Kill Decision Read online

  Strickland recognized that this was one of the problems inherent in working with brilliant people: They were half-mad. Fixations on details or finding links between disconnected phenomena was a mania with some of them. He patted Kasheyev on the shoulder. “There’s this thing called ‘migration,’ Nik.”

  Kasheyev looked at Strickland like he was an idiot. “Ravens don’t migrate. Adult birds like this have a range that spans miles. They don’t stay in one spot unless they’re a mated pair with a nest. And I don’t see a nest.”

  “Fascinating. These birds are way more interesting than our new research funding. I say we drop everything and—”

  “Look . . .” Kasheyev zoomed in on one of the ravens sitting in the tree, and then up to one of its legs. There was some sort of tag or transponder on it.

  Strickland shrugged. “Okay, someone’s doing research on ravens. This is a university.”

  “That’s what I thought too. Ravens are very bright birds, Josh.”

  “Maybe they’re here on a scholarship.”

  “No one is doing research on raven populations here. I checked.”

  “Jesus, I thought we were working on visual intelligence software, not stalking ravens.”

  “Take a closer look at the tag on its leg. . . .” He zoomed in the high-def digital image. Then he split the screen and showed a close-up of the other bird on the opposite side of the building.

  The objects on their legs looked like identical black squares.

  Strickland sighed, and was happy when he noticed Wang Bao-Rong, their twentysomething Taiwanese narrow-AI expert, motioning for them to follow as he walked past in the hallway.

  “What’s going on?”

  Wang was tossing a brain-shaped squeaky toy in the air as he walked. “Conference call with the lawyers.”

  “Oh!” Strickland pulled Kasheyev from the seat. “C’mon, Nik! The birds can wait, man.” He fell in with the rest of the crew, still sipping champagne.

  Stanford University graduate science teams had already founded Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Yahoo!, and, of course, Google. And the five patent applications Strickland’s team had filed for Raconteur were potentially worth billions—especially now that the federal government was signing on to fund their work. This was the culmination of everything he’d worked for.

  The team piled into a conference room, where Prakash was already standing, arms akimbo, in front of a speakerphone. Strickland was the last in and closed the door behind him.

  Prakash barked at the phone. “Okay, John. The team’s all here.” Prakash looked up. “Guys, this is John Wolstein at Hartmann, Blithe, and Peale.”

  A voice came over the speaker. “Hey, guys.”

  Everyone chimed in greetings.

  Strickland spoke up. “Tell us the good news, John.”

  There was a moment of silence. Then, “Well, I wish I could do that, but I’m afraid there’s a problem.”

  A hot flash ran across Strickland’s skin. Adrenaline surge. The intellectual property was everything. They’d already done a preliminary patent search. The path was clear. No one had ever taken Prakash’s novel approach.

  Prakash frowned at the phone. “What do you mean, ‘problem’? What problem?”

  Strickland realized that this was what Prakash was good at. He’d chew this lawyer a new asshole.

  “You have prior art problems, Vijay. Big sections of your source code base are already public knowledge—available online.”

  The room went utterly silent. The static on the phone line was the only sound.

  “You guys still there?”

  “What the hell are you talking about? That’s impossible! Where online?”

  “Several forums. A code search turned up a half-dozen sites that carried parts of your source code verbatim. Even some of the comments were there in the code. I don’t know how it got there or—”

  “Goddammit!” The words burst from Prakash as he glared around the room.

  “Vijay, I’m just telling you what the facts are.”

  “I designed this code from scratch. There’s no ‘inspiration’ from somewhere else. It is mine.”

  Strickland might have argued for more credit under different circumstances, but right now he felt like he’d been Tasered. He was just staring at the speakerphone, hearing the pounding of his heart in his ears. Hearing his future evaporate. He could see Prakash’s tanned face turning red, veins appearing—as though the man were about to explode.

