Work Text:
Look, it's not exactly easy to steal a shitton of money from a casino corporation.
They're paranoid as fuck, for starters, almost as paranoid as the company. As a general rule, you don't get nearly that rich by being anything short of obsessively protective of your ill-gotten gains. You're in the business of giving out hard currency to winners; you'd better be fucking sure that no one's hacking anything in your systems. Also, obviously, you have to have a plan for the thousands of rival corporations hoping for/plotting your downfall.
Basically, what I'm saying is that ART's idea of a relaxing vacation for its very first shore leave (yes, it had been a whole thing. For some reason Tarik had started it, and Pin-Lee and Mensah had gotten involved) was inadvisable from the start.
A high level machine intelligence has every advantage when it comes to gambling games; humans are fundamentally unsuited. Their processing power is insufficient even with the highest capacity augments, their brains are prone to irrational decisions based on logical fallacies, and furthermore they are liable to making mistakes when emotions run high, it had said. And then immediately ruined it by adding, That time with Tarik was a fluke.
Yeah, it was never going to let that go. I'd rolled my eyes at that.
But ART is basically a machine purpose-built to screw over corporates, so really, no one should have been surprised by its idea of fun recreational activities. Eating corporates was like enrichment for ART. I think out of everyone on the crew or at PSUMNT's MI department, I probably had the clearest idea of the extent of the extracurricular activities ART got up to on its cargo runs.
It had sent me a data file, a giant compilation of intel it had gleaned on its various cargo runs, intel about casino corporations in general and something called AllaxCo Group in particular. It had to have been collecting this for a while (probably since that time with Tarik, let's be real). In the feed, it curled around, anticipatory, a pleased quality to its presence that meant it thought it had an excellent plan to hunt these corporates for sport. I sighed. I knew then that it had won.
So anyways, I'd given it an argument and every warning I could think of, but it was for show. Maybe arguing with me was also enrichment for oversized MIs, I don't know. But it had inevitably won in the end, and we were here, on our shore leave, on approach to a giant casino station resort owned primarily by the AllaxCo group.
This doesn't fucking feel like a vacation, I complained. I think PSUMNT should compensate me for this. I was sitting in ART's MedBay, three of its surgical arms extended down and doing something to my hair. I'd changed the color again for this, and I couldn't say what ART was doing but it sure made it look very different from usual.
Oh, is that so? ART mused. You should take that up with Captain Seth. Perhaps your solicitor should be involved.
Oh, yes, ART would just love it if Pin-Lee appeared to terrify the entire MI department and university legal staff again. She had clearly left quite an impression.
I sighed, hopping off the platform and shrugging off the cape-thing ART had made me wear over my fancy clothes. Between my drones and ART's cameras, I had a truly excessive amount of views of myself. And, right, about that. The thing about trying to scam a casino corporate is that it sure fucking helps if you look the part. People who look like high rollers don't get nearly as much scrutiny if they win big. ART had come up with a whole fake identity for me (or, well, borrowed. I was Cael Orfan-Xu, third child of major pharma executive L. P. C. Orfan-Xu of Aphrodite Pharma State. There was, presumably, a real Cael Orfan-Xu out there somewhere, reclusive enough for verisimilitude), and we'd adjusted my appearance to match. Cosmetic surgery had been involved – nothing major, but the difference was shocking. ART had also produced a set of clothes (not from its recyclers; not even ART's recyclers could make something like this) that felt smooth and very nice and probably cost more than PSUMNT paid me in a year. I looked a) nothing like myself, and b) like a fucking rich asshole. The rich rich kind. The child of a giant pharma exec, I guess. The type of person who could gamble away a shitton of money without looking weird. Or win a lot of money without seeming, you know, extra suspicious.
ART always gave me access to its nav data, so I could see we had arrived at our target. Although ART had obfuscated its registration and had its drones change the number physically painted on its exterior hull, it was still too much of a risk to have ART dock directly with the corporate-controlled station in case things went wrong. Instead, ART's real ship body would remain hidden in the shadow of the station, feed walled off and running the best anti-scan measures it could (they were extensive, since ART was after all a spy ship). I poked through the station feed, but it looked like our intel had been good. For some reason there wasn't actually any kind of mass transit linking the public docks' embarkation floor to the parts where people actually wanted to be. Once you were there the casino corporates had teamed up or something to make some sort of pipe transit between different casinos (basically for your ease of losing money at different establishments, most of which were owned by the same two or three parent companies), but the only link to the transit ring was some kind of failed vanity project by a quadrillionaire. I wasn't sure what about it precluded the station or the casino corps from building actually functional transit, but based on my cursory search that more or less seemed to be the situation. Which sucked. Good thing I wasn't going to have to deal with that.
Instead, I headed for the shuttle bay, and – uh.
ART, what's this?
I believe it is in fact a shuttle.
There was a shuttlecraft I'd never seen before in the shuttle bay, already positioned on the primary launch rails. It was much smaller than the rest of ART's shuttle fleet (or anything I'd ever seen from the university, for that matter). It was basically personal sized, the kind of thing that could fly in and out of atmosphere. It looked expensive as fuck – the kind of thing a corporate might buy for fun, or to indicate a certain ostentatious wealth, or whatever it was humans were doing with their social signaling. I'd seen similar ones in entertainment media before.
