Chasing Rain
Brandt Legg
Contents
Copyright
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
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70
Chapter 71
Chapter 72
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Epilogue
A Note From the Author
About the Author
Books by Brandt Legg
Acknowledgments
Chasing Rain (A Chase Wen Thriller)
Published in the United States of America by Laughing Rain
Copyright © 2019 by Brandt Legg
All rights reserved.
Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN-13: 978-1-935070-38-2
ISBN-10: 1-935070-38-X
Cover design by Eleni Karoumpali
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, scanning, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher. Published in the United States of America.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
BrandtLegg.com
One
The end of the world, prophesied and feared for millennia, conjures images of fireballs plummeting toward earth, mushroom clouds obliterating cities, and pandemics sweeping the globe. But no one ever imagined it would begin on a cloudy day, as a line of code on a typical computer, in an average building, on a busy street, in the eighteenth largest city in America, and few would even notice what was, without a doubt, the first day of the last days of humanity.
Chase Malone, a twenty-nine-year-old tech billionaire, who’d made his fortune inventing RAI, a breakthrough artificial intelligence program, stared at a six-foot wide computer screen, in a nondescript skyscraper lost in the San Francisco skyline. “There it is,” he said to Dez, pointing at the horrifying data displayed.
“Tragic,” his business partner whispered. Desmond “Dez” Jefferson was one of the few African American engineers in Silicon Valley. His brilliant mind was among only a handful that could keep up with Chase, and occasionally surpass him. Dez, watching the stream of text and images filling the screen, chugged coconut water in an effort to quench his dry mouth as fear took hold.
The monitor showed results from an experiment they’d been running for months. It was a massive project requiring the creation of nearly endless code, and several custom supercomputers. Petabytes of data had been sifted. Even with their capacity, additional processing muscle had been borrowed, and their servers were consuming megawatts of power as if they were energy-eating monsters from a bad sci-fi movie. Even though the two tech-geniuses, who’d met five years earlier at Stanford’s famed Artificial Intelligence Lab, known as “SAIL,” had expected the results now playing out in front of them, it was, nonetheless, a stunning and brutal outcome.
“It’s not a question of ‘if’ anymore,” Chase said bitterly, digging his hands into the pockets of a pair of faded 514 blue jeans. “Success is our biggest failure.” His statement rang ironic, as the walls of the sweeping office were filled with framed magazine covers, all featuring images of Chase “the young genius” and his meteoric rise to billionaire status. His thick brown hair, easy stubble, along with ‘leading man’ deep blue eyes, gave him a pretty-boy look that belied his geeky-genius.
“We should run it again,” Dez suggested. “Tweak the algorithm, modify the parameters. This is too critical not to—”
“That won’t change anything,” Chase moaned. “The data is right, we’ve checked everything down to the nano, and we did quad-redundancy. Don’t you remember? It’s embedded in the code.”
“Of course, I know that,” Dez said, pacing. Six years older than his partner, he’d been a rising star in the tight circles of the Artificial Intelligence world while Chase was still in high school. “But we can’t just accept this.” He motioned back to the screen as if it were an attacking army. “No one will believe us.”
“Believe us?” Chase said, choking on the words. “We’re not going to tell anyone about this!”
“We have to,” Dez argued. “I can’t believe you want to keep this secret. You’ve never said that before.”
“We’ve never been here before.”
The pair stood in silence for several moments.
“We have to release this,” Dez repeated.
“Look at that.” Chase pointed to the data still churning on the big monitor. “What do you suggest we do? Publish a paper, convene the industry leaders, alert the media, call the White House, the Pentagon?”
“Yes, yes! All those things.”
Chase laughed quickly, as if he found the notion appalling and amusing in its absurdity. “No.” He spun around. The single word seemed to echo through the under-furnished, yet posh, space.
“Why not?” Dez said flatly.
“Because it’ll only bring it on faster.” Chase’s fingers raced across the keyboard, producing a symphony of rapid clicking noises and opening multiple windows along the bank of monitors surrounding the large screen. “See for yourself.”
