Free Rath's Gambit (The Janus Group Book 2) by Piers Platt Page A

I tested it to see if I could make money with that knowledge, here are the results.’ This message was different.”
    On his desk, Lizelle’s breakfast had gone cold. Dasi smiled, watching her boyfriend with pride.
    “FiveSight had been reviewing news articles,” he continued, “and recognized that poor stock performance over an extended period of time predicted CEO turnover. But it went a step further – it was predicting not just which CEOs would be replaced, but who might replace them. It was thinking creatively.”
    “Intuiting …,” the senator murmured.
    “Sort of. I watched it over the next few months, and it was right – over ninety percent of the CEOs it identified were fired, and it predicted the replacements correctly more than half the time. And the next quarter it was even more accurate.”
    “It’s interesting,” Lizelle allowed. “But it’s not too far off the investing mandate you gave it originally.”
    “That’s true,” Khyron agreed. “But it started branching out from there. Each night it strayed farther afield – again, with no guidance or direction from me. Within a week it had found a solution for reducing delays in space travel by adjusting routes on two major carriers. And it’s still creating. So I’m pretty excited about it as a learning algorithm – I believe it’s outperforming any other artificial intelligence out there today. I’ve got a meeting with one of the lead researchers on the Immortality Project in a few months; I’m really excited to see what we can do.”
    Lizelle sat back in his chair and spread his arms. “Okay, so you’ve got a hot program on your hands, I’m convinced. And I’m excited for you, really I am. But why come to me?”
    Khyron rubbed his palms on his pants legs. “Well, we’re hoping for your help. The more data sources I expose FiveSight to, the more learning it does, and the better it gets at … well, anything I ask it to do. But there’s only so many correlations that can be drawn from the limited open source datasets I can access, so now I’m trying to add more datasets – proprietary ones, not publicly available. And the government has a lot of data.”
    “Yes, we do,” Lizelle agreed. “I believe we store the most data in the galaxy, byte for byte.”
    “That’s true.”
    “Which data do you want?” Lizelle asked.
    “Um … all of it?” Khyron suggested.
    Lizelle laughed. “I like your enthusiasm. But I can’t just hook you up to every database we have. Give me an idea for what would be most useful.”
    Khyron scratched his chin. “FiveSight already looks at Senate voting activity when it’s making predictions – that’s public data. But I have a theory that the world in general is actually more susceptible to activity that happens off the Senate floor – meetings, deals, conversations that aren’t part of actual legislation.”
    “That’s a fair assumption; you’re probably not wrong. But there’s no database that can tell you what’s going on in every private conversation at Anchorpoint.”
    “No, of course not, sir. I guess … well, whatever data you can get me, really. Employment reports, environmental studies, budget decisions, phone and message logs – not the actual content, just who’s messaging whom, or even, who’s messaging a lot, and who isn’t. Um ….” he trailed off.
    The senator put his chin in his hands, shutting one eye and pursing his lips. “I can get you some of that, I think. But since you’re asking me for something, I’m going to introduce you to how things work at Anchorpoint: nothing’s free, and if you ask me for something, I’m going to ask you for twice as much in return.” Lizelle picked a piece of chicken off his plate and popped it in his mouth. “First, I’m going to put you in touch with a lawyer. He’s going to help you set up an LLC, and I’m going to be your first investor. We’ll work out the details, but when you monetize this thing, I want in. And