, they can be configured as complex backup systems or one large data storage structure. Sometimes the combination of both.”

“So, you’ve been able to pull up the data Andrew had on his computer?”

“Yes and no. Whatever caused the destruction in that room was also trying to remove that data, quickly. A combination of high-level and low-level formatting was taking place until all of the electronics just ceased.”

“High-level, low-level?”

“Sorry, I forgot. High-level just erase some of the system data so that it is not easily recovered. Low-level erases everything by overwriting the original data, much more difficult if even possible to recover.”

“I’m guessing this image is from the high-level stuff.”

“Correct again, Agent Brandt. But we only get fragments of information, for the most part. Sometimes we are lucky to recover entire files if they are small enough.”

“Neat, so what of the picture?”

“Pictures.” Agent Smith used the mouse wheel to scroll through several images ranging from seemingly innocent to utterly disturbing and grotesque. “From what we could gather, these images represent a method of training.”

“Training for what, a serial killer?”

“At face value, that’s what these images could signify, but there’s more to it than that.”

Brandt rolled his eyes. The back-and-forth questioning was only leading to frustration. He had wished that Smith would just get to the point. As politely as he could muster, he said, “Well, proceed.”

“We’ve discovered fragments of code and in some cases, entire pieces. From what we’ve been able to decompile… that is, to reverse engineer a program, we have found interconnected modules within the architecture. Modules responsible for things like speech recognition, visual interpretation, pattern recognition, cognitive reasoning, threat analysis, the list goes on.”

“Well, that was an earful.” Brandt caught a glimpse of Agent Beckett glaring over at him again. Brandt whispered, “Hey, what’s the deal with your buddy over there? He keeps looking at me as if I had just killed his favorite pet.”

Smith laughed. “Don’t worry about Beckett. He’s just not particularly fond of non-technical people. He considers it a waste of time trying to explain stuff. But he’s one of the best we have and responsible for much of what I’m showing and telling you.”

“Yeah, well, he’s creeping me out.”

“Trust me, he means no offense. It’s just his personality. He’s very friendly and chatty once you’re in his circle.”

“Alright, whatever. Please go on.”

“I was going to ask. Do you know what all of those things have in common?”

“That he’s nosey and an introverted weirdo.” Brandt was still thinking about the way Beckett was glaring in his direction.

“What? No. Oh, you mean Beckett. Then probably, but I’m talking about the computer. It means that this system functions like an Artificial Intelligence.”

Brandt didn’t reveal how much he had learned from Andrew’s letter through word or expression. The fact that this was confirmation was more than enough to verify his assumptions with the letter. He still felt he needed to safeguard his own information to avoid drawing rash conclusions. “So, it’s an Artificial Intelligence. So what? The term comes up in the news almost every day. What makes this one special?”

“What makes it special is that this one looked to be sentient, or at least very close to it from what we could recover. Andrew was training it to be able to act on its own.”

“Are you saying that he was training it to be evil?” Brandt had already known the answer through the letter but wanted to hear it for himself.

“That’s not our opinion at all. In fact, we believe that Andrew was training it to be a protector.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because of the name that we had uncovered. Averruncus. In ancient Roman, it’s the god of averting harm.”

Brandt never really understood what the name had meant until now. He figured it was just some fancy name for Andrew’s complex machinery. It did provide some relief to him, but he felt that there was more to come in terms of the STB findings. “Then that’s a good thing, right?”

“In a normal situation, it would be. Walk with me.”

Brandt followed Smith to another table with the golden remains of what once was the quantum computer in Andrew’s secret room. “Are you going to tell me that this is the Artificial Intelligence? Averruncus?”

“Again. Yes and no. I should explain how this works before I go into a more troubling revelation.”

“What do you mean troubling revelation?” Brandt’s eyebrows raised, expecting the reveal sooner rather than later.

“Please. Bear with me for a moment. I don’t want anything to be taken out of context.”

Brandt sighed. “Fine.”

