Chapter 45 Madison
Madison
Kind of a fitting end.
“It’s already out.”
My body feels cold and stiff as I fall back into my seat, which rolls a few inches and throws me off balance. Fred’s smile is condescending, and the blood coating his teeth from Nicole’s blow gives it a real demonic edge.
“It went out this morning to every city on the list,” he says, evil curling around every word and making my skin prickle.
Eleanor gasps, exchanging a fearful look with Nicole.
I’m reeling. How could this have happened? How could we have failed? I turn to him, blinking back tears of rage and horror. “You made a monster,” I say softly. “You just put a monster out into the world. And you’re so focused on the money, you don’t realize what you’ve done!”
“Not the money,” he shakes his head. “The numbers. Crime in Ulysses is down 30% since we gave the AI free rein on the data. 30%! That’s insane. That’s… you can’t argue with numbers like that!”
He’s the one who’s insane if he thinks he can win me over with that kind of argument. “Crime is down, but the murder of criminals is up? You seriously don’t hear the contradiction in that?”
He rolls his eyes. “We’re making this world safer—”
“No, you’re not,” Nicole cuts in. “You’re making them more careful, or you’re driving them to another city that’s less protected and prepared. None of this is happening in a vacuum. There are always repercussions.”
“And it’s still murder!” Eleanor adds.
Fred spits on the ground. “Good fucking riddance. Scumbags are dying. Boo fuckin’ hoo.”
“Scumbags, now. But what happens when it starts targeting not just violent, destructive crime? What if the AI starts going after anyone who breaks the law? You released something destructive into the world that self-polices. How can you not see how big of a problem that is?”
He turns his head.
“And what if it turns on you? What you’re doing is illegal, too. You created a literal killing machine. At what point do you meet the criteria?”
He inhales deeply and turns back to me, stone-faced.
“What’s your game plan, Madison? What’s your move?
You either have to let me go, or you kill me.
” Another bloody smile flashes, and I can tell how convinced he is that he knows how this is going to play out.
“Are you going to try to make me think you’re going to kill me?
After all that—your little bleeding-heart display? Yeah, I’m thinking no.”
Suddenly, the door to the meeting room creaks open. We all turn with similar expressions of curiosity—there’s no way it’s Wes or Dimitri returning, they’re still in the other building—and Todd steps into the room.
He lifts a gun, pointing it right at me.
“Oh my god!” Eleanor screeches in alarm. Nicole gasps, stepping in front of her protectively.
With a terrified noise, I throw my hands up automatically.
“What? What’s happening? What just happened?” Wesley demands in my ear, responding to the sounds in the room.
My heart pounds in my ears. Fuck, it’s scary being on the wrong end of a gun. I can barely think. “Todd,” I say softly, informing Wesley and willing my voice to remain calm and even. “What are you doing here?”
“Todd! Shoot her! The bitch kidnapped me!” Fred urges, sensing his chance.
“No, wait!” I cry. “Wait!”
He levels the gun at my chest with a maniacal smile—he looks truly deranged and ridiculously pleased with himself. “I got suspicious when Fred collapsed. I knew you gave me that SSD for a reason. I always knew you were a cunt, but I had no idea just how big of a cunt you really were.”
“Todd, help me!” Fred renews his request.
“Don’t help him,” I plead. “Fred isn’t on your side, Todd. After you gave him the SSD, he put out a hit on you!”
“A hit? Like… a hit to kill me?” At my urgent nod, Todd’s brows come down, and his eyes flick briefly to Fred. “Is that true?”
Before Fred can get in there with a lie, I keep going, “Safe-T Keeper is a program that SmarTech created that contracts hitmen to take out criminals or anyone who gets in their way. Remember how Fred told you I was dead? I got in their way. And you know too much! They won’t let you live,” I promise.
“Is that true?” he repeats to Fred.
“Of course not; she’s lying. Todd, don’t listen to her! I’ll make you a senior manager! Untie me, son.”
Todd approaches Fred, keeping one eye on me and the gun pointed firmly in my direction. “She’s a crazy bitch. She tied me up, too. What, you have some kind of fetish for men way out of your league, Crunch Wrap Supreme?”
I wince. “He’s the one lying. You were never going to get that promotion,” I say, my voice dropping in urgency. “I have proof. I can show you!”
I can see it then. The spark of a waver in his resolve. “Proof?”
