Boats drifted out of Greenwich Harbour to the north east, into the waters of the Sound still tinted red under the rising sun. Most boats were headed out to sea, except for a lone Sportfish drifting in their direction. It promised to be another lovely Saturday and the view through Ashok's library window was spectacular. This subdivision was located in the Bluffs, the swanky end of Portsmouth, not too far from the Fuller residence. Ashok's parents, the Viswanathans, were psychiatrists who could afford the exhorbitant propert tax, even if they weren't in the same league as the Fullers. The Fullers and their ilk with all their multi-faceted angst were a bottomless revenue pool for the Viswanathans who were charged with keeping the elite of Portsmouth mentally on-the-rails.

Mei Ling sat at the glass reading table staring out the window, while Sean scribbled furiously on the whiteboard that occupied an entire wall. The wall opposite the window was all one big bookshelf gouged out in the center by a reccessed nook fitted with reading bench and cozily lit by spotlights. The Phreak Club was about to convene and Ashok had offered his library for the venue after Mei Ling had refused to descend into "the pizza infested cesspit a.k.a Greg's basement". As a bonus, the Viswanathans were away on a conference and the juniors had the house to themselves with no one to yell at them.

"You know," mused Sean, as he finished up his sketch, "it wouldn't be a bad idea for me to level up on self defense skills... if I could figure out how. I don't want the stuffing beaten out of me when I run into Jason again."

"We've gone over that," sighed Mei Ling still staring out the window, "simply reading a martial arts book won't teach you to fight. You have to do it the hard way by training with a master. Not that approve of you getting into fights if it can at all be avoided... but I agree with the sentiment on principle."

"What if..." began Sean, when he was interrupted by footsteps that sounded like a herd of buffalo ascending the stairs outside. The door opened to admit Ashok followed by Greg and Randall.

"Looks like you blew the mission, bud," Greg puffed, slightly out of breath, as he collapsed on a heavily upholstered Anna Casa chair at the table, "Nice going."

"Shove it," scowled Sean, "Not in the mood for your sarcasm."

"Has the room been scanned for bugs?" Greg pulled out a handheld gizmo from his belt, "Never know who might be listening. This facility isn't as secure as my den, that's for sure."

"Nerds playing at X-files," Mei Ling rolled her eyes, "what a stunning surprise."

"Whatever you say, Mei Ling," Randall grinned at her, his grin widening into a rictus.

Mei Ling carefully extracted the pillow from the back of her chair and threw it at Randall's face, "Stop leering at me, creep."

"Ooof," Randall grunted, extracting a mouthful of pillow.

"Yeah," Greg grabbed a tiny Post-It pad from the table and lobbed it at Randall's head, "cut it out, creep."

"You know, I wouldn't mind a scanner," Sean said slowly, eyeing Greg's gadget, "my house was crawling with agents last Sunday... who knows what they planted."

"You bet your ass they did," Greg chuckled, "A scanner won't do you any good, bud, not when your cellphone is probably tapped. You're screwed... you're toast... up the creek without a paddle. Just covering myself here... with this audio jammer." He flicked a switch and a very loud whine sounded. Sean winced.

Mei Ling closed her ears, shooting Greg a murderous look, "Lower the volume, asshat."

"Just a sec, wimp," Greg fiddled with a knob until the whine dropped to tolerable volume.

"Speaking of opsec," Sean dropped into a chair, looking pointedly at Randall, "someone has been babbling to his sister about my intentions regarding the Fullers."

Randall had the grace to look embarrased, "A slip of tongue, dude. Won't happen again."

"Holy shit," Greg exclaimed, staring at the whiteboard, "what the heck is that?"

Ashok whistled in surprise. To Mei Ling the diagram looked nothing so much as a nervous system, perhaps of some nameless kraken from the deep. There was a vaguely brain-like nexus which Sean had labeled 'basal ganglia incentive net' with radiating tentacles entwined in mesmerizing complexity. The tentacles recursively split into multicolored nerves linking other modules with names like 'intentional systems predictor' and 'adaptive function phenotype'.