  Gerhard Koepple, always even-tempered, looked ashen-faced. Wang, Kasheyev, and Chatterjee were sitting down, running their hands through their hair as if they’d just heard a close relative had died.

  Strickland croaked out, “Where? Where online, John?”

  “I’m sending you a link right now—”

  Prakash broke in. “You’ll send it to all of us. Not just Josh. Do you understand?”

  “Yeah, okay, fine, Vijay. Listen, getting mad at me isn’t going to help.”

  “Just send the damned message.”

  “Okay.” A pause. “It’s headed your way.”

  Strickland chimed in again. “John, where does this leave us? What happens now?”

  There was silence for a moment. “Nothing happens. I’m going to submit a report to Doctor Lei that the patents are not enforceable. And I expect the patent office will come to the same determination. I don’t know what, if any, effect this will have on your Ph.D. theses, but that’s the situation. My condolences. However this happened—and I’m not saying that you guys copied work from somewhere else—but however it happened, this code is now public domain. You won’t be able to patent it unless this prior art issue is resolved.”

  Prakash grabbed the phone and ripped it off its base on the table—tearing out the phone cord—and hurled it against the window. The glass vibrated with a thud as the phone blasted into pieces.

  “Jesus, Vijay! Calm down! I wanted to ask him more questions!”

  Prakash ignored Strickland and stormed out of the conference room to the office nearby that he shared with Wang.

  Strickland was right on his heels, closely followed by the rest of the team. “Vijay.” He felt his iPhone vibrate in his pocket, meaning he’d probably received an e-mail, but he wanted to deal with Vijay first.

  Prakash was logging on to his computer and opening e-mail. He double-clicked on the top message as the others gathered around. There was verbiage from their lawyer, along with several links below the words “Prior Art.” The first one was for a website somewhere in Russia, judging by the “.ru” domain.

  Chatterjee leaned in and placed his hand between Prakash and the screen. “Not directly! Use a VM, dude.”

  Prakash looked like he was about to bite Chatterjee’s head off for a moment before he took a breath, nodded, and copied the first URL to the clipboard. “This is a just a bloody Xenon connection, Sourav! And the machine’s got nothing critical on it.” But he nonetheless launched a virtual machine, opened a browser, and pasted the address into the URL line.

  Everyone was waiting with bated breath as an offshore warez site named “Sourcebomber.ru” came on-screen. There, filling one section, was the source code to their attentiveness state class. Even Strickland, who’d not worked as much on the code as the rest of the crew, recognized it as Prakash’s work—or at least they’d always thought of it as his. Strickland was beginning to wonder whether the rich kid from Bengal really was the talented software architect everyone considered him to be—but of course, that was ridiculous. Prakash had gotten into Stanford! He’d aced undergraduate CS classes. Serious geniuses had worked closely with Prakash and come away impressed.

  Strickland was barely able to concentrate as Prakash’s quivering hand scrolled down the page as function after function, class after class, of their precious source code was revealed on this public forum. It was like finding the love of their life in a gang-bang porno.

  That’s when Prakash really lost it. He picked up the flat-panel monitor and tore it off the
desk. The team scattered as he began smashing it into the wall. Pieces of plastic and glass flew everywhere. He was screaming like an animal.

  Their faculty advisor, the elfin Doctor Lei Li, came in shouting at Prakash. That’s when Strickland realized that none of them had called her into the conference room. She had a stake in this too. But they’d thought it was just going to be a routine call.

  She was screaming at him. “Vijay! Calm down! What’s going on?”

  “The bloody source code is out on the Internet! Raconteur is freeware now! It’s fucking unpatentable! Someone on this team is responsible!”

  The rest of the team displayed the early stages of grief. Prakash had passed them all and gone straight to rage.

  Kasheyev stared unseeing at Prakash’s empty desk. “Or someone stole it from us.”

  Prakash focused on the boyish Russian. “Stole it? Do you think with idiots like Strickland and Wang around anyone would have to steal our code?”

