A procurement system nobody thought could lie has started approving transactions that never happened. The evidence points at the man who built it. He has eight weeks to prove it wasn't him — before the board, the board of AeroFly, decides it was.
THE STORY
Paris, April 2027. Christian Kerner, Chief Procurement Officer of the AeroFly Group, is called before the Board to answer for eleven transactions his own AI approved — transactions the biometric log says he authorised in person, at a time he can prove he was somewhere else.
The system is AURORA: the AI Christian spent three years building with his oldest friend, Dr. Daniel Reid, to remove human bias from procurement decisions. It has never been wrong. Now it is either lying, or being lied to — and the eleven-strong Board of one of the world's largest aerospace firms has given Christian eight weeks to find out which, in front of the shareholders he answers to.
What starts as a forensic audit of deepfaked voice authentication becomes a hunt through shell ownership structures, stolen intellectual property and a body on a marble floor in Kraków — and draws in a New York Times journalist who has spent twenty-two years learning what people who control things look like when they're lying.
THE STAKES
Enough to become curious. No more than that.
Twenty-one years at AeroFly. The man who built AURORA to remove human error from procurement — now the man the evidence says broke it. Eight weeks to prove otherwise.
Christian's Oxford friend and the architect of AURORA. A man who trusts data over people, right up until the data itself becomes the question.
Twenty-two years interviewing people who control things — money, armies, information, narrative. She has never sat across from a machine before.
Before you buy the book, enter the world of Henry Grant.
Kraków, Poland — May 6th, 2027
The sudden thud startled the accountant. Not because it was loud — it was not — but because her brain could not compute that such a noise was anywhere near normal at 7:15am in the office. Yet that initial sound was positively banal compared to what followed five seconds later. The screams were horrific precisely because they were not random or animalistic. Undeniably female, they wailed almost mechanically in a series of five loud, repeated shrieks of distress. They resonated from the cavernous atrium and pervaded every corner of the building.
The commotion came as the accountant was finalizing her presentation. She had come in earlier than usual to AGSS — AeroFly Group Shared Services — and despite the fact that nobody else was around, she had decided to ensconce herself in one of the 'Focus Work Pods', a glass enclosed room with precisely one desk and one chair. They were designed for the type of pure concentration that the task of running through numbers one last time demanded. Nevertheless, she had left the door open; the stuffy air-conditioning in the open space was slightly more refreshing than the stuffy air-conditioning in the glass box.
With her curiosity piqued, she abandoned the Q3 forecast and rushed through the open office, passing the rows of still empty desks and cubicles. She arrived at the wide corridor that skirted in an arc around the interior of the building and that looked onto the immense glass-fronted atrium. From her third-floor vantage point she immediately saw the security guard below, radio transmitter in hand, running from the turnstiles toward the center of the space as fast as his under-exercised legs would carry him.
Arriving at the balustrade, now with a full view of the lobby, her eyes pre-empted the guard's path and settled upon the scene. Two women, both of whom the accountant vaguely recognized, were hugging each other tightly. One of them, the smaller of the two who was dressed in jeans and a faux leather jacket, had evidently been the source of the screams. Even at the distance of the third floor the hyperventilation through the uncontrollable sobbing was clearly visible.
Then a millisecond later she saw it. The body.
Eight minutes later the police arrived, shepherded in by the security guard. Two minutes after that an ambulance appeared along with a second police Skoda. Yellow plastic cordons were stretched around the pillars that skirted the atrium, a female officer took the still-hugging witnesses into a meeting room, and before long a tented structure was placed over the corpse.
Clearly it was going to be a Tuesday that everyone at AGSS would not forget anytime soon. That presentation to Paris would have to wait. The young accountant was interviewed — twice — as was everyone else who found themselves in the building when the 'incident', as it was to be known henceforth, occurred.
Later that morning, the stoic young accountant decided the best option was to immerse herself completely in her work, and she returned to her desk. Meanwhile, the security guard completed the three hours additional overtime that he would declare thanks to the police enquiries. He was preparing to leave AGSS when he received the message on his phone. He read it discreetly:
'B214 860704'
He changed out of his uniform, slipped past the police vehicles and entered the rear of the waiting taxi. Upon his arrival at Kraków Główny railway station he navigated his way past the throngs of commuters, backpackers and tourists. He descended into the underground ticketing hall to locate the rows of luggage lockers. He then found B214 and took a moment to cautiously look around.
A young couple finished loading an adjacent locker a few meters away and then left, arm in arm. He entered the code. 860704. There was a click. The door sprang open. The guard removed the small, but reassuringly heavy, backpack. Without checking its contents, he slung it over his shoulder and then disappeared into the crowd.
Part I: Deepfake
Paris, France — April 23rd, 2027
Christian Kerner sat in the corridor, alone. There were six Louis XIV chairs that were lined up in a row against the outer wall of the Boardroom, and he was perched on the left-most one, resembling a disgraced schoolboy summoned to the principals' study. The seventh floor, the floor where Christian was now grudgingly undergoing the test of his patience, represented the apex of the vast AeroFly Group.
He had never yearned for those trappings of power that gave anonymity and protection. Christian was a man who insisted on getting his own coffee. Most days he used the RER to commute to the office rather than using the chauffeur-driven S-Class that came with the job. But here, in the open hallway of the Hausmannian headquarters of AeroFly S.A.S., Christian felt uncomfortably exposed.
Seeking reassurance, he looked down to the folio balanced on his knees. It contained all the necessary elements; data logs, the independent — albeit preliminary — reports confirming the deepfakes, the proof that he could not have approved that invoice at the date and time the system said it did.
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