The Last Firewall (10 page)

Outside, she used her implant to get a list of jewelry stores, filtering them by size and price range. She needed something moderately large, so there’d be more than one cashier. And it couldn’t be a boutique, because she needed them to have duplicate pieces for her replay hack to work.

When her filtering provided a list of fourteen jewelry stores, she chose one at random, using a net service to pick a number. She had to avoid even an unconscious pattern that might be anticipated by an AI.

Thirty minutes and a short bus ride later, she found herself in the jewelry district. In the back of her mind she juggled nearby security cameras, replaying previously captured snippets of footage as she passed into view, so there’d be no record of her.

She found the target store, a place called InterGems. White porcelain walls trimmed by stainless steel surrounded a set of double doors manned by a security bot just inside. Cat walked by once to glance over the interior. Through the window she saw three jewelers behind a U shaped counter that ran along the walls. Then she was past the store, and that was all she’d get.

She walked into a coffee shop on the next block and waited so she wouldn’t trigger the security bot’s suspicion. Her stomach flipped at the smell of coffee and pastries. She checked her pockets for money, even though it was a pointless exercise. It’d been thirty hours since she ate. Her mouth watered as a lemon scone floated by in front of her, carried by a fat woman who gave her a dirty look for eyeing her food. Cat ignored her and focused instead on the timer in the corner of her vision. When it hit nine minutes and ten seconds, she went back outside in the direction of InterGems.

At the entrance, she took a deep breath and turned in. She gripped the right hand door, remembering just in time to null out the fingerprint scanner. She stepped into the hushed interior, air smelling faintly of lavender. The robot guard stood just inside, a basic semi-humanoid bot, six feet tall. Its body was draped in porcelain white and stainless panels, obviously to match the storefront. The waist high glass counter top she’d noticed before ran around the perimeter of the store, while two square display cases filled in the middle. Cat took all this in as she nodded to the robot.

Three clerks stood behind the counter, two of them already busy. One customer was a mid-forties man shopping for what seemed to be women’s earrings, and the other, a woman trying on a necklace. The remaining cashier, an older Asian woman, maybe Vietnamese, approached. “How can I help?”

But Cat was suddenly distracted from answering by a huge chunk of data coming through the net. The hairs rose on the back of her neck and she felt time slow down. She started turning toward the security bot. She traced the data, tinged blue, back to its source, a feed for police bulletins. She continued swiveling toward the robot, which was absorbing the last of the data. Her right foot started moving toward the door, an infinite slowness compared to the speed of light movement of bits across the net. She felt a subtle distortion in cyberspace as the bot spun up more processing cores, pattern matching the police bulletins. There was only one reason for the sudden activity: her.

Her meatspace body, moving like molasses, continued its instinctive fight or flight response to the impending threat, still taking that first step toward the door. The bot hadn’t moved yet. Cat reached out into the net and cut off all the data streams to and from the robot. She felt it retry the connections dozens of times, but she squelched the attempts. The bot probed her implant, looking for her ID. She kept it masked, and probed the bot in return.

The security bot had three wireless connections. Cat found one of the probing links, and shoved random data down it, the first thing she could think to do. Her right foot came down, and her left foot started its involuntary trajectory toward the door. Her body wanted out of this space, but her mind knew there was no time. The robot tried to disconnect from the incoming data, but Cat forced the connection to stay open. She sent more data, pulling dozens, then hundreds of random other streams out of the net, and forcing them all down the pipe to the bot. It felt like forever, but less than a second of clock-time passed, and then suddenly the robot was dead. The connections faltered and dropped. She’d hit a buffer overrun and destroyed the bot’s main memory.

She found herself standing three steps from the counter. Her eyes slowly focused on the Vietnamese woman standing in front of her. “What do you want to see, please?” she asked.

Cat glanced at the bot. It hadn’t moved. In net space she could see that the bot was dead, but here in meatspace, it just looked like it had all along, a motionless sentry. Cat figured she had until the next patron entered the store. The employees would notice if the bot didn’t greet a customer. “I’d like to look at the necklaces please,” she said to the still waiting woman. In the back of her mind, Cat realized she just killed an AI. She hoped it was backed up, but didn’t have the time to think about it.

