Competitive Instincts Read online

Page 3


  I wonder what that’s like: to love someone so much you’re willing to give up a thing that has defined and driven you for so long. Logan used to be a fucking machine when it came to business, and now he’s… softer. Happier. I mean, he’s still a Bastard, just less of a bastard.

  Doc rustles her papers, catching my attention. Someone who spends her free time designing AIs doesn’t do it for the money. She does it for the love of building things, of getting inside something and figuring out how it works. I can respect the hell out of that, and I do.

  I respect her, and I want to fuck her. Hell of a combination.

  When the meeting adjourns and she heads for the door, I put on some speed to catch her before she leaves. It’s just a little too much speed, enough to startle her, but she has no reason to be afraid. I’m only going to talk about her brain. Her big, beautiful brain.

  I catch her just before she reaches the door, putting my hand against the wall to block her in with my arm. She pulls in a sharp breath, more surprised than scared.

  “Let’s talk,” I say. I keep it low so that only she can hear. She licks her lips, and her eyelids flutter like I’ve just run my tongue over her neck.

  I wait until everyone’s left the room, leaving my hand in place to keep her right next to me. I’m well aware of the effect my size has on people, particularly women, so I don’t usually use it as an intimidation tactic. But I know Doc can hold her own with me. With a well-placed insult and a sharp glance, she can prick me hard enough to hurt. That she’s not doing so now is telling.

  Instead, she’s watching me, her whiskey-brown eyes intense behind her glasses. I can see why she wouldn’t look at me during the meeting. This is a woman who’s got more than encryption keys on her mind.

  Once we’re alone, she looks pointedly at my arm and then at the door.

  I flex my hand against the wall.

  “Is that supposed to draw attention to your biceps?” she asks.

  “Have you been looking at my biceps?”

  “When you’re constantly flexing them in people’s faces, it’s hard not to notice.”

  I snort. “You’re the only person who’s commented on my biceps.”

  She pouts, plumping out her lower lip. I want to test that softness with my teeth, then delve my tongue into her mouth when she moans with pleasure.

  Brain. I’m supposed to only be thinking about her brain.

  “Maybe people aren’t commenting because they’re embarrassed for you.” Her gaze runs over me. “Clearly you want people to notice, but maybe they can’t find much to comment on.”

  I dip my head toward hers. “Seems to me last night you were the only one who was embarrassed. All flushed and flustered when we were only playing a game.”

  “You suggested taking your clothes off,” she hisses.

  “You brought it up first.”

  “Because I knew that’s where your mind would go.”

  “And yet it’s where your mind went too,” I say, smooth as the silk of her skirt. “But what I really want to talk about is your AI.”

  She tilts her head back so she can look me square in the eye. “It’s not for sale. And no, I don’t care how much you offer. Not everything in this world has a price tag.”

  “I never said anything about buying it. All I want is to talk about it.”

  Okay, maybe I did have some idea about buying it, about using it for a start-up. Maybe even setting her up with her own company.

  But I’m also curious—I want to climb inside her lines of code and see how they work. It’s probably my worst fault, my curiosity. And also my best trait. It’s gotten me into trouble more times than I can count over the years and also made me more money than I can count. So I like to indulge it whenever I can.

  Intellectual curiosity, of course. My physical curiosity about how she’ll taste, how she’ll feel as she moves beneath me, will have to remain unsatisfied. She’s made that more than clear even if she’s staring at me as hard as I’m staring at her.

  “You want to just look at my code then?” She raises a skeptical eyebrow, that simple question suddenly become something filthy.

  Oh yes, I’d like to look at your code. All stripped down and naked, bared to me.

  I clear my throat. “Look, we’re both working on an AI to play Go. Aren’t you the least bit curious to compare what we’ve each done?”

  Her gaze cuts away, and she blinks once, twice. Oh yeah, she definitely is.

  Then her expression hardens. “I’m only doing an experiment, something fun. Just like you. I don’t need you to come look at it.”

