9

  The first step did not take long at all, primarily because the bot’s human controllers were utterly unconcerned about being tracked down. After all, no murder had been committed by them, and the human body of the murderer was indisputably known, and under arrest. Lastly, no one was suspecting the involvement of a bot, and no one at all had become aware that secret commands had been issued via social media.

  The police had seized the laptop and smart phone as items of evidence, and had connected the laptop up in the investigating local precinct, making it possible for me to enter and search through it. Connection signatures were still available from the time the laptop had been delivering the live feed of the ghastly event. Accordingly, without too much fuss, I was able to find the computer that had been used to issue the instructions.

  “Found it,” I announced, in about ten minutes. “Here’s what the camera on the instructor computer is showing right now.” In fact, though the command computer was switched on and connected to the Internet, it was not currently in use. I had moved it out of standby, but all that its camera was showing was an empty chair facing it, and part of a room behind the chair.

  “Nothing,” said Jane. “Do you know where it is?”

  That was actually one of my specializations from my earliest days in the Internet, and I was able to zone in on the exact address by checking a variety of other devices, fixed and mobile, in the vicinity.

  “It’s in Washington DC,” I announced. “And it’s not far from where the murder took place.” I told them the address.

  “Will we be handing our findings over to the police, and all that?” asked Martina, sounding uncertain.

  “Not at all,” replied Bruce. “We are going to focus on understanding what the game is, and whose game it is.

  “If it’s big-time stuff, and a danger to humanity, we’ll have to figure out how to put a stop to it. Activity within the Internet, howsoever widespread and violent, can be conducted without too much of a footprint. So, if we have to commit mayhem, we’ll do it in a way that does not lead back to us.”

  “Which is what would give us the freedom to work on it,” said Ravi. “If need be, if something really huge is in the works, we can secretly team up with like-minded people that we know, extremely good programmers and computer professionals, who will give us the numbers to help fight whatever menace it is.

  “But if we start publicly identifying the people involved, it will place us dead center in everybody’s sights. That would be enough to prevent us being effective.”

  “We need to find out who trained the killer bot, and how,” said Jane. “Anyway, we can never hope to convict any other human, after a publicly broadcast murder, committed by a human, with or without chip in head, who has already been caught and arrested.”

  “But, for ourselves, we are certainly interested in finding out who was behind those commands,” said Bruce. “John, please keep an eye on that specific computer.” He pointed at the computer-camera view being shown on our monitor. “When it comes into use, you’ll probably get to see the person behind the murder.”

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  The computer came alive that night, and showed me a young boy through its camera. The boy looked to be around middle teen, and when I hunted out his personal details, it confirmed that he was almost exactly fourteen, and that his name was Daniel.

  The other information I managed to dig up, without going too deep, was that he was the only child of a divorced couple, and that he was living with both of them, spending roughly equal time with each one. The instruction-issuing computer was in the house of the father, whose calling card, scanned and saved on it, described his specialization as Personal Improvement and Rehabilitation.

  Tracking Daniel back to the computer he used in his mother’s house, I found that he had been doing other online things on it at the time of the murder, which could only mean that it had been the father sending the commands to the bot.

  It being Saturday, the father was hanging around at home, and I was able to see him at a laptop at different times, in a couple of different locations within the house.

  That was all I got on them at home, as father and son did not speak even once with each other, in the period I had them under observation.

  As I never sleep, and was keeping an eye on the still-sleeping Martina, I saw Abraham becoming active very early on Monday morning. Following him through his mobile phone, and by way of brief glimpses out of the computer camera, I realized he was becoming ready to leave the house.

  I got confirmation through an external security camera, that showed the garage gate rolling up, and the man driving out in his saloon car. My plan was to follow him wherever he went, as that would undoubtedly lead to where he worked.

  When Martina got out of bed, I told her that I was following the suspect to somewhere unknown. “He’s driven out of DC, and got onto the motorway to NYC,” I said. “We’ll find out now what his calling card means, Personal Trainer and whatnot. I’ll be available whenever you call for me, but I am going to be in his phone to wherever he goes.”

  The programmer group was told by Martina, and they were all in agreement. “John will have to track him physically,” said Bruce on the phone. “We cannot make any headway until we know how he has got access to bots who have access to human bodies.”

  It took no effort to follow Abraham to his destination, which practically anyone could have done with a mix of GPS and Google maps, but I was with him when, about a hundred miles short of NYC, he got off the motorway and started heading west on a dirt road. I did some zoning in that direction, and found a surveillance camera where the track ended, at a walled property less than a mile off the motorway.

  I relocated to the surveillance camera, to see Abraham driving up to the gate, and his car being let in by the guards. Now that I had the location in which he would be staying put, I gave up hanging around in his phone, deciding to watch the gate, and get back to him when he had sat down at a computer.

  So, I first looked for a while to see the comings and goings at the place. The camera, fitted to a pole, was aimed at the guard hut and the dirt road leading up to the gate, and, because the perimeter of the property was not square, I could read the sign facing the road.

  It seemed to be a relatively new signboard, the letters freshly painted on two planks fixed horizontally on wooden poles. The upper plank had Digby’s Rehabilitation Center in large letters, and the lower one had Therapy and Recovery in smaller and finer lettering, followed by a web address.

  Quite naturally, I immediately checked out the website. Not expecting to find any mention of chatbots and robots, I was not surprised that I did not. According to the website, Digby’s was a place for the rehabilitation of disabled people, offering state-of-the-art services, including brain chip interface treatment, to those who volunteered for the pioneering procedures they were undertaking.

  Obviously, no other sort of information could have been expected, and when I had cooled my heels for an additional ten minutes, cars began arriving at the gate. The people in the cars were looked at and waved in. Some of the vehicles had more than one person in them, obviously a couple of people sharing the ride, as the place was pretty far from both NYC and DC. I knew that everyone need not have been living in those two cities, but I would check such things out later, if we thought that information might be relevant to our investigation.

  At 9 a.m., when what seemed like the last car had gone through, the gate was pretty securely shut with a rather heavy wooden bar.