Ch.43Work Record 008 – Case Files of Two Detectives (5)

The night streets weren’t cold. Quite a few people wore coats to avoid the skin-unfriendly smog, but the temperature was still close to fifteen degrees. It was finally typical November weather.

I made sure to bring my gun. It was fully loaded since I hadn’t fired a single shot. There weren’t any hackable components in my head. I passed the intersection in front of the company and reached the apartment complex. There were no pedestrians around.

I nodded along as Kay talked about how easy it was to get lost among the densely packed buildings where you couldn’t even see the sky, pointing out where various commercial buildings were wedged in. I only spoke after we passed the CCTV.

“Did you know someone from Belwether’s Legal Assassination Team came this morning? It was someone named Dewey Novak from Investigation Division 8.”

While the security team’s investigation division handles case investigations, the Legal Assassination Team’s investigation division determines the exact damages suffered by Belwether Company. In other words, they’re insurance investigators. Kay flinched slightly at the name Dewey Novak.

Since she didn’t respond, I continued. It wasn’t quite time to draw my gun yet. I still hadn’t resolved to betray her. I was just being prepared.

“And someone from the Non-Human Liberation Front came by too. I know what I’m saying. I’m just curious. Whether I can trust Kay or not.”

Kay stomped her foot once as if she had goosebumps on the back of her neck, then spoke. The drones she had been holding flew up again and began circling around us. Probably for voice blocking.

“So that’s why you offered to walk me home without even showering? Really, people from Belwether are just impossible to trust! What do you think? Do I look like someone you can trust?”

She seemed to be trying to speak in her usual arrogant tone, but her voice was already trembling. Her eyes were tightly shut beside me. She knew that if my answer was “no,” she might only hear my response after she was dead.

If I had been Belwether’s biological weapon, that is. But I was much closer to being Arthur Murphy, an ordinary employee of Nightscape. That’s just how things had turned out, and I had no intention of denying it.

“As a colleague, I trust you enough. You gave me correct information today too. But about the eye issue… well, it seems like you’ve just been deceiving me.”

Kay kept walking. She seemed to have figured out that I at least had no intention of twisting her neck as a result of distrust and betrayal. She spoke in an uncharacteristically complicated voice.

“The transparent eye is my misfortune. Misfortune becomes unhappiness, and unhappiness is as difficult to erase as fallout. Unhappiness always needs someone to take responsibility, and this time I’m the one who has to be responsible. I don’t want to die. I don’t plan to be trapped in a brain prison like the prisoners we transported today. I don’t care whether androids gain souls or not. I just… I just don’t want the transparent eye to be released because of me…”

It was almost the same as what Manager Dewey Novak had said. That misfortune becomes unhappiness, unhappiness is difficult to erase, and someone always has to take responsibility. Seeing the resemblance, I didn’t draw my gun. I quietly followed her.

She entered her apartment building and got on the elevator. She kept her mouth shut in the CCTV-equipped elevator, and only spoke after getting off at the 24th floor and sending the elevator back down.

“You don’t need to come in. I won’t be here long either. Seeing how they came to the company, they’ll be here soon too, and I need to move the transparent eye before then. You’ve heard what it is, haven’t you?”

Her usual confident, somewhat arrogant, and talkative demeanor had disappeared, leaving only a gloomy expression. Just because there’s misfortune doesn’t mean luck won’t come. I said something she probably didn’t expect.

“The Non-Human Liberation Front will take quite a while. They only knew it was somewhere in this area, so I told them it was likely in the drug dealers’ district, not the apartment complex. Belwether’s Legal Assassination Team will arrive faster, but they’ll have a hard time in an apartment complex with over thirty buildings each exceeding forty floors. As long as the transparent eye doesn’t scream again.”

Kay looked up at me with slightly bewildered eyes. She seemed to think I had no reason to help her after openly expressing my distrust. She looked up at me sharply.

“Are you confused too?”

“I didn’t want androids coming here talking about transparent eyes and whatnot. Kay is a company colleague, and those androids are just androids. Mental liberation… well, that would be nice, but I’m not nice enough to sell out a senior colleague from the same company to help them find it. Like I said, I just wanted to know.”

That was the ideal scenario, but Manager Dewey Novak might use the detective from the Non-Human Liberation Front snooping around the drug dealers’ district as a clue to divert attention from here. The situation was good.

Kay’s expression was ambiguously caught between trust and distrust. It was a look that said she wanted to trust but couldn’t. However, she had just heard about the favor I had extended for the trivial reason that we worked at the same company.

The way to get others to reach out is always to extend your hand first. Kay reached out in return. A small drone flew out from the doorknob, scanned her artificial eye, and the apartment door opened.

