Kill Decision(11)

The more he thought about it, the more it irritated him. He raised his cup again to Prakash and gave him an obnoxious wink, aiming a finger pistol at him in oily salesman fashion. “Who loves ya, guy? Eh? Who loves ya!”

Someone came up from behind and ruffled Prakash’s hair, laughing. Strickland took the opportunity to step away, heading outside for some air. He worked the room on the way out, and by the time he made it to one of the hallway doors, he could see the light on in one of the tiny, windowless offices that surrounded the lab cluster. There sat the childlike form of Nikolay Kasheyev, their visual processing expert, sitting at his desk.

Kasheyev had some sort of pituitary condition that gave him the appearance of a twelve-year-old, even though he was in his mid-twenties. He was often told he was a child prodigy, and every time people made that mistake, Strickland winced on his behalf. But the Russian seemed used to it.

He could see Kasheyev examining multiplexed video streams, tiled into squares on his screen. Strickland rapped his knuckles on the office doorframe. “Hey, Nik, why aren’t you joining the party, man?”

Kasheyev spoke without turning around. “The ravens are back.”

“What ravens?”

Kasheyev finally bothered to turn around. “You never listen to me, do you?”

Strickland was too busy wondering how much Kasheyev’s eyeglasses cost. It seemed that among the team members, only Strickland had come from humble circumstances. Everyone else seemed to have parents with money. No one else had had to work through their undergraduate years. At least not at menial jobs. It seemed like Kasheyev wasn’t even aware that they’d probably laid the groundwork for becoming wealthy men today. It was as though it barely mattered to him.

“Josh.”

“Ah. Of course I listen to you. I just don’t retain what you say.”

Kasheyev pointed to an array of six video images tiled on his screen—surveillance cameras that Strickland knew were being “watched” at all times by Raconteur algorithms. They’d had the system running more or less continually (in progressive versions) for almost two years, watching the public spaces all around the Gates building. Watching the comings and goings of students, automobiles, everything. That was part of the power of this system: persistent surveillance. Watching over time. Noticing patterns and changes to those patterns. Continuing to deduce meaning from what was seen, storing the symbolic representations, and sending alerts—in this case to Kasheyev’s iPhone—whenever anomalies were detected. Specific alerts could be created, and apparently Kasheyev had started fixating on these birds. It was the least of his eccentricities.

Kasheyev tapped at one of the images, where what appeared to be a black raven gazed at their offices from a tree branch. Clearly the video was running, because Strickland could see the leaves of the tree swaying in a slight breeze.

Strickland leaned in to examine the screen, and then examined the Raconteur log, highlighted for the entry. Raven perched in tree.

“Okay, Raconteur recognized a species of bird. We’re amazing.”

“That’s because it searched tagged Web images for comparisons—object identification is not really my point. It’s that there have never been ravens in these trees. And, look, there’s another raven here, up near the Packard Building to the south. . . .” He clicked around the screen and brought up a larger image of another raven perched on the parapet of the architecturally modern electrical engineering building across the street. He scrolled backward in time, and Strickland could see that as the sun rose and set, the twin, but lone, ravens returned day after day—but then one day, they weren’t there. “It started a week ago. And they’ve come back every day since.”

Strickland recognized that this was one of the problems inherent in working with brilliant people: They were half-mad. Fixations on details or finding links between disconnected phenomena was a mania with some of them. He patted Kasheyev on the shoulder. “There’s this thing called ‘migration,’ Nik.”

Kasheyev looked at Strickland like he was an idiot. “Ravens don’t migrate. Adult birds like this have a range that spans miles. They don’t stay in one spot unless they’re a mated pair with a nest. And I don’t see a nest.”

“Fascinating. These birds are way more interesting than our new research funding. I say we drop everything and—”

“Look . . .” Kasheyev zoomed in on one of the ravens sitting in the tree, and then up to one of its legs. There was some sort of tag or transponder on it.

Strickland shrugged. “Okay, someone’s doing research on ravens. This is a university.”