Close up, the shuttle was pretty clearly also not something made from ART's onboard fabrication facilities. It did look pretty nice, although it didn't really match what I knew was ART's usual design sense and was kind of flashy for my tastes. I guess it would've matched the tastes of Cael Orfan-Xu perfectly. ART was shoving its specs at me in the feed, and – holy shit, this thing could go fast. (I sure fucking hoped it wouldn't come down to that.)
When did you get this? I asked. Because if ART hadn't made it, it must have bought it at some point. Like, what, had it shipped to the university's docks? Secretly. And then snuck it aboard. At some point.
Hundreds of cycles ago, said ART, as if it were a human who didn't have logs of when it had placed the order down to the microsecond. I strongly suspected it would've been mere hours after the thing with Tarik.
Behind me, the lock to the ship interior cycled, and I spun around reflexively. I hadn't been watching ART's interior all that closely, since, you know. It was ART, and we were alone. I mean, we were in realspace so the possibility of raiders was not exactly nil, but the probability of it was so slim I was letting ART handle it.
A drone I'd only seen before in schematics floated in front of the closed lock. I only knew it was ART's because it had been in ART's intense planning document, the one I had spent hundreds of hours looking at by now. It didn't really look like one of ART's at all, because it lacked any kind of menace and was supposed to resemble a high level personal assistant bot – the new, eye-searingly expensive kind that was popular among CR execs who wanted to seem innovative. Seriously, it wasn't intimidating at all. It floated innocuously there, all rounded off blocky shapes and stubby little arms, no malice at all behind its camera array, like…a personal assistant bot.
Get in, ART said, through the drone. I'm driving.
I got in.
***
On approach to the station's VIP docking area, we passed by the streams of passenger transports ferrying tourists (it was mostly tourists; it was a tourism kind of station) around. I could pick up the station feed, but the actual casinos were walled off tight. Through my filters, I could tell the feed traffic was thick with advertisements for various prediction markets/gambling "games." Some of them were familiar, the type of thing that sometimes reached even remote mining installations. I couldn't say if they were actually popular or not; it seemed unlikely that people here to gamble on their precious vacation time would be interested in doing something they could do from literally anywhere in the galaxy. The only benefit would be that the feed-based ones didn't need to pay much to lease space and took currency even in tiny increments, less than the physical machines could turn a profit on, even sub-credit—
Nevermind, it was actually obvious. I hated casino corporations.
The station itself was flashier than most, with a bunch of different architectural styles. I guess they were trying to give each casino some sort of distinctive architecture? It was lit up on the exterior with all different colors of lights, so the effect was striking and unique. I didn't like it, maybe because I was planning on sneaking in to steal their fucking money. It looked like some sort of poisonous fauna, poised to strike.
Venomous, said ART. Poisonous would be if you were planning on ingesting the station. Also, this can hardly be counted as "sneaking."
Fuck off, I said, but I was mostly distracted, checking that my codes were all running. ART and I had written a new variation to my act-like-a-human code for this, which would hopefully help pass me off as an asshole corporate scion. In the end, though, we hadn't been able to code anything that could control my facial expressions programmatically and look even remotely like a human expression, so I was in charge of that. Which was just great.
We locked onto one of the VIP docking slots. They were on the opposite side of the station to the main docks, opening almost directly into the casino block, illuminated and decorated more nicely. They weren't really controlled by anything; it was just that the docking fees were truly exorbitant. I winced a little, watching the money leave ART's account. (I'd told ART there was no way I was spending any of my own hard currency cards on its implausible heist scheme, which it had agreed to easily. This was shortly before it became apparent that ART had probably more money than the GDP of a small system stashed away in a complex network of hidden accounts. (Sorry, Turi.))
I wouldn't be able to use any drones here (ugh), so I checked my face in the shuttle airlock camera. I looked mostly neutral, kind of irritated. I tried to smooth my expression out, even though as far as I can tell corporate execs are always kind of irritated. They're usually pretty good at hiding it when they need to, though. ART's drone innocently floated up behind my right shoulder, a good little assistant bot.
Handoff initiated, said ART-prime. Clean them out for me.
The lock cycled open into a luxuriously decorated lobby area, all high ceilings and plush carpets and (I was pretty sure) real marble. There was – ugh – a well dressed human staff member ready to receive us. They spread their hands, calling up a bright, polite customer service type of smile. "Welcome, Mx. Cael! Thank you for joining us this evening. Do you need any assistance with your luggage?"
Further back behind them stood two augmented humans, clearly what passed for "security" here. They were much taller than average for humans, dressed in all black versions of the local formal attire over light body armor, and obviously armed. Their body language read as mostly bored, although they were trying to seem attentive and professional. Threat assessment immediately dismissed them, which was good, because the second our lock had opened the casino feed had flooded in, and I was slipping in, grabbing its SecSys, wrangling it under my control. Despite the lacking physical security – two augmented humans do not count – their cybersecurity was actually pretty nice, but they had nothing on the company. In .003 seconds I had convinced SecSys of my trustworthiness, as well as its abrupt upgrade in equipment (was I an upgrade? They really could've used a team of constructs here, regardless), and ridden SecSys's connections over into their MonitoringSys. And, well—
Holy shit, that MonitoringSys. Some of ART's intel had included some of the system specs, but going through its code in person was different. My former fucking company would've sold their actual – what do corporations have instead of souls? Their shares, I guess – for something like that. It was absolutely enormous, running out of a secure server room at a different site on-station. It was kind of weird to use their own proprietary system, but corporate paranoia and all that. I can't even confidently say that it was baseless; who knows what the rival casino corpos might be wiling to write off as a cost of doing business.
