Neural Wraith 2, page 1
part #2 of Neural Wraith Series
NEURAL WRAITH 2
K.D. ROBERTSON
Copyright © 2023 by K.D. Robertson
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and events are the product of imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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CONTENTS
Character List & Glossary
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
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Also by K.D. Robertson
CHARACTER LIST & GLOSSARY
CHARACTERS
Nicholas Waite—protagonist; Lieutenant Cipher of the Archangel Division in the Neo Babylon Police Department; former black company cipher in Neural Spike and Tartarus
Uriel “Rie”—police ARMD; prototype Mark 3 Archangel in command of Babylon PD’s Oversight Taskforce; long black hair, amber eyes, large bust and thighs, 5’7
Kushiel—military ARMD; prototype Mark 2 Archangel deployed as liaison between the military and Babylon PD; long silver hair, red eyes, enormous bust and figure, nearly 8’
Ezekiel—police ARMD; prototype Mark 3 Archangel in development at Sigma labs; long white hair in a ponytail, purple eyes, lithe figure, 5’2
Chloe—police ARMD; Mark 3 Archangel acting as Nick’s liaison and assistant; looks like a standard Mark 3, 5’2
Metatron “Meta”—police ARMD; Mark 1 Archangel who acts as the voice of the Mark 1s; named by Nick; looks like a standard Mark 1, 5’0
Juliet and Rosa—police ARMDs; Mark 3 Archangels acting as Nick’s bodyguards; look like standard Mark 3s, 5’2
Helena—experimental mainframe; stored beneath the police Spire following her rescue in Book 1; has no body or physical appearance beside her bulky computer body
Paul Hammond—human; Nick’s immediate superior and captain; a grizzled detective in his 50s ripped right from a 1920s crime film; a burned out and bitter man with anti-doll sentiments and a family history as police officers
Dennis Kim—human; police commissioner and political appointee to automate the Babylon PD; brother of RTM Strategic’s CEO; a charismatic politician and true believer in automation; an aging man of Korean ethnicity always in suits with a statesman-like appearance
Carolyn Andrews—human; absentee police chief who is disfavored by politics; formerly from the military; a stoic and capable woman respected by almost everyone
Andrew Lieu—deceased; human; former captain of Nick’s bureau; conspired to bring down Babylon and the Spires from the inside by creating a zombified army of soldiers using Helena; killed by Nick in Book 1
Alex Griffiths—human; general of the Neo Westphalian Military’s Aerial Command; “gifted” Nick his expensive apartment with no known motive
Lucas Miller—human; gang lord, cipher, and entrepreneur; owns and runs black companies, Formeus Imports and the Cobalt Lily; an old friend and mentor of Nick’s; has dark skin, shows off the wealth he’s earned, vapes, and aspires to more than just the streets
Lumen—logic engine mainframe; Lucas’s old mainframe and “virtual daughter” who runs the Cobalt Lily; has a crush on Nick; interface body has bobbed white hair with blue highlights and blue eyes
Omoikane—judicial mainframe; one of six state-of-the-art mainframes responsible for all court decisions in Babylon; interface body wears a gleaming silver suit, and he has an overwrought male idol-like appearance
Athena—judicial mainframe; one of six state-of-the-art mainframes responsible for all court decisions in Babylon; interface body leans into a lewd office style with a skimpy miniskirt, sheer stockings, lots of cleavage, tattoos, and skin that sparkles with gemstones
Tiferet—emotion engine mainframe; the mainframe used in GWT’s global HQ to interface between local and international affairs; interface body has thick, curly platinum-blonde hair, an hourglass figure, and an elegant appearance.
Lucida Harm—human; GWT’s chief of security and former black company cipher; pitch-black pigtails, mid-20s, sloppy clothing preference
Richard Toke—human; Senior Vice President in GWT’s global HQ and head of Security and Audit; American; Spires resident; a trim, muscular man who is comfortable with his position in life
James von Magnus—human; Chief Operating Officer of GWT; family were some of the first to move to Babylon; slightly overweight, in his 60s, square jaw, casual sense of extravagance
CONCEPTS
ARMD “Doll”—Autonomous Robotic Modular Dolls, ordinarily called dolls; AI-powered androids that come almost exclusively in the form of women; they serve a variety of purposes, from nursing, to cleaning, to police duties, and even warfare. There are three primary manufacturers: Sigma, RTM, and a Chinese company.
