KINDRED - Transmission 08
The lines are drawn.
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“Got your report, lads—good work. Wish I could say the same about the news you’ve given me.”
Mike Reynolds’ voice was a shrill buzz from Nik’s smartphone, laying face up on the table between him and Tim. Nik squinted at his laptop screen—his finger sliding, scrolling through an open document.
“I mean, frankly, I’m surprised and… disappointed. I thought we’d built a close relationship with the Campfyre execs. There’s no bloody way Trent can pretend he doesn’t know they’ve been flogging their assets off all over the place.”
A pause from the other end. Tim opened his mouth, but stopped himself before saying anything.
Three seconds passed, then Mike sighed.
“I’m sure you both know this means that we’re not going to be sticking around here much longer. But who knows, maybe we can drag something out of this mess. Now, what was it you wanted my help with?”
Mike’s tone was direct, clipped. Nik’s boss was in the London headquarters of their consulting firm Fleurus that morning. No doubt managing fallout over the failure of the project and trying to save his reputation.
Nik hovered over the phone and glanced at Tim, who nodded.
“Uh, yes. In the report you saw the project Kindred—we highlighted it as being… out of the ordinary.”
“Got it. What’s this one about, then?”
“Well, that’s the problem, Mike—we can’t find anything in the usual places. The documents and paperwork seem to have gone, uh, missing—or maybe they never existed?”
Nik leaned close to the phone.
“But, what we have found leads somehow to the top—to Alan Maddox. Can I get your help in organising a meeting with him to discuss this?”
Mike cleared his throat, a distorted burst of static, then paused. They waited. Mike’s voice was slower, deliberate.
“Ahh, yeah. Alan Maddox. Listen, that—might not be so easy right now.”
Another pause and a hastily drawn breath. Mike continued in a near-whisper.
“Look, I had a call earlier from an Inspector with the Hampshire Police. So, Alan Maddox went missing late last week—Friday. The police tell me they’ve found his body in his wrecked car and they’re investigating further. They think it was—what did that copper call it? Funny business.”
Tim bent closer to the phone’s speaker, then glanced up at Nik, his mouth forming a silent word.
“What?”
Nik raised his eyebrows and shook his head.
“Right, I see. I’m… not sure where we can go from here, then...”
“Look, mate, I think it’s best not to get too close to this one.”
Mike’s voice was stronger again, but distracted, distant. Nik let a few moments pass.
“Well—I, guess I could go and talk to Preston Miller, the chief engineer. He might know something—”
“Sure buddy—you do what you think is right. Oh, and Tim?”
“Yes, Mike?”
“I got your email as well, about the analysis—thanks for that one, it’s all a bit, uh… clearer now.”
Nik shot a look at Tim who smiled back.
What the hell did that mean?
“Alright Mike, is there anything else you wanted from—”
He was cut off by a renewed blast from the smartphone’s little speaker.
“Hey, look lads, I’ve got this—urgent meeting now. I know I can trust you guys to do the right thing.”
The line went dead. Mike’s curt manner was one thing, but the menace in his last words?
Nik looked at Tim.
“What the hell do you think he meant by that—do the right thing?”
“I don’t know mate, sounds like he was reassured by my email is all. Look, no use in stressing; we’ll have to get on with this…”
Tim trailed off. Nik regarded his colleague a moment.
“Tim, which—email was he talking about?”
Tim turned to face him.
“I did that analysis, Nik—your work from a few months ago. Frankly, it was… messy.”
“See Tim? It was obviously stacked… percentages vs absolutes right?”
Tim looked at his hands, folded in his lap.
“I don’t, know. I mean, what I saw; it wasn’t great, Nik… a bit—sloppy…”
He looked back up at Nik.
“I—I gave him the green light, though, Nik. It’s done. Sorted.”
Nik looked at his friend, his heart beat in his ears.
“You… didn’t have to—”
But of course he did. Tim had no other real choice. There was too much at stake. Either Nik was under the bus—unjustly—or Tim compromised himself.
Still, the choice mustn’t have been easy.
Nik lifted his hand to his friend’s shoulder. Tim cleared his throat. A half smile.
“You won’t be hearing any more about that one mate.”
Fuck.
But… wait.
Tim was wrong. They were both implicated now. Without evidence, something more concrete—they were both screwed. He nodded at Tim. His friend turned back to his laptop.
So… The project, KINDRED—that was the next breadcrumb here. But, something in Mike’s tone, his words. Did Mike want them to investigate further, or to stay away?
Nik closed his laptop lid with a snap.
His brow furrowed. No more Alan Maddox… and, suspicious circumstances? There was no way back for the business now. But for a project as big as KINDRED—he must have had collaborators.
