Causal Engine, v. 2.9.1

ostende mihi et scies omnia

Report, Query 2061.11.19-1212A

Subject: Culpability of (Masters, Clive) in (manufacturing/distributing illicit material)

Corroborating Material Volume: 7.9 x 1022

Result: Plausible, probably correct (8.2/10)

Input Material

• 13 documents (categorized official/legal/formal)

• 81 images

• 22 audio recordings

• 6 video recordings

BackTrack Source Identification Result: 99.8% confidence in integrity of selected corroborating materials. Contact information for sources listed in appendix.

Abstract: The following information should be officially considered allegations, if/until proven in a court of law. Multiple felonies are implied.

The subject of the input material (Masters, Clive) met personally with employees who themselves met with persons wanted by authorities in several nations, on suspicion of unusual murders. The weapon used to perform the actions was an experimental, genetically-tailored biological agent, designed to target individuals, but able to be programmed to attack new targets quickly in the field.

No official, publicly-released documents from federal organizations, or from Dane Research and affiliates have been made available. However, 121 leaks matching the style of documentation were discovered, referencing such a weapon in various detail. Signatures on said documents, where available, were matched to known present or former employees and/or affiliates.

Though the Relevance Factor of this information is high (4 out of 5), its Public Interest Factor remains low (1 out of 5). Misinformation efforts by Dane Research and invested parties have been minimal, as such efforts have not been necessary.

Sam

It was all I could do not to pound my desk in frustration. There was nothing I could do with what I was seeing. It was damning information, sure, but no one would believe it.

I was still immensely flustered from the encounter with Maryam. Every time I tried to rewind to that moment, to pick up some clue that I had missed, some direction she might have been trying to give me, the memory of the kiss turned every other detail of the moment into haze. I’d feel the same burning in my cheek, the feel of her warm breath down my neck, and my skin would begin to tingle, causing me to lose all focus.

She knew me. Or at least, knew who I was, and what I was like. She had to. Then again, maybe not. Maybe she was able to melt any young man with the right words, at the right time, in the right places. It’d do a bit to explain her unbelievable success in this challenging field of work, I grumbled to myself.

I turned off the screen. This was, all of it, insane, and had only grown more so as the day went on. Right now, I was looking at evidence that one of the richest men in the world, a “benevolent philanthropist” and saint in the Church of Public Opinion, helped create the perfect tool of assassination. In today’s information environment, I knew everyone could be hiding a double life, but to have to peel back the layers and look at it?

And his soon-to-be ex-wife, herself an independently rich titan of the so-called “fifth estate,” the ones who watched the watchers of the watchmen, was attempting to seduce me into helping to bring her husband down.

At least, that’s what she appeared to be doing. How could I be sure she wasn’t some kind of double agent, too?

Then I remembered the kiss again, and I started to want to believe in her. Green as I was, even I knew that would be a mistake.

I had to focus, I told myself. Maryam had agreed to pay millions if I came through with this, and On to Logic was in dire straits. We needed this. I turned the screen back on, staring at it as though it would tell me how I’d even begin to corroborate this apparently stolen information. Without an AI to comb over the nonillions of documents, images, videos and countless other types of media on the internet, I was looking for a microscopic needle in a galaxy-sized haystack.

Nonillions. I didn’t know there was a word for that big a number until I took this job. This was exactly why we had the Causal Engine; we couldn’t verify anything unless we’d removed every shred of doubt that there was some kind of credible evidence countering a piece of information. For those who still believed in the idea of truth and still cared to find it, any less than that level of scrutiny wasn’t enough.

It was pointless; I couldn’t do this. But I couldn’t let this sit, either. This was all kinds of illegal. Forget the police, this was the kind of thing that went before a military tribunal, right before the summary execution of whoever pulled the trigger.

It was also the kind of thing that a government couldn’t be ignorant of, because they’d have to fund it and employ an army of scientists and weapons manufacturers to develop this. No one was rich or smart enough to do this on their own.

******

I wasn’t a complete novice at this job. Everyone had something in their search history that would net them a visit by the police, if they didn’t anonymize that search. This usually meant that the “Special Intervention Group” only ended up visiting the homes of the elderly who mistyped something, and people who lived in poor parts of town, as everyone else had the means and the knowledge to purchase or borrow the right tools to stay reasonably private.

Loading up my personal tablet, I connected it with a hardline to the building’s Causal Engine server; no need to take the risk of interception of a wireless signal. I’d have preferred to set up a dummy account to connect to the Causal Engine’s central server in London, but I was forced to use my own login. What I was doing was legal, but I’d been warned about doing verifications connected to wealthy individuals. Hopefully, they’d agree with my rationale once they saw the evidence. My measures should have been enough to keep me off the radar of anyone but Tamika and maybe the IT guys, I thought.

They were not enough.

******

Everything happened quickly after I made my search.

For about two minutes, I stared at the wall in complete shock. It wasn’t a surprise that the allegation was true; it was that there was so much out there that proved it. Sure, the Causal Engine had found a handful of documents on improperly secured government servers abroad, but the vast, vast majority of the corroborating documents were…banal. Ordinary. People were taking pictures of a top secret, experimental weapon that could perfectly target any one person on Earth, and posting those pictures on social media. They talked about the “field trials” of this weapon on blogs and with obscure entertainment personalities. They spoke openly, laughingly, and without concern about things they had every reason to hide.

