The Sentient Collector (The Sentient Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  Elliot stepped in front of Graham and placed a hand on his chest to stop him in place. “Why?”

  “The guy sounded pretty angry when I called him. I think he may be a handful. You get to work as soon as we get in, and I’ll humour him.”

  “Typical, we help them and all they seem to do is moan,” Elliot said, moving aside.

  Walking toward the door of the house, Graham marvelled at the size of the building. Its two floors were impressive. A smaller building was attached to the side that could hold an entire Mag-Lev car inside – a novel reminder of the days when people owned and drove their own cars. All of the homes down the street were equally as large, suggesting that those who lived there were enviably well-off too.

  In comparison to his own home, these were palaces. His house was actually a small, two bedroom apartment nearer to the centre of the city. He looked to his right, past the end of the street and far into the distance, and felt certain that he could see his home from there. The cityscape sat in the background like a permanent and beautiful light show that rose high into the sky. From this far away it looked impressive, from his own window it was a constant light source to keep his six-year-old daughter awake at night.

  He reached for the doorbell and pressed it lightly. It rang out, and to Graham’s amusement the door was answered before the second chime had finished. This guy’s eager, he thought.

  The man standing in the doorway looked as irritated as Graham had been expecting. He glared at each of them in turn and then turned to walk back into the house.

  “This way,” the man said.

  Elliot sent a wink to Graham. “Of course, sir,” he said.

  Graham stifled a laugh under his breath and was forced to fake a cough when the man peered back at them. The exchange was innocent enough, and yet the man became even more frustrated at the two of them for daring to make light of the situation.

  Following the man into the lounge of the house, they were confronted with a room much larger than they were expecting. At the front was a screen that covered almost the entire wall, and bathed the rest of the room in a soft glow from the displayed image of a moving field of yellow flowers. Running along the length of the three remaining walls was a comfortably cushioned sofa, which had been measured to end perfectly at the doorways.

  As soon as they entered, the man decided to lay into them. “I’ve been waiting three bloody days to get someone to sort this out,” he said, placing his hands on his waist. He had rolled up the sleeves of his green shirt before Graham and Elliot had arrived, no doubt to show he meant business. Unfortunately for him, his guests had encountered many people such as him and they knew every trick he had to get his way.

  Graham removed the device from his arm and flattened it out. He then took a hold of the edges and pulled until the device began to stretch out. Once it had expanded fully he set it down on the sofa next to him and removed the bag from his shoulder. He placed the bag next to the tablet-sized device and reluctantly engaged with the angry customer. “We can only apologise for the delay. It takes a couple of days to find out what the problem might be.”

  “I told them what was wrong, their system is dangerous and I want it fixed,” the man replied sharply.

  As agreed, Elliot wasted no time in getting to work while Graham continued to talk with the man. In the corner of his eye, he could see his partner open his own bag and begin to look for the tools he needed.

  “Again, I’m sorry about that. We’re here now so shall we take a look for you?” Graham said.

  The man crossed his arms and stood still, eyeing Graham suspiciously. He eventually moved his gaze over to Elliot, who had found his own tablet device and was walking around with it held up to his face. For some reason Elliot rarely wore his device as a wrist band, choosing instead to leave it in his bag.

  “What’s he doing?” the man asked.

  “He’s scanning the output from your house.” When the man’s eyes began to glaze over and he appeared to lose focus, Graham chose to reword his sentence. It was never easy to explain how things people used every day worked. “We can see if the devices contained within are working correctly. The tool my partner here is using will give us a virtual overlay of the network activity.”

  “And what is he looking for, exactly?”

  “Well that’s what we’re here to find out,” Graham said. He lent down to grab his clear plastic tablet, and before he could return to an upright position the man was again pressing him.

  “So what do you do when you’ve found the problem?”

  The tablet lit up in Graham’s hand and started to display a video feed from Elliot’s device, which bobbed about with the regularity of an amateur user. It moved from the ceiling and then fell away to the floor, where it focused on the feet of the man, or more specifically the brown slippers he wore. Graham saw that Elliot was holding the device at his side and pointing it toward the ground with little thought.

  “We need to get scanning if we’re going to find it,” Elliot said impatiently.

  Graham completely agreed, except the man had a very clear need to vent his anger, and as usual they were taking the brunt of it. “Sure, go ahead.” Graham nodded to Elliot and then spoke again to the man. “My colleague will head upstairs and look around while I search down here.”

  “Fine, just find it quickly, I’ve had nothing but trouble.”

  “Is it through here?” Elliot pointed to the hall they had entered through.

  “Yes, stairs are by the front door.”

  Not wishing to hang around anymore than was necessary, Elliot stepped around them both and left for the stairs. A second later Graham could hear his partner stomping heavily up the stairs. He cringed every time Elliot stamped a little too hard with his boots. He was making his annoyance more audible than Graham would have liked. Luckily, the man failed to notice.

  The video feed on Graham’s device returned to eye level and began to move about the walls in the hall. The overlay displayed a virtual representation of the activity occurring within the house in the form of bright lines of wiring that snaked its way throughout the building.