“How did you know?”
“Because as long as they continue utilizing RAI how they are, the outcome will be the same.”
“At least let’s contact Sliske.”
“Sliske isn’t going to listen,” Chase snapped. “He’s evil.” Irvin Sliske, CEO of TruNeural, had purchased RAI from Chase’s company, Balance Engineering. At first, it seemed a perfect mat
ch, the leading AI technology and TruNeural, a subsidiary of GlobeTec, the giant conglomerate and one of the world’s largest industrial manufacturers of such products as automobiles, jet engines, major appliances, and a vast array of other hard goods. However, soon after the sale, Chase began having second thoughts. Now those early doubts had magnified into apocalyptic terror.
Chase looked from the screen and into the strained eyes of his partner and said, quietly and calmly, “We can pretend it’s a hundred different things, but the fact is, we now know how the world is going to end . . . and when it’s going to happen.”
Two
Silence hung for several long minutes as their eyes focused on the irrefutable data showing the extinction event that meant the destruction of humanity on earth.
“The end of the world,” Dez repeated. “What do we do with that?”
“You realize it’s our fault,” Chase finally said. “We created it.”
Dez shook his head. “No way. We may have gotten there first, but it was coming. If it wasn’t us, it would have been Krizinski’s team, or Banyon, or DeepMind, maybe even—”
Chase cut him off. “If the school kid didn’t get his stuff from the drug dealer, he’d have just gotten it from someplace else?”
“Artificial intelligence isn’t drugs,” Dez said.
“Isn’t it?”
Dez nodded slightly, acknowledging the comparison, then reached for another coconut water.
“Anyway,” Chase continued, “argue all you want about how it happens, the point is that we have to find a way to stop it.”
“Us? How?”
“We created RAI. We must create a way to destroy it.”
“It doesn’t belong to us anymore,” Dez said.
“It belongs to everyone.”
“No.” Dez shook his head. “And even if it did, you can’t get in. Once they made it RAIN . . . ”
As soon as the deal closed, Irvin Sliske, CEO of TruNeural, embarked on an aggressive program to use RAI in all their products, but it was when he added an N, which made him a rainmaker, that everything changed.
“I can get in,” Chase said. “There is a way.”
Dez looked at him as if he’d just said he could turn invisible and fly, because that’s about what it would take to break into one of the most “extreme secure” facilities in the world, and then, once inside, to penetrate the most sophisticated computer program ever devised.
“I’m not talking about an evil maid attack,” Chase said, using hacker’s jargon meaning to gain physical access to a computer or server in order to compromise a system. “I’ve got nuclear codes.”
Dez raised his eyebrows while opening a glass container, offered it to Chase, who refused, then reached in delicately and slowly took a bite, inspected, and then took another taste of the toasted Brioche with herbed mascarpone, white truffle shavings, and mango salsa. When Dez wasn’t writing code, he was cooking or baking, a wild man in the kitchen, producing gourmet goodies everyone craved. “Seriously?” He reached for another delicacy. The revelation that his partner had retained some sort of backdoor into the RAI code meant that either Chase had suspicions about Sliske even before the sale, or that he was planning on something unscrupulous. Both possibilities left him uncomfortable. However, that conversation would be for another time. Right now the idea that they could get into RAI was too incredible to allow distractions.
“Assuming they haven’t done a detect-and-recast,” Chase added, again declining Dez’s offer of food with a nod.
“Of course they’ve done a D&R,” Dez muttered, sounding suddenly deflated.
“Yeah, on day one, but the system requires daily sweeps at specific times for twenty-nine straight days. I doubt they did that.”
“Did you tell them to do that?”
“No, I guess I forgot,” Chase said, almost smiling for the first time since they’d seen the results. It faded quickly.
“Was it in the docs? Authentication? Training sessions? Compliance sections? Disclosure statements? Anywhere?”
“No, ‘fraid not.”
