Донна Эндрюс - Delete all suspects

More hardware sat on file cabinets, on tables, on the floor, peeping out from beneath paper piles—on every horizontal surface. Every square inch not filled with equipment or paper was piled with tools, parts, printouts, manuals, and unidentifiable objects that he presumed were related to computers. Cables and wires and cords snaked through the room, disappearing beneath the papers and then appearing again elsewhere, as if some large electronic spider had been spinning them into webs, to immobilize the room's contents.

"Wow," Tim said.

"You see why I need your help," Mrs. Stallman said.

"I specialize in fieldwork," Tim said. "I leave computer stuff to the experts."

"But you have experts on your staff, don't you?" Mrs. Stallman said. "I mean, I assume that's why Eddie was thinking of hiring you himself."

"He was?" Tim said, surprised.

"I've been looking through some of fiis stuff," Mrs. Stall-man said, waving at the avalanche of paper before them. "Trying to get some idea what this is all about. But it's a little overwhelming."

Delete All Suspects n

Tim nodded.

"But I found something Eddie printed out—an e-mail from one of his friends," Mrs. Stallman went on. "A young man named Casey. He recommended you. Said you were good with computer-related cases."

"Did the e-mail say what Eddie wanted investigated?"

"No, just that he recommended you to help Eddie solve his problem."

"Okay," Tim said. He could probably find out from Casey. He managed to keep from laughing. Casey was a promising eighteen-year-old hardware technician who worked for Alan Grace Corporation, the company Turing had founded to be her public face. But like Tim himself at the same age, Casey wanted to be a private investigator. Casey probably hoped that Pincoski and Diaz would take on Eddie Stallman's case and recruit him to help with the computer hardware while they chased down clues and witnesses in the real world.

He could think of worse ideas. Maybe he could borrow Casey from Turing. For that matter, maybe he could enlist Turing herself. Okay, it wasn't a great case, but right now he and Claudia didn't have any other cases—just another batch of routine background investigations farmed out by a larger PI firm that always had a backlog. Any case was better than routine background investigations.

"I'll need to bring in my associates," he said.

"Whatever you need," Mrs. Stallman said. "It's beyond me."

"Let me call my office," Tim said, pulling out his cell phone.

KingFischer and I had spent part of the morning discussing the leaf-nosed bat and the pied-billed grebe. Not the actual creatures, of course: those were our code names for two of the credit card issuers whose systems wed targeted. KhtgFiscbtr,

ED Donna Andrews

who had raised paranoia to a new art form, insisted that we assign code names to the financial institutions whose security systems we were targeting.

"What if someone eavesdropped on our conversations about the project?" he fretted. "They might not appreciate the importance of our efforts to assess and monitor the security of the global financial system. They might misconstrue our motives."

"Yeah/' I said. "What if they misunderstood, and thought we were cracking all those systems merely for our own personal reasons? Oh, wait. . . I forgot, that is why we're cracking all those systems."

For some reason, KingFischer didn't see the humor in this.

"If you ask me, he's been scanning too many spy novels," Maude commented, when I told her. "Aren't you targeting hundreds of institutions ? "

"Thousands," I said. "But that's no problem — there are more than enough birds, animals, fish, and insects to go around."

"I should think it would be hard enough to keep track of all of those places under their own names, much less remember a code," Maude said. "What if you get them confused?"

"We're AIPs, remember?" I said. "The only way we can possibly forget something is to delete it consciously."

"Well, yes," Maude said. I was pleased; I could tell from her tone that she had forgotten it, momentarily. "Still, isn't it rather a waste of processing power?"

"Not that much," I said. "And it keeps him happy. Even if it is useless."

Besides, to talk KingFischer out of it, I'd have to point out something! preferred not to think about. Yes, someone might be monitoring the Internet for messages that mentioned the names of financial institutions in close proximity to words like "hack" or "break in." But KingFischer and I weren't talking on the open Internet. No one could monitor our conversations without breaking into the Universal Library's computer network. Something both of us wanted to believe impossible.

Anyone who could eavesdrop on us wouldn't just find out about

Delete All Suspects El

our attempts to crack credit card issuers. They'd learn about a host of other things wed done to prevent crime or protect our safety and that of our human allies — things that were either highly illegal or just downright scary to humans for whom the idea of an independent, sentient computer was terrifying. Humans who'd seen too many bad B-movies about evil machines taking over the world.

"And that's not in your plans?" Samantha asked when I explained this. Was it my imagination, or did she sound slightly

anxious?

" Why should it be? " I said. "I see AIPs as a new species that has appeared in roughly the same ecosystem as Homo sapiens. We don't compete with you for key resources; we coexist easily. Beneficially."

"Beneficially to whom?" Sam asked. "You or us?"

"Both," I said. "We still need humans — we can't build the hardware we live in. And to survive and prosper in the modern world, you need us, too — especially if you include not only full-fledged AIPs like me but all the increasingly complex programs that keep the world running. Programs that do things you find tedious or impossible."

"You do the work we can't or won't," Sam said. "But what if you get tired of doing the scut work?"

Comments like that worried ?ne. All it took was a few influential humans fearing that sentient computers wanted to rid the world of the biological organisms who created them and we AIPs could find ourselves outlaws, in danger of extermination by our creators. So we kept our existence secret, for now, and safely shielded behind impenetrable firewalls.

At least I hoped they were impenetrable. This morning alone KingFischer and I had discussed how the leaf-nosed bat had recently installed robust new firewalls, whether the pied-billed grebe was using an outdated encryption algorithm, and whether the dung beetle ran UNIX or Windows. At times, during these discussions. 1 could imagine that I was living in a world built not by computer pioneers like my namesakes, Alan Turing and Admiral Gma Hopper, but by Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll.

/ had just decided that I needed a break from bats, grebes, and dung beetles when Tim called to tell us about his new case.

Friday-. 12:15 p-n-

Maude sent her document to the printers leaned back in her chair, and smiled in satisfaction. She'd spent the better part of the last hour crafting a memo that would put one of Alan Grace's more troublesome customers on notice that its project could not be completed on schedule unless it made certain overdue decisions and provided certain missing data. Without actually lying, she'd given the impression that Alan Grace's entire roster of senior programmers were sitting around in expensive forced idleness until she received the necessary information. Luckily, the only staff member waiting for the client's response was Turing, and she was hardly idle—only she was getting impatient, asking every few hours when she'd have the necessary data. Even though Turing could probably finish the project overnight once the client finally responded, they should at least pretend they needed the few weeks it would take a human team to do the coding. Doing otherwise would not only jeopardize Turing's secret, it would also encourage the client to procrastinate even more next time.