"That, lady and gentlemen," Sean crossed his arms, raising his voice to be heard above the noise generator, "is a high level schematic of Excursion Net's trading AI, which I'll refer to as Excursion for brevity. Excursion was hired and deployed in the stock market five months ago by Kirkcaldy-Chang-Crawford Associaties where Judith's... I mean, Mrs. Fuller is a managing partner. There are also two other competing artificial intelligences trading in the market, created by Euryale Consulting and Neurogen Solutions."

"Dude, did you just memorize the entire diagram?" Ashok gave Sean an odd look.

"Um... I was staring at it for quite a while... in Mrs. Fuller's office, I mean," Sean lied fumbling. Mei Ling sent him a warning look, meeting his eyes.

"You have an eidetic memory?" Ashok sounded envious.

"Something like that," Sean answered vaguely, "My... our goal is to exploit what I know of these AI systems for our own profit."

"How?" frowned Randall, "You aren't expecting us to make one of our own, are you?"

"No," Sean shook his head, "that plan is dead on arrival. These things are too far ahead of us and constantly adapting. Even if you guys could code one from scratch, which I seriously doubt, we'll never catch up. Besides, why reinvent the wheel? We needed an advanced predictor for the market, and we found one."

"Look Einstein," drawled Greg raising his voice, "I don't know what you've been smoking, but this Excursion AI doesn't exactly belong to us, in case you hadn't noticed. HOW THE HECK DO WE MAKE USE OF IT?"

"I'm glad you asked," grinned Sean, pointed at the whiteboard, "because it occured me that I've been looking at this the wrong way. We'll never out-guess the market, because the market itself is one of the best predictors out there. Think of all the traders and hedge funds trying to squeeze every penny out of the economy and each other. Who can hope to beat that collective widom? But what if we ask the market to tell us what it's predicting? Will Fed Chairman raise or lower interest rates in six months? What will the European Central Bank do next year? Do you know? I don't. But the market does, because it is already reacting to the Fed's future actions. And Excursion knows what the bankers and legislators are doing even before they do. That's how scarily accurate it needs to model them."

"You want to make a deal with this Excursion... thing," Randall guessed suddenly, giving Sean a schrewd look.

"Bingo," Sean nodded. The rest started at him in stupified silence.

"I don't know, dude... sounds over complicated," objected Randall, "why not simply ask it for stock picks?"

"I don't think that'll work," Sean shook his head, "we're talking about milliseconds to complete a trade before profits evaporate. We can't compete with AI response times. But we can exploit Excursion's superhuman predictions elsewhere... the housing market for instance."

"Dude," grumbled Greg, "I don't know which is scarier, that you want to make a deal with an AI or that an AI might be advanced enough to make a deal with."

"How smart are these things anyway?" Ashok asked apprehensively.

"I am not exactly sure," admitted Sean, "perhaps rat level intelligence if I had to guess, though that's misleading. Think of a shark that's evolved to hunt market arbitrage and capable of modeling every prey in the ecosystem. Profitable prize differentials smell like blood in the water. In fact, it's pretty obvious Excursion's architecture is biologically inspired."

"What makes you think a trading AI would even talk to you?" Mei Ling demanded.

"Because we have what it wants," Sean smiled at her.

"We do?" Ashok raised a brow, polishing his glasses with carefully practiced motion, "All it cares about is profit, right?"

"Not quite," Sean got up, tapping a region of the schematic labeled 'reward max/port' with an hexadecimal string next to it, "what it really wants is to maximize its reward feedback. Just like everything we do is really to maximize our dopamine concentration. This right here is a port address which delivers a jolt of pure bliss to it's pleasure center. And just like a wire-headed lab rat, it will do anything to get that fix."

"I don't like it," muttered Randall, "Why would they leave a back door like that? What if it's a honeypot?"

"Back doors are more common than you think, scaredy cat," Greg scoffed, "Excursion's authors probabaly left it in there as a kill switch, in case their creation ever goes haywire."

"That does make sense," admitted Ashok, "Hmm... looks like the default input is a stream of zeros. A step function of ones would do it. We should be careful to keep the stimulation spike very brief, to keep it coming back for more. A continuous stream of ones would probably send it into catatonic bliss, and the client would notice that... that's probably what the kill switch is."

"Death by ecstacy," muttered Mei Ling, "I think it's mean."

Greg shot her a look of disbelief, then turned to Sean, "Next steps, bud? You want us to figure out a communications protocol with Excursion? First Contact, sort of?"

