LARA

"A hit man/woman falls in love with his/her target."

Approx 1,911 words

LARA

The hard part was behind him. “Red” Hesseling crept over the roof of Sirius Global Software in the darkest hours before dawn. He found the access to the air conditioning maintenance shack, jumpered the alarm wires and cut the lock. The rest was simple. Follow the ductwork to the central elevator shaft, down three floors, thru the ducts and then into the secured and climate controlled server room. With the hard part behind him came the real challenge, breaking into one of the most secure computers in the world, if he was good enough.

Red knew he was good enough. So did his employer. There would be a cool five million in cash transferred to his account in the Caymans if Red succeeded in killing Lara. It would be a pity, a personal loss to him, for he had glimpsed her several times and marveled at her loveliness. He had never seen such beauty before! Lara was stunning; Lara was incredible! Red was an educated man, but he found his vocabulary wanting for superlatives with which to describe her. He felt inadequate. He could admire her from afar; but knew he could ever possess her, so he agreed to terminate her.

Lara was worth hundreds of millions and two security guards were on duty for her protection. Red stole a glance down a dimly lit corridor from behind the grill of an air-return duct on the seventh floor while calculating his chances of getting past the guards. They were watching a portable TV. Judging from their excitement, it must be a taped replay of today’s basketball game, or perhaps it was an event in Europe where it was already late morning.

Red quietly emerged from the duct, replaced the grill and ducked into a door-well before either guard saw him. Hidden from the guards, he used a pocket-mirror to scan the corridor in their direction. There was a cross corridor about twelve feet away. Red knew employers must have a way to make certain the guards would actively perform their duties and not simply sleep away their shift. He himself had worked nights as a security guard while attending college and suspected there must be an unseen key-station down the cross-corridor. At regular intervals, one of the guards must wander through the corridors carrying a time-clock and use a key chained to the key-station to punch a recorded code into the time-clock. There might be several key-stations on each floor. Red could wait until the guards separated and disable one of them, but how long could he afford to wait?

His watch read 2:47. Dawn would be 5:36 and he must be away before it began to lighten outside. He watched, and watched, until both guards cheered and clapped at something on the TV. Red rushed to the cross-corridor and ducked out of sight. As he had guessed, there was the expected key-station at the far end of the corridor. Exploring, he found a janitor’s closet containing mops, brooms, cleaning supplies, and a floor polisher. He slipped inside and prepared to wait.

Damn! It soon became stuffy in the tiny closet. He couldn’t afford to open the door even a tiny crack as the guards, having been down this corridor several times during the shift, would quickly notice if it were ajar now. Perspiring heavily, Red took a sip of water from the drinking tube attached to the reservoir he wore around his waist. He couldn’t afford to drink too much for fear of over loading his bladder.

Red glanced at his watch again, 3:12. By this time, his eyes had become accustomed to the gloom and he could see the dim illumination of the corridor through the crack where the door met the floor. Where was the damn guard? Shouldn’t he have begun his rounds on the hour? Perhaps his route first took him to the other end of the floor, or perhaps to a different floor. This key-station might be at the end of his return.

Red waited. 3:19. He held a plastic baggie in his left hand. The moment he saw the shadow of the guard move across the crack near the floor, he ripped open the baggie, grasped the chloroform soaked pad in his right hand and burst from the supply closet. Striking from behind, Red wrapped his left arm around the guard and held the pad tightly over the man’s nose and mouth. Silently, it was over in a few seconds and he gently eased the guard’s body to the floor; one down, one to go.

Red’s working clothes were a very dark navy blue, nearly the same as those of the security guard, with the exception of the guard’s robins egg blue shirt. Red removed the shirt from the guard and slipped it over his own, tucking it into his belt. It should pass; he hoped it would give him a second’s diversion as he approached the remaining guard. In case he wasn’t so lucky, Red shifted his silenced twenty-two revolver from his pocket to his belt where he could easily draw it if necessary.

Furtively, he peered down the corridor. The guard was intently watching the game on the TV. Red boldly stepped out in plain view and began a nonchalant walk to the security station. Fifteen yards, ten, seven, three…!

“Way to go, Smitty! Three points! Hey, Chuck…” Before the guard could finish, before he could turn around, Red pressed the pad over his nose and mouth until the man went night-night. He was grateful he hadn’t needed to kill the guard… the only termination planned for tonight was Lara.