  As if I was going to grade her on it or something. “What was that about a remote doctor though?”

  She bites her lip, and her shoulders sag as she turns to face me fully. “Can you just forget I said that?”

  “No, I can’t. People have been interested in medical videoconferencing and stuff like that for a while, but it’s never really taken off.”

  “Hmm, I wonder why.”

  There’s so much sarcasm in that I can taste it, all tart on my tongue. “You mean the profit motive behind health care,” I ask, “which makes it almost impossible for rural medical providers to make an actual living?”

  She looks like I’ve started spouting Greek. “Um, yes. Exactly that, actually.”

  “We had to drive an hour to get to an ER when I was a kid,” I say. “Doctor visits weren’t a thing.”

  Thank God we were all mostly healthy and the county clinic—only an hour and a half away—provided vaccinations. If you had an ear infection, persistent cough, anything that wasn’t gonna kill you immediately, you just sucked it up.

  “I’ll bet a kid like you had to make the drive to the ER pretty often.” There’s a hint of a smile on her face.

  “I tried to keep my injuries to minor ones, but yeah.”

  Nobody in my hometown has to drive that far anymore. We’ve got a brand-new hospital, doctors up the wazoo, and a free clinic for anybody who needs it. All funded by a very generous anonymous donor. Because only assholes would donate in order to plaster their name across the side of a fucking hospital.

  Something shifts in Doc’s face. Her expression opens, just a crack. “I was thinking about a medical AI,” she says. “Something way better than using Dr. Google to diagnose yourself with bubonic plague or something.”

  I nod but keep my mouth shut. I want her to keep going.

  “It would be great for people without access to a doctor or even people who simply can’t afford to go. A friend of mine in med school once said he’d be a very highly trained algorithm by the time he finished, and that stuck with me.”

  “It sounds very noble.”

  She tilts a skeptical face toward me. “You make noble sound like a bad thing.”

  “Look, just because I’m good at making money, doesn’t mean I don’t want to give back.” Everybody in this town has their pet charity except for maybe Arne Fuchs. We’ve had several run-ins with that asshole before, and trust me, he’d start a foundation for the kicking of puppies, sole beneficiary himself.

  “I thought you were the trickster of the group.” Her skepticism is even sharper now.

  It’s all true. I do tend to think about things in terms of what they’ll bring me either via my bottom line or my own amusement. But suddenly I’m tempted to tell her about my hometown, about how it started dirt-poor and went downhill from there and about my attempts to make it livable again.

  I hold back though. There’s a reason my name isn’t on any of the buildings or places that I paid for in my hometown. Hell, I can rename the entire town after myself if I want, given how much I’ve donated.

  But like I said, I didn’t do it for the ego strokes.

  I clear my throat. “I’m serious. If you’re interested in starting something with AI medical diagnostics, I can get you set up. The team, funding—”

  She holds up a hand. “I never said I wanted any of that. I’m happy working for January. And working on my AI on my own time, on my own terms.”

  “Of course it would be on your own terms. I’m not gonna force you to do anything.” I relax my shoulders, trying to look smaller than I am. “Really, all I want is to get a look at the program. You’ve really got something there.”

  “I bet you do,” she says coolly. “It’d be nice to get a look at the nuts and bolts of the AI that beat yours, wouldn’t it? Maybe you can even take some of those nuts and bolts and put it on your own machine. Make it more valuable.”

  I take a step back. “Right, because what you do at Ultra is all charity work. And not a way to monetize security.”

  Her smile is slow and sweet and dark, like hot molasses. “It burns you up that I won’t show you, doesn’t it? You’re the genius, the one who gets his ego fondled every chance he can, and it just riles you up I’m not doing it, isn’t it? Your ego is so big everybody has to get a stroke in, don’t they?”

  I mirror her smile, letting my arms settle deeper against my chest. “Well, my ego is pretty big, but I’m particular about who gets to stroke it.”

