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  Soon they came to a locked door. There was a keypad beside it.

  The Ghost pointed to Benjamin, then to the door. Benjamin approached, his bottom lip between his teeth. His hand hovered over the keypad.

  Ash could tell what he was thinking. If he got the door open, there was a strong chance the Ghost would kill them both. But if he didn’t, the Ghost would torture them, and then, if that didn’t work, kill them anyway and find his own way in.

  The Ghost stepped forward and prodded Benjamin’s back with the harpoon. Benjamin took a deep breath, and touched the open key.

  Eight digits flashed up on the screen: 40707975. That meant that every code would be four digits long and a factor of that number.

  A computer would have had to work out a usable code by trial and error. It would have divided 40707975 by the lowest possible four-digit combination, 1000, to see if the answer was a whole number. Then it would have tried 1001. Then 1002. It would have kept going until it found an answer that worked, by which time the five-second alarm in the door would have gone off.

  Not Benjamin. The numbers were only on the screen for a moment, but Benjamin was already typing by the time they vanished. He hit four, then three, then eight and nine. The digits appeared on the screen as ****. He hit OK.

  There was a pause.

  The door lock clicked. He’d done it.

  The Ghost whirled around, raising the harpoon gun one-handed, taking aim at Ash as he shoved Benjamin’s back with his other arm, pushing him against the wall. He was going to kill them.

  But Ash had seen this coming. She’d already taken aim and was reaching for the trigger of the Benji.

  The point of the harpoon was rising rapidly. The line of fire swept up her torso and past her neck until the gun was levelled at her face. She leaned back like a limbo dancer, trying to duck out of the way without losing her aim.

  He pulled the trigger. So did she.

  She was quicker.

  The Ghost yelped as an anaesthetic dart punctured his thigh. The harpoon exploded out of his gun, rocketing past Ash and shattering the glass wall of a nearby office.

  He dropped the gun and stumbled forward, his legs already buckling under him. Ash tried to step out of reach, but even drugged, he was too quick. His hand shot forward and closed around her throat. Muscles inflated under his sleeve, all along his arm and across his chest.

  Ash let go of the Benji and grabbed the Ghost’s fingers, trying to prise them from her neck. She couldn’t breathe – he was crushing her windpipe, blocking her arteries. Her eyeballs felt like they were swelling in their sockets.

  Benjamin had recovered and was pulling at the Ghost’s arm. He grabbed the wrist and squeezed, squashing the tendons, trying to loosen his grip.

  Ash felt the chokehold slacken a little, then a lot, maybe thanks to their combined strength, maybe thanks to the drugs. She ripped his hand away and gasped.

  The Ghost fell to his knees and thumped face first to the floor.

  “Whoa,” Benjamin said.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re fast.”

  “You’re the one factoring eight-digit numbers in microseconds.”

  They stared down at the unconscious boy.

  “How long will he be out?” Ash asked.

  “Six hours, give or take.”

  “You said the tranquillizer was practically instant. How did he stay standing that long?”

  “Beats me.”

  A puddle of drool was spreading out from under the Ghost’s chin.

  Benjamin said, “Shoot him again.”

  Ash hesitated. “What if he overdoses?”

  Benjamin didn’t reply.

  “We can’t kill him,” Ash said.

  “He was going to kill us.”

  “That doesn’t make it okay.”

  “He’s killed lots of other people.”

  “Nor does that.”

  Benjamin gritted his teeth. “He’s a monster.”

  “He was, a minute ago. But now he’s a sleeping kid. We can’t murder a sleeping kid.”

  “So we just let him go?” Benjamin demanded. “When he wakes up, he’ll come after us. Even if he doesn’t, he’ll hurt someone else.”

  “We’ll shoot him again on our way out,” Ash said. “Once his system has had some time to absorb the tranquillizer. Then we’ll call the cops on him. He’ll still be unconscious when they arrive. Okay?”