Preston.
Preston was the type to have his hand in every pie. He was sure to be involved somehow.
Nik exchanged glances once again with Tim, straightened up, and reached for his laptop and phone. He turned to walk away—but stopped mid step when he heard Tim’s uncertain voice.
“Yeah… you know, Mike—I think he’s just a bit stressed about what’s going on. I mean, he must be under a huge amount of pressure in London.”
Nik turned, his eyebrow creased.
Tim was looking towards him. No, through him. Eyes glassy, mouth crooked. Nik furrowed his brow. Three seconds passed.
Tim blinked, locked eyes with Nik and smiled.
“Look, you should go have that chat with Preston—I’ll finish up here.”
He turned back to his laptop. Nik released a breath he didn’t realise he’d been holding.
“Sure, mate… Yeah—No problems. See ya later.”
Nik left Tim, who dove back into the financials, and strode off.
He headed towards the high-security isolated section of the Innovation Centre, the Test Fire Chamber. Built for the technical development team’s most ambitious—and potentially dangerous—projects. Nothing gets in. Nothing gets out.
Nik crossed a conspicuous yellow and black warning stripe on the floor, and presented his ID tag to the lone security guard at the entrance to the facility.
The guard scrutinised it, then pointed to a sign to his left.
No Electronic Devices of Any Kind.
“I’ll need your laptop and mobile phone.”
Nik handed them over with an ironic smile, then stepped into a narrow hallway.
No electric or electronic signals in or out. And an onsite, closed-circuit power generator, for when the digital shit really hit the fan.
The bluish LED lighting was dim. His slow, careful footsteps were accompanied only by the low, constant whirring of cooling fans. Ranks of glass-fronted server cabinets slotted behind open doors lined the corridor.
Nik was isolated, alone.
He passed through a large steel door and found Preston in his usual spot off to the right of the NASA-like control room. He sat behind the last rank of desks, facing a huge five-metre long screen at the front.
The chief engineer scrutinised his own, smaller screen. An over white glint from his perched glasses.
Nik made a noisy approach. The tall, portly man didn’t budge.
Nik cleared his throat and bent down, placing his hands flat on the desk next to the engineer.
“Preston?”
He received more of a hiss than a reply.
“Yes?”
“Could I—have a bit of your time?”
An exaggerated sigh.
“Depends… Nik, wasn’t it? How much of my time do you need?”
Nik lifted his left eyebrow, and reached for another office chair. He wheeled it over, then sat himself at a comfortable distance.
“It’s about Alan Maddox, and the work he was doing on a project called KINDRED.”
Preston straightened in his chair, his jaw tightened.
“KINDRED. That’s… What the hell do you know about it?”
Preston leaned towards Nik, his eyes narrowed.
“Look, I—I don’t know anything about it at all. But—the… Executive Leadership Team has asked us to look into it. So, perhaps we can start from the beginning?”
Nik followed with an innocent smile. Preston lifted his eyes to the ceiling an instant. Then fell back into his chair and crossed his arms.
“Well, I heard about Alan. It’s a damn shame, that—he was a smart—and, and a good man.”
Preston faced his computer screen again.
“Look, I—lost track of all that some time ago. I warned him, Alan—that he should stop. Reconsider what he… But from what I hear he was throwing himself more and more into the project over the last few months.”
Nik slipped a small notepad onto the desk beside him and leafed through the pages.
“You mean KINDRED?”
Preston clicked on something on his screen. A blue progress bar appeared.
“Yeah. You see, Alan isn’t—wasn’t—like any of the other guys at the top. He had a conscience. He actually cared about the risks for society, what all this means for humanity. Unlike—Trent Robinson, who’s only in it for the money.”
Preston’s tone ended bitter. The Campfyre CEO’s name pronounced through bared teeth.
Trent again.
The man wasn’t short on enemies.
“I, uh—think you’d better save that stuff for the police, Preston. I only wanted to find out a bit about the project itself.”
Preston slouched back in his chair, and straightened his glasses with his free left hand, his eyes glued to his screen.
“Right, sure. So, you’re familiar with the state of modern AI technology, right? Neural networks with multiple trillion parameters, and the Transformer architecture?”
Nik grimaced.
He called it his domain, but Preston was deep tech—he’d risk being out of his depth. His consultant instinct kicked in. Play dumb—get Preston to talk.
“Consider me a… newcomer to the field.”
Preston narrowed his eyes. The progress bar on his screen reached the end, a notification flashed up.
File Deleted.
Preston was silent as he shifted the mouse around on his desk, then clicked again. A new progress bar appeared.
