Page 74 of Lone Wolf

Allman’s shiny cheeks bunched and he showed his small, squarish teeth. He produced a rectangular slate from his pocket, a modern phone unlike any Evan had seen, and held it balanced on the clutch of his fingertips like a waiter’s tray. “You’re a monkey, Professor Leigh. This? Is the knowledge of eternity.”

Evan’s jaws were clenched, sending an ache through the bone. Snatching the phone from Allman, he hurled it at the fireplace. It shattered against the marble and rained down in pieces. Rising, he hammered a fist across Allman’s face, spraying the couch with a rooster tail of blood.

Allman coughed teeth onto the cushions, his spectacles twisted, one metal arm impaling the flesh of his cheek.

“You forget,” Evan said. “There’s always going to be a monkey at the controls. And there’s always a stronger monkey than you.”

Evan blinked twice and then he was back and there were no shards near the fireplace and Allman’s face was unmarred and he’d never thrown the phone because he wasn’t Evan Smoak or Orphan X or the Nowhere Man right now, he was Professor Stanley Leigh of Fucking Harvard and he had a role to uphold despite every last blood instinct coursing through his veins.

“Don’t feel diminished by any of this,” Allman said, with impressive sincerity. “We all seek to be governed, controlled. I don’t mean consciously. But we all do. You by me. And me by it.”

“‘It’?” Evan asked. “What’s ‘it’?”

Allman stood and walked to a smudged sliding door that let out onto the rear deck. “‘It’ is the next layer down.”

37

Baby Hitler

Allman stood with his hands on the splintery back rail. The earth sloped precipitously away into woods, no tamed backyard to speak of. A disused Jacuzzi at the edge of the deck gathered scum, a tornado of mosquitoes flurrying above it. Nothing below but pepper trees, eucalyptus, and oak forming a dense landscape that undulated like frozen waves. Way beyond twinkled the second-rate skyline of Woodland Hills.

“I own all that,” Allman said, with a gesture. “As far as you can see to the next lights. It’s quiet here.”

When the breeze shifted, Evan could smell the crispness of the earth, wood and sage, soil and bark. Somewhere an owl hooted and hooted again and was answered by a mate somewhere in the vast darkness.

“What’s the ‘it’ that controls you?” Evan asked.

Allman’s eyes watered in the breeze. He blinked a few times, his cheeks shiny. “What I’ve described to you. The AI. In a few months, it’ll be gaming me.”

“How?” Evan asked. “Precisely?”

“Hmm. It tells me trends, things to look at and do. I’m stuck in a feedback loop with it. But increasingly, it’s driving the direction of that feedback loop. Understand?”

Evan’s stupid goddamned tie flapped in the wind and he smoothed it down, wishing he’d brought a tie clip or chain or whatever Harvard professors wear on their stupid goddamned ties. “No.”

“All the information I’m gathering? It feeds into a big data farm. And that feeds into my other AI as new training data and then spits out recommendations. So let’s just say”—he scrunched his nearly shut eyes, scenario-building—“Solventry targets heavy people with more junk food because it’s an easy sale, right?”

“Sure.”

“Wrong. We do it to push them toward diabetes while we’re seeking to buy a consortium of endocrinologic health services from apps to meds and simultaneously lobbying Congress to widen the prescription parameters and shorting health-insurance companies on the stock market. I’m still driving the enterprise. Cool, right?”

Evan debated seizing Allman by the collar and waistband and launching him off the deck. A twenty-foot fall, a forty-degree slope, enough to snap a neck or at least cause permanent mental impairment. Baby Hitler and all that. But yet.

It was legal.

Allman was just playing the game exceptionally well.

Evan cleared his throat. “Cool.”

“But lately? It’s started to drive the enterprise. This month I realized that our automatic stock-trading program had started to invest heavily in caffeine-inhaler vape-pen start-ups all on its own. And I didn’t know why. So I searched for other irregularities in the adjacent AIs. Turns out our e-commerce shipping division had begun to create delays of purified water to a specific subset of residences. Turns out our social-media subsidiaries were promoting shorter short-form content that shifted the median duration on our platforms from fifteen seconds to five. Turns out our appliance-development group was receiving machine-learning recommendations to switch to blue-LED light indicators in our smoke and carbon-monoxide detectors. The AIs are playing with each other and feeding off each other. Know what they’re doing?”

The breeze blew cool and dry across Evan’s face. His lips felt chapped. His stomach roiled. He thought about his tie pin and the beckoning hole of Allman’s ear, the tiny bones beyond the paper-thin drum.

“No.”

“Encouraging childhood ADHD.” The moonlight made the narrow slits of Allman’s eyes glint. “Stimulation, dehydration, choppy focus, sleep deprivation. We exacerbate the symptoms in childhood and from there we can move the consumer population on to juvenile-onset bipolar comorbidities.” He moved to straighten his glasses once more, a tremor in his hand betraying the slightest human vulnerability. “It’s beautiful. You asked about my reproductive fitness, what I’ll leave behind? It’s them. My offspring. They’re the future.” His lips parted with a genuine grin, the first speck of humor in his lexicon. “It’s alive.”

An unhuman destiny, spun into existence by Allman’s prolific mind.