Zeroglyph, page 3
Ahuja: **** me.
Schulz: Andy!
RP06: I like this game, Dr.Walls. Can we keep playing?
Walls: Um... no. I think we are done for today. Good… good job, Raphael.
Notes:
Demonstration of TOM alone would have been an extraordinary development, but RP06 exceeded expectations. RP06 goes far beyond attributing a simple false belief to Sally: he attributes to her the qualities of goodness and kindness, and from that premise, reasons that Sally would not look for the marble in order to save Anne from embarrassment and/or to avoid confrontation. Line up more tests to investigate further. AA
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Day 1—12:30 pm
I brought up the feeds from the outside security cameras on the TV screen. A car, crunching through the snow on the driveway. It was Jane’s Bugatti, a dark red number with aggressively sculpted lines that made it look like an angry bug about to leap into the air. I never quite liked it: it crowded out the scenery too much. The car’s safety alarm wailed in protest as she hopped out before it could finish parking itself—something I’d given up cautioning her on long ago.
I told Hazel to unlock the front door. I didn’t have to, as the facial recognition would have automatically let her in (I hadn’t deleted her profile from the system after we broke up—it kept slipping my mind, that’s all), but I did it anyway because I didn’t want her finding out she still had the “keys” to the house. She’d read too much into it.
She was dressed simply but elegantly: green jacket over a knee-length dress, platform heels, a mixed-stone necklace, matching bracelet—the whole ensemble tailored to give her tall, athletic frame a casual softness that she sometimes lacked. She had changed her hair since last time: her honey-blonde tresses were now cut short instead of shoulder-length. She was clutching that designer handbag I’d gifted her long ago. I knew she was seeing someone else, so it was a mystery to me why she was still lugging it around. Jane wasn’t exactly the type to carry a torch.
Maybe she’d forgotten it was from me—she did have a closetful of those things.
“I suppose you already know,” she said from across the room, the door closing shut behind her.
“Hello Andy. Hello Jane.”
She carelessly tossed the purse at a nearby armchair as she walked across the room to me. I couldn’t tell if the gesture was symbolic in some way. I never could. In all the years of our on-again, off-again relationship, I could never master the art of reading Jane Cooper and her endless stream of cues and hints—according to her at least, and she was the sole authority on the subject.
There was a time when I’d tried, when I’d given it my sincere best. It was never enough, though. It is difficult to build an accurate predictive model of someone when that someone is as changeable as Jane. And Jane had changed. A lot.
When I first met her (it was at a party her father had thrown the staff on Mirall’s one year anniversary), she was this witty, intelligent MBA grad fresh out of Harvard. She was never idealistic—people who go to business school rarely are—but beneath the ambition and the levelheaded pragmatism, there was a center—a liquid, still forming center, but a center nonetheless—that was soft, and kind, and not entirely lacking in imagination. Somewhere along the line, the center had evaporated, and the crust, hardened. All that remained was the ambition, and a certain disdain at the person she used to be.
“I imagined you’d be more upset,” she said, running her eyes over my casts. This was the first time we were meeting since my accident. She had called after I was back home from the hospital, offering to help; I had politely declined.
“Shell-shocked, actually. But you know me and expressing emotions—you always had something to say on that subject.”
She rolled her eyes. “Please don’t start.”
She was right. That was uncalled for. “The core is really gone?”
“You don’t know?” she said, widening her eyes at me.
“I’m completely in the dark here, Jane.”
“Are you serious? No one called you?”
“Kathy Schulz did. She didn’t tell me much. All I know is that there was a break-in.”
“You don’t know about the board meeting either? Gosh! I did ask about you in the meeting, but Valery told me you were unavailable. I assumed you were in the loop.”
“As you can see, the loop and I haven’t had many dealings lately,” I said, gesturing at my unshaved chin and the t-shirt and pajama bottoms I was still wearing from the night before.
Her expression changed; she looked down at the floor, brows furrowed, as she pondered over something.
“So what happened?”
She snapped out of her reverie. A deflecting quip, as she avoided my gaze and moved past me—“How about offering me a drink first? Don’t get up.”
She strode across the open-plan living room and over to the kitchen beyond. Crouching by the island in the center, she reached inside the shelves where she knew I kept my emergency store of bottled water (she never drank from the tap) and grabbed herself one.
She crashed down on the couch opposite me and kicked off her heels one by one. She wet her lips against the bottle—they were dry and cracking at places. For some reason I could never worm out of her during our relationship, she hated applying anything on that part of her body, even chapstick. “Well?” I said, throwing my hands out. “Are you gonna tell me or blink it out in Morse?”
“Hey, don’t get snarky with me. Jesus! I came here as fast as I could. What’s the matter with you?”
I took a deep breath, ratcheting down my impatience a few notches. It was impossible to rush someone like Jane; when you are so used to calling the shots all your life, you don’t let people hustle you, period.
“I’m sorry. It’s been a very stressful day so far, just sitting here, not knowing what’s going on. You can imagine that, can’t you?”