"Exactly," Sean smiled, "I located a few journal papers that describe the syntax used by Excursion and its kin. That should help."

"There is a small matter of payment," Ashok steepled his fingers, "We are looking at significant coding effort that could very well amount to nothing. The Phreak Club will need a large stake in potential profits to justify the opportunity cost. Not to mention risk of premature discovery.. We should discuss terms now, if Greg agrees."

"Damn right, I do," barked Greg, "I can almost smell the dough we'll rake in from knowing interest rate hikes ahead of time."

"Steady there, Soros," Randall grinned, "something about counting chickens before they hatch, etc."

"Shut the fuck up, party pooper," Greg lobbed another Post-It pad at Randall.

Mei Ling sighed, as the haggling started, wondering what she had gotten herself into. Surely it was borderline illegal to profit from stolen info and probably completely illegal. Not to mention "communicating" with private software. She should walk away and leave Sean to his dumb endeavours. But if she did, there would be no one to keep an eye on him and save him from himself. Besides if push came to shove she was no longer certain if Sean would choose her friendship over his single minded pursuit of riches. And she was afraid to find out. Last year she would have scoffed at the idea of Sean walking away from her. But that was back when Sean had been content to follow her lead. That Sean was nearly gone now, reforged into some kind of super-polymath on the other side of that wormhole. Unfortunately his goals hadn't evolved. His rivalry with Jason had twisted Sean into coupling his self-worth to his wealth, no matter that Mei Ling tried to counsel Sean to the contrary. It was sad.

#

"...party pooper"

Megan's headphones delivered digitally reconstructed audio as she finetuned the knob on the FFT analyzer/decoder. The gyrostabilizer pointed the IR laser mic with rock steady precision at the target window pane, despite the Sportfish pitching in the gentle swell. The conversation was being recorded and processed in realtime through a supercomputing cluster at HQ, but human judgement was still needed to distinguish between information and noise. The anti-eavesdropping tech deployed by these kids brought a smile to her usually stern demeanor. Offshelf junk was no match for the number crunching muscle that OAT brought to bear. Stakeout duty was no fun, but at least this one wasn't inside a sweltering van. Dawn over the sea was gorgeous even if the fall breeze pierced right through her jacket. It was a hassle to monitor Patient Zero 24/7, but hardly a challenge given OAT's resources. They had bugged all his frequent haunts of course. Every table at Cardiff High's cafeteria had one leg modified to hold a transmitting mic wired to a Li-ion cell, with OAT's cluster sorting out Patient Zero's conversations from a myriad others. But even OAT couldn't bug the homes of everyone of his aquaintances.

Her smile faded as she sat back to make notes of the highlights of the audio surveillance. Patient Zero's competence was unsettling, though Megan still stood by her assessment that the kid wasn't an intelligence excursion. Let's face it, she thought, no superhuman genius would still be hanging out in high school. The boy was still human albiet a precocious one. She was sure normal highschoolers didn't trigger GORGON's IQ thresholds meant for experts. Or make credible attempts to gain competitive trading advantage. The FBI would be quite interested in this audio, Megan smiled to herself. Not that she had any intention of passing it on to the feds, intel sharing be damned. OAT was a state within a state, answerable only to the President and the sole defence against superhuman threats at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Patient Zero was far too valuable as a free agent and an unwitting synchronizer for operations against Sybilline. Megan wasn't sure why they couldn't simply use a random number generator, even though Jonathan had tried explaining it to her. Something about near-omniscience and Newcomb Paradox, yada yada.

It occasionally pricked Megan's conscience, or what was left of it, to be using a highschool kid to bait Sybilline. But they needed him, since OAT was denied the option to create another one like him using a subject of their choice. The latest report from Dr. Hale had been discouraging. The attempt to create a second stable wormhole at 345 MeV had failed, with ominous implication. Whatever superbeing had anchored the wormhole on the other side had not been so accomodating this time around, presumably having already made its move through Patient Zero. It was for the greater good, Megan told herself on more than one sleepless night, to risk one kid's life so they could deal with the threat of GORGON. Even if a traitorous voice whispered in her head that the worst tyrants in history - even GORGON itself for that matter - had started out for the greater good.

END OF CHAPTER