Puppet Master Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Data sheet

  Only God Gives Life Flash forward

  1: Real time

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  Watched & Unwatched Flash forward

  13: Real time

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  Leg Work Flash forward

  36: Real time

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

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  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  Blasphemy Flash forward

  58: Real time

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  70

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  72

  73

  74

  75

  76

  77

  78

  Puppet Master Flash forward

  79: Real time

  80

  81

  82

  83

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  85

  86

  87

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  90

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  About the Author

  Praise for the Author

  By the Authors

  Back Ads

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Data sheet

  Important people

  Louis Massina—scientist and entrepreneur, proprietor of Smart Metal, deeply religious; lost his arm in a motorcycle accident as a young man; never remarried

  Chelsea Goodman—project engineer at Smart Metal; young, genius at math, petite, creative

  Trevor Jenkins—FBI special agent in charge of anti-ATM theft task force; hardworking, always wears a suit; could use a haircut and shave

  Johnny Givens—young, athletic FBI agent on Jenkins’s task force

  Gabor Tolevi—first-generation American of Russian and Ukrainian descent, raised mostly in the Ukraine where he served in the army. Now an “entrepreneur” with connections to Russian mafya, though not a member of a family; widower and single father

  Important places

  Boston & suburbs—birthplace of freedom, hardscrabble values, great Italian food

  Crimea—peninsula in Black Sea annexed by Russia in 2014 from Ukraine

  Donetsk—major city in southeastern Ukraine, center of struggle between Russian-backed separatists and Ukrainian government; under Russian domination

  Important tech

  Bot—Smart Metal slang for robot that can function to some degree on its own, in contrast to mechs and industrial robots designed for specific, stationary tasks such as welding or chip making; Smart Metal constructs all types

  Mech—Smart Metal slang for robots that are preprogrammed for specific tasks but retain more flexibility than industrial robots

  Autonomy—ability of bot or other entity to “think” or make decisions without direct commands from operator

  Only God Gives Life

  Flash forward

  “I am not in the business of creating supermen.” Louis Massina fixed his gaze on Chelsea Goodman, then shook his head. “No. We can’t go there.”

  “You’re just going to let him die?” Chelsea touched his arm. “Lou—boss. You can save him.”

  “I’m not Frankenstein. I don’t make supermen.”

  “That’s not what I’m asking.”

  “It amounts to the same thing. And there’s no saying whether any of it will work. The drugs—we’ve only used them in simulations and on pigs. Pigs.”

  “He dies if you do nothing. You can help him.”

  “Giving him legs is one thing, even the heart, but the drugs—”

  “Without the drugs, Lou, he dies.”

  Louis Massina turned toward the window, gazing out at Boston Harbor. The wooden remains of a wharf sat in the distance to the right, a sharp contrast to the gleaming pink granite of the unfinished office building just beyond it. Massina liked the incongruity, the mix of old and new. The wharf had last been used close to fifty years before; Massina was sure he’d been on it around that time, a young man taken to work by his father, just a few days before he disappeared. In his lifetime, Massina had seen the white planks turn gray and grow splinters, then gaps. The slow-motion ruin of the wooden pier not only marked time for him; it reminded Massina that life was circumscribed by limits. There were only so many chances, so much time.

  “Listen, boss, you have to do something. He was hurt helping us.”

  “We were helping him,” Massina said softly, still gazing out the window. “We were helping the FBI. Not the other way around. This is their person. Their case. Not our problem. Not mine.”

  “You’ve saved so many people.”

  A new heart, two legs, and a batch of untested drugs to take him from the brink of death in a matter of days, if not hours: was Louis Massina a god, that he could give life like that?

  Givens was already dead. Really. The doctors all agreed.

  “He won’t survive the operation,” said Massina. “Even with the drug.”

  “Now you do sound like you’re playing God. Or Satan.”

  Louis Massina did not really think of himself as God. That was sacrilege. But his prosthetics, a sideline of his robotics company, did literally save lives. Was that sacrilege? Or a gift from God that by rights he had to share?

  “I don’t understand why you’re hesitating,” added Chelsea.

  Massina turned to face her. “The heart is experimental. The spinal attachments are still at a very primitive point. We don’t have FDA approval, among other things. And the drugs—”

  “You can get all that waived. You know it.”

  “Just like that.” He snapped his fingers.

