LOOKING FOR SOME STRINGS TO PULL

Jamal had been willing to die before divulging the name of the Portsider’s main benefactor, and this told Garth that Sa Ashok Guillfoyle was very powerful indeed. Maybe a Latelian would worry about going against a man with so much going for him, but Garth didn’t care how powerful the man was; he’d ordered the Portsiders to kill him and to steal his AI buddy, and that made him Enemy Number One. OverSecretary Terrance ranked in at Number Two only because his plans hadn’t come to fruition yet. Garth personally hoped that Terrance made a move soon so he could have two Number One Enemies; it’d give him another reason to start blowing stuff and making everyone’s lives miserable.

Lounging in the most decadent bathroom ever devised, Garth read over the specs of Sa Guillfoyle’s operation with only half a mind; the other half was running down the list of pros and cons surrounding a relationship with a civilian –every time the ‘con’ side came up with what it thought was a pretty good reason to avoid getting involved with a civvie, the ‘pro’ side whacked it’s opponent over the head, a goofy smile on its lips.

Guillfoyle was himself a civilian, but one with a number of military contracts. According to what Garth read, the man’s primary focus was defense; his project teams were currently working on trying to develop duronium-IV, a thus far theoretical upgrade to the alloy that Garth knew for a fact they’d never reach: the technique to make the fourth stage metal was very similar to that of the first stage, but had next to nothing to do with the middle two forms. In order for them to even come close, they’d need the same earth-shattering epiphany that the long-ago design teams had experienced, and unless one of them developed a startling case of religion in the next few years, that would never happen.

Of more interest, though, were Guillfoyle’s offensive contracts. With the climate for military aggression rapidly waning, the man had somehow managed to wrangle a number of deals with the God army; the dollar values which weren’t attached, , had to be in the trillions; there were dozens of pages outlining project titles and associated engineers, doctors, research assistants and more, which meant that Guillfoyle was likely the R&D firm for the Army at the moment. To make things even more interesting were the project files that were listed as classified: anyone in their right mind knew that when the word ‘classified’ was attached to any piece of work there was some serious graft going on –Garth hadn’t met a contractor yet who didn’t pad their expense accounts so they could get themselves a new television set or a new car. It was just the way things were.

Reading through Guillfoyle’s projects and future undertakings put the businessman’s decision to steal Huey into a whole new light; Latelyspace’s networks, computers, and the undeniably powerful programming skills could only take entirely completely human design team so far; as amazing as the human intellect was and always would be, there were just some concepts too alien, to multifaceted for an organic brain to comprehend, never mind solve. Work that would take a Latelian scientist, armed with the very best computational programs and teams, centuries or longer to accomplish would take a properly configured AI just a few weeks. Huey, who was rated as a Level 8 artificial intelligence, could solve the bulk of the Latelian design problems in a few days.

With an AI of that magnitude in the hands of a man like Guillfoyle, who had the means, motive, and wherewithal to use it properly, the entire system would suffer a rapid explosion of ideas. Guillfoyle, who was driven only by greed, probably hadn’t even considered the negative social and economic aspects of unleashing AI-developed sciences.

Ashok Guillfoyle deserved what was going to happen to him.

Garth drained the tub a little bit before refilling it with hot water; he’d been in the tub since returning, and had no plans on getting out until he’d come up with a game plan.

By now, the Portsiders had learned of the slaughter. They’d be hot for revenge, which meant they could be nudged into doing something stupid with little effort; treating Jamal like a science experiment had been carefully planned out to build up just such a level of craziness. Garth imagined long, sleek cruisers stuffed full of Portsiders cruising the mean streets of Port City, angry and full of a desire for revenge, no matter the cost, no matter the risk. They’d drive those streets day and night until they found their target, ignoring the other aspects of their ‘business’, making them ripe for plunder.

But how to use that blind rage without risking his own narrow ass?

Next, Garth opened up one of the Intelligence directories on his prote labeled ‘Devil’s Left Testicle’ and scrolled through the information inside. They were a fairly new gang, and from the crimes they got themselves mixed up in, it was apparent they weren’t fortunate enough to have their own corporate sponsor. The bulk of their crimes were of the usual, small-time variety; gangland-style assassinations, home invasions, a faltering protection racket. Nothing really worthy of catching the ire of the Portsiders were it not for a strong desire by the leader, Bobby ‘Devildong’ Horatio, to ‘get back’ at the Portsiders for stealing the best members of his gang. They’d since then recouped their losses by focusing strictly on giving membership to local talent, and by staying out of range of the Portsiders whenever possible, yet Devildong’s desire to strike back at the Portsiders was as strong as ever. .

The two gangs hated each other so vehemently that Garth felt certain he could nudge the two of them into mutually assured destruction with some careful words and a little play-acting.