  “What’s that?” the man asked.

  Graham turned his attention away from the video. He could tell this man wanted to know everything about how they worked. Usually the customer left them to it until the problem had been resolved; not this time. “That is how we see what’s going on. If everything were working properly then this is what we should see.” Graham ran his finger along one of the lines on his screen, which bulged out of the surface as a centimetre high 3D structure. “If there were a problem then we would see a surge of activity where there shouldn’t be.”

  The man shook his head and stepped back to his sofa, where he sat, rubbed his left eye and then said, “I guess it’s too much to ask for any of this to make sense to me. All I know is my house seems to be turning against me and my family. One minute it’s heating up bath water to scalding temperatures with me still in it, and the next it’s locking my daughter in the cupboard for two hours and won’t let her out.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. From what you’ve told us it sounds like what we refer to as a MARC. It stands for Malicious Awareness and Resurgent Corruption. These are particularly hostile at times and can be rather dangerous to deal with.”

  “So you think that’s what I’ve got somewhere here?” The man again shook his head, but this time he remained quiet.

  Finally getting through to him, Graham thought. It was now time to lay it on thick, just to make sure the guy understood exactly what the job they had to complete entailed. “Possibly. It fits the description. It’s a problem we’ve been seeing for the last nine years and one I’ve been dealing with for all of my six years at Simova. The problem is with how everything is connected these days. The Simova network runs everything from your oven to the city’s transport systems, and does so while monitoring and organising everything we do on a daily basis. It’s the most advanced network in the world and one tha
t is constantly working on the limit of achieving Singularity.”

  “Singu… what?” The man asked. “Wait, you mean like that trouble a while ago? What was it ten years ago?”

  “Twelve. Yes, but that isn’t what’s happening now.”

  “So this isn’t an AI thing?”

  “No, absolutely not, no. These things are almost intelligent, except they don’t last long enough to achieve it. They usually appear, cause some trouble somewhere on the network and then fizzle out. We just try to get to them before they do too much damage.”

  “Why haven’t they stopped this from happening already?” the man said as the wall screen display changed to a waterfall scene. It cast a distracting blue light across the room that immediately began to cause Graham problems with his device. A few of the reflecting beams were shining through the back of his clear plastic screen and causing the video feed to distort. To compensate he moved so that the sofa was behind, and importantly not interfering with his view of Elliot working upstairs.

  “Sorry, what was the question,” Graham said, slightly embarrassed for having lost track.

  “Why haven’t they stopped them happening?”

  “Oh, right. My guess is if they shut down the entire network to fix it, they’re afraid people might not stick with them after such a disruption. After all, that would pretty much require stopping everything. Remember that the Simova network runs everything.”

  “Sounds about right. I wouldn’t be surprised if these issues were started just so we’d have to pay more.”

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Graham said with a chuckle. “This is better than living with a fractured network like we did years ago. Having everything working from Simova’s makes sense. Until they came along we were stuck with that World Wide Web network thing, with no-one in control at all. Once that started splitting up into different regions, it probably wasn’t worth using, that’s why it’s only used by hackers and criminals now.”

  The man nodded in agreement. He then stood and walked toward the door at the far end of the room. “Coffee?” he asked.

  Graham found it amazing how quickly people’s attitudes often changed in these situations, when he spoke to them at least. The frustration of being passed from department to department evidently made people cranky, and yet after only minutes of answering the man’s questions and allowing him to vent his anger, Graham was now being offered a drink. A kind gesture, but with one problem, he hated coffee.

  “Sure, thanks. Two sugars please,” Graham said. He chose to be polite, even though two sugars were nowhere near enough to hide the taste he always despised.

  When the man had disappeared into the kitchen, Graham let out a long held breath. It was hard enough trying to get rid of these corruptions without the customers getting irritable with them too.

  He returned to looking over Elliot’s video feed and was disappointed to see he had taken it upon himself to have a little break. All the time Graham had spent trying to calm the man down, Elliot had been getting cosy with a packet of crisps. Only adding to his annoyance, the video feed then pointed into the half empty bag of salty snacks as Elliot struggled to hold both at the same time. You wait until I tell Ruth! Graham thought. He would enjoy landing him in trouble with the missus, Graham’s very own sister.

  After a few minutes of standing around and admiring the wall screen display as it cycled through a selection of stock footage of various landscapes, the latest being a desert scene, Graham heard the man approaching.

  “Here we go,” the man said.

  Graham took the cup and thanked the man for his hospitality.

  “The name’s Daniel,” the man said as he held out his hand.

  “Graham, and my partner is Elliot.” Graham placed his cup on the arm of the sofa and shook Daniel’s hand. He decided in that split second to conveniently leave the coffee there, choosing rather to appear forgetful instead of just plain rude.

  “So has your friend found anything yet?”

  The video feed was still playing and it still showed Elliot partaking in a snack. To keep Daniel from having another reason to become angry, Graham moved the display to his side. “Not yet, no,” he said. “Perhaps you could tell me when you last encountered a problem. What were you doing?”