“This, as you know, was the quantum computer that was destroyed under the house. You’re probably thinking, ‘fancy name, must be the artificial intelligence, must be Averruncus.’ You would be right and wrong. A conventional computer has to calculate problems one by one, which means they are slow. The entire purpose of a quantum computer is rapid problem-solving. It can take in a problem and run almost every conceivable scenario simultaneously to get results. They do this by using qubits. Think of it as on and off switches at the particle level. Only they don’t simply have an on and off like a conventional computer; they can also be in a state of both functions.”

Brandt felt like his brain was ready to implode by all the science thrown his way. But he understood at least the gist of what Smith was saying. “Cool.”

“Understatement of the decade, we have a winner!” Smith jests. Brandt didn’t look amused. “Sorry. Well, that is why this was in the room called Mind. It’s the calculator and the decision maker of the system. Let’s go back to the Body.”

Smith paced so fast with the enthusiasm of explaining how everything worked that Brandt could hardly keep up.

“And, of course, these modules represent the body. The body needs a signal from the mind in order to function. The body then acts upon that information. The body asks for another answer, and around and around it goes. Once that process was perpetual, then it becomes sentient.”

“So, this thing was a free thinker?”

“Probably in the worst way. We don’t know how or why, but it definitely wanted to escape the confines of the room and go out into the world. So, it found help, and with that, Andrew killed.”

Brandt couldn’t believe what he was hearing. How could this thing have orchestrated such a thing? Even with Andrew’s letter, he had been so focused on someone trying to steal the technology he wasn’t thinking about the technology acting on its own. “How could it do such a thing? I mean, the mechanics just don’t add up for me.”

“This is where things get a little darker.”

“It wasn’t dark enough already?”

“I’ll chalk that up to your attempt at humor.”

“I wasn’t being funny but go on.”

“There was a string of random characters that we had found within the recovered data. At first, they made no sense. It actually took Beckett to understand that it wasn’t simply a random string of code; it was actually an internet address. An address specifically used within the dark web. I reckon that you’ve heard of that?”

“Spooky place. Has vile porn, narcotics, etcetera. A criminal haven so I hear.”

“Right. What it also has is wet work. The term used to describe assassins, killers for hire. The link brought us to a site called ‘Nyx’s Tricks.’”

Nyx. Brandt felt like he had just uncovered a major piece of a puzzle that only the late Tremor could answer for him.

“Apparently, that’s his job. He is an assassin for hire. And Averruncus hired this person.”

The only question remaining was how this was even possible if Avery was meant to be separated from the outside world. “Do you have any clues as to how the system could even reach out to such a person?”

“I know where you are going with this. You almost tripped over that cable. It had to have been placed there well after the murder. Averruncus was meant to be an air gapped system until it was ready.”

“Air gapped?”

“It’s a common means of securing a system. Basically, there’s no physical connection to the outside world. Even the power supply could be kept from the grid through generators. We don’t know for sure how, but we have the best guess.”

“If the system is isolated, how can it reach out?”

“This, again, is where the expertise of Beckett comes in. There actually is no such thing as a one-hundred percent secure system. Anything can be hacked with the right know-how. Andrew had a wireless router in his office. Averruncus knew enough about its inner workings to turn its working memory, or RAM, into an encoded wireless signal on the two-point-four gigahertz frequency to reach the outside world. It must’ve taken a bit of time to find where to look since information doesn’t pass as quickly as a wired connection, but eventually, the solution was presented. This assassin probably placed the ethernet cable as per some kind of instructions along with whatever was being paid.

“So, Avery found a way to have Nyx kill Andrew and release itself somehow.” It was starting to make sense for Brandt, at least vaguely. He wasn’t one hundred percent formidable with the techno-jargon thrust upon him, but it was more than what he had entered the room with.

“Avery? I didn’t mention that name. Where did you hear that? What is it you’re not telli—”

Dan burst through the door interrupting Smith mid-sentence. Everyone jumped at the sudden intrusion. There was a panic with him, the likes Brandt had never seen before. “Quick everyone, turn on the television!”

A look of horror fell upon the faces in the room as the banner read ‘Crisis onboard Air Force One – President’s safety currently unknown.’