Chapter 40 Madison
Madison
Well, that’s fuckin’ terrifying.
I’m in the shower when it hits me.
“Dios,” I breathe, eyes widening and then wincing as a stream of sudsy water falls right into my surprised expression. “Ah, fuck!”
I’m so excited by the realization, I can’t get my hair rinsed out fast enough. I nearly trip over the lip of the shower and slip on the wet tile as I climb out. The near brush with death makes me pause and catch my balance.
I can’t die because of something stupid before I get a chance to tell Wesley what I just figured out.
And I suppose that means—since I have to go downstairs—I should probably also put on clothes first. Everyone is downstairs, and I don’t think Wesley will be very receptive to what I have to say if he’s anxious I might accidentally drop my towel.
No time for undergarments. I throw on a dress over my nudity and fly down the stairs, hair dripping in my wake. Just as I’m about to turn the corner towards the office, I skid to a stop, my feet literally making stuttered squeaks on the marble.
I poke my head into the kitchen. “Hey!” I call to Eleanor and Nicole.
Nicole spins, and Eleanor looks up from her knife work and the enormous, beige lump on the counter in front of her. “Madison, you’re… wet?”
“I thought you’d—are you butchering a whole turkey?” I interrupt myself. I shake my head. “Doesn’t matter. I figured it out! Come on!”
I turn and sprint down the hallway.
After a second, Nicole and Eleanor follow. Nicole’s voice echoes after me. “That was way too dramatic not to pique my interest.”
“Hell yeah. I want to know,” Eleanor agrees.
I jerk open the door, feeling Nicole’s presence at my back. “It’s a project!” I shout into the office, making all three men turn to me with identical expressions of shock.
Okay, so I know what that means, but I can see how it makes no sense without context.
I rush over to the laptop Wesley set me up with and hurry to log in before I lose my train of thought.
It’s a weird feeling to have everyone watching over your shoulder as you type—like being on display.
The contents of one’s computer are a deeply private thing, and even though this isn’t really my personal machine, I can’t shake the itchiness under my skin.
Or maybe that’s just nerves. Dios, I hope I’m right about this…
Eleanor appears in the doorway, wiping her wet hands on her apron as I type my epiphany into the search bar, holding my breath. The result comes back, and I cover the elated laugh with my hand as I spin the screen towards Wesley to show him. Goosebumps erupt all over my skin.
He goes very still next to me. “Why didn’t that come up in my search?”
“Because it doesn’t say ‘General’ it says ‘Gener-AI.’ It’s SmarTech’s generative AI machine learning project.
It’s Fred’s project,” I emphasize. I want to kick myself for not realizing it earlier.
“It was all very hush-hush; I wasn’t there long enough to work on it, but obviously I snooped,” I add, chuckling when Wesley gives me a knowing look.
Shower thoughts for the win.
The software itself isn’t in the file, but there are some confidential documents. I see out of the corner of my eye as he pulls up the project documentation and starts skimming.
“What is it?” Eleanor asks, eyes round.
I cut her a grin before pulling up a Google search and sending an article I read a month ago about SmarTech’s project—Safe-T Keeper (still the stupidest name, ever)—to the group chat.
“You know how they say things are cutting edge if it’s advanced and state-of-the-art, and they call it bleeding edge if it’s newer than that—more experimental, more exciting? ”
“Oh, yeah, I totally knew that,” she says, resolutely shaking her head at Nicole, making Nicole grin in amused agreement.
“This is ahead of that curve. It is the edge, I suppose,” I continue, losing my metaphor in my excitement.
“It’s a software that’s supposed to be a kind of support tool for city governments to make better, data-driven decisions for the safety of their citizens. That’s how they’re selling it, anyway.”
“This is it,” Wesley confirms. His hands are shaking. “I recognize the patterns in the architecture this lays out. It’s my data filtration, and this describes the same platform I’ve been logging into for jobs and contacting the General.”
“They will sell it to cities to use?” Dimitri asks, tone rising in concern. “They will put the mayor or some such self-serving politician in charge of a program that could target and end lives at will? That is insanity. Even in Russia, they would know better.”
I shake my head. “That’s the thing—it’s being sold as a fully set-it-and-forget-it, AI-run thing. No one’s running it. It’s supposed to run itself.”
“It’s making decisions? The program is choosing people and sending out hits?” Nicole looks totally terrified as I nod.
“Are you tellin’ me the robots are deciding who lives and who dies?” Mac asks, dead serious despite essentially summarizing the plot of several excellent sci-fi movies.
“With some human input initially, but yes. Essentially,” Wesley says. “Someone programmed the criteria to use; the program is filtering their massive amounts of personal data to find targets and sending them out to an approved list of hitmen. The AI handles payment when the job is complete.”
Mac shivers. “Well, that’s fuckin’ terrifying.”
“All the things that didn’t make sense about how the General acted and made decisions, all those behaviors we couldn’t account for…
it’s because they weren’t human behaviors.
The motive was just to reduce crime—it wasn’t a man trying to benefit from the death, or someone who had a personal vendetta.
There was never any urgency or disorder to it.
It was a computer. It didn’t have desires; it had a pattern. ”
“Until me.”
He looks at me. “They must have programmed it to protect its own secrets. When you stole the data, you triggered a fail-safe protocol.”
“Yeah,” I agree.
“How long has the AI had full control, do you think?”
“I don’t know. They’ve probably been testing it for years.
You might have always been working for the AI.