“Lower the gun, I’ll show you the software and the list. I’m plugged into their network, and we just got into the project framework. I can show you that your name is on their kill list.”
Looking incredibly suspicious, he glances between the two of us a few times. With a slow nod of agreement, he approaches and leans over my shoulder. He pokes the gun into my back, between my shoulder blades. “Don’t get any ideas,” he growls.
But my only idea is to show him the proof. So I do. I scroll through, find his name, and point to it with one shaking finger. With an angry noise, Todd turns to Fred. “She’s not lying. My name is in there.”
Fred pales as Todd turns on him. He starts shaking, trying to back away in the rolling chair with small, ineffectual movements of his taped feet. “I… It… It’s not what it looks like.”
“I think it is what it looks like,” he returns.
“Todd, stop! I can still help you!” Fred screams. “You can still come out on top! You can have everything! Your revenge against the cunt and the promotion!”
“Oh yeah? How?”
“I can tell the program not to kill you. I have an override code. I can take you off the list with my phone.”
“Fuck,” I whisper, glancing down at Fred’s phone on the edge of the conference table. The key is in there?
Todd’s eyes cut to me. He swipes the phone off the desk before I can make a move for it, then points his gun back at me as he sidesteps towards Fred. “Then do it. Right now. Show me.”
Fred’s head bobs up and down, an immediate promise. “I’ll show you, and you shoot the bitch, yeah?”
“Okay, deal,” Todd agrees, sending me a cold look.
I know the phone is still unlocked, so Todd can just hold it up in front of Fred’s face and let him direct him through the screen to get to what he needs.
“You go into that app,” Fred coaches, eyes darting up towards me and the other girls to make sure no one is making a move while they’re distracted.
But we’re all rooted in place, hands up in the air in surrender to the weapon, terrified expressions on our faces.
“Go into the messages… yeah, it needs my thumbprint again. Okay, look for your name—that one. Pull that one up. Okay, now reply to it with this exact phrase: Signing key 11 rejected.”
Todd eyes him suspiciously. “Simple as that?”
Fred nods. “You’ll get a confirmation in a second—it confirms that the hit won’t be carried out. You can look back in my sent box if you want, see that it’s worked before. It’s synced to my phone and my identity.”
“A signing key?” I repeat as it all clicks into place.
I fucking knew it. I knew SmarTech never would have released something like this without a failsafe. I grin, throwing Todd a look as I sit back and let my arms fall. “Makes sense. Every monster needs a leash.”
With a similar confident grin, Todd tosses me the phone, and I flick through the app.
Fred glances between the two of us, confused at the abrupt change in the temperature of the room. His eyes are wide as he glances around, watching Eleanor and Nicole relax, too. “What… what’s going on?”
I read the messages he exchanged with the AI, assessing the content.
“Looks like the program has a command-and-control function. That’s the failsafe.
The AI is autonomous, but it checks in with the parent program for every hit.
If anyone enters their signing key, the hit is negated.
It’s how they’re protecting themselves. I fucking knew there was no way they’d just let that program out into the world with no guardrails. ”
“Everyone involved in the project probably has a key,” Wesley remarks, entering the room.
Dimitri is hot on his heels. “If no one responds, it moves forward with the hit. If the connection is severed, it becomes fully autonomous, and no one is safe. It’s SmarTech’s self-destruct option.
If they go down, they take everyone down. ”
Our eyes meet from across the room, and I know he feels the same swell of relief.
“You were right,” he breathes.
“We can stop it,” I say, nodding. “We have his key, so we can keep every hit from happening until we can find and destroy every copy of the program that got out.”
“I don’t know what that means, but it sounds like we won,” Mac declares from the doorway, the last to join the party.
“What the fuck? Who the fuck are you? Who the fuck are you people?!” Fred interjects, raging against his bonds. “You… you… No!” he roars.
Todd steps up to him, winds up and punches him squarely in the nose. Fred’s head jerks back, bone crunching and blood pouring out as his momentum shifts forward again, and he flops against the tape, unconscious.
“That’s for trying to fucking kill me, you fucker,” he yells at Fred, shaking out his hand.
Eleanor lets out a giggle that’s as much a noise of relief as amusement.
Wesley crosses the room, holding out his hand, and Todd offers him a half smile before slapping it with his own in a high five. Wesley frowns. “I’m not fucking high fiving you, you twat. Give me the gun.”
