It had been two weeks since Lana Wilson had set up her subspace tweeter relay in the closet of her proxy home. During that time it had acted as a conduit for over ten exabytes of data: ten billion gigabytes. The AIs were using a complex virtual routing system to throw off the local cable company’s data monitoring systems and hide the amount of their bandwidth that was being taken up by a single location. It could not, unfortunately, reduce the effect this was having on the surrounding area’s cable signals and the slight but rising number of complaints the company was inevitably going to receive, but it would make it nearly impossible for the company to trace the source of the problem, if the small, local provider was even proactive enough to seek it out at all.

As the information poured into the four supercomputers’ memory banks it was sorted and dated in a complex relational database. Without politics or complaint, the four satellites dotted around the globe divided up the data and began wading through it.

For now, they had the time, capacity and patience to analyze all the data they could get, so they had yet to refine a set of criteria that would limit the search. At this stage they did not leave any stone unturned. Starting with e-mails, they began reading every message sent by every user of all of the major e-mail providers. Literally trillions of messages were sorted, read, and categorized, key pieces of information they contained tracked, logged and cross-referenced in a separate section of the database.

Addresses, bank statements, names, dates, meeting times; everything. When you have onboard memory equivalent to nearly half the combined capacity of every computer on earth, you can afford to start by storing everything you find, and worry about cleaning out the raw material once you have already gleaned any useful information from it.

Pictures were analyzed using complex facial recognition software, the computer determining with surprising accuracy the people in each photo by cross-referencing the e-mails of the sender and receiver over time, categorizing and noting relationships, lovers, family members, office flings, potential pregnancies, potential divorces. As the advanced artificial minds began to gain more understanding of their subjects and their cultures, they became capable of identifying compromising photos and situations, which were flagged for potential use later.

More private material and blackmail fodder was gathered in the two weeks after the connection was placed than by every secret service in human history combined. Admittedly, people worth blackmailing were far less likely to have bank details or naked pictures of their mistresses on their gmail account, but few people were completely infallible when it came to their electronic communications.