  Strickland had more riding on this than anyone else here. Prakash was talking crazy. “Whoa, wait a second—”

  Prakash got into Kasheyev’s face. “How could anyone steal it? Our servers aren’t even on SUNet. There are no wireless devices on them. I’ve been checking the logs on the Merakis for months, looking for rogue connections and transfers.”

  Doctor Lei frowned. “How are you able to do that? You don’t have rights—”

  He ignored her. “And the only code of ours that gets near a network connection is already obfuscated and compiled. Except for the code my ‘teammates’ have in their possession.” He pointed at where the monitor had been. “You saw that code. It was our uncompiled source—and recent source at that. Comments and all!”

  Strickland felt a sinking feeling. He did indeed have a fairly recent copy of the source code—on the Leland network, on the cluster in the basement. But then, so, too, did the others. Didn’t they? Did they actually not trust the hardwired network? And only their team had access to that share. Strickland suddenly realized that Prakash was studying his face.

  And he had apparently come to a conclusion based on what he read there. “You son of a bitch!”

  Strickland felt warm pressure on his face as the world spun out of control. It was several moments before he realized he was on the floor, feeling pain on his lips and the back of his head. He came to his senses with Koepple and Wang trying to get him to his feet. Prakash was nowhere to be seen, and neither were Chatterjee and Doctor Lei.

  Kasheyev leaned into Strickland’s line of view and placed an ice-filled paper towel that smelled of champagne onto his face. “You okay, Josh?”

  His lips hurt like hell. One tooth felt loose. Strickland looked down to see blood had run down his white shirtfront. “What the hell, man . . .”

  Wang was shaking his head. “Vijay has finally lost it.”

  Koepple was still looking pale—not his normal unflappable self. Perhaps he, too, was realizing just how completely fucked they were.

  Strickland felt tears rising. What was he, a pussy? But he couldn’t help it. This had been his ticket. These other guys had serious technical talent. Strickland was smart but not as technically brilliant as these other guys. He needed people like this to employ his own talents—people and management skills. If his doctoral thesis was rejected due to plagiarism, of all things . . . Jesus Christ.

  Strickland looked up at the others. “Why did Vijay hit me?”

  Koepple shrugged. “Why did he hit you, Josh? Is there a reason?”

  “Oh, don’t you start.”

  Kasheyev motioned for them to be quiet, and then turned to Strickland. “I don’t think it was you, Josh. I think we need to look at the evidence here. This is a vision intelligence system. I have cameras in these rooms. No one can approach the project servers without our knowing about it. Vijay is right about that. And if no outsider physically got to those machines, then—”

  “The damned project servers are in the middle of a party right now! There must be forty people in the lab cluster! Why the hell is everyone focusing on me? Because little Lord Fauntleroy popped a gasket and needs to find someone to blame? And why not the least talented coder in the bunch? Why not the guy who’s had the least to do with the code? Do you realize how this fucks me? Do you realize how totally screwed my life is now?”

  The whole team looked embarrassed.

  Kasheyev patted Strickland’s knee. “Sorry, Josh.” With a last look he walked out, followed by Koepple.

  Wang lingered a moment to point to Strickland’s face. “You might want to think about pressing charges, Josh. We were witnesses.”

  Strickland shrugged. It was likely that Doctor Lei would already bring Prakash up on disciplinary charges. And besides, what was the point? Now his face looked the way he felt inside.

  Wang walked out too, leaving him alone.

  Strickland turned in the office chair to face what was actually a rather beautiful day out the window. From his position on the second floor, he could see a tree just outside, and a raven sitting on a branch there—staring at him. After a moment it flew away.

  CHAPTER 4

  Intrusion Detection

  Joshua Strickland slumped in an office chair in the deserted lab cluster. Eyes closed, he listened intently to Rage Against the Machine. It was late. Very late. The place was littered with plastic cups, wine and beer bottles, and pizza boxes. It had cleared out pretty quickly after the intellectual property spill, but that had been hours ago. Hours and hours. Strickland glanced at his watch—then realized he wasn’t wearing one. That he was, in fact, “philosophically opposed to wearing watches.” What a poser he was. Lately he had begun to annoy even himself.