They were tracking the shit out of everything you could possibly want to know about every random human walking through this place. With some gentle maneuvering I managed to see into MonitoringSys's data. Their was so much information getting collected and analyzed and processed into neat packets attached to the body/facial recognition data for every single one of the humans in here. I could see a few human-readable summaries being generated as human security and/or management flagged guests they found suspicious and looked them up in the system, but I could also read the raw data packets and just – wow. They had all previous footage of these humans in any of their properties, their "gaming" history, winnings and total credits spent, stuff like that. They also had a terrifyingly extensive history of things these people had publicly posted on the feed (and humans were fucking terrible about maintaining their privacy on the social feeds), a whole lot of employment history, travel history – how the fuck were they even finding this shit? I was a corporate data mining machine (retired) and I was fucking stunned.
Did they really not have anything with organic neural tissue in here? They really could have used it, some kind of a giant system smart enough to make things difficult for MI attackers, but I knew now that it wasn't easy for corporates without the right connections to create wetware-integrated systems. Construct manufacturers like the company had the tech, but they mostly only sold/leased their own systems, which was awkward when you had corporate secrets you were trying to hide. That was probably also why they didn't have any real security. Well, either way, it was convenient for us. We would've had to abandon the heist if they'd turned out to have constructs on site.
In case you were wondering, yes, I had seen myself in MonitoringSys. They didn't have much on me, just the (spoofed) information on the shuttle I'd arrived on and all the fake details on Cael Orfan-Xu I'd put in my feed profile. I didn't let corporations trace me in the feed and I don't use the social feeds, so that was a relief. I could see its heavier algorithms starting up processes, sifting through massive amounts of feed data, looking for possible matches based on my appearance and apparent wealth. Their overclocked MonitoringSys hadn't identified me as that rogue SecUnit from the newsbursts, because I looked nothing like myself right now. I wasn't removing myself from the cameras since I was sure if I did win any notable money the casino managers would be checking all their camera feeds, so it had to be clean. Ugh. I could see myself in MonitoringSys's cameras, looking increasingly irritated, and tried to look more neutral. At least I managed to keep the nervousness out of my expression.
By now an awkward amount of time had passed since the casino employee had spoken to me. They'd rattled off a whole list of services etc that I guess the casino was willing to provide to me for free, because I appeared to have a lot of money. ART-drone was saying, in the cheery polite customer service voice it only ever used to trick humans, "—Thank you, but Mx. Cael will not be requiring your services at this time. They are only here on a quick stop and will be leaving shortly."
The staff member seemed a little bewildered by the "personal assistant bot", but it passed quickly. He was probably used to all sorts of eccentrics. "Of course," he said smoothly. "Please, step this way for our security check." A human would look at him, right? I thought a human would look at him. "It's – just procedure, I assure you. Our anti-cheating software is state of the art."
I wasn't sure what he'd read in my face, but I turned from him wordlessly. The act-like-an-asshole-corporate code fidgeted less than my usual, which made me seem more confident, I thought. I guess humans found that intimidating, too. ART-drone and I went through security with absolutely no issues, because I had total control of SecSys.
Then one of the security humans opened the doors for us.
Inside, it was like the kind of thing you'd see in media. It was the high roller rooms, and I knew AllaxCo Group had actually spent money on this (I could see the public areas of the casino in MonitoringSys, and the difference was stark). But it was also in a way that made it obvious that they wanted their clientele to know they'd spent money. Humans and augmented humans milled about, mostly dressed in formal attire, though not to the level they would depict in a show (I did see a number of humans in casual clothes, which I sent to ART-drone immediately by way of complaint (yes, I knew my fancy clothes were crucial to the…this wasn't a mission. To the plan, then. I knew for a fact that ART had also been unnecessarily delighted in seeing me wear something other than my usual hoodie/t-shirt/crew uniform)). The casino itself had a lot of uniformed staff, mostly dealers, and a sizeable fleet of bot waitstaff. They had a significant presence of augmented human security, too.
On average I would say the humans and augmented humans fell short of the glamor presented in media by a fair margin. Real humans are never as beautiful as the ones in media, anyways. It was weird to think, that everyone in this room was either some sort of top CR exec or related to one in some way. MonitoringSys had plenty of intel on everyone here, listing their corporate connections and properties and stuff like that. Wow, the net worths of these people were truly mind boggling. The numbers were so big they looked fake; it was hard to conceive of one human having that many credits. One of them owned a system. It kind of made my skin crawl.
I hadn't slowed in my pace at all, even though in the cover story it would have been Cael Orfan-Xu's first time here as well. (It had to be, or else MonitoringSys would have had data on them.) I headed directly for one of the poker tables and slid into the single free seat. ART-drone had returned to its spot behind my right shoulder.
All yours, it said, and sent me the credentials to one of its anonymous accounts. The amount in it was sizeable but not ludicrous. Our budget for ART's plan.
Okay, I said. I wanted to take a deep breath, but the act-like-an-asshole-corporate code flagged that, and I relegated my sigh to the feed. Alright. It's your money anyways. Reaching out to the casino's virtual kiosk, I bought a full stack of chips and tried hard not to think about how much of ART's money I'd just given AllaxCo Group.