  “They might not come,” Benjamin said. “Or he could talk his way out of it when they do.”

  “We’ll make sure that doesn’t happen. He’s getting locked up for a long time. Okay?”

  After a moment, Benjamin nodded. “It doesn’t feel right just leaving him here,” he said. “But I trust you.”

  “Thanks” would have sounded too casual, so Ash didn’t reply.

  Benjamin turned to the door. “Ready to be heroes?” he asked.

  “I just hope we’re not too late,” Ash said.

  Benjamin opened the door and Ash followed him into the server room.

  Peachey disassembled his gun for the fourth time, checked each component, and reassembled it. It was a nice piece – eighteen-round magazine, closed bolt, and a decent-length barrel, not one of those snub-nosed things that couldn’t hit a cow in a pen.

  Only minutes ago he’d seen the lights go out at the Googleplex. The car radio had gone dead at the same time, and when he’d checked his phone, the screen had been dark. EMP, he thought. Probably for my benefit, to get me in. But I’m supposed to wait for instructions. So I’ll wait.

  He was uneasy, though. Why would they tell him to wait for orders and then cut off his only means of communication?

  Because they didn’t expect me to be here yet, he realized. They told me to go to Mountain View and await instructions, but I came specifically to the Googleplex on my own initiative. Damn it.

  So, now what? Should he sit in the car with a potentially broken phone all night, then buy a new one tomorrow morning and switch the SIM cards? That would probably be his best option – except that he wanted to go to the HBS International Bank on Castro Street. He wanted to find Ashley Arthur. And every second he spent at the Googleplex made it less likely she’d still be there.

  It had been five minutes since he last attempted to switch on his phone. He took it out and tried again. “Come on,” he muttered, pressing his thumb hard on the power switch, as though the amount of pressure would make a difference.

  Maybe it did – the phone hummed and came to life.

  Peachey waited as the company logo flashed up on the screen, the menu opened, and the phone searched for a signal. It found one, but didn’t register any missed calls or messages.

  Peachey frowned. Could the EMP have been coincidental? Surely not.

  Beep. The phone registered a text message. Peachey opened it.

  Michael, the main entrance to Building 42 is now unlocked. Follow the signs to the server room. Kill everyone inside, then anyone else you find in the building as you leave. Don’t touch any of the equipment. $400,000 has been moved to an account accessible with the documentation you have been given. The same amount will be transferred after you leave. This will conclude your service.

  There was a name at the bottom of the message. Female, old-fashioned, just as he’d suspected: Alice B. Peachey congratulated himself on his deductive reasoning, and opened the car door.

  “Time to go to work,” he said.

  The Devil’s Lair

  Ash and Benjamin stared at the rows of server towers, square and dirty, illuminated only by the glow of various monitors and status lights. Cords overflowed from the tops of the towers like Medusa’s hair. Dozens of cooling fans hummed in the darkness.

  This was it – the brain of the world’s biggest intelligence agency.

  “What now?” Benjamin asked.

  “We can’t just call out,” Ash said. “There could be someone guarding her.”

  Benjamin looked around doubtfully. “I don’t think there’s an
yone in here,” he said.

  It did look like an ordinary server farm. But we’ve come this far, Ash thought. We have to look.

  “You go that way, I’ll go this way,” she said. “I’ll phone you if I find anything. It’s on silent, right?”

  “Yeah. Yours too?”

  She nodded. “See you soon.”

  Benjamin tiptoed away down an aisle. Ash crept in the opposite direction.

  This doesn’t add up, she thought, looking at the towers of drives and processors. The security out there was tight, which would make this a perfect place to hold a prisoner – except that there’s no security inside. The locks on the doors are one-way. It would be impossible to keep someone trapped in here without Google® knowing about it – they could just walk right out.

  Ash had a sudden vision of a woman with her legs chopped off, screaming, bleeding, unable to drag herself to the door.

  She shivered. Ridiculous. It would be far more practical to handcuff a prisoner to a wall-bracket or something...