The guilty parties didn’t care. It didn’t matter that it was out there, because as many pieces of solid evidence there were about this ongoing Geneva Convention violation, the ratio of misinformation to evidence was 100 to 1.

I was beginning to wonder what Maryam expected me to do with this, when I was violently spun around in my chair. Someone had caught my arm in a vice grip, and I was being pulled toward the entrance, barely managing to keep my feet beneath me.

“I told you not to use AI!” Maryam hissed softly.

Even in the confusion and fright, I marveled at how her hand could feel so soft while her grip nearly crushed my wrist.

“I was encrypted, there was no-” I stopped. The fact that she was here at all, that she knew, meant my search wasn’t encrypted enough.

And if she had found out so easily, who else knew…?

My heart suddenly felt like it was detonating.

“Is he here?” I said, now trembling so violently that I could hear the quaver in my voice.

“Maybe. I don’t know,” She said, abruptly pulling me away from the entrance and behind a set of stairs by the doors. Her legs seemed to collapse under her as she got to the floor, taking me with her. My fall was not as graceful, but she latched on to me, pulling me close and taking half of the impact. We both gasped as the wind was pressed from our lungs. I began to groan in pain, but she clamped a hand over my mouth.

“Hush. Slow, quiet breaths,” She said as she took her hand off my mouth. She managed to sound authoritative and soothing at the same time. Like before, I was too stunned to disobey her, or even ask what was happening. I could only hope she'd tell me, or at least keep me safe from a threat I couldn't even see.

"We have to get out of here. I hit the breaker for the HVAC, but Clive’s men are leaving, which means they got there before I did with the weapon,” Maryam said.

My breath hitched as I realized why we were on the ground…who we were hiding from.

“They put it in here?” I said, nearly yelling. I started scrambling back to my feet, but she pulled me down again, this time laying atop me. Every thought in my head ceased as those grey eyes stared through me.

“Not…yet,” She hissed, “He has people waiting to take us if we come out.”

Her grip on my arm relaxed, but she didn’t let go. My ragged mind settled on how good, how comforting her hand felt. The sheer terror of imminent death barely seemed like an emotion anymore, but rather a whole ocean of ice and needles. It was too big to approach with any rational thought.

With her other hand, she pulled out her phone. I couldn’t see what was on the screen, but what shined at her was a bright green that grew dimmer with a swipe of her thumb across the device.

“They’ll move away as soon as the gas spreads to the whole building. Won’t take the chance that Clive didn’t program it to kill them as well, tie up loose ends.” She said.

“With us still inside!” I choked out.

“It’s our best chance. Only chance.”

As the phone’s screen turned yellow, then orange, I trembled so violently that it shook Maryam with me. The hand holding my forearm reached up to caress my cheek. I closed my eyes, trying to take in as much of the comforting touch as I could.

Then she gave me a kiss square on the lips, gentle but long. My heart briefly felt like it would burst again, but this felt more like a sugar rush than the nitroglycerine explosion from before. I felt like a teenager: alive, excited, aroused.

It only lasted a few seconds, but it served to blunt the worst of the fear. We would probably still die, but…maybe this wasn’t so bad.

Tamika

Something wasn’t right. Several somethings.

Three Mercedes vans, each painted the same hunter green, sat across the street from the office’s front doors. So it was happening again, I thought, and for the fourth time this year. The thugs various politicians and billionaires hired to intimidate us were getting more brazen now that Dunning was dragging our names through the mud.

But strangely, the front doors to the office were propped open, while three rather large men in construction gear stood inside, blocking the inner doors behind them. I briefly wondered if anyone else saw through the ridiculous disguise…or if anyone even glanced in the direction of the men wearing the bright orange safety vests.

If they meant to funnel in a crowd of bruisers to give our staff a mass beating, they would have propped both doors open, or broken them down altogether. If they hoped to make a statement by taking hostages at knifepoint, they’d chain the door shut from the inside.

And none of the thugs wore masks. While it was true that the public at large would not care about violence given to us…or might even deny that it happened at all…the SIG heavies would not resist the chance to do some government-sanctioned bashing of skulls, and this “construction crew” had to know that.

I sighed, knowing I couldn’t just wait for Big Brother to come clean house. My people were in there, and I had to make sure no one was bleeding out in a corner. 

I rolled my fingers into a fist, popping my knuckles. These three were about to find out why I wasn’t scared of dying on the job.

******

“Sorry, mum. Gas leak,” The stubble-faced thug in front said when I approached the entrance. The patchy, unwrinkled face, set in a permanent scowl, suggested he was a young zealot, probably indoctrinated into this “political movement” by his parents, 24-hour news, or both. He gestured with a raised palm for me to stop, and the pretentious look on his face set off an irritation I struggled to bring under control.

“We both know that’s not true,” I said, crossing my arms.

He seemed to consider this for a moment. Deciding the facade wasn’t worth the effort, he gave a sidelong glance to one of his colleagues, who pulled out an old-fashioned hand radio.

“Might have a problem here,” The radio thug said into the device.

The man who replied gave a groan, and spoke in a London dialect so thick that it had to be embellishment.

"I have to do everything myself, don't I?" The voice said.

The three bruisers rolled their eyes nearly in unison. Behind me, I heard the sound of a van door opening.

I took a deep breath, then lunged at the man nearest the door, reaching for his neck with both hands as I rode him down like a snowsled. The world erupted into glass and noise as I found the man's carotid arteries and squeezed.