Dale Brown - Puppet Master

“Wasn’t me,” said the accountant, who was used to getting calls at odd hours and on odd subjects. “I’ll check with the bank first thing in the morning.” Robert Pesche, now the head of a sizable firm, had first done Massina’s taxes in a McDonald’s when they were both a year out of school. “It’s probably just a computer glitch.”

“There are no such things as glitches,” said Massina. “Just bad programming.”

But this turned out to be neither a glitch nor bad programming: it was theft. The account had been drained an hour before Massina’s visit to the ATM — one of two dozen that had similarly been robbed. The bank promised to make good immediately, something Massina was surprised to find it didn’t have to do, according to the banking laws.

The felonious transfer both annoyed and intrigued Massina. Not only was his sense of morality and fairness offended — theft, obviously, was a grave sin — but his scientific curiosity was aroused. How did the theft occur? Why was the bank vulnerable in the first place? It was a math problem as well as one of morality.

His accountant couldn’t answer any of his questions. Nor could the bank manager, who came out to meet him when he stopped by just before 5:00 p.m. to collect a new ATM card and some cash.

The manager hesitated as she grabbed Massina’s hand to shake. Massina was testing a new prosthetic — he had lost his right arm from just above the elbow some thirty years before — and people who knew his hand was artificial sometimes thought he was going to crush their fingers.

Which he could have, if he wanted.

“I’m very sorry about this theft,” said the manager. “And your troubles. You are a good customer.”

The manager continued on in an overly sympathetic vein until Massina asked how the account might have been drained.

“It was definitely due to an ATM transaction,” she said. “There were a large number of simultaneous transfers that were just under the amount our security programs would detect.”

“Excuse me — so the ATM system was definitely involved,” Massina said. “Interesting. How?”

She suggested that perhaps he had authorized someone else to use his card and been careless with the PIN.

“How would that account for the other thefts that you said happened at the same time?”

“They, uh, just waited.” She nodded gravely. “You really have to guard your PIN number as if it were your Social Security number. More so.”

“I don’t want to get angry with you,” Massina answered, “but you sound like you’re saying this theft is my fault.”

“No, sir. You are our valued customer.” She glanced at his hand, somewhat nervously. “We value your business.”

Massina resisted the impulse to scoff as he left.

Massina’s annoyance at being ripped off and then treated like a dunce by the bank had subsided by the time he woke the next morning in his house outside Boston. There were, after all, many other things occupying his mind, most especially the morning’s test of a new autonomous bot they were working on.

It was just before five o’clock, and still dark. Winter lingered in the low hills around Boston, fogging Massina’s breath as he walked onto the concrete veranda in front of his house. The low-slung, postmodern structure had been situated to take advantage of the view; had it been a little later, Massina might have gazed at the mirror-edged Hancock Tower and the Pru off in the distance. In winter, much of Boston was visible, not just those tall landmarks: you could see the Custom House and even, if the air was clear and the light good, a church spire or two. Thick evergreens obscured things closer to the east and south; the highway, so convenient for his work, was out of sight, as was the industrial area that had first attracted him to the location. If Massina had been more of a dreamer, or rather one who dreamed in a certain way, he might have fantasized that he lived in the middle of untouched land, sufficiently removed from the distant city to be immune from its charms as well as its vices.

But Massina was not that sort of dreamer — no Emerson and certainly no Thoreau; if there was an American he might emulate, it would be Edison or Bell, great thinkers whose thoughts turned to things far more tangible than nature. Though in many respects Massina might be said to be the modern embodiment of the vision Emerson articulated in the essay “Self-Reliance,” Massina’s world was one of computers and robots, of nanotechnology and forces far beyond Emerson’s ken.

The lights at the far end of the winding driveway switched on, announcing the arrival of Chelsea Goodman, who was taking Massina to work today while his car was being serviced. This was a matter of convenience for both of them, since Chelsea didn’t own a car and was using one of the company trucks to transport both herself and the subject of the morning’s test to the proving grounds south of the city.

The gates at the foot of Massina’s property swung open, activated by a coded input from the driver on a small touchpad next to her console. The security system had already read the truck’s license plate, comparing it against its database and DMV data; it had also examined an infrared scan of the interior, making sure Chelsea matched the associated profile. Another sensor “sniffed” the air around the truck, analyzing the molecular contrail that had been enhanced by a light stream of vapor flowing from vents at the side of the driveway; had the contrail contained even a few molecules related to explosives, additional barriers would have sprung up just beyond the gate and an alarm would have sounded.

None of that was actually necessary; Massina in fact disliked security measures of any kind and kept as low a profile as possible in any event. But the system was being tested by his company; grounds security seemed like a growth area, and one where the company’s expertise in advanced AI systems and robotics might possibly give it an advantage.

As it happened, the driver had worked on a small part of the system a year before and was probably as familiar with it as its owner. Chelsea Goodman had joined Smart Metal as an AI specialist barely two years ago. Since then, she had been promoted three times until, at the tender age of twenty-three, she was now Smart Metal’s lead AI developer.

Neither her age nor her rapid advancement was particularly unique, either at the firm or in the industry in general. Even the fact that she was a woman did not make Chelsea Goodman particularly unusual at Smart Metal, which Massina had established as the purest of pure scientific meritocracies from its earliest day. The unique thing about Chelsea was her personality: she practically bubbled when she spoke. Her enthusiasm was infectious, and not just about her field — she could get even a die-hard Red Sox fan, such as Massina, rooting for their longtime nemesis, the New York Yankees, if she wished.

Which made the uncharacteristic frown on her face when she pulled up all the more obvious.

“Problem?” asked Massina, climbing into the Ram 1500 cab.

“We’re good,” she said, lips barely moving, teeth held close together.

“Coffee,” he told her, recognizing the problem.

“I—”

“Starbucks. Go.”

“Thanks.” Her expression brightened; by the time they reached the street she was more or less back to her usual self, adjusting for the hour.

“Long night?” he asked.

“I didn’t sleep. We had some trouble with the secondary logic section.” Chelsea said this with the tone of someone describing their stupendous vacation in Barbados. “In optimizing the memory section, Bobby had used a random fill to get around the zero-bit problem. Of course, he hadn’t been able to test every last permutation, and wouldn’t you know, we hit on a combination that caused a bizarre overload, adding twenty nanoseconds where we should have saved at least sixty-four.…”