  Daniel sat perched on the edge of the sofa and sipped his own coffee. The contents was obviously too hot as the moment it touched his lips he winced. “Well,” he began. “My daughter, who’s twelve, was playing in her room and the wall screen began to show a scrolling message. Most of it was gibberish, then every now and again the words ‘kill’ and ‘murdered’ kept popping up.”

  “And that’s the last time you saw something like this?”

  Following another sip of his coffee, Daniel glanced over to the cup balanced precariously on the other arm of his sofa. “Yes, that was yesterday. I haven’t heard a thing since then.”

  “Well these things sometimes go quiet for a bit, but it’s still here I guarantee you.”

  At that Graham heard footsteps coming down the stairs at a quick pace, suggesting he was about to be proven right. Elliot then appeared, his scanning device swinging at his side in his right hand. He was out of breath and had to take a few deep intakes of air before he could say anything.

  “What’s the diagnoses?” Graham said with a laugh. No-one joined in with him.

  Finally Elliot had calmed enough to speak. “It’s upstairs,” he said.

  “Is it a MARC?”

  Elliot nodded with a smirk. Things were getting exciting all of a sudden. The last time they had seen one of these corruptions, things had gotten quite intense; MARCs always made a run for it.

  “What else could it be?” Daniel asked.

  “A MARC is…” Elliot began.

  “There’s three different categories for these things,” Graham interrupted. “A MARC is the worst. A RANDI however, is less troublesome and stands for Random and None Damaging Intelligence; these are normally just removed and nothing else is required. The last is a NIC, which stands for Non Intelligent Corruption. A NIC doesn’t require any interference from us and will simply work out itself.”

  Daniel sat in silence as he allowed Graham to list out the different types of corruptions. He took small sips of his coffee as he listened, without really understanding any of it – as evidenced by his slow nodding. Graham had encountered this on many occasions. Sometimes the only weapon he had to get a difficult customer off of his back was to confuse them with techno-babble.

  “Which room is it in?” Graham asked.

  “Girl’s room upstairs,” Elliot replied.

  The mention of his daughter’s room instantly grabbed Daniel’s attention. He suddenly stood up, placed his coffee on the floor and then turned to face Elliot. “Show me,” he said.

  Elliot went ahead, but not before he shot a look of concern over to Graham. It was unusual for a customer to join them when they were dealing with a corruption of this sort. Normally, Graham would tell them to stay behind. Except this one had shown an eager curiosity and it seemed easier to just let him tag along.

  They traipsed up the stairs, and once at the top they stopped. Graham was left to stand a few steps from the top as the two in front of him chose not to continue for some reason. After leaning around the side of Daniel he saw why. The hall stretched away silently and into darkness, but something was moving around and sending flashes of light toward them from the far end.

  “You should head back downstairs,” Graham said, after changing his mind much quicker than expected.

  “You’re kidding, I want to see it,” Daniel replied, much to Graham and Elliot’s annoyance.

  “Fine. But stay here while we take a look, OK?”

  Thankfully, Daniel agreed to this and moved aside to allow Graham through. Daniel stood staring down the hallway, unsure of what lurked beyond. Something had invaded his house and was now making its presence known to all.

  “Elliot, grab the isolators from your bag and stick behind
me,” Graham said.

  He heard a rustle from behind as Elliot searched his bag and then saw his partner stop next to him with a new set of devices in his hand. Each of the three devices was made up of an orange cone on top, which housed a light, and a metal stand that extended telescopically from the base. On the side of each cone hung a flip-up cover that protected a circular socket, where the power was plugged in.

  Graham then held up his own clear plastic tablet to his eye level. Again his view was augmented by a virtual overlay that physically protruded out of the screen’s surface slightly, showing the network activity all around him. Inside the walls ran a multitude of glowing wires. Blue meant no sign of any corruption. From there the colours went from orange and then to red. At red it was time to get serious. For the time being things were relatively quiet and all wires were nicely sitting between blue and orange. Of course it was certain to become a little redder at the end of the hallway.

  Walking slowly along the corridor, Graham watched each time another flash illuminated the walls around them. The lights were out and were that way because of the corruption that was having its way with the houses devices. Because of this, Graham and Elliot were forced to enter a dark and threatening realm almost blindly. Along the corridor’s walls the colour of the virtual wiring was increasingly turning closer to red. They were getting near to something bad.

  “Get ready to set them up,” Graham said to Elliot.

  “Sure, just don’t scream at me like you did the last time. I work better when I’m not stressed.”

  “You barely work at all.”

  The sound of a derisive snort came from behind Graham. He loved winding Elliot up.

  By the last door the sound of movement stopped them both in their tracks. Graham held his finger up to his lips to signify silence. He then turned back to the door and held out his tablet. The camera feed now showed all of the wiring virtually flashing a violent red glow. The image appeared far too washed out by the warning colour for him to see anything useful, so he pulled the device back.