Present Tense

"What's the matter?" asked an enormous man without a trace of humour in his voice after he casually pushed open the electronically coded entrance to the suite on the penthouse floor of Jiong's carefully selected hotel, known for it's discretion and attention to matters of security. "Haven't you ever been intimidated by a man in a suit before?"

Jiong Hon Peng carefully studied the man who nearly filled the hotel room door he now occupied, watched him mentally turn his attention to a bluetooth headset, nod, then tap it off, the entire time never taking his eyes from Jiong's. The man was wearing an impeccable dark suit which seemed to absorb all the light which fell on it as he stepped smoothly into the room and shut the door behind him.

Jiong was scared, but that wasn't unusual in his line of work.

"Sure", he said "plenty of times, but they usually had guns."

The man in the light swallowing suit unbuttoned his jacket with his left hand which covered the deft removal of a silenced pistol from within by his right. "Like this?" he asked.

Jiong stared. The man could have been a magician. Jiong wondered what other tricks he might know.

"I have the network here", Jiong sputtered, "It works as advertised. You take it back with you and I can get paid, we all go home happy."

Jiong was a thief of very specialized data; groomed, trained, lab grown data. Jiong specialized in stealing weighted directed graphs, statistical correlation engines, software grown probabilistic models. Such things were the work of programmers who designed software which could absorb massive amounts of domain specific data and work out which elements could be used as accurate predictors of future uncategorized values. They were algorithms too complex to be accurately programmed by hand, so instead computer scientists teased out delicate code which could grow its own solutions to very specific problems.

Such problems tended to have very profitable solutions.

Jiong wasn't much of a programmer. He could hack together what he needed when he needed it, but he was no computer scientist and he knew that. He would never design an earth shattering compression algorithm, or revolutionize multithreaded software with a sublime concurrent processing system. What Jiong was though, was a great reverse engineer.

His parents had sent him away from his home town of Suzhou in South East China to Poland for school, the best foreign school they could afford which they had worked tirelessly for years to pay for. While he was there during the day he had barely obtained an undergraduate degree in computer science, but nearly three years of his evenings consisted of full time study with two of the best reverse engineers in the world, friends he'd made his third week in. Jiong wasn't sure what else Poland was renowned for, but he was certain software reversers were near the top of that list.

After he'd returned home with his razor edged reversing skills some local students at a hacking den had recruited him to teach what he'd learned and he'd gone along. If Poland had been his undergraduate studies, the den back home was Jiong's masters degree. It was there he'd learned to weaponize the bugs he found while ripping apart the programs that ran half the worlds computers. He learned exploit development, the techniques of putting carefully sharpened ends on his outgoing network connections which would fit just-so into the holes his reversing had shown him, giving him the tiniest bit of purchase in a remote system. Tiny, but more than enough.

One day his brother in law, a small time day trader had learned of the rise of "quants"; cowboy software engineers who trained sophisticated stock trading systems feeding them decades of stock data and real time news feeds then and then letting them loose on the markets with huge amounts of capital to trade with as they saw fit, often to the tune of tremendous profit. It sounded too easy, and his brother in law wanted in.

Jiong realized it was the perfect digital commodity to steal. No one would notice anything was missing, because his brother in law would never share it the way Jiong had to share stolen credit card numbers or proprietary software in order to turn a profit. He could steal it once then sell it as many times as he liked and no one would be the wiser, so steal it he did.

In the years that followed Jiong had stolen dozens of other software grown intelligent systems. He'd nicked and sold email analysis systems that could establish which employees were about to quit, or were fucking coworkers, or were about to fuck the company itself into bankruptcy. He cracked the University of Alberta to steal their world champion poker playing engine for some Brazilian bot herders who had jacked who knows how many online poker accounts and used them to grind out winnings from clueless players trying feebly to fight back using only neurons and caffeine. Most recently he had gotten his hands on an FBI research project designed to predict criminal activity which had been tested with great success in a half dozen major US cities.

The man in the suit cut from velvet shadows smiled sympathetically at Jiong. "You misunderstand; my employers and yours are not the same people."

He was right, Jiong didn't understand. "What do you want then?"

"The organization which hired you to deliver what you have obtained for them has been at war with my employers for many years. With the tools you will sell them they will have advantages over us, too many advantages." He nodded as though Jiong ought to understand.

Jiong had never used the software he stole, other than to verify its functionality. The safer profits were in the sales. He began to wonder what this crime prediction engine would have told him about his own probabilities if he'd had the inclination to feed the data about this deal into it.

The man in the suit swung his arm upward, squeezed the trigger twice, and continued the motion across his chest, vanishing the gun in the same too slippery way he had produced it. As Jiong looked down at himself to discover the wetness he felt wasn't his bladder giving way he realized he'd never have a chance to find out. He fell forward, his eyes locked on the magician who had turned his back to him. The man in the suit slid out the door like a fleeting dream, and the coded door lock flicked from harsh red to gentle green as it shut, letting the world and the hotel security systems know that nothing here was amiss. No statistical anomalies required attention inside.