Fatal Judgment by Andrew Welsh-Huggins

Author:Andrew Welsh-Huggins [Welsh-Huggins, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ohio University Press
Published: 2019-06-10T16:00:00+00:00

30

THE GRAY LIGHT OF dawn was filtering into the room when my eyes opened the next morning. Gloria lay asleep beside me, face planted on her pillow. I was very much not on the couch. I eased up as quietly as possible from her bed and set feet on floor. Gloria stirred, tugging at the sheet, but didn’t awaken. I reached out for my phone and checked the time. Not quite six. I had texts from both Kevin M. and Bonnie. Bonnie’s said, Check your e-mail. Carefully, maneuvering my way past a pair of slumbering Rottweilers, I retrieved my clothes and tiptoed out of the room.

I pulled my spare kit from the go bag and tiptoed into the bathroom. A few minutes later, I crept into the kitchen and after a couple false starts found what I needed to make coffee. While it brewed I opened the text from Kevin M. He’d sent three pictures: another of Hopalong at Schiller Park with the pugs; a second of what appeared to be a rack of ribs from Kevin H.’s new smoker; and a third, somewhat to my astonishment, of Laura’s cat nestled beside Hopalong on my couch as the two dozed. Will wonders never cease. As the coffee dripped, I read the e-mail from Bonnie.

She’d done some additional research on PG Inc. and the other donors on the list she sent me. Some of them showed up in references to a giant server farm project in Indiana that had apparently floundered. Flota, the European Union–backed AI rival to Google and Amazon, was the company behind the deal. That made sense, as Bonnie noted: Flota had projects on the front burner in Germany, Sweden, and Estonia, which was embarked on a project to transform itself into a completely digital society. Communities were bending over backward to woo these companies, with billions on the line in terms of construction spending, not to mention the impact of thousands of new employees on a community.

That’s the funny thing about AI, Bonnie wrote. It takes a lot of humans to make it work.

She added: If PG Inc. is connected to Flota, I’m guessing it has plenty of money to make big donations to your judge, for what it’s worth.

Three beeps in sequence signaled the completion of the coffee. I opened and shut cupboards until I found a mug collection. I considered my options, settled on one that said Richland County FOP, filled it, and retreated to the couch. I snapped on a light and pulled Gloria’s laptop off the coffee table and onto my lap. I brought it to life, but it asked for a password immediately. Duh. Cop. I replaced it, allowed myself ten seconds of further self-recrimination for setting out on this misadventure without my own computer, and returned to my phone.

I tried combining Laura’s name and PG Inc. and Flota in Google searches, with no luck. So whatever the connection was between someone named Randall P. Schiff and Laura and these companies—if there even was a connection—someone was keeping a lid on it.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.