Free The Daedalus Code by Colin F. Barnes

“I’m just looking to find the kids. All I want is your help, and I’ll leave you alone.”
    Pagakis backed away, dropped the shotgun to his side and slumped into one of the filthy blanket nests. He bowed his head to his chest and sobbed. It was an awful sound. Hollow and wet, dredged from some deep, dark place that a man—or woman—should never have to go. The sound of guilt and desperation.
    He raised his head and nodded. “It was all my fault,” he said.
    Sensing his opportunity, Mouse knelt down to eye level with the broken man and said, “Tell me where I can find them. Tell me what you know about the Daedalus Project, and I promise I’ll do all I can to find them and keep them safe. Do you know if they are still alive?”
    “They are. Sort of. I think it’s too late for them though. I…I sent them to their doom.”
    “I thought you were the one responsible for hiring them for MacroComputing. Doesn’t sound like you were doing anything wrong. What happened?”
    “I put them in the spotlight, you see?” The man held out his hands, as if begging. “It was my dealings with Kalani and my interest in their research that caused Metion to sit up and take notice. And when I hired them for MacroComputing, I let my dossiers—and their research—be stolen.
    “By whom?” Mouse asked.
    “It turned out Metion were tracking my activities for months, and had their own specialists copy their program of self-aware AIs. Only it didn’t quite go to plan. It’s out of control! It took the kids.”
    “What did? The Daedalus Project? It’s software, an AI, how could that be responsible?”
    The man pointed to his head. “It gets in there, fucks with your brain. The thing has an insatiable appetite. Devouring terabytes of the world’s data, hour by hour.”
    “Slow down,” Mouse said, making sure his PR unit was recording everything. “I don’t understand. Are you saying Metion didn’t kidnap these kids?”
    “That’s exactly what I’m saying. Metion have no idea how to stop it, they’re riding it for as long as they can, getting rich and getting protected: off the grid and away from…from…”
    “From what?” Mouse urged.
    “The result of the Daedalus Project! Its core, its brain, its center! Asterion!”
    “What’s Asterion?”
    “The AI in the Daedalus Project. It’s sentient. It was supposed to work within Metion’s protocols, developed from the research they stole from those poor kids, but they didn’t wait, didn’t follow Ariadne’s concerns or guidelines. They didn’t set up the proper fail safes, and the thing got away from them. It set up its own data vault: a virtual labyrinth that once inside, can never be escaped. Not without Asterion’s say-so. It controls everything. Soon, it’ll control all the networks from the DarkNet to the MeshNet, and then we’ll be screwed…”
    “But how did it take the kids? It’s not like it just got up and grabbed them, is it? Metion must have had people physically take Ariadne and her colleagues.”
    “It got into their PR engines, lured them somewhere. I couldn’t trace it. When I tried, it found me, tried to get inside my brain, but I realized quickly enough and managed to get off the grid. But it has sent people after me. People it controls. Every day, its influence grows wider.”
    “People work for it?” Mouse asked, wondering if Mikos was one such person.
    Pagakis nodded.
    “But why?”
    “Information. When you’re on the inside of the biggest data vault in history, that’s quite the motivation.”
    Mouse slumped to the floor. It was worse than he could have ever imagined. How could you take down a virtual enemy that controls people via their Personal Reality Engines?
    With direct access to their brains, it could get them to do almost anything. It was far worse than Neuro-D, which had a similar effect, but was short-lived, and mostly the people on Neuro-D experienced things already preprogrammed. Usually violent or sexual