Mainframe—AI-powered supercomputers that run companies and governments using quantum computing
Interface—a subtype of ARMD that acts as a body or conduit for a mainframe to interact with humans physically; all interfaces are legally required to have silver armbands and a barcode engraved into their face; come in both genders
Pile—a subtype of ARMD that assists mainframes with human interaction in large organizations; use small, androgynous bodies made extremely cheaply and have little personality or processing power
Warbot—the term used for all autonomous military units that are not dolls, including tanks, warships, and drones.
Emotion and Logic Engines—two distinct methods of AI operation. Logic engines strictly follow predefined directives and parameters; emotion engines possess high-level objectives that allow them to deviate from their programming and are more “human-like.”
Neural Implants and Mods—implants are installed in the brains of early pubescent children and integrate them with augmented and virtual reality; neural mods enable alteration of implant behavior
Ciphers—AI troubleshooters; people with specialized skills to handle a variety of AI and neural issues that slip between the cracks of other specializations
The Altnet—Neo Westphalia’s Internet platform, built around the concept of augmented and virtual reality; rarely used outside the country and the United States
Black Companies—undertake activities that are either decriminalized (but not strictly legal) or “victimless crimes;” police turn a blind eye to them
LOCATIONS
Neo Westphalia—a country formed from six man-made islands in the East Pacific; created sixty years ago by tech trillionaires
Neo Babylon—Neo Westphalia’s oldest and grandest island-city
The Spires—five enormous skyscrapers that form the headquarters and residences of Babylon’s government and elite; their names are Olympus, Avalon, Axis Mundi, Sindansu, and Yggdrasil
Alcatraz—a commercial district in the outer metro filled with black companies and criminal activity in Babylon
The Doll District—a red-light district in the inner city that specializes in doll services
COMPANIES
Aesir—the largest electronics and neural implant company in the world; currently embroiled in a court case over the right to force older neural implants to purchase premium neural mods to remain functional
RTM—the largest doll manufacturer and electronic parts developer in the world; also contains RTM Strategic, their military subsidiary
Sigma Robotics and Industrial—an industrial AI manufacturer who has branched into AI and doll development in the past two decades. Created emotion engines and the Archangels.
Neural Spike—a black company that did R&D for emotion engines; was shut down by the military to cover up illegal human trials they did for the government
Tartarus—a black company that contained all former Neural Spike personnel that were not “disappeared;” shut down in Book 1 by the police
CHAPTER 1
The headquarters of the Grand Westphalian Trust loomed over the CBD like a pristine, gleaming beacon of an age long past. Clean, unbroken panes of glass ran along the skyscraper, unmarred by tacky LED displays.
The entire building seemed to hover on a handful of marble columns, while small cafes hung from glass platforms underneath the tower itself. A bank of transparent glass elevators sat inside an open plaza beneath the tower.
Locals knew the company as GWT. It was a trusted bank in the ar
Which is why the cordon of SMG-wielding autonomous police dolls surrounding the pristine HQ was a sign for alarm in the city. Each of the dolls looked like the same identical woman, with fluffy white hair, antennae hidden as pigtails, armored pauldrons and greaves, and were five-foot nothing. They were known as the Archangels, the city’s elite police force.
Lines of extravagantly suited office workers formed in front of the dolls guarding the elevators, presumably to be checked one-by-one. Far more watched from beyond the cordon, kept behind an invisible line. The Archangels didn’t bother manhandling people.
In truth, there was a line. It existed only in augmented reality and was visible to almost every person and doll in the city of Neo Babylon. The use of neural implants merged the digital world with the physical world. Known as the Altnet, life itself had been augmented for decades here. Everyone had an implant. Well, almost everyone.
A sleek police interceptor slipped through the cordon and pulled up amid a dozen oversized SUVs with flashing lights. Two more interceptors swiftly followed. Inside the first sat two people: one human, the other an Archangel.
The human was Detective Nick Waite, one of the only functional adults in the city without a neural implant. The other was Chloe, a Mark 3 Archangel. Unlike the older models outside, she was a little taller, with slightly longer hair, and a little fuller in the chest.
“Are things this bad?” Nick asked Chloe as he peered out the windows at the small army of dolls around them.
“The safety of Neo Babylon’s financial sector is of the highest priority. Murder, the possibility of corporate espionage, and hacking are individually all dangerous to financial stability. Combined, they must be taken very seriously,” she said.
The car doors snapped open and the pair slipped out. Nick wore his standard baggy coat that made him look like a real detective, and a more nondescript set of clothes beneath.