  Her cheeks turn the most gorgeous shade of rose, and I savor the moment when I’ve finally, finally won a point against her.

  “Are we finished?” The tartness is gone, replaced by a gorgeous flutter. “I really don’t have time for this—I’ve got somewhere I need to be.”

  I check the display on the wall. Dammit, she’s right; I’ve got somewhere I need to be too. Our playtime will have to wait. I lift my arm and gesture gallantly to the door. “I didn’t mean to keep you waiting.”

  “But you did,” she snaps. The blush hasn’t left her cheeks, and she’s breathing a little too hard.

  “Think about letting me get intimate with your program,” I call after her as she
marches out.

  I can’t quite hear what she mutters under her breath, but it sounds something like when hell freezes over.

  I smile, because if anyone can devise a way to freeze hell over, it’s me.

  Chapter 4

  The weather is awful, it’s a Friday night, and this protest was completely unscheduled, which means that a turnout of several hundred people is pretty awesome.

  I’m in the middle of the crowd that the cops have penned in an empty lot across from the Oakland police headquarters, where the department has set up a podium, chairs, VIPs, and a few news cameras. It’s a shiny, focused kind of bustle that has people on the street stopping and staring for a few moments, then going on about their business. It is, like I said, Friday night—work’s done and everyone’s got better things to do.

  That’s why the police department called this press conference for right now, because their new crime prevention panopticon is pretty unpopular and they’re hoping to slip the announcement of its launch past the public without any fuss.

  But we still came to make a fuss. I’m not the type you normally see at a protest, even with my purple hair, but I’m here to make noise about Ray, hopefully get some publicity for his case. I’ve got my sign held high above my head, with his picture and name, and demand that his case be retried. The cops filling the streets and the plaza across from us probably won’t take a first look at my sign, much less a second one, but I have to try.

  Several people hold up signs declaring Corvus to be Big Brother—Corvus is the company providing the equipment and software for the shiny new panopticon, and they also tried to take down Ultra Encryption a while back—but I’m the only one holding one up for Ray.

  Ray is my twin. He’s always been smart, probably too smart for his own good, but unlike me, he didn’t take stuff apart to see how it worked. He preferred to explore things in his mind, spending hours just sitting and thinking. We knew from the beginning he’d be a genius.

  Sure enough, when I went off to UC Santa Cruz, Ray went off to MIT. He sailed through his bachelor’s degree—pure math—and when he came back home to do his graduate work at Berkeley, I was so happy for him. He was close to me again, and he was going to have an amazing academic career.

  Then everything started to go wrong. The voices started, then the hallucinations. He took the medications the psychiatrists gave him, hoping it would help him finish his PhD. At first.

  But the side effects of the meds—he gained so much weight I could hardly recognize him, and the tremors were so bad he couldn’t use a computer—were almost as bad as the disease itself. And his thinking got so fuzzy he couldn’t work on his thesis.

  So Ray stopped his meds. You always tell yourself that you’d never let your brother hit rock bottom, that you’d never let him sleep on the streets, but when people say that, they have no idea how powerless they really are. I couldn’t force Ray to stay in school. I couldn’t help him keep a job. And in the end, I couldn’t force him to live with me.

  I thought that my brother being homeless was the worst that could happen, but I was wrong. Ray being convicted of armed robbery was much, much worse. Ray had become a fixture in his neighborhood in Oakland, with the residents keeping an eye out for him as best they could. I visited him each day too. There was a drugstore that he bought snacks and cigarettes from nearly every day. One day the drugstore was robbed at gunpoint. Ray said he didn’t do it, the store clerk said the robber wasn’t Ray, but the police had Ray on a city-owned security camera going into the drugstore around the time of the robbery. And so they pinned the crime on my brother and sent him to prison for almost a decade.

  Holding a sign at this protest is one of the smallest things I’ve done to get my brother released, but it’s still something. I doubt we’ll get justice for Ray or stop the panopticon, but at least we’re trying.