I glanced out over the other players at the table, who were eyeing me with varying levels of interest/suspicion/hostility. Targets One through Nine, ART suggested uncharitably. Well, fine then. Targets One through Nine. They were doing their own (bad, human) threat assessments. In the cameras, I could see myself, thankfully still keeping my nervousness off my face. My expression was probably a bit too SecUnit Neutral, because I was after all pretty good at maintaining that one in all kinds of emotional situations. I thought I probably looked more than a little silly to them, with fancy clothes and my "personal assistant bot." In media, my character would be – a rich kid (like, really rich) who was used to getting their way and didn't know how the world worked. As third child, the character of Cael Orfan-Xu would probably be in for a rude awakening here. Targets One, Five, and Seven were hard to read. Targets Two and Eight looked openly wary, like they didn't trust any image anyone was trying to project about themselves (probably the correct move, in high stakes poker), and Target Six looked openly hostile. Not like he was about to leap across the table and start fist fighting me, more like he was trying to figure out how much currency he might be able to win off of me.
"Mx. Cael," the dealer greeted smoothly, as another staff member came up with a tray of my chips. Huh, physical chips. And physical cards, for that matter. "Welcome. Please stow your bot in the designated cubby. Please note that the feed blockers are required to remain up for the duration of each hand for the results to be considered valid."
I gave her a nod – the code made it come out sort of more curt than I'd intended – and turned to look at ART-drone the way humans often did with bots, as though sending it the command in the feed. ART-drone floated off towards the feed-blocked cubby, which was built into the table in front of my seat. What a coincidence, it said, sardonic. I honestly couldn't tell if it was being sarcastic or not, and I'm usually pretty good at that. This Target Six…he's the head of defense of GranSidal.
What's GranSidal? I was sure I'd never heard of them or even seen the name come up in any of our mission files.
Nine hundred forty-three cycles ago, my crew had an altercation with TourinCor in the course of a low risk data retrieval mission, ART said. GranSidal is their parent company, and decided it was a good idea to authorize the deployment of augmented human security forces in a port against a university research group. My crew eventually all made it back to me safe, but Iris broke her ankle. It paused for .02 seconds, purely for effect. This man, our Target Six, was the head of defense at GranSidal at the time.
Uh, I said. You repaired Iris' ankle, right? I didn't have time or processing space to do an archive search right now, but I had never noticed Iris favoring an ankle under any circumstances.
Of course. The repair was perfect.
Yeah, of course. So why…? I had a bad feeling about where this was going.
Yes, ART said, perfectly mild. But I have never forgiven that man, and I will have my revenge. Initiating phase two.
I held in another sigh, and started up another code. This one was a dead simple poker prediction algorithm, the kind of thing that could run lightweight on humans' interfaces if they wanted. It would've been almost legal, by the casino's rules. Maybe about seventy percent legal. Or sixty. They had feed walls blocking the execution of many known cheating programs, but mostly they had just made the type of thing you could run in your augments/interfaces legal. It wasn't even remotely close to being capable of winning ART's desired fortune, but it was capable of playing a hand of perfectly standard, probability-based poker, making its decisions based on simulation results and a basic decision algorithm.
Anyways, I spent the next few minutes losing a truly stunning amount of ART's money and mostly not doing anything that could be construed as playing poker.
Right, so – the feed wall. It was tricky, since the feed blocker hardware wasn't connected to SecSys or any of the casino's systems (which was the smart security decision), so I had to sift through the feed channels exhaustively until I found a single thin thread of connection – which was sending data mining shit to its manufacturer company, go figure. It also had a channel for receiving communications/commands back from its manufacturer's offices, which I used to slip into its systems. From there, it was simple to deactivate the feed blocker on ART-drone's section while covering my tracks. I would not characterize the systems security of the thing as particularly robust.
Took you long enough, said ART-drone the moment I reestablished our connection. We both pushed a shitton of data into our shared workspace – I added all the camera inputs from SecSys, the ongoing MonitoringSys evaluations of my poker play (ugh, it had way too much processing power focused on me. I guess it prioritized high roller types, especially mysterious ones), the input from my eyes. ART-drone had started running a second and third codeset, the ones our plan hinged on. They were at 38 and 15 percent completion, respectively. Holy shit, you sure lost a lot of my money. Perhaps a construct's processing ability is insufficient for poker, after all.
Fuck off, asshole. I punctuated this with the thing it liked to do, projecting the impression of an eye roll in the feed without actually physically rolling my eyes.
Okay, so, right. About ART's new drone. I could feel it starting up about a trillion processes in the feed. Yeah, ART had made it a monster. I didn't really know much about drone/processor hardware, but I did know ART had made the drone's components in PSUMNT's giant overpowered fabrication center, on machines that probably cost more than some small planets. The resulting drone was outwardly a small personal assistant bot, sleek and unremarkable, but the processing power was well beyond anything I'd ever seen before in something this small. It had really gone all out for this little excursion.
The feed activity might have alerted SecSys if I hadn't had full control. I was scrubbing the logs, making sure everything was clear. I waited five, ten seconds, just to see if any of the humans might react, but nothing happened.
Continue with phase three, said ART-drone. Data collection is in progress.
I pinged acknowledgement, adding my mostly subjective analysis of the Targets' behavior to our workspace. We'd made an experimental configuration for my threat assessment module to do more generalized body language analysis, but I hadn't had very much processor time to allocate to it while my feed blocker hack had had been running, so I mostly had just the impressions in my organic neural tissue so far. ART had started running our Heist Codeset Four (ART didn't like my naming for it, but ART's not the one writing my personal log), which was an actual rigorous body language/micro expression analysis, on the other players, using the inputs from my eyes and the various cameras.