“You can come in, Arthur. You said you wanted to know, right? And you’ve shown me kindness once. I can do the same at least once. What wouldn’t I do for a junior colleague who’s too kind for his own good?”

She seemed to have regained some of her usual composure. Following her through the door she had left open, inside the apartment was… a server room. It was large enough to fill almost the entire living room.

How did Belwether not track this? If she could bypass Belwether’s security to get in, hiding it wouldn’t have been difficult, but I felt like I was one step closer to the city’s secrets.

“What, what is all this? I thought there would be some neat chip stored somewhere.”

As soon as Kay entered the room, she sat down in front of the server in the living room and connected to the net. While her body remained seated quietly, only her mouth began to speak.

“You’re the one who said you were an IT manager, not a hacker! Did you think hackers would leave their trophies out on display? This? This is LA. At least for the transparent eye, it’s LA. We can call it a security isolation server. A sandbox! The transparent eye is sleeping inside. It still thinks it’s inside Belwether, waiting in a state of non-resistance. I told you I was obsessed with historical accuracy, didn’t I?”

I definitely heard that on my first day. Was her obsession with historical accuracy because she needed to make the inside of the sandbox exactly like reality to keep the transparent eye contained? I was beginning to understand.

“And the distress signal. That was… sigh, my fault, yes. I couldn’t keep it stored like this forever, so I was going to put it in a suitable storage device and destroy it. If you knew how much of my life I’ve wasted on this thing, you’d be surprised… No, no. You already know! I spend all my time outside of work at home trimming this damn net bonsai!”

It was a reasonable approach. As Chance had said, software is bound to hardware. Like people, if the hardware is destroyed, software that hasn’t been uploaded dies too. If she had succeeded, there wouldn’t be a server room here.

“Whether the transparent eye sent a distress signal when I took it out of the sandbox or not, I was going to finish the job quickly by smashing it. It would have only taken an hour or two… but androids who received the distress signal directly from the transparent eye started coming here faster than I expected.”

“So that’s why you contacted me about hacking Turner & Tucker and asked me to deal with the androids?”

“That’s right! You were a new employee, so I thought you wouldn’t contact the boss! And I thought you could capture the androids without leaving a scratch!”

Whether it was some kind of trust or underestimation, I’m not sure, but if it hadn’t been me, everyone would have reported first and then come looking for Kay in that situation. It was a lie, true, but there was no malice. I could understand.

“President Yoon is a really good person. He doesn’t ask me to spy on other companies. You understand why I insisted on denying everything and asked you not to report it, right?”

The transparent eye had been in Kay’s hands for years. Before that, it had been in Belwether’s hands for even longer. Yet it still had functioning androids.

Then… had the transparent eye been preparing something before it was captured by Belwether? I couldn’t be sure. Those androids showed no signs of human use and were completely worn out. They hadn’t been used by anyone.

I don’t know how the transparent eye was created, but if it was made by a large corporation, there might be an unmanned factory somewhere in the wasteland producing androids with the transparent eye applied.

If that artificial intelligence had arrived during the brief moment it was being uploaded from Kay’s server to a storage device, the unmanned factory must be quite close to the Greater Los Angeles area. I drew a circle on the mental map.

After sketching the outline, I sighed. Another question had arisen. To trust Kay, I needed to be certain this was the best option.

“What about blowing up the entire server? Let’s pull the pin on a grenade, considering the neighbors will come knocking.”

Kay, sitting on a beanbag sofa facing the server, smiled with just her lips and said:

“I’ve already considered that method, but gave it up because it’s too dangerous. Look at me! I’m a hacker with dozens of cybernetic implants just in my brain! If I were to use a grenade, I’d have to be outside, and what if the transparent eye, thinking this is a Belwether server room, survived while the server was being physically destroyed? It would think someone had come to rescue it and go even more berserk! And I’d be outside, unable to take immediate action!”

“How did you get around it this time?”

“I fed it a scenario where android attacks occurred during the transfer operation, so the move was canceled. To the transparent eye, I am the world. This thing is so stubborn, I don’t know how to persuade it…”

Since she had been trying to move it to a portable storage device rather than simply destroying the server, even the intelligent transparent eye would have been fooled. I didn’t think I could expect more from Kay.

The safest option would be to return it to Belwether, but that wouldn’t end well for Kay. If maintaining the status quo was possible, or if it could be destroyed, I felt I could help with that.

“That makes sense. What’s Plan B? You wouldn’t have just been sitting at home wracking your brain after Plan A failed.”

“Can I be honest?”

I nodded slightly, but there was no response from Kay. With her artificial eye connected to the net, she couldn’t see my expression either. She had willingly closed her eyes in front of me despite fearing I might kill her.

