Caldwell heard his name rumbling through the mountains like distant thuhe sound gradually grew closer. It was Mei Lin calling out to him. The goggles had slid off his fad he was slumped in front of Kenzo Yamamoto』s sole, which had reverted to its former shape. He』d been booted out of the Tsinghua system. The lights in the operations room were on.
「Wow, that was so realistic. I thought I was dead.」
「Dead? What happened?」
「Call it a stroke of luck, call it whatever, but I may have stumbled upon the ao all of this.」
「Go on,」 Mei Lin urged.
「I hacked into the Tsinghua Uy system and found the puter that seems to be single-handedly responsible for the data being sucked out of cyberspace. It appears it is not so much sug data as replig it into the largest database probably ever built. We are talking terabytes of data everyday. We are talkiive data, mostly US eic, financial and stific data. It』s almost like the entire knowledge of the Western world is being systematically appropriated. Not really appropriated, as it is all publiain, but basically being digested in a way no human digest information.」
「What do you mean digested? What are you talking about? What kind of puter?」
「An AI unlike any other, if this kid is to be believed.」
「Which kid?」
「Have you heard of Professor Yao Guo ?」
「Yes. He was one of my professors at Tsinghua. Very tight with the PLA. Some would say too tight. What has this got to do with him?
「This AI and some quantum neuroprocessor that powers it seem to be his latest pet project.」
「How do you know that?」
「Well only three people have access to this so-called data-guzzling mae. Professor Yao and his two assistants Li Jin and Wang Lin. It appears that Wang Lin had retly fallen out of favor and seemed to hold some kind e against the other student.」
「But how do you know it』s an AI?」
「Was just talking to Wang Lin on the uy BBS. He thought I was a girl from the department, a girl called Vicky Zhao. He started talking about this AI based on a quantum neuroprocessor. The strahing is that both the professor』s and Li Jin』s ats are disabled.」
「A disabled at means they have left the school. The ats are disabled temporarily and then finally deleted.」
「Or they are dead?」
「Dead?」
「That was what I first thought when I saw the disabled ats.」
「Mmm ...」
「Earlier this evening Anthony and Victor were talking about some rumored breakthrough in Shanghai. They were st oails but I think what they were referring to is somehow related to this huge amount of data going into Tsinghua. The stuff going on in Tsinghua has got to be related somehow to Shanghai. Wang Lin said something about the city being a trailblazer for the AI.」
「And Kenzo Yamamoto guy found out about the AI or whatever is going on in Shanghai. He bribed someone in the PLA for the blueprint and had someone build the soles for him to order. His i was to sell the information to the highest bidder?」
「And was murdered before he could,」 Caldwell tinued.
「And he sent the soles out to two people he thought actually had a shot at accessing this thing? A hacker and an artificial intelligence expert? Sounds like some kind of work that the AI is being built for.」
「Yes, it would seem so.」
「If it is a work why didn』t Yamamoto access it himself? They have hackers in the Yakuza too?」
「He would have if he could get in. I am sure he tried.