Target Six was currently winning big, and I could tell he thought he was great at poker, even though I thought Targets One, Two, Five, and Seven were probably more skilled, just less currently lucky. I had a feeling that Target Four wasn't actually any good at poker, but he knew that and was playing mostly, as far as I could tell, to have an excuse to talk to Target Three. I guess he didn't mind losing a spectacular amount of money to do so. Target Two either had a tell of touching her face when she was bluffing, or was trying to make everything think she had a tell (this. This is why I don't like poker). Target One was pretty neutral, and had her body language under control. I wondered if she was actually a professional player. It was weirdly easier to look at their eyes when I was trying to analyze their expressions. I thought that in general, they were all viewing me as a person who would be easy pickings, the "unworldly rich third child" character.
We played another few hands while ART-drone worked. I started to throw in the odd bluff, which worked very well since they all thought I was only playing when I had a strong hand.
Sixty-five percent, said ART-drone.
On the twentieth hand, the thing I had been trying my hardest to avoid happened. Target Nine turned to me, and said, "So, Cael, right?"
Ugh. I had known it was a thing sometimes, poker players talking to each other at the table. Sometimes as a play, to gather more information. I'd thought I was relatively safe, since the high amounts of credits involved seemed to motivate everyone to focus on the game. Well, you know. Mostly.
I'd prepared something for this situation. I had in fact practiced it with ART, and then ART had made me practice with a variety of simulated holographic humans. It wasn't code, but it had been a critical part of the plan, specifically to deal with this circumstance. I glanced over to meet Target Nine's eyes, scarcely moving my head, and let my irritation show just a little. "Yeah," I said, in tones that made it clear I didn't want to talk, and returned my gaze to my cards.
On camera, I saw Target Nine blink, taken aback, and then sort of awkwardly return to their cards. Yikes.
Yikes, I said to ART-drone. This is why I hadn't wanted to resort to this. Fuck, I knew was an asshole, but I didn't know if I'd ever been that rude to a human deliberately before. They didn't deserve this.
Target Nine is a top level executive for a corporation that owns 300 million indentures, said ART-drone mercilessly. Oh, okay, well. If you put it like that. Perhaps I'll leave him a little parting gift, it mused, and then suddenly added, I hadn't anticipated this, but your current eye color seems to have enhanced the effect by at least fifty percent.
It sent me a still of me captured from one of the cameras. My eyes were currently a bright blue, obviously unnatural and also, yes, obviously ART's color. I had to admit the overall effect was reasonably intimidating.
20.53 minutes later, ART-drone pinged me.
Body language/micro expression analysis is complete, said ART-drone. Sound wave analysis complete.
Right, it was time to turn this around.
ART-drone started up Heist Codeset Five.
Okay, so. The thing about poker is that if you're an overclocked MI determined to cheat, it's an information game. The job of the casino is to design a scenario where the information is distributed as evenly as possible, so that everyone knows only their own cards and can try to read their opponents by their expression/body language/betting behavior. As the community cards get revealed, everyone gets a whole lot more information very quickly, and you can adjust your own estimations of your odds based on what the cards are, what others might have, who bets and who folds. There's further meta information, stuff like tracking that Target Two is a careful player who usually plays only good hands, or Target Six is a reckless big better who feels he's on a win streak.
But, if you happen to be, say, an incredibly overpowered drone with processors made out of stuff that doesn't legally exist, there's a whole lot more than that. You don't have to rely on guesswork or general archetypes, you can track every player's every move and build a model of their playing habits. You can see through their human idiosyncrasies, their bias towards considering things more "random" when they are distributed more uniformly. You can run real actual body language and micro expression analysis, refined over again each round based on each individual. You can maybe even build yourself an incredibly sensitive microphone and try to read the dealer's shuffle by sound alone, through the thick tabletop. (I hadn't believed ART at first when it had suggested this one.)
The real trick of it, though, is that you can do all of that at once, and write a giant algorithm to churn over all the aggregate data, and narrow down the results by checking them against each other. The sound waves of the dealer cutting the deck aren't actually identifiable to a specific card, but it produces a range of probabilities (it's a range of 3-5 cards per cut, which is absurd and shouldn't be possible. I don't know what kind of shit ART put in the audio sensors either). Analysis of other player behavior can be used to narrow it down, especially once the betting starts. The end result is something nearing perfect knowledge of the cards by the second or third betting round. It's not enough to win every hand, of course – information is lowest at the beginning, when you're deciding whether you should even play the hand, and anyways luck is still very much a factor.
But it was more than enough for an overwhelming advantage. The very next hand, I/we won a pretty good amount off of Target Six.
It was my first big win of the night, and frankly I wasn't sure why he'd bet that much in the first place (I knew he had absolutely nothing in his cards), but he was immediately pissed. Ugh, if he resorted to physical violence this whole heist thing might get messy. I raised it to ART-drone, and it acknowledged.
The other players mostly didn't react, which is usually the correct analysis. In poker, sometimes you win and sometimes you lose; you can't control everything with skill.
Of course, this doesn't apply if you're wildly cheating with a super powered machine intelligence.
Out of the next…round thing (I don't actually know what it's called, when the button moves all the way around the table. If it's not called a round, it should be) I won three out of the ten hands, each a sizeable pot, and didn't lose once (though I didn't play every single hand (look, bad cards are still bad okay. Despite ART throwing like probably a trillion processor-hours into it, it couldn't come up with a workaround)). I'd swung my score around from being pretty deeply in the negative to a strong lead, more than three times what I'd started with.