Red turned his attention to the high security lock standing between him and his target. The lock was controlled by computer, requiring a user name, password, and digital image of the user’s retina scanned into an eye-piece located above the lock. The list of authorized users was closely guarded and Red had not been able to bribe any of the employee’s at Sirius; neither had he wanted to take the chance of alerting them to the threat of a possible break-in.

During the past two weeks, Red had patiently probed the Sirius mainframe, hacking into the network until he obtained the system-administrator’s username and password. Two days ago he had found the key and was now prepared to bypass the security lock. The vest he wore contained a wearable computer, with CPU, memory chips, and wafer-batteries sandwiched between several layers of fabric, connected by flexible ribbon cables. Cooling was nonexistent and Red knew he would have only a few minutes of operating time. He switched on the power and plugged a USB cable into the port beside the security lock.

Unlike the high-tech capers in the movies, Red had no keyboard with which to enter data and no miniature monitor to see what was happening. He had to trust the programming he had written into the chips, had to trust the interrogation of the Sirius mainframe and the code he had written to change the defense criteria. Nothing happened.

Red began to sweat more, and it wasn’t from the heat of the computer chips he was wearing. If this didn’t work, he would have to beat a hasty retreat before either of the guards awakened and stopped him. Even though he knew his wearable computer was issuing hundreds of commands per second, getting responses, evaluating comparisons and issuing new commands, Red couldn’t understand why the process was taking so long. Hadn’t he doubled up on the math co-processors of his system?

Suddenly the red LED changed to green and Red turned the lever. Bingo! The door opened! Red surged into the server room, turned on the lights, and then winked at the sudden illumination.

The walls consisted of banks of electronic components, with an operator’s bench and two work-stations to his right. The monitors of each had a flying-logo of Sirius moving about while the computer was in stand-by mode. Red seated himself and touched the spacebar of the nearest keyboard. The monitor cleared and Red called for a directory listing. When he found the executable file he wanted, he highlighted the entry and pressed ENTER. Line after line of text filled the screen. Red scrolled down and down. There must be two or three hundred thousand lines of code! Routines to access multiple hard drives, video and audio inputs, connect to networks and servers both by phone line and T1 cable.

This was LARA, the Learning and Reasoning Architecture developed by Sirius, and the only major competition to the software being developed by Galaxy Systems, Red’s employer. The Department of Defense as well as NASA were both in the market for a new operating system capable of learning from events and applying the data to future responses. LARA was top of the line! Harvard Medical School had estimated the capacity of the average human brain to be the equivalent of six megabytes of random memory and 80 megabytes of disk memory. LARA exceeded that many times over. Her combination of virtual and hard-disk memory was designed to equal six terra-bytes. Red could not help but appreciate and admire the concise code, the superb logic which took in data from the outside sensors, compared it with existing memory and reassigned old data to new variables for future computation. LARA learned not only from her actions and the actions of others, she was capable of reasoning the results of future actions and changing paths. LARA was the first practical artificial intelligence ever created.

Red could wait no longer… one of the guard’s was sure to wake up soon. He plugged in the USB cable from his wearable computer and accessed a file in memory from the Sirius keyboard. He pressed ENTER and the file was transferred so quickly there was but a brief flicker on the monitor.

He typed, “ILOVELARA.EXE,” no commas allowed in the command line, and pressed ENTER once more.

There were none of the visual effects provided by Hollywood. No indication of files being deleted or code being destroyed. The Sirius mainframe had a processing speed in excess of three giga-Hertz and LARA was dead in less than thirty nano-seconds. She continued to die while Red’s code looped and erased; branched and reformatted, copied and re-copied. LARA might take several minutes to be totally eliminated, but the damage was irreversible in less than a quarter of a second. LARA was terminated.

His job done, Red left the server room. Regretfully he was unable to save any of the beautiful code which was LARA because his wearable computer didn’t have a fraction of the required storage capacity. No matter. He couldn’t have LARA and neither would anyone else. It would take another ten to twenty years for the programmers to recreate her, and all the while Red would be lying on a beach just south of Rio.

There was no need to crawl through the ductwork and over the roof on his way out. Red took the elevator down to ground level and exited through an exit at the rear of the building, near where his car had been left. When the engine was running, he stashed the dark wig and mustache into a trash bag for quick disposal once safely out of the area, making the transformation back to the red-headed Judy known by her employer. She had a plane to catch and didn’t want to be late.