The Last Firewall (13 page)

“Go faster,” Mike said, his voice urgent.

Leon seized the wheel tighter and pushed the car to a hundred. The old Caddy seemed to drift over the road, its connection as tenuous as a cloud’s grip on the earth. The car in the mirror grew larger still. He pushed the convertible to one-o-five.

The lights of the car behind them were huge. If it were an autopilot driving, it would have changed lanes long ago.

“Slam on the brakes,” Mike yelled.

“They’ll crash into us!”

“Just do it.”

“We’ll die!” Leon screamed.

“Do it or I’ll come over there and do it.” Mike gripped the door with one hand, as his other hand struggled to get purchase on the leather seat.

Leon swore and slammed on the brakes. The tires howled as the car began to shudder. Leon looked up at the mirror, saw the other car impossibly large, then it pounded into them. The wheels continued their tortured scream as the Caddy slid into a spin, the other car hooked into their bumper. The steering wheel turned back and forth with no effect. He kept his foot mashed down on the brake, and with a lurch, the other car spun off. After a half dozen more revolutions, the Caddy came to a halt in a cloud of smoke and dust. Leon tried to get out of the car, the world still spinning around him, only to realize he was buckled in.

“No, don’t get out.” Mike held his forehead, blood oozing between his fingers. “If that car had been on autopilot, it never would have hit us. If they’d been freeriders, they would have gone around. They meant to ram us.”

Leon looked down the highway. The white car, a sleek wagon with low profile tires on maglev wheels sat a few hundred feet further on. “That car can do two hundred miles an hour easy. How can we outrun them?”

“Ram them. Do it now before they get moving.”

“What?”

“That car is made out of carbon fiber and aluminum. It weighs maybe a thousand pounds. We weigh five thousand. Do the math. Punch the gas and hit them.”

Leon looked over at Mike again. He had pulled a handkerchief out of somewhere and was holding it to his head.

Mike met his gaze. “Leon, they’re trying to kill us. Just hit them.”

Leon heard the shrill sound of the other car’s flywheel charging up.

Leon put the car back in drive and stomped on the gas. The electric motor got them up to fifty before they hit the wagon. Leon had time to see the outline of two people staring back at him, then the other car’s safety windshield shattered, going opaque with a thousand micro-fractures. The lightweight sports car barely slowed the Caddy at all. They pushed the wagon a hundred feet before it slid off and rolled into a ditch.

“Go,” Mike said. “We have to get to Shizoko in Austin, and it’s still seven hours away. God knows how many people they’re going to put on us now.”

Leon pushed the Caddy up to ninety, but it started to shudder. The crash must have done something to it. He slowed down to eighty. His body hurt all over and he was exhausted. And Mike was in no shape to drive. They couldn’t go on this way. “We have to call someone,” he said to Mike. “We need help.”

“Who? The Institute is shut down.”

“The police.”

“We’re in the middle of fucking nowhere. Do you think the police out here will be friendly to two guys from DC? Us? This is where the anti-AI extremists come from.” Mike shook his head. “We’re on our own.”

Leon looked around. Nothing but two-lane blacktop in any direction as far as the eye could see. Just grass and scrub trees on flatlands, like the last five hundred miles. He didn’t think anything came from around here.

“What if we find an airport or something?” Leon asked. Noting the setting sun, he pulled the switch to turn the lights on, as he’d seen Mike do. Sparks shot out of the hood, and the whine of the motor disappeared. Suddenly they were coasting without power.

“What did you do?” Mike asked.

Leon guided the car toward the side of the road. “Nothing. I just turned on the headlights.”

“Turn them off.”

Leon complied. He was tired of being told what to do, but he pushed the switch in. The motor engaged again and the Caddy started to accelerate.

“What the hell?” he said.

“Pull over,” Mike told him.

“Stop telling me what to do!”

Mike looked at him, his head tilted. “Look, we’re both stressed. We’ve been driving for almost twenty hours and people are trying to kill us.”

“I know that, you don’t have to tell me!” It felt good to yell.

“If you pull over, we can see if there’s damage to the car,” Mike said, his voice gentle. “Maybe some wires shorted out and that’s why the motor stopped when you turned on the lights.”