” I exhale long and slow, looking around the room at the serious, concerned faces.
“SmarTech is launching this tech soon. Next week, I think? The launch party is on Saturday. They probably already have buyers.”
“We can’t let it get out. We have to stop it before it goes live.”
“Did these assholes learn nothing from movies? You never give the machines the power to kill,” Mac growls. “What do we do?”
I turn and am shocked to be at the center of attention. “We…” I falter under the weight of everyone’s anticipative stares. Are they all expecting me to know? “Uh… I’m just the devastatingly beautiful, brilliant mind who put it all together. I’m not the ideas guy. Wanna take this one, SpyderMan?”
He frowns and sits back, steepling his hands, deep in thought.
“We need… to find where it’s being kept.
Before they start releasing the project to any buyers, they’ll be holding it in a private server.
If I were them, I wouldn’t use the cloud for backups—too unsecure—but we can’t rule it out.
If we can get in and get onto a network computer that would have access to the confidential software files, I’ll be able to determine if there’s a cloud backup. ”
“And once we’re in, we can delete the source code, overwrite the backups, corrupt critical dependencies,” I suggest.
He nods, excitement growing. “And even if we can’t get access, it would have a kill switch. They’d never release it without some kind of failsafe.”
“You’re right,” I realize. “This program could potentially be a danger to them as well, so they’d never release it without some ability to control it internally…”
“Are you getting a word of this?” Nicole stage-whispers to Dimitri.
Dimitri’s answer is a grunt.
But I’m staring at Wesley. Watching him think out loud—having a front seat to his incredible mind doing its thing… well, if I weren’t so caught up in the moment and my excitement at figuring it out, I’d probably drop to my knees and unzip his pants right here and now.
Fuck me, he’s hot. I press my thighs together, squeezing to give that dull thrumming in my blood the pressure it’s craving.
“Fred would know,” I assert confidently, finishing his thought. “Even if it runs itself, it’s still his project. He should know all the details, or at least have access.”
“Then we need to have a little chat with Fred Harvey.”
“Right, about that…” Mac cuts in. “We’ve been following him for a few days now. Short of nabbing him from the parking lot—”
“Which is a terrible idea,” Dimitri interjects, making me think they’ve already had this exact conversation.
“—the guy is never alone. Always protected, always with his phone in his hand. It’s like he knows we’re after him.”
“He might,” Wesley observes. “He knows Madison’s alive—he might assume she would come after him.”
“Or he’s paranoid as a side effect of being a terrible person,” I add, grumbling.
“You said there’s some kind of launch party?” Mac asks, excited like he’s got an idea.
I grin. “Yup.”
“That could be our in. It’s weirdly easy to nab someone in a room full of strangers, if you do it right,” Mac says.
There’s some silence after his revelation, and I consider that. He’d be surrounded by strangers at a launch party—I suppose that’s when it would be the least conspicuous to get close.
“I want to help!” Eleanor says. Mac cuts her a look, and she shrugs at him with one shoulder. “What? You said it was going to be a party. Guess what parties have: caterers. I can totally get in unnoticed.”
Looking suitably proud and impressed with her, a smile splits his face. “Damn right you can, darlin’.”
“I want to help, too,” Nicole says, her voice softer, but no less determined.
Dimitri swallows, looking at her with a scowl that would make me cower. She just lifts a brow and meets him head-on, daring him to say something. Clash of the frickin’ Titans.
“We’ll need all hands on deck,” Wesley says to Dimitri.
“We need a team to nab him from the party, someone to question him, a team to go into SmarTech to access the network computer, someone to find and destroy the servers, and add in someone to take care of the extra security they’ll likely have due to the hype and inherent risks… ”
“Even with Eleanor and Nicole, that’s… too many someone’s,” I say, watching out of the corner of my eye as Nicole goes to stand with Dimitri and they have some kind of silent exchange. “Just finding the right servers to destroy would take all of us.”
“We need more help,” Wesley realizes, sending me a meaningful look.
Dios, I feel like I’m in the man’s brain. I love it here.
“I’ll text Tío Felix. He promised to help,” I say, mostly for Dimitri’s benefit, who seems to tense up anytime my tío’s name comes up. “He wants the General gone just as much as we do.”
Wesley smiles at me, eyes shining with hope.
“We can do this,” he says, and it’s an assurance that everyone takes to heart, but I know he meant that just for me.
Him and me. We did it. Not to minimize what will likely be a bitch of a planning session as we hash out the logistics of finding the Gener-AI program and destroying it before it gets out, but we’ve done the hard part.
We solved the puzzle. We’re halfway there.
I chew on my lip, squirming in my seat against a strong, sudden pulsing and pounding between my legs. We’re so close, I can feel it.
And now I’ve got an itch to scratch.
I lock in on Wesley, biting my lip. I’m so horny, I can feel my nipples pebbling against the loose material of my dress.
Something about solving the puzzle with the man I love…
When I look down, I realize I can see the outline of his dick in his pants, and I swallow the sudden wave of heat. He’s getting hard, too.
“Okay, everyone out,” I say. I feel the curiosity as everyone turns to look at me again.
Fuck. I can’t wait another minute. I start reaching for the hem of my dress, eyes hot on my man. “I mean, I guess you can stay if you want—but if you stay, you play. No spectators.”
Eleanor’s giggle cuts through the shocked silence.
Wesley’s eyes flash. “Everyone out!” he roars, reaching for me.