“Ah, forget it. I knew it would be a waste of time. Look, I have to get back to work—and I prefer to work alone.”
Preston grunted and tilted his head towards the exit.
Nik paused a moment, glanced at the steel door.
Not a chance.
Other than Preston, there was no one left at Campfyre who could shed some light on this. Besides, Preston wasn’t usually one for displaying emotion. He had something to do with this project.
And maybe the exculpatory evidence I need.
“Look, Preston, I’m sure I can catch on pretty quick. You want to give me a little refresher? And—you don’t want me to get my boss Mike involved, do you?”
Preston shut his eyes tight for a moment then turned to face Nik. He opened his mouth, but it was a few moments before he started speaking.
“Okay. Well, you’re familiar with the neural network part. We’ve got a vast set of individual data—fragments of words, images, numbers—that are connected together across a huge, complex network—like a web. This is what is called the model.”
Preston paused and kicked off a new file deletion. Then swivelled back to face Nik.
“At the start the model is useless—its responses just random noise. So, you train it across enormous quantities of data. Done right, this training infuses the model with a deep, flexible knowledge.”
Preston waited. Nik nodded.
“With you so far Preston. You train it, it learns how these fragments of words connect together. It can apply this knowledge to make new connections of its own.”
Another click; another file deleted.
“Yes, and as the scale of models increases, they start to show some… creativity—applying what they’ve learned in new, surprising, and—more complex ways.”
A sniff.
“If you squint a little, you could say a sort of intelligence emerges. Like most of the world, you’ve already seen this with Large Language Models.”
Nik tilted his head.
“Okay, but we’ve been using LLMs for years now, and Campfyre never invested—”
“What Alan was working on was completely different… No, well—I mean, architecturally it follows the same principles; it was still a neural network, it was trained using basically the same methods…”
A slow breath.
“But the difference was in the data. The training data.”
Preston paused, spread his arms and waved them around the room.
“Did you know that this building houses more than half of the computing power in the United Kingdom? What’s it for?”
“I don’t know—”
“For advertising to the users of Campfyre, Nik… to sell them stuff—to make them consume.”
Preston paused, leaning closer to Nik.
Right. The compute budget. That’s where it was going before KINDRED.
“And what feeds this advertising machine?”
Nik raised his eyebrows.
“Data?”
“Data, Nik—exactly. Billions upon billions of interactions, clicks, likes, posts and photos. The largest, most detailed, and most diverse collection of data about people and their behaviour ever compiled… From the nearly three and a half billion unique accounts that have been created on Campfyre.”
Preston’s head sunk lower. He stared at his keyboard.
“It was—Alan. He had the idea. He wanted Campfyre to be more. To truly bring people together. Not only—advertising algorithms. Alan wanted to know them intimately—so they could know each other intimately.”
A couple of seconds passed.
Nik ended the silence.
“I mean… it all sounds a bit like our friends in the NSA, you know, the US National Security Agency—watching our every move… Only I’m sure they have the means to go beyond—”
“Do you think we were playing here, Nik?”
Preston slid lower, folding his arms.
“Compared to us, those spooks are amateurs—looking for microscopic needles in mountain-sized haystacks. If you’re going to insult me, I don’t see any point in continuing.”
“Sorry, Preston. I didn’t mean to offend you. I’m just saying that surely it’s illegal to process people’s personal data in such a way? Certainly here in Europe?”
Preston paused a moment, then continued: “Yes, certainly—at least for the vast amount of private data that we store for our users.”
He glided minutely closer to Nik.
“But this is where the genius comes in.”
Preston’s greasy ponytail whipped around as he turned to focus on the computer screen in front of him, his hand reaching for his computer’s mouse.
“The data we compiled didn’t fall into this legal trap because it wasn’t considered personal data at all—but… that didn’t make it any less useful. In fact, we discovered that true personal data would only be valuable for a very limited purpose.”
He clicked, opening up a data sheet.
“For example, someone’s address can tell you where they live—but, in the end, when you have everyone’s address, what does that really tell you about them? Who’s rich and who’s poor—what does that matter? To go where we were going, we needed data on more important things—deeper things.”
Preston’s screen scrolled down through the data sheet. Nik spied record after record of simple dates and times. There were many hundreds of millions of entries.
“Here you can see records of dates and times that different users have logged into Campfyre. Nothing personal about that—indeed, this kind of data is collected with every tiny item of information sent over the internet, anyway.”
Another data sheet flashed up—a vast number of small lists of codes. Some repeated, most looked random.
“This one is the list of buttons and hyperlinks that the users clicked on while they were using Campfyre, and the time and order in which they did this. We collected this to keep an eye on the health of the network, and to work out how to make improvements. All websites do this, of course.”