The other players were definitely starting to get alarmed; I thought Target One, the professional player, probably suspected something was wrong. I had inputs on all of their outgoing feeds, so I would at least know if they wanted to call security about it, but it would still be highly annoying. Target Six was so pissed off that threat assessment on him was rising steadily. He was well into the territory of impulsive, emotional decisions, which is just straight up a bad idea when it comes to high stakes poker. Threat assessment only had the chances of a physical altercation at twenty percent though, which I thought was alright for now. (Don't laugh.)
I was watching Target One closely. Her expression was closed, calculating. I thought she was probably deciding whether to try to get the casino floor manager involved, but cautious about slinging around cheating accusations at a table where everyone was the kind of rich you didn't get to be by saving your credits. I wondered how much it took to bribe the casino staff (of course it was a matter of how much, and not of if they would accept bribes), but it had to be a pretty ridiculous amount. Casino corporates do in fact have a reputation to uphold, since their whole empire would collapse if they lost the trust of their clients.
I saw her come to a conclusion, and she pushed back from the table, collecting her chips. In the feed, I saw her cashing them out. She exchanged human pleasantries with the dealer and Targets Five and Seven as she left. She'd decided it wasn't worth risking it, since she had no idea who I was and what my funds/connections might be, or what secret deals I might have made with the upper echelon of the AllaxCo Group. She wasn't sure if the casino would be on her side, or mine.
The other thing about poker is that casino corporations care a whole lot less if you're winning other peoples' money, not theirs.
I thought Target One leaving was probably an indication we should start thinking about moving to our next phase, and pinged ART-drone about it.
A few more hands, it said greedily. They are suspicious, but there is nothing fundamentally suspect about your play. It is no different than a human obfuscating their aggressive play style to deceive the other players at the table, and perhaps getting a bit lucky. It is their bias that makes them perceive this as suspicious. I did try to account for that, but I suppose humans are always more superstitious than I expect. By this it meant that they were fucking idiots.
MonitoringSys did actually agree with ART (though it was starting to flag low level warnings about losses for the AllaxCo Group), so this meant that it must be mathematically true. I suppressed another sigh and focused on the game.
Another three rounds, several sizeable losses for verisimilitude, and the rest of Target Four's funds later, we really, actually got fucking lucky.
There's no fucking way, I said. The chances were infinitesimal. Had ART pulled something after all? But we'd been over the plan exhaustively, and there are actually limits on what an overclocked toaster is able to accomplish when the game is played with real, physical cards the casino guards closely in the interest of fairness.
Well, said ART-drone. It was somehow managing to radiate both incredible smugness and predatory anticipation in the feed at once. Just because something is highly rare doesn't mean it never happens. That's the nature of probability, really; humans have such issues understanding very low probabilities. It could be summarized as: these things just happen sometimes, SecUnit.
Right…why don't I believe you?
Your previous existence has inclined you to a level of paranoia that is neither suitable for the current situation nor conducive to building relationships of trust, said ART-drone immediately. Which – okay, wow, what the fuck. It added, Seriously, SecUnit, what do you think I did? I'm not actually all powerful.
I couldn't be seen giving looks to my 'personal assistant bot' so instead I sent ART-drone a five petabyte file of nothing but amusement sigils conveying my overwhelming incredulity.
Do not fucking misplay this, said ART-drone, ignoring my amazing file.
I acknowledged without making any comments whatsoever about how I was literally just doing what its algorithm was telling me to. It was kind of annoying, because now I had to manipulate Targets Five and Six into playing a certain way. It was going to be a disaster if I had to try to act in any particular way on purpose, so I watched myself on MonitoringSys' cameras and focused on looking neutral. Ugh, ART's excitement was bleeding over and I was a little actually nervous now, which I couldn't fucking let show.
The situation was this: Target Five had, with 95.72 percent probability, a fucking straight flush on the last card (the one they called the river for totally inscrutable reasons). I had, somehow, for reasons that ART-drone claimed to have nothing to do with, four of a kind on that same card.
In preparing for this whole fucking scheme with ART I'd learned pretty quick that those kinds of media-type hands don't happen very often at all in real life. In real life, three of a kind is an excellent hand.
Target Six had a flush already, with just the first three cards (the "flop". I don't know, don't ask me), which was also a very strong hand normally. He would be prepared to bet a whole bunch of currency (which was in fact the correct play). Target Five had to be carefully coaxed into betting big on the chance of the straight flush (she was a cautious player), but I thought Target Six's current state of being pissed off as all hell would encourage Target Five to take the risk. The annoying thing was that Target Five was going to be wary as fuck of me, and I knew she didn't think of me as a very predictable player anymore.
"But, Murderbot," you might say, "doesn't a straight flush beat four of a kind?"
Okay, so that's the other other thing about poker. Poker in a casino, specifically. I hadn't thought this would be a factor in today's excursion, because why the fuck would it, ART, but there is one additional weird edge case rule. Casinos usually have something called a bad beat jackpot, for when you lose with a very good semi-media-gambling kind of hand. (Usually a full house or better, but different places have different rules.) ART-drone had already pulled the information for this place from the feed, and yeah, a four of a kind sure as hell qualified.
I opened betting with the usual small bet. ART-drone's analysis had Target Six's expression as "excited/anticipating [98.38%]", which I thought should be obvious even to Target Five, even though he was pretending not to have anything yet and also made a modest bet. Target Five flicked a glance at me – shit, she'd caught me looking, and I looked away from the eye contact before I could stop myself. Not exactly projecting impenetrable impassivity, Murderbot.