“Damn it, Chase, do the terms ‘fiduciary duty’ or ‘willful disregard’ mean anything to you?” Dez asked, now even more worried that his partner had purposely led them into perilous legal waters.
“End. Of. The. World,” Chase said, as if stabbing him with the words.
“But you didn’t know that then.”
“It was always possible. We’ve all known from the beginning . . . Whenever we mess with AI, we’re like a bunch of drunk frat boys dancing with a loaded gun. AI done wrong means someone dies. Maybe a lot of people.”
“So then the nuke codes and the untraceable D&R wipes were insurance?”
Chase nodded. “Good thing, huh?”
“Yeah,” Dez said reluctantly. “Let’s hope so.”
“Maybe the only chance we have to save the world,” Chase said, studying the screen still creating data streams. “Big job.”
Dez felt sick. He put his food away, stood, and walked around the room, then stopped at a painting of his yacht, “The Wadogo,” navigating a storm on rough seas. If the forecasts were right, and he knew they were, the odds were heavily against them. Impossible-to-one type of odds. He wanted to go for a walk in “the garden,” a forty-foot high atrium filled with trees and plants that took up half of the first three floors of the BE headquarters. Normally, when he was this stressed, he’d cook, but suddenly his faithful appetite had deserted him. Instead, he stared back into the “lab,” as they called the three thousand square-foot room packed with monitors and computers with a direct feed into the underground servers located below the building. Desperate for daylight and a reality he still understood, he walked to the curtains that closed off the fifty-foot wall of windows and found a seam to look through, his eyes wandered out over the city. “It’s bigger than us,” he said, hardly loud enough for Chase to hear.
Just then, Adya Patel, the financial whiz in the company, walked in. She’d met them both in college. Dez and she briefly dated before realizing they were both too ambitious for each other. Her money connections, negotiating skills, and accounting mind were as responsible for BE’s success as the coded creations of Chase and Dez.
“Chase, sorry to intrude, but there’s an urgent message,” Adya said.
“I told everyone ‘no interruptions’. Nothing is as important as what we’re doing.”
“That’s why I came.” Her dark brown hair fell across her shoulders as she spun around to catch Dez’s concerned expression. “I was the only one who could get in to you.”
He looked at the screen, ready to explode, and then back to her. But Adya had no idea what they’d just discovered. “Sorry, it’ll have to wait,” he said firmly, returning his attention to the monitors as if she were already gone.
“The message is from Wen Sung. She’s in trouble,” Adya said, knowing the impact of her words.
Dez’s face mirrored the shock in Chase’s eyes.
“Where is she?” Chase demanded.
“That’s not clear,” Adya said, handing him a folded paper.
He snatched it, read it quickly, and jogged from the room.
“Where are you going?” Dez yelled after him.
“I’ve got to get to Hong Kong immediately!”
Three
On board Balance Engineering’s Gulfstream G650ER jet, en route to Hong Kong, Chase tried to think about Sliske and the RAIN nightmare, but Wen had entered his mind like a long-dormant virus. She’d been his first and only true love. Even though there’d been no word from her for more than five years, she’d remained a constant fixation. He’d searched, spent several hundred thousand on investigators . . . nothing. She’d vanished, and had been but a dream.
Chase couldn’t do anything about Wen until he reached his destination. He’d already alerted one of his people in Beijing who would reach Hong Kong at least ten hours ahead of him.
Rather than dwelling on Wen, the one thing that could have pulled
him from the end of the world, Chase did something he’d gotten very good at over the years—pushing her to the back of his mind. He then reviewed the data on his laptop from Joey Porter, one of his first employees. Porter had gone to TruNeural with the sale seven months earlier. They’d offered him a chance to lead the company when Sliske moved up in GlobeTec. In truth, Porter would have gone even without that enticement and considerable increase in compensation. He considered RAI his baby, and couldn’t stand the idea of letting someone else take it to its full potential.
Chase missed working with Porter at Balance Engineering. In addition to being smart, he always found the humor in things. Every time Chase talked to him since the acquisition, he always asked Porter, “When are you coming back home?”