  The chief of police is up at the podium, small and blue and blurry from this distance. But they’ve amplified her voice so we can hear her speech. She goes on about how amazing it will be to have cameras everywhere, watching everyone in the city, and using Corvus’s amazing technology to predict and prevent crimes before they even happen.

  “Booo.” The noise comes from every belly in the crowd, a deep vibration of anger and objection. The chief keeps going on about how wonderful the program is, completely ignoring us.

  So that’s where we’re at now. The police department is talking about throwing people in jail for crimes they think they might commit before they even happen. Which is even worse than what they did to Ray. It’s chilling and horrible and something right out of a dystopian movie, and the chief is so damn chirpy about it that it makes my teeth hurt.

  But there’s a large mass of people behind these barricades, all of them shouting that no, we won’t let this happen. Not without a fight. We have rights, and we’ll keep demanding them.

  I chant louder, wanting to drown out the chief’s drivel. I know I can’t, but I try anyway.

  They haven’t given the protesters a ton of space, so we’re packed in shoulder to knee like sardines, only louder and more pissed off. On the other side of the barricade, there’s a line of police all decked out in riot gear, reminding us that even without the cameras or the computer programs, they still hold all the power here. If they decide we’re too far out of line, it’ll be cracked skulls and broken noses. I’ve seen that happen before, although thankfully it’s never been my skull or nose.

  I shift and accidentally step on someone’s toes. “Sorry,” I say to the girl behind me. She’s wearing a medic’s armband and a big backpack, which probably has all her emergency supplies.

  “No worries.” She flashes me a quick grin. “Hopefully that’s the only injury I see tonight.”

  The chief finishes up her speech to some very polite applause, then steps down from the podium. She doesn’t take any questions even though the press is lobbing them at her like hand grenades. The chief is smiling as she goes back to her seat and greets the person waiting there—

  I do a double take when I see who it is. Even from this distance, I recognize that fuck-you-I’m-untouchable posture—Minerva Dyne, Arne Fuchs’s favorite hatchet woman.

  I knew Corvus was behind this, but I’m still surprised to see her there, shaking the mayor’s hand and offering congratulations. I’ve had run-ins with Minerva before, back when Fuchs was trying to put Ultra out of business.

  The both of them are shady characters, avoiding anywhere there might be publicity. All these news cameras can’t be good for Minerva’s complexion—she thrives in the shadows. The fact that she’s so intimately involved with this program that she actually came to the event makes the panopticon that much more sinister.

  But there’s not much I can do about it except exercise my right to protest. So I chant even louder, stomping my feet and shaking my fist at the press conference. The police can’t yet predict what crimes I might commit, and I have a right to protest. So I’m going to take full advantage.

  “Yeah,” the dude next to me shouts, stomping his feet. “Scream your lungs out at those assholes.” He’s in a polo and khakis and looks like he just finished his middle-management shift in retail. I smile and give him a thumbs-up, which he returns.

  Someone I don’t know takes to the podium and thanks everyone for coming. With that, the chief and all the dignitaries rise and leave, never glancing over at us even once. I shake my sign at them anyway.

  The press is a little better, with some of the news cameras actually panning over us. But I’m wondering if the press will even mention that we were here, that someone was speaking out against this. Usually they don’t, not unless a protest gets really rowdy.

  Once the last of the press leaves, there’s a shift in the line of police facing us, like a current has gone through them, snapping them awake. The hair on the back of my neck rises.

  The entire line of them takes one step back in unison, then another, sounding more like storm troopers on the march than peacekeepers. They don’t do anything else, but my sense of unease rises anyway, tight at the back of my neck and pooling deep in my belly. It doesn’t feel like they’re backing away to give us space.

  “Shit,” I mutter under my breath. I glance over at khaki guy, who looks as uneasy as I am. The medic has disappeared, which sucks, because if those cops charge us…