The clerk led her across the store with a gesture and polite words that Cat didn’t hear. Her heart was beating fast, the adrenaline rush coming on now, too late to be of any help in an encounter with AI.

The other woman customer had just picked something out, and a young male clerk was putting her necklace into a box. Damn, she’d missed what the woman picked. That was the whole point of this exercise. She pointed to a few necklaces, while she figured out what to do. The shopper paid for her purchase, and Cat, on impulse, captured and buffered the transaction.

“These are very beautiful,” the Vietnamese woman was saying, as she laid the necklaces out on a velvet display board. Cat feigned interest, and watched as the customer left.

“To be honest,” Cat said, leaning in closer. “I really wanted what she purchased. Do you have another?”

The woman raised her eyebrows. “Everything we do is custom, and that was a unique piece. Why don’t we look at one of these.” She bent down to show several necklaces. “See here, this is a blue diamond, very unusual.”

Cat raised her voice in a petulant whine. “But I really wanted that necklace. Not one of these.”

The woman met her gaze with a stony face for a few seconds, then sighed. “I may have one similar.” She turned and went through a white door in the rear wall. Cat felt her unlock it with a command, but she was concentrating too hard on the other customer’s buffered payment transaction to pay close attention. The data was huge and heavily encrypted. It felt like trying to remember an encyclopedia, just holding it in her head. A few seconds later, the jeweler came out holding a black box.

“I’ll take it,” Cat said, before the woman even had a chance to open it.

“But don’t you want-”

“Look, I am late for my hair appointment. Just let me pay for it.” Cat tried to compose her face in a semblance of haughtiness, with no idea if she was succeeding. She had to get out of here before she dropped packets or someone noticed the robot was dead.

The woman frowned. “Fine, come with me.”

They walked toward the payment console in the mid-point of the long counter, the jeweler on one side, Cat on the other. Cat felt her temples beginning to pound, and a sheen of sweat broke out on her face from the effort of concentrating on the long data stream. The woman started the process of wrapping the box. “Please pay,” she said, as she initiated the transaction on the console.

Cat felt for the time signal, and interrupted it, substituting her own false time data. The payment console probed her ID, and Cat faltered. In the convenience stores she’d robbed, there had never been an ID exchange, just the payment data. She had to think of something quick. Cat reached out into the street, looking for a person with an open implant. The payment console was pinging her again. She grabbed an ID off someone on the sidewalk, realized it was a man, and then reached again, getting a female one. She provided the credentials to the console, just before the request timed out again.

Then the machine requested payment. This part was easier. Cat made micro-adjustments to the time signal, getting it to align perfectly, and replayed the buffered transaction. The console accepted the payment, and Cat allowed herself to take a breath. The jeweler held out a white bag that rippled like liquid porcelain. Suddenly her eyes went big. “But you have paid too much,” she said with alarm.

“That’s a tip for you,” Cat said and grabbed the bag out of the woman’s hand. “Thank you.” She sailed out of the door just as a man came in. He moved sideways to hold the door open for her, and bumped into the security bot. “Thanks,” Cat said. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the dead security bot begin to tumble over, crashing into the ground with an impossibly loud thud that shook the store windows. She forced herself to keep going at a steady pace and not look back, even as a commotion started to break out behind her.

Two avenues over she hopped on a street car, took it fifteen blocks, then walked down an alley and grabbed the next bike cab she saw. She had the biker drop her off two blocks from the subway, and took it to the stop nearest her hotel. She was dying to look in the bag, but she’d wait until she got inside her room. Walking the last block, she was suddenly conscious of the rippling liquid porcelain bag: it screamed money. She turned sideways into a space between a Chinese laundry and a ramen noodle joint. She found a cheap plastic bag in a dumpster, and exchanged it for the expensive one. She threw the jewelry store bag into a pile of yesterday’s noodles. She paused, salivating from the smell. God, she was hungry. She wasn’t above eating from a dumpster if she had to, but preferably not food that had been sitting out all night, probably already visited by rats. She turned her back on the noodles and continued on to her building.