Mike was making perfect sense, but Leon didn’t want him to. He wanted Mike to be wrong so he could yell more. He took a deep breath, then slowly pressed the brakes and pulled over. “I’m hungry,” he said, hanging onto the steering wheel for support. “I can’t remember when we last ate. I’m tired. This trip was a bad idea.”

“We’ll buy some food,” Mike said, getting out of the car. Leon followed him to the front.

The bumper, hood, and fenders were crumpled, and a mess of wires protruded through the hole where one of the headlights had been.

“Well, there’s the problem,” Mike said, and started to laugh.

“Why are you laughing?” Leon asked. He tried to take a deep breath, but it caught somewhere in his throat. He wished he could go home and pretend none of this had happened.

“If I don’t laugh, I’m gonna cry,” Mike said. “We’re just going to have to drive in the dark until we get somewhere with food. Here, look at my head before we lose all the light. There’s a first aid kit in the trunk. If you patch me up, I’ll drive.”

Ten minutes later they were on the road again, driving with the last remnants of dusk. Leon couldn’t watch Mike drive in near dark. He closed his eyes and slowly drifted off.

When Mike woke him up later, Leon was disoriented and lightheaded. He felt disconnected from his body, but when he moved sharp pains lanced through his neck and back. The double crash hours earlier had messed him up. He slowly realized they were parked a hundred feet from a convenience store.

“You have any payment cards?” Mike asked.

“No, why?”

“Because one of us is going to have to go in and get food. We were stupid. We should have gotten anonymous payment cards before we left DC. Now one of us will have to pay with our ID.”

Leon looked around, but couldn’t see anything but the blacktop, stars, and store. “How far are we from Austin?”

“Three and a half hours if we keep up our current pace.”

Leon looked up the time in his implant: 2:10am. “I’ll go.”

“You sure?” Mike looked concerned.

“Yeah, I’m really freaking hungry.”

“Fine. Get me some coffee and food. Painkillers.” Mike rubbed his neck. “And payment cards while you’re at it.”

Leon nodded, then walked in. He shielded his eyes from the harsh lights, and rushed around the store picking up what they needed. He grabbed hot prepared food, trying not to think about what it was made of. At the counter, a heavily tattooed teenager with closed eyes ignored him, rapid twitching giving away that he must be gaming through his implant.

Leon called out loud, and the clerk gradually focused on him. He scanned the stuff on the counter, carelessly slid it into bags, and took Leon’s ID for payment, all in thirty seconds, and disappeared back into his game. Leon shook his head, bewildered by the surreal encounter even as he was grateful for the lack of attention, and carried two bags back out to the car. He got in, and Mike pulled away before he’d even shut his door. Leon handed over a cup of coffee and Mike swore as he burnt his tongue. Then Leon pulled out burritos. Five minutes later, Mike declared, “That was the worst thing I ever ate,” as he put an empty wrapper on the seat next to him.

Leon nodded. “I’m not even sure it qualifies as food.” He folded up the empty wrappers and turned to Mike. “We’re in a heap of trouble.”

“We just have to make it to Austin, then we’ll be OK.”

Leon swallowed. There was an awful lot riding on an unknown, super-powerful AI being willing to help and protect them.

22

T
ONY LOOKED UP
from his udon noodles, beef skewers, and grilled rice. Slim was staring at him. “What?”

“You eat a lot, you know that?” Slim nursed his whiskey. A half-eaten bowl of ramen with eggs sat in front of him.

“I gotta keep up my energy.” The sounds of more food being grilled came from the kitchen. It smelled like pork belly. “We have to find the girl or the boss is gonna be pissed.”

It was their third day in LA, and they hadn’t found anything yet.

“She’s a slippery one,” Slim said. “There’s too many pawn shops to figure out where she’s selling the diamonds. Maybe she left LA.”

Tony shook his head. “Adam would know.”

“How would he know? He’s disconnected from the rest of the world. He put up that firewall so none of the other AI would discover him.”

“That’s why we bring him the memories, you idiot.” Tony looked out the window. If he hadn’t killed that family in the hit and run, where would he be now? Not sitting here with Slim.

“But we’ve brought him memories from what, six hundred people?” Slim picked at the ramen with his chopsticks, but let the food drop back into the bowl. “How can he know everything in the world from that?”