  A nearly empty bottle of champagne hung in his hand. No, that wasn’t quite right. He examined the foil label.

  Sparkling wine.

  The French were sticklers about their intellectual property too. He upended the bottle into his mouth, finishing off the last inch or so, then tossed it against the far wall, where it ricocheted into a trash can.

  Not drunk enough by half. He groped among the bottles on the nearest desk until he came away with another half-empty. More of the cheap shit. But then, that’s all he’d be drinking from now on. No first-round-funding-leading-to-an-eventual-IPO for him.

  He thought about his student loans. About his other debts. It was nearly a hundred thousand by now. Did he even have a thesis to defend anymore? Did this incident violate the terms of his partial scholarship? Surely, someone could establish that his team really had written the Raconteur code before copies appeared online. Couldn’t they?

  He’d started wondering whether they’d actually written the software—and by “they” he meant Prakash. Prakash and Kasheyev. And maybe Koepple.

  Strickland had always been the smartest kid in his high school, but when he’d come to Stanford, he was suddenly the slow guy. It was like swimming in white water here—a constant struggle to keep from drowning in knowledge, while for others it was easy. Or at least it seemed easy.

  No, scratch that. He knew a lot of people were working hard to keep their place here.

  Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You’re no idiot.

  The truth was that Strickland sought out supergeniuses—people who were obviously going places. That’s what he’d seen in Prakash, wasn’t it? And Kasheyev? The others just came with the package. Strickland supposed they thought the same of him.

  But Strickland did have skills they lacked, didn’t he? Unlike them he was outgoing and persuasive. A motivator of people. He could focus work groups.

  He paused for a moment.

  He was a parasite, wasn’t he? Fuck. If he was honest with himself, he was the least valuable member of the Raconteur team. If they’d never met him, the software would probably have looked exactly like it did right now—Prakash’s vision. Strickland had spent hours and hours studying the team’s source code, intent on comprehending each class. Each function and subroutine. Damn, their code was elegant. Brief. Tigh
t. Integrated. Epic poetry for machines. Strickland was still trying to understand all its subtle details and interconnections. He couldn’t imagine having actually developed it.

  In truth, Strickland’s recklessness with the source code might have sunk all their hopes for youthful success. But was it really that reckless to store the code on their own department’s servers?

  What would it have taken to steal the project files from the Leland cluster? Someone with inside access, obviously. The server’s log files might show who and when.

  Unless they covered their tracks. But then he realized that these were probably virtual servers—part of a cloud. And even if that wasn’t the case, the computer science department was crawling with arch hackers. People who could design microchips on the back of a cocktail napkin. He wasn’t likely to find evidence they didn’t want found.

  And what the hell was he thinking—someone with inside access? What if it was someone who’d stolen the code from a misplaced USB drive? From a laptop or a wireless home network? Who was to say it was Strickland who had screwed up? What if it was Prakash? Judgmental prick.

  Strickland slid his tongue across his front teeth. One still felt loose. The swelling on his lips had gone down, but if he weren’t drunk, he guessed he’d probably be in serious pain right now.

  Bottom line: There really wasn’t much chance of finding out how the code got out. He was no computer forensics expert. Maybe Prakash and his rich family could hire one, but their hiring a lawyer to sue Strickland seemed more likely.

  A thought suddenly occurred to him. What if whoever stole the source code was still stealing it?

  Strickland sat upright—suddenly alert.

  What if he could insert something in the source code that “phoned-home” if they stole it again? A smile spread across his lips—and he stopped himself as the pain spiked. He slid the wine bottle across the nearest desk and marched unsteadily over to the nearest workstation. Man, he actually was pretty drunk.