Inside her room, she ripped the box out of the bag. She sat on the bed and carefully pried the black polycarb box open.

“Holy shit,” she said out loud. “Oh my God!” She pulled the necklace out of its velvet backing. It lay heavy against her hand, a solid rope of maybe thirty diamonds held together with white gold or platinum. She had no idea what it was worth, but she was pretty sure she wouldn’t be dumpster diving ever again.

She fell into the bed, cradling the necklace and laughing in relief.

16

“I
T
’
S TIME TO CALL THE BOSS
,”
Slim said.

Tony looked up from where he sat on the bed, the backlight from the video game he cradled in his hands turning his face blue. “You do it. I don’t like talking to him.”

“That’s not the protocol. We call him together or he’s gonna suspect something, and then he might decide he doesn’t need either one of us.”

Tony sighed and put the game in his pocket. “I’m not doing that again, I will not kill a bunch of people like that.” Tony felt bile rise up at the thought of what they’d done. One goddamn hit and run when he was eighteen, and look what his life had turned into. Everything could have been different.

Slim walked up to Tony and stood in his face. “That’s what we do. We kill people for Adam, and he protects us and pays us. Or do you want to go back peddling heroin and motorcycle parts and living off our bikes?” Slim smoothed his dress shirt and suit jacket. “Look, we’re respectable now.”

Tony stood up, his six-foot-four-inch frame towering over Slim. “I was OK with the memory extractions.” He rubbed his forehead. “But that thing with the enforcement team, that was wrong.”

Slim glanced at his handheld computer. “Look, we’re going to miss the window in the firewall.” He jabbed at the computer with scarred fingers. The screen flashed “Initiating Connection,” and Slim lay the computer down on the dresser where it could see them both.

The pocket computer scanned them, saw they didn’t have implants, and projected a virtual screen onto the wall. An image of a blocky ivory-colored battle bot appeared, fluid metal rippling smoothly over its joints.

“Report,” the robot said.

Tony scooted sideways on the bed until Slim was closer to the camera. Slim look at Tony with disgust, then turned to the screen. “We found the enforcement team. They were exactly where you said they’d be.”

“And?” The robot’s face rippled and looked hungry.

“We used the emitter and knocked them all out, right in the hotel. But the memory extraction didn’t work. They must’ve had encrypted implants. We killed some and let the rest watch, still nothing. So we tortured the last few, including Sonja, but none of them said a thing.” Slim shook his head. “There was something about those people.”

Adam rippled on the screen, making Tony nervous. It was obvious he was disappointed. “Never mind them. I have a different project for you.”

Tony relaxed just a bit. Adam wasn’t going to kill them.

“There’s someone in Los Angeles I want you to find, a girl named Catherine Matthews.” Adam displayed a photo. “She’s doing something to the net, manipulating it in ways I don’t understand.”

“Where does she live?” Slim asked.

“Unknown. She’s the primary subject of a police investigation into three murders. She left Portland twenty-four days ago, spent two weeks in San Francisco, and is now in LA.”

“What do we do when we find her?”

“Call me for backup. I’ll send a team to extract her.”

“She’s just a girl, boss. We can take her.”

Adam switched to another photograph, this one of four people. Slim looked closer. Three were being zipped into body bags, and the last had a broken leg. “OK, she’s dangerous, but we can handle dangerous. We just took care of that enforcement team, right?”

Adam reappeared and glared at Slim, liquid metal flowing around his face in terrible ways. “You will notify me. Do not attempt to capture the girl on your own, and whatever you do, don’t use the memory extraction machine on her. I am leaving a port open for you around the clock in the firewall. Find her, call me, and the extraction team will be there in an hour.”

Slim nodded. “Yeah, boss. You got it.” The call terminated. Slim picked up the handheld, which displayed a photo of Cat, and they looked together at the slight girl with short blonde hair. He flipped through other photos from her social profile. “See, this is a better assignment.”