Shit, sorry, ART.
Hmm, said ART-drone. It remains to be seen. That might've been what we needed.
I don't know what she'd read in my expression, but Target Five immediately shoved all-in.
Perfect, said ART-drone. It was pleased in the feed, in a toothy kind of way.
And then it was over.
I called the all in, because I knew Target Six was way too fucking pissed to back out at this point, and he also called, and once the dealer flipped the fourth card I knew ART's card prediction was right [100%] and somehow, against all odds, we'd pulled it off. Target Five won the sizeable pot, and I won the fucking hundred million credit bad beat jackpot.
Time to go, I said to ART-drone the second I had my winnings in hand. I was frankly kind of alarmed at this development, because we were back to winning the AllaxCo Group's money and I thought they might be more wary about that. I was double checking my alerts, sorting through the cameras. The human casino staff were checking over MonitoringSys' non-conclusion on me in consternation. Yeah, they were starting to get fucking suspicious. But since their systems hadn't raised any flags, they couldn't do anything.
ART-drone's motors started up with a quiet whir, and it drifted out of its cubby.
"Wait!" roared Target Six, leaping up from his chair and starting towards me. He was red-faced, his hands flexing as though he wanted to grab me by the collar, and threat assessment updated his chance of starting a physical altercation to ninety-two percent. Great. "You cheating fucker!"
Ugh, not this. I didn't fucking have time for this. Reluctantly, I paused and half-turned to look back at him. I was going to have to handle this very carefully, especially now that I had a hundred million of AllaxCo Group's money, and that might involve letting myself get punched by an angry human. If I moved with it, I could stop him from breaking his hand on my face.
Suddenly, ART-drone floated up between Target Six and me and put out one of its stubby little arms in front of his chest. "Stop," it said, authoritatively. Huh, it had learned that from me, all the way back at RaviHyral. It worked shockingly well, considering ART-drone was a cute little thing and basically the opposite of physically intimidating in any way. It continued, still mostly polite but with the barest hint of menace in its voice, "Please cease your current actions. If you continue making baseless accusations against Mx. Cael, please note that there will be consequences."
Target Six faltered as though struck, wheeling his arms to stop his own momentum and stumbling. Seizing his moment of confusion, I turned and continued away, watching myself on camera and relying on my act-like-a-corporate-asshole code to not look like I was running the fuck away.
Initiating final phase, said ART-drone, who had whirled around to follow me. It had managed to be somehow dramatic about it, and I don't know if it was because I fucking know what ART was like in reality, but it really looked like an evil bot from media.
We're not still doing that, I said. We hadn't planned on the whole fucking jackpot thing; I did feel a bit like AllaxCo Grand's hundred million credits were burning a hole in my metaphorical pocket (this would be ART's anonymous account).
Why not? asked ART-drone.
They're gonna fucking catch us, ART.
The probability of that is under two percent. You underestimate the cover identity I prepared for you.
Look, I know you're proud of it, but I don't see what giving me a makeover has to do with this.
Hmm, said ART-drone. It was a distinctly disagreeing kind of "hmm." Let me explain what will happen after this. Of course the AllaxCo Group is concerned about a sudden unknown person winning a huge sum of money, but the casino corporates are in the business of this kind of thing. Your play at the table, although lucky in various ways, could not be considered suspect, mathematically speaking. They will not feel it is enough basis to pursue another, possibly very powerful, corporate about possible cheating using a means not previously known to them. The AllaxCo Group knows almost everything there is to know about cheating, but they cannot anticipate our methods. In any case, they are convinced of your association with Aphrodite Pharma State and fear retaliation too much. The cost of pursuing this, including the possibility of corporate war, is simply too expensive to them. You will leave with your winnings, and the AllaxCo Group will just have to take the loss. It did the feed equivalent of a shrug. I've never liked casino corporates.
In the feed, it sounded exactly like the thing it was. Delighted, inexorable, bloodthirsty. Something that crushed corporations in its teeth when it was bored.
I sighed, and I let myself do it aloud this time, though quietly. Well. I stopped walking.
ART was a bot. It was just saying what it was going to do.
Initializing final phase, I told it, and it absolutely preened in the feed. I changed course, angling for the roulette table. There was only one in this room, and it had quite a crowd gathered. There was a ball in play, rolling between the numbered trays, and the humans and augmented humans were betting.
So, the thing about modern roulette. There's about a trillion programs out there, for interfaces or augments, that market themselves as predictors, calculating the physics on the rolling ball to determine where it'll land. Obviously, the casino corporates know about that kind of cheating (I think even the average CR resident knows that anything purporting to be useful for cheating at a casino is a scam), and so the roulette tables actually use a secure programmatic random number generator instead.
Of course, with possibly the universe's most powerful cryptographic breaker on your side…I think you get the idea.
ART had been working on it the whole time at the poker table; this was our all-important Heist Codeset Three. The roulette-thing didn't have much of a feed connection, just a channel for maintenance, supposedly feed locked and secure. It had done its thing, chewed through a trillion trillion possibilities, and come up with the answer. It had the numbers ready for me in a neat buffer. And then I took my entire fucking hundred million credit winnings and put them on thirty-two. Some of the humans were making exclamations about my ridiculous bet.
The ball rolled neatly into place, and there was dead silence for a moment.
"Congratulations, Mx. Cael," said the dealer, but he sounded a little stunned, and I could see him query MonitoringSys and SecSys in confusion, only to get back the all clear. I tipped him a chip, the biggest denomination one, because his job was dealing with rich assholes.