With the plan taking shape, Garth saved a few Devil Nut prote-sigs he had on file and turned back to the work he’d started a few hours ago; upon returning to the Palazzo, he had been given a package by the front desk that’d turned out to be the scanner add-on he’d ordered the night before. Immediately seeing a way to turn this new equipment to the task at hand, –that of tricking the Portsiders into getting him into the Space Port- he’d scanned his face and programmed the Facial Reconfiguration software to generate a half-dozen Latelian faces based on his own ugly mug.

The avatar had done its job well; armed with six new non-Offworld faces that would be indistinguishable from the real thing over proteus communication lines, Garth could essentially be anyone he wanted to be. All that remained now was to choose a specific face out of the handful generated for him and run through the configuration program to save his personal characteristics into a database. Garth selected the crudest face of the lot; Latelian General Face #3 was a broad-faced, wide-nosed IndoRussian descendent with a thick brow-line, fleshy lips, watery brown eyes and a ruddy complexion. Based on a large database, #3’s features happily fell into the ‘typical lower class worker type’. It was also a dead ringer for ‘gangster’.

Garth booted up the program and ran through the tests. He spent a long time reading sentences out loud and mimicking what felt like hundreds of expressions that ran the gamut from easy ones like angry to ‘joy mixed with sorrow’. By the time he was done an hour and a half later, there was absolutely no doubt remaining that the spy game in Latelyspace was the number one sport enjoyed by damn near everyone.

At the end of the process, he was given the option of running a secondary program that would scan through the results to remove ‘tells’ from the database. Garth declined, on the assumption that anyone skilled enough to read body language would be able to tell they were not talking to a live person. It was eerie to see a face that was marginally based on his own and yet so very different make faces and talk with his own voice. Garth ran the face through its paces for awhile, quitting only when he started to get uncomfortable in the bathtub. Garth got out of the tub, dried himself off, and headed off into the other room. He pulled on some clothes, this time making sure he didn’t put on one of his slogan shirts –even the stupidest gangster would remember a shirt proclaiming him a ‘Foreign Devil- and began making calls to some of the Devil Nuts.

His story was a simple one: every one of the thugs he spoke to -who were naturally very suspicious- learned that he was Hieronymus ‘Harry’ Bosch, and that he’d almost been killed by a maniac Offworlder the night before. He told them that he’d barely escaped with his life, and that he didn’t want to go back to the Portsiders because they were going to try and kill this Offworlder –who he thought couldn’t be killed no matter what- tonight. Many of the Devil Nuts didn’t care one way or the other and ended the call a few seconds later, but eventually, he got one on the line who was interested enough to start asking questions.

Why was he calling the Devil Nuts? Harry didn’t want to have nothing to do with the Portsiders anymore because they were acting crazy over this N’Chalez guy. They’d want him along because he’d managed to get out of the house before getting killed, so he’d know how tough the guy was, which wasn’t going to happen no matter what because then they’d kill him for leaving his brothers behind.

Why should the Devil Nuts care? Harry had an inside tip on something big that was going down later on that night, and all he wanted in return was a promise that he was going to be left alone when everyone stopped dying.

What was this ‘big thing’? Harry had it from one of the higher ups that the reason they were trying to kill the N’Chalez freak was because he had his own spaceship, and that it was of some kind no one’d ever seen before. The Portsiders wanted it because of something inside, and they needed to kill N’Chalez before they could get it. Harry figured N’Chalez was going to get himself dead real soon, and then the Portsiders’d sneak into the Port late tonight to get inside the ship.

Why should we, the Devil Nuts, believe a thing you, a Portsider, is saying? Harry gave the Devil Nut Jimmy’s address and told them that if they were real gangsters they could find out what happened inside. Harry reiterated he didn’t want to have nothing to do with the Portsiders anymore because if they did manage to kill N’Chalez, a whole lot of Portsiders were going to go down with him and he didn’t want to be one of them because N’Chalez was a fucking lunatic Offworlder. He’d always liked the Devil Nuts because they were more local, and thought they deserved the chance to get all kinds of the Portsiders in the same area so they could kill them.

We, the Devil Nuts, will get back to you as soon as we find out if this is true or not.

Garth smiled when the call ended. Devildong Horatio would hear about the rumor and would dispatch runners to find out what the hell was going on. In a couple of hours, he’d learn that something horrible had gone down in the suburbs, and that the Portsiders were hot for revenge. If the runners were especially good at their jobs, they’d find out that they had been trying to kill a specific Offworlder from the moment he’d landed, and that this Offworlder really did own his own spaceship, and that it had something very valuable to them inside.

While the Devil Nuts were running around trying to find out as much as they could about the Portsiders’ actions over the last several days, Garth planned on having a little personal tete a tete with Ashok Guillfoyle to set the next phase of his plan in motion…

He was going to give the Meadowlark Lemon to the Portsiders.