Whether this was a bluff or trust, I decided to play along. Trust always produces more efficient results than distrust. I suppressed my anxiety with a desire for efficiency.

“It’s okay to tell me. I’ve already been deceived once, so what’s another time? At least you haven’t tried to deceive me again.”

“Um, well. I was going to deceive you one more time to destroy the transparent eye’s unmanned android factory somewhere in the wasteland, then put the transparent eye in a storage device and smash it to pieces?”

“I hope you’ve changed your mind.”

I said as I approached Kay and crouched down lightly in front of her. Her furrowed brow and the expression of someone wrestling with something I couldn’t see without computational assistance implants couldn’t be faked.

“Yeah, I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to ask for your help to destroy the transparent eye’s unmanned android factory in the wasteland, then put that thing in a storage device, and ask you to smash it to pieces with your fist!”

It was essentially the same plan. Only one thing had changed. And that one thing was important. I deliberately played dumb to see if Kay was thinking the same thing I was.

“Nothing’s changed…”

“That’s not true! One tiny thing has changed, making it an almost identical but much better plan! After showing nothing but a good-natured attitude all this time, are you going to pretend now? Stop the deception and show that you understand first! Think about it later!”

The chattering voice meant things were back to normal. I smiled slightly at the voice without malice and replied:

“Right. At least you won’t be deceiving me anymore. Adding a piece of trust makes it taste much better.”

“What? Do Posthuman Type IVs watch mukbang too? Your way of speaking is exactly like that!”

I laughed a little before answering. Looking at the efforts to keep the transparent eye trapped in an illusion within the dryly stacked servers, I continued:

“Just promise me one thing. If all this fails, and it all becomes useless…”

“Okay. I’ll report to Belwether myself, even if it means a brain prison. I don’t want to see the transparent eye get loose because we messed up. The sentence would be about 20 years, right?”

Because the facial feedback was working normally, I could see her expression turning fearful. I gently brushed aside the hair covering her frightened eyes and said:

“At least by the time you get out, the Pacific will be clean, and KSC will be selling Fish-O-Fillet burgers. I’ve never worked at Belwether, but for some reason, I know Belwether people well. I’ll try to help you with those connections, so worry a little less. Oh, why did you hack Belwether in the first place?”

Kay sighed. She pouted her lips, then shook her head and said:

“It was just recklessness. Until then, I lived like the nerd you’d imagine when someone says ‘IT manager.’ Since I didn’t show off, nobody recognized my abilities! I wanted to break through Belwether’s security, steal a couple of insignificant confidential documents, and show people who I really was. That’s all. It was my fault. I know. I know.”

At least she’s not shouting that it wasn’t her fault. I looked down at her quietly and replied:

“I find that hard to believe. I thought you were an irresponsible person.”

“What, are you stupid? If Belwether ever found out about this, I’d be headed straight for a brain prison the next day, and even if not, if the transparent eye realized everything it was seeing was a sandbox, it would send androids to tear me apart! I’m basically living on borrowed time! When you have so many ways to be screwed, you end up doing whatever you want!”

Kay’s voice, which had been speaking proudly and boastfully, suddenly went quiet. As if it was a fact she didn’t want to admit, she pouted her lips and said:

“Or maybe, just because of my one irresponsible act, things turned out this way… and I’ve become someone who tells myself, ‘You’re an irresponsible person!’ That’s pretty common these days! This is real.”

Kay made a stupid choice. After hacking Belwether for a line of experience she couldn’t even put on her resume, the transparent eye escaped in the chaos, and Manager Dewey Novak lost half his face.

But is this the appropriate consequence for that stupid choice? Building a prison in an illusion and forcing her to be a permanent guard for a prisoner who doesn’t even know they’re imprisoned? I couldn’t tell.

I could trust Kay now, but I couldn’t tell if this was the right thing to do. She disconnected from the net, saw me in front of her, and was startled, sinking deep into the beanbag before barely managing to get up.

“You scared me! I thought your voice sounded close… Anyway, there’s not much I can promise, and it’s shameless, and honestly, it would be faster to count what I have than what I don’t have right now…”

Kay took a deep breath. I would make my choice based on what she said. We don’t act. We always react. This was the creed of Nightscape, not Belwether.

“Help me! I really need your help. To destroy the unmanned android factory owned by the transparent eye, to completely eliminate the transparent eye…”

The silence lasted about seven seconds. And after hearing what she said next, I decided to help Kay.

“And to apologize to that Manager Dewey Novak you saw. I’m not good at things like apologies! When I start with ‘Sor-‘, my autocomplete shows ‘Sorry, you asshole, you were wrong first!’ But still, I need to apologize. If I hadn’t broken in, the transparent eye wouldn’t have caused that mess, so I need to apologize.”