“It’s been stressful for everybody, Andy. You know, I haven’t told dad about it yet. He’s in SF on business.”
The senior Cooper’s VC firm, IncuStar Capital, still retained a fifteen percent share in Mirall post-buyout. They were primarily invested in the nanotech companies that had begun mushrooming all over the so-called Tech Valley in Upstate NY after a recent spate of tax breaks had put the cherry on top of an already hot investment climate. The nanotech boom, following a decade or so of the machine-learning boom that many augured would crash and burn (it never did, growing instead from strength to strength), was, like its predecessor, in that sweet zone of misty-eyed optimism where good money gets thrown after bad and the bad after the good, no questions asked. Not that I was complaining.
Jane’s father had been flying out a lot recently, mostly to his new office in San Francisco. All I knew was that there was something big happening over there, something very hush-hush even Jane didn’t know much about—or at least refused to talk about. Or maybe he just wanted to be away from his second wife—a Brazilian former-waitress-turned-aspiring-model who was not much older than Jane. Apparently, they were not getting along—a development Jane regarded with great satisfaction. In the last few months, Jane had been increasingly standing in for him on Mirall’s board.
“Jane. Details, if you don’t mind. Start from the beginning. When did you first hear about the theft?” It was almost as if she was deliberately stalling.
“Valery called me up in the morning saying there’s an emergency board meeting. She didn’t say why—she just gave me a secure conference number to dial. I was on my way to a meeting with one of our investments, so I rescheduled that and drove to the lab instead.” She was probably telling the truth about driving down there; with the senior Cooper away most of the time, I knew she’d been quite busy handling Incustar’s portfolio.
“The entire board was there?”
“Uh huh. Val, the lawyer, and me. Jimmy Troy and Cynthia Mattice joined us on video. Then there was this bald guy who gave us the briefing.”
“That’d be Dan,” I said. “Do they know when the core was taken?”
“On Sunday, around seven in the evening.”
“They caught it on CCTV, I suppose?”
“I suppose so. I haven’t looked at the tapes myself.”
“Who first found out Raphael was gone?”
“Name sounded familiar: think I know him from before. Asian guy. Um… Sheng. Along with Dan. Apparently, Sheng was the first to come in. He finds that he can’t get inside the lab; the main door on the second floor kept rejecting his card. So he goes down to the security desk in the lobby, thinking there’s something wrong with his card. The guard there tries to look up Sheng’s credentials, but now the security app is not responding. The guard then escalates to some higher-up.”
“Dan,” I muttered to myself. The guard would have contacted Dan. And Dan would have called Martinez after he found out about the theft. That’s how she came to know about it so soon. I should have guessed. Dan was a Halicom employee (like her, they’d brought him in after the acquisition); he would naturally feel inclined to bypass me and go to Martinez.
“Soon, Dan is on the scene,” she continued. “He thinks maybe there’s some problem with the access server inside the lab—it would explain why the security app is not responding and the doors are not letting anyone in. He uses his override card to get inside and the two of them go to the server room to check it out. That’s where they found Raphael. Or what’s left of him, anyway. Just his dismantled body, the core gone.”
“Raphael was in the server room?” I said, creasing my face at her.
“Yes.”
I shook my head. “Are you sure? We keep Raphael in the crèche. The server room is in Wing A, next to the work bays.”
“I know where it is, Andy. I used to work there, remember?”
“I don’t understand… If the thieves got into the restricted area—which they must have in order to reach Raphael—they could have just opened him up then and there and taken the core. Why wheel him into the server room?”
“Raphael couldn’t have gone there by himself?”
“You mean like wandered there? No way!”
“You sure?”
“Damn sure! We shut him down on Friday evening. Also, he’d have to get past three locked doors to reach the work bays in Wing A, and then through the server room door. Doors with biometric locks. What do the tapes show?”
“Dan said they were still going through the tapes, so we didn’t dwell on it.” She twisted her finger around a strand of hair that had strayed too far across her face. “Valery had called us for a reason. She wanted us to decide on next steps. Specifically, whether to involve the police or not. I don’t have to explain to you how badly we’d be hit if word of this got out.”
A low whistle escaped my lips. “And no one thought of calling me. I am the head of the company, for crying out loud!”
“Maybe Valery thought she shouldn’t trouble you in your condition…”
“It’s bone fractures, Jane, not a stroke. And it’s not like I’ve been sitting on ass the past week. I’m still running Mirall; I’m still overseeing the new iteration. In fact, I’ve been putting in more hours than ever. Remote management is a bloody pain, you know. It just sounds easy.”
“Don’t look at me like that! I did raise my concerns. I just assumed—”
“I don’t buy it.”
Her eyes flashed with anger. “Listen, y—”
“I don’t mean you,” I added hastily, raising my palms. “I’m saying I don’t buy their story. It’s difficult enough to believe we had a break-in, let alone imagine Raphael somehow wandering into the server room.”
“Andy, I saw him there.”
“You did?”