Preston turned back toward Nik.
“This was it, Nik. The perfect neural net training data. Varied. Vast. High quality. And we owned it all.”
The engineer trailed off. He brought his hand up to his chin.
“We… didn’t know what was going to come out of it. It was all a bit abstract—an experiment, nothing more. But we did one full training round; then another. We tested. Then we tuned to reinforce certain, um… behaviours.”
Preston moved closer again, and drew a slow breath.
“I started to see things in there Nik… There were things emerging—only hints, really. I mean, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at—but it… made me uncomfortable—”
A heavy knock on the steel door behind them.
Nik swivelled around.
A medium-sized man in his fifties, all tweed jacket and ruddy country air. The man scanned the room, a lopsided smile spreading across his face.
“Good afternoon. Brian Webster, Inspector, Hampshire County Police.”
The Inspector strode into the room, and stood next to Nik and Preston, peering at the enormous screen at the front of the room.
“Captain Kirk didn’t need his command station any more, then?”
As Webster wheeled a chair over, Nik’s mouth dropped open. Mike’s tall, square frame now filled the doorway. Mike gestured for the young consultant to come over.
Nik stood, hesitated briefly, and strode toward his boss.
The Inspector, now sat at arms length from Preston, turned to Mike.
“Thanks again for helping me find my way here, Mr. Reynolds. As I said, there was no need to come all the way down from London.”
“Not a problem, Inspector—I’m… doing my bit for justice.”
Mike’s voice was forced charm. His own business mattered more. He again motioned to Nik to follow, directing his voice back into the room.
“He’ll be right back with you in a minute.”
Mike led Nik to one of the server rooms off to the side, closing the door firmly behind them.
“Okay, Nikky my boy, this is very important, right? As you know, Alan Maddox has been found dead. Suspicious circumstances.”
Nik nodded, and opened his mouth to speak. But held his tongue.
“So, the Inspector called me just after we spoke earlier, and asked me to help with the investigation… A damn messy business. But I’m… in a bind. I need your help.”
Mike pointed back toward the control room.
“This copper’s here to understand Alan’s recent movements. He’s clueless about what Campfyre is—or… was—and he has no technical background. He’s asked for someone who can translate—”
Mike made an air quote gesture.
“—the techno-babble into something he can understand. This is where you come in.”
Mike’s lowered his head. His nose twitched.
“But I want to be clear with you. You’ve got this afternoon with him, and then we clear out of here for good. You understand?”
“I’m not sure I do, entirely—”
Mike eyed the young consultant. His nostrils flared.
“I mean the project’s over—finished. Today. The rest of the team are packing up their desks as we speak. They’ve been given the afternoon off. Now, we still have the professional commitments I spoke about on Friday.”
Mike breathed in deeply. An inward sigh.
“When you’re in that room with the Inspector, you’re playing the role of translator—and that only. You’re not giving your opinion on anything or revealing any further information.”
Mike paused a moment—waiting for his words to sink in.
“Nik, we have contractual obligations to Campfyre, whatever their current state, and Trent’s legal team has been playing hardball with us over the last few days. Am I understood?”
Nik looked into Mike’s eyes. They were cold, steely. The server cooling fans whirred softly for several seconds.
This felt wrong.
“Just let me get this straight, Mike. Alan Maddox is dead… And I’m being instructed to honour some bullshit corporate pact of silence?”
He opened his arms wide. Raised his voice.
“What happened to you doing your little bit for justice?”
Mike face twitched. He grasped Nik’s forearm—not violently, but with a sense of purpose. His slender fingers tensed up in an iron grip as if acting on impulse.
“Nik. Let this be a warning. Don’t get in over your head… There are sharks in these waters.”
Mike was more than rattled. His eyes were no longer cold—they burned.
But there was nothing to be gained from arm wrestling his boss.
Nik sighed. Dropped his gaze.
“Understood, Mike. I’ll keep it simple.”
Mike’s smile flashed back, and he released Nik’s arm.
“Good, that’s my boy! Look, I’ve gotta run—I have to help get everything squared away in the main office. We’ll be at the Boar’s Head for a couple this evening. I’ll expect you there.”
Mike winked then left the room in haste. Nik stood still for three breaths, then started back towards the control room.
He paused at the steel door. Listened to the retreating footsteps of his boss. With a new project, that might be the last time the two met.
That would be best.
He pushed through the door and strode toward Preston and Webster.
The Inspector had a wry smile on his face—Preston’s head was drooped, his fists balled on his lap.
“Sorry, Mr. Miller, I think you’re going to have to explain that to me again. In plain English this time?”
Nik sighed and sat back down, his notebook at the ready.
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