“I don’t know,” Tony said. “He’s a thousand times smarter than any other AI, a million times smarter than a person. He can do things like that. It’s called interpolation.”

Slim looked up at him, disbelieving, but said nothing.

“This girl must be messing with security cameras and stuff if there’s no record of her.”

Slim sucked down the last of his whiskey. “Yeah, so?”

“We have to forget about finding her digitally by ID. She’s hiding from the cops, so she’s had to disguise herself, so we can forget about spotting her by appearance. That leaves only behavior. Pull up the file from Adam again.”

Slim pulled out his handheld computer with a sigh and placed it on the table between them. “We’ve been through all this.” He scrolled through the data on Catherine with flicks of his finger through the air.

“We need something we can use to geo-locate her,” Tony said, between bites of onigiri. “Like if she had a disease and needed a special medicine.”

“It doesn’t say anything here about a disease or special medicine.” Slim looked on in disgust as Tony put an entire beef kabob in his mouth.

“It says she’s a black belt in karate,” Tony mumbled about mouthfuls of food. “You know what karate practice sounds like?”

“No, what?”

“Like this,” Tony said, and he pounded a fat fist against the table rhythmically.

“So?”

“So the girl, she’s messing with cameras, but she isn’t perfect, right?” Tony wiped his hands on his napkin. “Because Adam knows she’s in town, and ’cause this drone camera took a picture.” Tony pointed at the blurry photo. “So she probably doesn’t know that karate has an acoustic signature that can be detected.”

Slim looked incredulous for a second. “Come on, Los Angeles has got ten million people in it. There’s gotta be thousands of people practicing karate at any given time.”

Tony flicked at the computer. “Two percent of people practice martial arts, that’s two hundred thousand. But only a quarter of those do karate. That’s fifty thousand. There’s about two hundred kata, and she practices a dozen according to Adam’s file. They’re popular ones, but that’s still gonna limit it to about ten thousand people. Of those, how many are living in temporary or cheap housing? She isn’t going to be in Beverly Hills.”

Slim tried to protest. “But—”

Tony was on a roll, and kept going. If his life hadn’t derailed ten years ago, maybe he would have been happy as a data analyst. “So figure twenty-five hundred are in temporary housing. Plus she’s gonna want to be near lots of people to stay anonymous, and near transit for quick getaways. That’s gonna narrow it down to maybe a thousand people. Now she does all this electronic stuff, so she’s probably using a lot of bandwidth, even if it’s anonymous. So of the thousand, she’s gotta be in the top hundred bandwidth users. Half of those will be guys, so that only leaves fifty people. Half will be too old. That leaves twenty-five.”

“How are we gonna do all that? We don’t even have neural implants. Adam could do it maybe, but he can’t do anything outside of Tucson.”

“We hire another AI to do it, some high class AI with a low reputation score. We tell them we’re looking for a girl who skipped out on her old man or something.” Tony pulled the bowl of coconut rice pudding closer, using a flowery porcelain spoon to shovel it into his mouth.

“Adam doesn’t want us to talk to other AI. You know that.”

“You want to find the girl?”

Slim gritted his teeth and nodded.

After lunch Slim smoked a cigarette while Tony picked at the computer with his chubby fingers. “Got one. It’s a Class III AI with a reputation in the low forties. Any lower and they’d demote it.”

Slim tossed his cigarette into the gutter. “Let’s find a video booth to make the call.”

They walked down two blocks until they found a cheap bar with private video booths. They slid a payment card into the booth, and the video came to life, a cheap animation of a spinning globe.

“Contact Yori Rimer, Class III AI, Los Angeles, California.”

“One moment, please,” the booth answered.

The video shimmered and coalesced into a digitized likeness of a human being, with too long fingers and limbs, too big eyes, and golden flesh. Tony would have liked to flee the booth if he could. What could possess a being to create such an unsettling likeness of a human? The incorporeal AIs were the hardest to understand.

“We need help finding a girl,” Slim said. “She skipped out on her husband, our client, and he wants us to find her.”

The likeness on the screen blinked slowly. “I’m sure.” Then it waited and said nothing. The big eyes seared Tony, pinning him to the seat, causing his breath to race. He’d rather face a dozen angry cops by himself in an alley than sit here.