“Oh,” Todd makes a sheepish face, handing it over.
Wesley checks the chamber, then lets out a long breath. I think if Todd had been pointing a loaded gun at me, Wesley would have killed him, regardless of how much he just saved our asses. “Thank you, Todd. For… that. Thank you.”
Todd’s chest puffs out, and I nearly roll my eyes, but even I have to admit that was well done. “Yeah, thanks,” I say. “You acted the shit out of that. Fred really thought you were going to help him.”
It was a big risk—the biggest of the night by far. But I knew that Fred would never give up any critical information willingly. Dimitri might’ve been able to torture it out of him, but I argued this was quicker—and at the time we thought we were up against a time crunch to stop it from getting out.
Todd wasn’t initially really open to anything I had to say—still kind of butt-hurt about being duct-taped and threatened with a gun—but once I showed him the proof, he turned out to be pretty reasonable.
We also offered him a bunch of money in exchange for his help. Like, a lot of money. We had to make sure to preemptively outbid Fred if he tried to bribe Todd to switch sides.
“Fuck yeah, I did.” He grins, then reaches his hand out to me. I do roll my eyes this time, but I give him that high five he’s after. “Sorry about the Taco Bell joke, too. I was… uh, going for authenticity. Fred laughed at that one earlier this week—I wanted to make him think I was on his side.”
“Authentic, huh?” I repeat, unimpressed. Authentically a pendejo, through and through. At least he apologized for it, I guess.
“So I’m safe now, right?” Todd asks, glancing back at Fred like he’d really like to land another punch.
“I’d lie low for a day or two. What are your plans?” Wesley asks.
Todd’s answering grin is huge. “With this kind of money? I’m retiring at 32, buying a beach house and filling it with girls and booze.”
“Classy,” I snort.
“I am who I am,” he shrugs. “All right. Well, I’m out. Good luck cleaning… uh… all this up.”
As Todd strides from the room, hands shoved in his pockets, humming something happy, we all turn to the last remaining issue. Fred. “What do we do with him?”
Six people regard the tied up, passed out man with varying degrees of anger.
“You will need his fingerprint, da?” Dimitri asks, palming his knife.
“You’re gonna… cut it off? So we can carry it around?
No. Ew.” I shake my head. “No, there’s a password.
The fingerprint is just a secondary authentication option.
We’ll be able to do it as long as we have his phone.
We can clone the app and use his credentials and change them to guarantee ourselves access. ”
“I know you guys can stop the hits, but is there a way to… I don’t know, add him to the list?” Nicole suggests.
I grin, liking this neat bow she’s come up with. “Hell yeah. Kind of a fitting end to be a victim of the machine he helped create and sell. But how do we keep the other signing keys from blocking his name?” I wonder.
“I have a suggestion,” comes a deep, familiar voice behind me.
I whirl, and Felix is in the doorway. His stance is protective, and the look on his face is a little wild and urgent.
“Felix? How did you know we were here—” Mac begins.
“Your big ugly van is parked outside, and this was the only room with lights on,” he replies, like it’s obvious.
“What are you doing here?” Dimitri growls.
Felix glances at him, then directs his next statement at me. “So… things… escalated. You’re all gonna want to get the hell out of here.”
“What? Why?”
Felix’s grin is positively feral. “Boom,” he says, doing the appropriate hand motion to demonstrate.
“What? Why?” Wesley repeats, much more alarmed than when I just said it.
“Uh… ‘cause I want to?”
“I told you, they have government contracts! The military police will—”
Felix cuts in with a noise of exasperation. “You can stay here and yell all you want, but I’m getting the fuck out, and I’m here to make sure she gets out,” he nods at me. “The building next door is gonna blow, and you really don’t want to be in here when that happens.”
With that, he disappears, and we all turn again to look at Fred.
“We could just… leave him here,” Mac suggests.
We’re halfway home, most of us piled in the van, when the car shakes. I spin in my seat to look out the back window and find a pillar of smoke in the night sky that glows an eerie shade of red as it reflects the fire from the explosion.
“That was it?” Mac pouts.
“If you are close enough to be impressed by an explosion, it will be the last emotion you ever feel,” Dimitri returns sagely.
“Google doc?” I suggest to Wesley, who grins and nods.