  Chelsea narrowed her green eyes. She was a pixie of a thing, barely five foot, with skin the color of light chocolate; her face glowed like a dusty rose in the fading sun of the late afternoon. He guessed she might weigh ninety pounds, and that was counting the ink on her tattoos and the piercings she occasionally wore in her lip.

  “Boss, you know you can do this.”

  “It may be too far,” said Massina, though he had made up his mind. “And we don’t know if he’d agree.”

  “He wanted to be resuscitated,” said Chels
ea. “His form says, I want to live. That’s the only agreement you’re going to get.”

  He’s hardly old enough to understand what it will mean, thought Massina. Even Chelsea has no idea. Choosing to live—it’s a choice for more pain, more suffering. There will be no easy day.

  Instead of saying that, he turned back to the window. Chelsea’s reflection was there, looming over the old pier. Two large construction cranes stood in the distance; if the light were better, they would have given the illusion of hoisting his employee’s face into the sky.

  “Arrange it,” he told her. “Tell Sister Rose to keep me updated herself. The doctors tend to get lost in the details.”

  1

  Real time

  A week earlier—near Boston, Massachusetts

  Sunday evening

  Louis Massina bent forward and refocused his eyes on the ATM screen.

  Account Balance = $0.00

  “What?” He tapped the screen to ask for a new transaction, then once again requested his balance.

  Account Balance = $0.00

  “Impossible.”

  Massina re-swiped his ATM card and keyed his PIN on the touch screen. There was only one account connected to the card, which he used solely for petty cash. Not only did he know there was money in the account—he had used it on the way to mass this morning—but the sum was $5,437.14.

  Massina was very good with numbers.

  He tapped the screen, then waited. The machine thought about it, then responded exactly as it had earlier:

  Account Balance = $0.00

  Either the bank’s computer network was down, Massina thought, or his accountant had drained it without telling him.

  Damn it.

  Massina had more patience with computers than with accountants, but only a little. He had considerable experience with both: he ran a robotics and applied AI, or artificial intelligence, firm called Smart Metal, and had in fact been a programmer himself through his early twenties.

  That was two decades and three dozen patents ago. In the interim, Massina had built a business worth exponentially more than the amount that should have been in the bank account. But he was not so far removed from a childhood raised by a single mother that he would ignore the disappearance of five thousand dollars, or even five.

  He called his accountant as soon as he got back to his car; though it was nearly 11:00 p.m., the phone was answered on the first ring.

  “Wasn’t me,” said the accountant, who was used to getting calls at odd hours and on odd subjects. “I’ll check with the bank first thing in the morning.” Robert Pesche, now the head of a sizable firm, had first done Massina’s taxes in a McDonald’s when they were both a year out of school. “It’s probably just a computer glitch.”

  “There are no such things as glitches,” said Massina. “Just bad programming.”

  But this turned out to be neither a glitch nor bad programming: it was theft. The account had been drained an hour before Massina’s visit to the ATM—one of two dozen that had similarly been robbed. The bank promised to make good immediately, something Massina was surprised to find it didn’t have to do, according to the banking laws.

  The felonious transfer both annoyed and intrigued Massina. Not only was his sense of morality and fairness offended—theft, obviously, was a grave sin—but his scientific curiosity was aroused. How did the theft occur? Why was the bank vulnerable in the first place? It was a math problem as well as one of morality.

  His accountant couldn’t answer any of his questions. Nor could the bank manager, who came out to meet him when he stopped by just before 5:00 p.m. to collect a new ATM card and some cash.

  The manager hesitated as she grabbed Massina’s hand to shake. Massina was testing a new prosthetic—he had lost his right arm from just above the elbow some thirty years before—and people who knew his hand was artificial sometimes thought he was going to crush their fingers.

  Which he could have, if he wanted.

  “I’m very sorry about this theft,” said the manager. “And your troubles. You are a good customer.”

  The manager continued on in an overly sympathetic vein until Massina asked how the account might have been drained.

  “It was definitely due to an ATM transaction,” she said. “There were a large number of simultaneous transfers that were just under the amount our security programs would detect.”

  “Excuse me—so the ATM system was definitely involved,” Massina said. “Interesting. How?”

  She suggested that perhaps he had authorized someone else to use his card and been careless with the PIN.

  “How would that account for the other thefts that you said happened at the same time?”

  “They, uh, just waited.” She nodded gravely. “You really have to guard your PIN number as if it were your Social Security number. More so.”

  “I don’t want to get angry with you,” Massina answered, “but you sound like you’re saying this theft is my fault.”