Not that he really needed to dress up. Neo Westphalia never got too cold. A side-effect of being an artificial chain of islands in the north-east Pacific. Although as they entered spring, he might not appreciate the heavy coat. It’d been nearly five months since he’d become a detective after all.
Little light entered the Central Business District at this early hour. Despite that, the cafes, coffee shop chains, and bakeries teemed with suits and people in athleticwear. If the line to enter GWT’s HQ was this bad already, Nick could only imagine how bad it would be at 9AM. No doubt many of the people camped out with coffee were employees logged on remotely using their neural implants.
The high-security nature of finance meant work-from-home options tended to be limited. Or at least, that was the excuse given to force the office drones into the cubicle farms each day. On the flip side, the banks had the shiniest golden handcuffs to attract ciphers into their dull halls.
“GWT didn’t seem that alarmed,” he said as he and Chloe approached the central elevator. “I checked their notification. Their head of security sent it in personally. Which seems weird to me—shouldn’t a mainframe have automatically notified us once she found the body?”
“Many organizations have policies that require internal security to contact us, rather than mainframes,” Chloe said.
“So a human decided that a cipher being murdered overnight in the middle of one of Babylon’s most prestigious banks, without being noticed by any of their security systems, was of low priority?”
“It is of concern.”
Nick felt that Chloe might be understating matters.
A mugger was of concern. Somebody embezzling funds was of concern.
But the head of security of one of Neo Westphalia’s largest banks shrugging off murder and gaping security holes? He sincerely hoped this didn’t end up as another Lieu situation. Cracking open one long-term major conspiracy had been enough excitement to last him at least a year, and it hadn’t even been half that long.
The Archangels forming the cordon were all Mark 1s, but only one or two had familiar serial numbers to Nick.
While he considered his memory excellent, keeping track of thousands of identical dolls was hard work. It didn’t help that there was no pattern to them. Whenever one was destroyed or disabled, they simply transferred into the next available unit and “rebirthed” into its serial number.
When he had told Rie that he wanted to name the Archangels to make it easier to remember them, she’d called him an idiot. Not just because he would need to come up with—and remember—several thousand new names, but because the process would throw the Host into havoc.
For now, the Mark 1s didn’t seem fussed about his inability to differentiate them. Metatron—better known as Meta—acted as their voice and liaison to him ordinarily, and that seemed to satisfy them. Although they did have a propensity to chatter in his earpiece when he got close.
Like right now, as the Archangels noticed his arrival and began shifting onto his frequency. One after another, they reported in, letting him know their current status, what they’d noticed, any current thoughts, the color of their underwear, and all sorts of random oddities.
“I do not believe any of us tell you the color of our underwear,” Meta told him, making her presence known as she stepped up beside him from his escort. She looked identical to every other Mark 1, save her serial number.
A discordant hum in his earpiece suggested discontent from the Archangels at his comment.
He shrugged. “It was an example. And I don’t think you even wear underwear? I know the Mark 3s have the same strange crotch plate that Rie has, but what about you Mark 1s?”
Meta shifted uncomfortably and looked to Chloe. Over the past few months, the pair had become “close” for lack of a better word. Both acted as liaisons for their respective model lines to Nick. The primary difference was that Meta almost never left his side, much like his bodyguards, Juliet and Rosa, unlike Chloe, who had other duties.
“They lack in-built sexual features,” Chloe said, with an unspoken “for now” in her tone.
Given Rie was presently at Sigma Robotic’s central factory in the Atlantic, Nick wondered whether the Host might have some inside information on when some physical upgrades were forthcoming.
Officially, Rie’s visit was to finalize Ezekiel’s tuning. As the prototype and the new batch of Mark 3s would be deploying under Nick’s command, Sigma felt it was important to review their current directives. New Archangels would be running off a master instance of the training data, after all, rather than the live data that the active Archangels made decisions based on.
Sigma Robotics and Industrial was one of the major players in everything related to robots and dolls, military or otherwise. They’d created the Archangels and developed the first emotion engines—the more advanced type of processing engine used by newer dolls and mainframes. RTM Strategic was their direct competitor in the military and police space, and it was a subsidiary of the monolithic RTM, who did everything and anything electronic.
Nick had been busy over the past few months ensuring the Archangels could hide the data within their neural net from Sigma. This visit would prove whether his efforts were enough.
Although given his mentor was there, he suspected at least someone would find out the truth. Whether Welk cared was another matter. Something was deeply wrong in the depths of Sigma Labs, and it wasn’t being resolved through the captured researchers taken from Neural Spike.