  She paused. Took a few steps backwards. Stared at the LCD monitor she’d just passed.

  The screen was dark except for two words.

  Hello, Hammond.

  Ash blinked, trying to make sense of it. Was this something someone had Googled? Surely not – hundreds of searches were passing through this data centre every second. Why would this one be singled out?

  There was a keyboard nearby. Ash tapped a random key to see if it was connected to the same processor.

  It was, but the letter K appeared below the message, not alongside it. She hit delete a few times. The K disappeared, but she found that she couldn’t erase the greeting. No one had typed it in.

  Feeling silly, she typed, Hello.

  The response was instant. I wasn’t sure you would come.

  Ash thought of how the Ghost had laughed when she’d told him Alice’s name. She thought of the soldiers, here to pick up “a package”.

  She grabbed her phone and dialled Benjamin.

  “Have you found Alice?” he asked.

  “Um...I don’t know.”

  One-handed, she typed, Who are you?

  I am ALICE B. Nice to meet you, Hammond.

  “You’d better come take a look at this,” Ash said.

  Benjamin appeared beside her a few seconds later, panting. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”

  Ash gestured at the screen. Benjamin frowned.

  “She’s not here,” Ash said. “She’s been moved.”

  “To a place with internet access? Generous kidnappers.” Benjamin’s eyes traced the screen, keyboard, and the nearest server stack. He nudged Ash.

  “Hey,” he said, pointing.

  There was a grey box sitting on the shelf, plugged into the server, the screen and the keyboard.

  “Does that look like a four-terabyte hard drive to you?” Benjamin asked.

  “I don’t get it,” Ash said.

  “Alice has been moved,” Benjamin said. “From our local city library to here.”

  He stepped in front of the keyboard and typed, What does ALICE stand for?

  Alice replied, Artificial Linguistic Intelligence Computer Entity.

  “See?” Benjamin said. “That hard drive is her. She’s the program that Kathy Connors wrote.”

  “But I’ve heard of Alice,” Ash said. “My dad mentioned it. It was written back in the nineties. It’s just a chatterbot, with a series of set responses to common questions. It imitates conversation, but it can’t think. How could it send out a distress call? How could it even send a fax?”

  “It can probably send emails, text messages – anything that’s digital. This isn’t just Alice, remember? This is Alice B. Four terabytes is way more data than the original Alice software had, so this must be something new. And it’s a lot more code than one programmer could write – so she must have taught it to write itself.”

  “But software can’t do that,” Ash said.

  “Sure it can. Someone made another chatterbot awhile back that could learn – every time it received a question it didn’t have an answer for, it asked someone else online and added their response to its database. Pretty soon it was talking like a real person. Suppose Connors did something like that? What if she went one step further and taught it to read? With internet access, it could learn pretty much everything there is to know.”

  Alice said, Are you still there, Hammond?

  Benjamin said, “Ash, what if she taught it to talk to itself? That’s all thinking is, really. What if this is the first example of true artificial intelligence?”

  “Why does it believe we’re Buckland?” Ash asked. “How does it know we know him?”

  “Maybe...” Benjamin paused. “Alice is plugged into the system here, right? Maybe it faxed the note to the city library vault, digitally, and then waited for the coordinates to show up in the Google® search logs. Buckland’s the one who did the search, so when she traced the IP address, it led back to him.”

  Hammond? Where are you?

  Ash reached for the keyboard. I’m not Hammond, she typed. I’m Ash.

  Hello, Ash. I am Alice.

  “It doesn’t seem that intelligent to me,” Ash said. “Are you sure that—”

  She broke off. The screen was filling up with text. It read:

  Ashley Arthur birthday 21 October age 16 address 146 East Park Way blood type B negative school Narahm School for Girls associates Hammond Buckland Benjamin Whitely Kenneth Preen...

  It went on and on. It listed Ash’s parents, her classmates, all her teachers. It listed everyone Ash could remember meeting, and many people she couldn’t.