  “No, sir. You are our valued customer.” She glanced at his hand, somewhat nervously. “We value your business.”

  Massina resisted the impulse to scoff as he left.

  2

  Concord, Massachusetts

  Tuesday

  Massina’s annoyance at being ripped off and then treated like a dunce by the bank had subsided by the time he woke the next morning in his house outside Boston. There were, after all, many other things occupying his mind, most especially the morning’s test of a new autonomous bot they were working on.

  It was just before five o’clock, and still dark. Winter lingered in the low hills around Boston, fogging Massina’s breath as he walked onto the concrete veranda in front of his house. The low-slung, postmodern structure had been situated to take advantage of the view; had it been a little later, Massina might have gazed at the mirror-edged Hancock Tower and the Pru off in the distance. In winter, much of Boston was visible, not just those tall landmarks: you could see the Custom House and even, if the air was clear and the light good, a church spire or two. Thick evergreens obscured things closer to the east and south; the highway, so convenient for his work, was out of sight, as was the industrial area that had first attracted him to the location. If Massina had been more of a dreamer, or rather one who dreamed in a certain way, he might have fantasized that he lived in the middle of untouched land, sufficiently removed from the distant city to be immune from its charms as well as its vices.

  But Massina was not that sort of dreamer—no Emerson and certainly no Thoreau; if there was an American he might emulate, it would be Edison or Bell, great thinkers whose thoughts turned to things far more tangible than nature. Though in many respects Massina might be said to be the modern embodiment of the vision Emerson articulated in the essay “Self-Reliance,” Massina’s world was one of computers and robots, of nanotechnology and forces far beyond Emerson’s ken.

  The lights at the far end of the winding driveway switched on, announcing the arrival of Chelsea Goodman, who was taking Massina to work today while his car was being serviced. This was a matter of convenience for both of them, since Chelsea didn’t own a car and was using one of the company trucks to transport both herself and the subject of the morning’s test to the proving grounds south of the city.

  The gates at the foot of Massina’s property swung open, activated by a coded input from the driver on a small touchpad next to her console. The security system had already read the truck’s license plate, comparing it against its database and DMV data; it had also examined an infrared scan of the interior, making sure Chelsea matched the associated profile. Another sensor “sniffed” the air around the truck, analyzing the molecular contrail that had been enhanced by a light stream of vapor flowing from vents at the side of the driveway; had the contrail contained even a few molecules related to explosives, additional barriers would have sprung up just beyond the gate and an alarm would have sounded.

  None of that was actually necessary; Massina in fact disliked security
measures of any kind and kept as low a profile as possible in any event. But the system was being tested by his company; grounds security seemed like a growth area, and one where the company’s expertise in advanced AI systems and robotics might possibly give it an advantage.

  As it happened, the driver had worked on a small part of the system a year before and was probably as familiar with it as its owner. Chelsea Goodman had joined Smart Metal as an AI specialist barely two years ago. Since then, she had been promoted three times until, at the tender age of twenty-three, she was now Smart Metal’s lead AI developer.

  Neither her age nor her rapid advancement was particularly unique, either at the firm or in the industry in general. Even the fact that she was a woman did not make Chelsea Goodman particularly unusual at Smart Metal, which Massina had established as the purest of pure scientific meritocracies from its earliest day. The unique thing about Chelsea was her personality: she practically bubbled when she spoke. Her enthusiasm was infectious, and not just about her field—she could get even a die-hard Red Sox fan, such as Massina, rooting for their longtime nemesis, the New York Yankees, if she wished.

  Which made the uncharacteristic frown on her face when she pulled up all the more obvious.

  “Problem?” asked Massina, climbing into the Ram 1500 cab.

  “We’re good,” she said, lips barely moving, teeth held close together.

  “Coffee,” he told her, recognizing the problem.

  “I—”

  “Starbucks. Go.”

  “Thanks.” Her expression brightened; by the time they reached the street she was more or less back to her usual self, adjusting for the hour.

  “Long night?” he asked.

  “I didn’t sleep. We had some trouble with the secondary logic section.” Chelsea said this with the tone of someone describing their stupendous vacation in Barbados. “In optimizing the memory section, Bobby had used a random fill to get around the zero-bit problem. Of course, he hadn’t been able to test every last permutation, and wouldn’t you know, we hit on a combination that caused a bizarre overload, adding twenty nanoseconds where we should have saved at least sixty-four. . . .”