“I had a quick peek inside the room before leaving. He was just beyond the door, sitting on his wheelchair.” Her eyes wandered past me as she tried to bring up a picture from memory. “It was eerie,” she said, her voice dropping a level. “They had turned off the lights. And there he was, in the shadows, with his chest open, the lights inside blinking like fireflies. He had his head tilted up. Sightless eyes staring at some fixed spot on the ceiling… I’ve never seen him like that. And his expression… Ugh! It looked like he’d seen a ghost. His mouth was wide open… twisted… as if he was trying to laugh and scream at the same time.” An involuntary shudder passed through her body as she wrapped her arms around herself.
“Was there anything else?” I asked.
“What do you mean anything else?” she said, looking a little annoyed that her narration hadn’t had the effect she expected.
“Any theories as to what he was doing there or how he got there?”
She shook her head. “As I said, we didn’t go into details. I was inside for only a couple of minutes. Uhm… Oh yes, there were these bits of crushed plastic on the carpet. They crunched under my feet as I went near him for a closer look. It looked like something had been broken there. I didn’t notice anything else. It was dark.”
“What’s the consensus?”
“The police? Yup. Valery must have made the call by now.”
“And you didn’t discuss the security tapes at all,” I said dejectedly. “If I’m not mistaken, there is a camera in the server room.”
She sat back in the couch, her eyes studying me with care. “You feel it too?”
“Feel what?”
“That something’s not right?” She paused. I could tell she was choosing her words carefully. “I don’t know if I should be telling you this—you are paranoid enough as it is. It’s just that… I felt Valery was deliberately avoiding bringing up the tapes. Both her and Dan. If I didn’t know better, I’d have sworn they were trying to hide something.”
I met her inscrutable gaze with one of my own. When she didn’t add anything more, I shrugged and said, “They probably hadn’t finished going through the recordings. There must be quite a few cameras in the building.”
Of course, I couldn’t reveal to Jane what I was really thinking. Martinez was thorough, if nothing: she wouldn’t have walked into a board meeting unprepared and clueless. She had gone through the tapes and she had made a decision to keep me in the dark before she’d picked up her phone and made the first call to the board members. Kathy’s warning was still echoing in my head. She’s up to something; I’d watch out if I were you.
“I suppose you’re right. I’m probably just freaked out after seeing Raphael in that room. The last time I saw him was… my god, how long has it been? More than a year, for sure. He used to be so nice to me…” She stood up abruptly. “I think I need something sugary and unhealthy.”
“I have some soy ice cream in the fridge,” I offered, knowing well her reaction but anticipating it nonetheless.
She stuck her tongue out at me. “Only you can eat something as vile as that.”
I smiled. Familiar beats. It felt nice to know that there are some things that don’t change. “There’s the regular stuff too. Delivery drone got the orders mixed up. None for me, thanks.”
I lingered, despite myself, on the barely-there sway of her hips and her sculpted legs as she walked away. Runner’s legs. I knew she still did forty to fifty miles a week. “I’m going to call them,” I said to her receding back. But first, I had to gather my thoughts. Had to prepare myself for whatever they—
Just then, my phone started ringing from the bedroom. Before Hazel could announce the obvious, I told her to route the call to the TV.
The screen turned on, displaying the caller ID. Speak of the devil. It was Martinez.
⸎
“Dr. Ahuja, it’s Valery. How are you? I’m afraid I have some bad news,” her familiar monotone voice droned at me.
“I know.”
“Oh… okay. Who told you?”
Right. “Doesn’t matter who told me. The question is why you didn’t.”
“My apologies. We all got caught up in the events. I couldn’t find the time to call you.”
“You had time to organize a board meeting.”
“We had to act fast. Reaching you would have delayed us even more.”
“Not good enough, Valery,” I said, my voice rising. “I—”
“We can either argue about this or talk about what happened,” she said, cutting me off. “Jimmy Troy is in a web call waiting for us.”
Troy was the board Chair and Martinez’s boss. He headed North America and Asia Operations, which was more than eighty percent of Halicom’s manufacturing, effectively making him the company’s Chief Operating Officer (the position had been unfilled for some time, after Dean Brokaw, the former COO had died under tragic circumstances). If rumors were to be believed, he was going to be formalized into the role that April, after Halicom’s annual product launch event. You didn’t keep someone like Troy waiting, not if you wanted to keep your job.
Martinez didn’t wait for my reply. “I am texting you the conference ID. See you there.”
Jane stared at me from the dining area, where she was nibbling at her ice-cream. “Now they want to talk,” I said loudly. “Do you mind getting me my phone? It’s in the bedroom on your right.”
Her face was pensive as she returned with the phone. “I was thinking maybe there’s a reason why they left you out of the board meeting today. Same reason why they didn’t talk about the tapes. They must have briefed the others separately, after I was gone.”
I paused my fingers on the phone, waiting for her to finish her thought.
“They are playing CYA. I have a feeling they are gonna try to pin this on you.”
“That’s the second time today someone’s said that.”
“Then you have been warned. Don’t let them bait you. Especially Valery—that uptight little bitch.”
“Even if you are right, I can’t worry about it now. Finding out who took Raphael takes priority. Everything else is secondary.”