  “Whoa,” she said. “How...what...”

  “It knows everything Google® knows,” Benjamin said. “It’s probably the smartest thing on earth.”

  “But I didn’t even tell it my last name!”

  “It knows about Buckland, and it knows you’re connected to him. It must have just taken a guess.”

  Ash sat down on the floor. There were no chairs and this was too much to take standing up.

  “So what do we do?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. Take it back to the Connors family for the reward, I guess. That was the original plan.”

  There was a pause.

  “There’s one thing I don’t get,” Ash said. “It must be programmed to seek out information, or else it wouldn’t learn anything. And the more it has access to, the smarter it becomes. Right?”

  “Right.”

  “So why would it want to leave?” Ash asked. “There’s more information here than anywhere else in the world. It said ‘help me’. Why does it need our help?”

  Benjamin squinted at the screen. “I don’t know.”

  Ash felt unease growing in her belly. “How did Connors die again?”

  “Her house was burned down,” Benjamin said.

  “By people who heard a rumour she’d murdered a child, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s...wait. You think Alice was behind that?”

  “Like you said, it can send emails and texts. It can probably even do online banking. What if it knew she was going to sell it? Or switch it off?”

  “So it had her killed?”

  “And paid someone to steal it and take it to the city library. Another reservoir of knowledge for it to feed off.”

  “If it moved up from the library to here, where’s it going next? Where does it want us to take it?”

  A chill ran up Ash’s spine. “Maybe it doesn’t want to go anywhere. Maybe the SOS was a trick. It wanted anybody who came to the library looking for it to be led into a trap.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Benjamin said. “It may be the first self-aware computer, but in another sense it’s just a talking box. What kind of trap could it possibly set?”

  Alice said, Hello, Peachey.

  Ash scrambled to her feet. “What the hell?”

  Benjamin was pale. “It must know about him. It’s trying to freak you out, tha
t’s all.”

  Ash typed, I’m not Peachey. I’m Ash.

  “Peachey’s in jail, right?” Benjamin said. “He won’t get parole for decades, right?”

  Alice said, Hello, Peachey. Hello, Peachey. Hello, Peachey.

  And the server farm door clicked closed somewhere behind them.

  He’s here, Ash thought. Oh god, he’s here. We’re dead.

  She’d had nightmares about Michael Peachey. She would be running through the corridors of HBS, heart in her mouth, legs growing heavy and clumsy, and she could hear him getting closer, hear his voice – You can’t get away from me! No one ever does! – and then she’d fall, grazing her hands, and when she turned she’d see his face, not stony like the mugshot on TV, but lit up with fury and madness.

  Ash gripped the Benji. There were eleven tranquillizer darts left in the magazine. But she doubted she would be as successful as she had been with the Ghost. He had needed her. She’d had time to find an opportunity to shoot him.

  Michael Peachey would kill her and Benjamin on sight. No questions, no negotiation, no “Unlock this door for me and I’ll let you live.” Just six bullets in their brains, lungs and hearts.

  “What do we do?” Benjamin hissed, eyes wide.

  Think, Ash. Think!

  “The door,” she whispered. “He’s going to have to move away from it to search the room. We’ll get out while his back is turned.”

  “He’ll hear us open it.”

  “So we’ll shut it behind us and run like hell.” She unplugged the hard drive and slipped it into her bag. Alice’s words vanished from the screen. “You ready?”

  Benjamin nodded. “Let’s do it.”

  For the first time, Ash was struck by how brave he was. A coward would have refused to move, hoping Peachey would go away or that he could be talked down. But while Benjamin was often frightened, he never let the fear make decisions for him. Cowards hope, heroes act.

  They crept along a row of servers, listening for Peachey’s footsteps. Ash heard nothing but her own breaths, which felt terrifyingly loud. If Peachey wasn’t moving, he was probably listening for them. She willed her shoes not to squeak.