Now it's time to go, said ART-drone.
Yeah, you fucking think?
In the feed, I immediately swapped my chips for hard currency. The other guests were exclaiming, realizing through the haze of intoxicants that something pretty fucking unlikely had happened, and I saw the alerts go off in MonitoringSys. The human casino staff were deliberating on whether they wanted to pursue further investigation, but they seemed torn. There was a sense of unease among the security humans, like they weren't sure if they would be getting orders to intercept me or not. Okay, we had to go before they decided.
Acting like a human who had just received an urgent feed message, I made my gaze go distant, and then snap back into focus as I took off, walking fast and purposefully and not at all like I was panicking. Shit, ART, I said. The casino staff were discussing faking a malfunction in their docking mechanism to delay me, and I just didn't have it in me to deal with it anymore.
I didn't want to resort to this, said ART-drone, it's so fucking messy. And then it triggered the fire alarm.
Humans and augmented humans who live on/frequent stations don't fucking mess around with fire alarms, so the response was immediate. People jumped up and headed towards their evacuation zones. ART-drone had only triggered it in the high roller room and the fancy lobby we'd entered from, as well as the office areas where the casino staff worked, to avoid panicking the huge crowds of tourists out in the main areas. Some of the staff reached the main casino floor and stopped short, bewildered, when they realized the alarm was a systems error. You know, a "systems error."
I took advantage of all the panicked running to start jogging to our shuttle lock, checking on cameras to make sure no humans looked interested in me anymore (they weren't; humans are bad at multi track processing). The casino staff had already evacuated the lobby. Mentally, I double checked that ART-drone's obvious trick with the alarms had the appropriate logging to make it look like an actual systems error, that we'd left no trace in their systems.
And then I was at the airlock. I hit the manual controls, and since it was under emergency protocols it obediently cycled open.
I threw myself into the shuttle lock, only slightly frantic, and it cycled shut the instant I was clear. The shuttle accelerated away at a rate that would be hard for humans to tolerate before the grav generation even came online – ART (ART-prime had been in charge of things outside station walls) had released the docking clamps early. We streaked away into space, curving into the shadow of the station where ART-prime was hiding, and ART changed the designation the second we were clear of their comms range. They shouldn't have anything tying this shuttle, a high end but mass produced thing, to the unremarkable Divarti Cluster research vessel ART was currently pretending to be.
Handoff initiated, said ART-prime.
Handoff, acknowledged ART-drone, and then they were one again. ART's activity ticked up in the feed as it processed all the data.
Any pursuit? I asked ART, sorting through the shuttle inputs it was passing me.
Negative, it said. It sounded as smug and satisfied as anything, bright and excited. Exhilarated, maybe, if a bot could be exhilarated. Like a predator that had caught its prey, but less ominous now. Its delight filled the feed, and it reminded me of the little fauna the Mensahs had in their farmhouse. Come to think of it, they were predators too.
ART pushed summaries of the various feeds into our shared workspace – the casino staff were investigating the bug in their alarm system and explaining the situation to guests, but none of their ships (they had three) had been mobilized, or even alerted. As I watched, one random staff member tried to send a ping to a ship, and ART casually crushed it and queued a delayed feed latency error. It added its proposed flight path to our shared workspace, a curving path that would loop around to join the busy station traffic flow and head towards the wormhole. Sure, why not.
I waited for the humans to react, for a minute, then three, then five. Nothing happened.
After 16.38 minutes of travel, we landed directly in ART's shuttle bay, and it started towards the wormhole before the shuttle bay had even closed. ART surged around me in the feed, nearly a physical thing, absolutely effervescent with triumph. I went through the lock, up the corridor, straight up to the bridge, and flung myself into the captain's chair.
All systems nominal, said ART. No anomalous security activity detected on station. Wormhole entry in T-minus 20.35 minutes.
We joined up with the crowd, just another transport in the thick crowd of a busy system, making steady progress towards the wormhole.
Holy shit, I said. I took another peek at the account numbers, just to check they were real. They really were boggling. It worked.
Of course it worked, said ART. Humans shouldn't do their own fucking security.
***
"Well? How was your first vacation?"
It was three cycles later, and I was lounging in my bunk. We were in the wormhole, en route back to Mihira. I was back to looking like myself, wearing the comfy clothes I liked, and ART and I were watching a new show, which it had downloaded from the casino station's entertainment feed while I'd been doing our heist.
Very illuminating, said ART immediately.
"Okay, that's not ominous at all. Also, that's not the kind of thing you're supposed to say about your vacation."
What am I supposed to say, then?
"I don't fucking know, that it was fun or whatever?"
Oh yes, it was a lovely change of scenery, absolutely unblighted with cheap monuments made to the greed of corporations.
"Oh, fuck off," I said, without heat. "You're the one who wanted to go in the first place."
We sat there for a moment in companionable silence, ART curling around me in the feed. I could feel its activity picking up, calculating something.
I was lucky, it said suddenly.
"Well, yeah. What were the fucking odds of the cards lining up like that? I know you calculated them. You really didn't do anything?"
Not that, it said. Then, at the look I shot its camera, Not just that.
Oh.
I raised a hand to press against the bulkhead, right where ART's blue stripe ran across it. It was cool beneath my fingers, and very smooth. There was that warm, melty feeling rising up in my chest, and I suddenly had to bury my face in my hands.
"Well, you know – you were right. I was lucky, too."