Free The Daedalus Code by Colin F. Barnes Page A

acts.
    Conscious, intelligent acts controlled by an AI…that was something else entirely.
    “How do we stop it?” Mouse asked.
    “Hah!” Pagakis jumped up, his eyes wide. “Stop it? You can’t stop it!”
    “You said you tried to trace it, do you still have that information? Do you have any idea where Ariadne and the others were taken, or coerced, or whatever this thing did?”
    “You can’t go there. Things are bad enough already. It can’t be allowed to spread. We have to take down the networks.”
    “Are you mad? The world will stop if that happens. Everything is controlled by the networks. No, I have to find a way in. Tell me what you know.”
    Pagakis shook his head. “You’re madder than I am. You really want to know? You prepared to take the risk?”
    Mouse thought about it. As far as he figured, he was already in deep and he might as well keep digging in the hopes he’d come out the other side.
    “Yes. Can you help me?”
    The man stood and walked across the room and down the corridor. A minute later, he came back and handed Mouse his deactivated PR engine.
    “It’s all in there. It’s yours. Do with it as you please. But not here. People are looking for me, and I need to stay hidden. You understand me?”
    Mouse nodded and thanked him, pocketed his PR engine.
    “Now go, be quick before others come looking for me.”

Chapter Eight

    Each step of his journey back to the bullet train and the FT was fraught with the fear of being followed. Not surprising he was feeling paranoid after speaking with Pagakis. Carrying the headhunter’s infiltrated PRE unit upon his person wasn’t exactly comforting.
    Despite that, he got into the FT, set the scanners to check for any unusual traffic about him. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. He decided to activate Pagakis’s PR unit in passive mode, which meant no transmitting or receiving, and see what he could found out about Asterion.
    He connected its output to his own PR screen and waited while it booted up. When it had launched, he started to scan through the log files, and knew the man was correct.
    Asterion had logged into his system as a super-root, taking full control of the brain signals going into and out of the unit. Amongst the various commands given by Asterion, Mouse found a map coordinate of a location that presumably Asterion was attempting to get Pagakis to travel to.
    Mouse looked up the destination on his New Crete map database and found that it was an empty tower in the tenth-level district of Phraxos. The tower used to be owned by an old software company. Microsoft. They quickly went out of business once the populace ditched bulky, slow desktop machines for the more immediate access to information via Personal Reality.
    An empty tower unit that high up would be a good place to hide the servers required to contain such a powerful AI. But it still didn’t answer the question of what this rogue AI would want with a group of kids. Experts or not, if it had already gained self-awareness, what more could it want from them?
    Only one way to find out , Mouse thought. He engaged the H-Core engines and plotted the coordinates.
    As the FT navigated through the layers of traffic, Mouse sent a message to Phaedra to let her know where he was going—just in case he didn’t come back.
    He got an instant response.
    “You’re going up to the tenth?” Phaedra said.
    “That’s where the trail’s led. I believe that’s where the heart of this Daedalus Project is. I’m sending you a recording of a conversation I just had with a very interesting man.”
    “What happened?”
    “You won’t believe it.”
    “Try me.”
    “An AI developed by Metion is self-aware, that much you know, what you didn’t know was the damn thing is insane. It got to the kids, and presumably Ariadne, via their PR units. Lured them to a tower—or at least that’s what I’m currently banking on.”
    “Aegeus and I are on our way there.”
    “Don’t be fools. Agents