Lone Wolf by Gregg Hurwitz

Author:Gregg Hurwitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

37

Baby Hitler

Allman stood with his hands on the splintery back rail. The earth sloped precipitously away into woods, no tamed backyard to speak of. A disused Jacuzzi at the edge of the deck gathered scum, a tornado of mosquitoes flurrying above it. Nothing below but pepper trees, eucalyptus, and oak forming a dense landscape that undulated like frozen waves. Way beyond twinkled the second-rate skyline of Woodland Hills.

“I own all that,” Allman said, with a gesture. “As far as you can see to the next lights. It’s quiet here.”

When the breeze shifted, Evan could smell the crispness of the earth, wood and sage, soil and bark. Somewhere an owl hooted and hooted again and was answered by a mate somewhere in the vast darkness.

“What’s the ‘it’ that controls you?” Evan asked.

Allman’s eyes watered in the breeze. He blinked a few times, his cheeks shiny. “What I’ve described to you. The AI. In a few months, it’ll be gaming me.”

“How?” Evan asked. “Precisely?”

“Hmm. It tells me trends, things to look at and do. I’m stuck in a feedback loop with it. But increasingly, it’s driving the direction of that feedback loop. Understand?”

Evan’s stupid goddamned tie flapped in the wind and he smoothed it down, wishing he’d brought a tie clip or chain or whatever Harvard professors wear on their stupid goddamned ties. “No.”

“All the information I’m gathering? It feeds into a big data farm. And that feeds into my other AI as new training data and then spits out recommendations. So let’s just say”—he scrunched his nearly shut eyes, scenario-building—“Solventry targets heavy people with more junk food because it’s an easy sale, right?”

“Sure.”

“Wrong. We do it to push them toward diabetes while we’re seeking to buy a consortium of endocrinologic health services from apps to meds and simultaneously lobbying Congress to widen the prescription parameters and shorting health-insurance companies on the stock market. I’m still driving the enterprise. Cool, right?”

Evan debated seizing Allman by the collar and waistband and launching him off the deck. A twenty-foot fall, a forty-degree slope, enough to snap a neck or at least cause permanent mental impairment. Baby Hitler and all that. But yet.

It was legal.

Allman was just playing the game exceptionally well.

Evan cleared his throat. “Cool.”

“But lately? It’s started to drive the enterprise. This month I realized that our automatic stock-trading program had started to invest heavily in caffeine-inhaler vape-pen start-ups all on its own. And I didn’t know why. So I searched for other irregularities in the adjacent AIs. Turns out our e-commerce shipping division had begun to create delays of purified water to a specific subset of residences. Turns out our social-media subsidiaries were promoting shorter short-form content that shifted the median duration on our platforms from fifteen seconds to five. Turns out our appliance-development group was receiving machine-learning recommendations to switch to blue-LED light indicators in our smoke and carbon-monoxide detectors. The AIs are playing with each other and feeding off each other. Know what they’re doing?”

The breeze blew cool and dry across Evan’s face.

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