The Last Firewall (2 page)

When she finished qigong, she bowed once. The peaceful motions of qigong were gone now, replaced with the hard, quick snaps of
Naihanchi
, her first karate kata. Forty minutes later, she completed
Kusanku
and bowed again. Her body sank gratefully into seated meditation, legs crossed, hands on knees. A slight sheen of sweat covered her skin, her muscles warm and limber. The sounds of the coffee pot gurgling, laughter, and the toilet running filtered quietly from the house. As thoughts came in, she let them go. Empty mind. Empty mind.

Ninety minutes after she’d gone outside, she opened her eyes and gazed anew at the world. She watched the sunlight play on leaves, then stretched her arms and legs wide.

Some people said they had a hard time meditating, their minds always wandering, becoming trapped in thoughts. She didn’t understand. If they wanted to meditate, why would they think about other things?

She padded barefoot up the porch steps, and pushed the door open. After the cool morning air, the house was stuffy. Her housemates were in the kitchen now.

“Hello, Karate Kid,” Tom said, his tone affectionate. He waved a coffee cup in her direction, his distraction suggesting he was deep in cyberspace.

Catherine concentrated, and switched her neural implant on. A moment later, her vision flickered as the implant came online. Syncing with the net, it revealed a status bubble above Tom’s head: “Busy.”

“How was last night?” asked Maggie, the self-appointed mother of their little group. Everyone who wanted to stay sane found some way to define themselves now that the artificial intelligences, or AI, had taken all the jobs.

“I met this guy, Nick,” Catherine said. She smiled. “He’s upstairs.” She held one hand over a cup, trying to keep Maggie from pouring her coffee. “No, it’ll spoil the effect of meditating. Are those eggs I smell?”

“Quiche coming up in five minutes,” Maggie said, giving up on the coffee.

“Yum.” It was blissfully peaceful in the kitchen. With a sudden suspicion, Catherine asked, “Where’s Sarah?”

“I thought I heard her up,” Maggie turned away in a sudden rush to check the oven.

Catherine looked toward the ceiling, then turned and stalked silently across the living room. She climbed the staircase, the old carpeting masking her approach.

At the top of the stairs, Nick and Sarah came into view in the hallway between the bedrooms. Sarah rested against the wall in a bra and underwear. Nick leaned but an inch from her body, his hands on either side of the wall above her head. Cat couldn’t mistake the expressions on their faces: they had linked. Through the net, she saw the high bandwidth connection between the two, a thick blue stream connecting their heads loaded with an exchange of sensory data.

Catherine’s fingernails pressed into her palms as she balled up her fists. She squeezed harder, the pain barely registering. She waited a second, but Nick and Sarah were too deep in the throes of virtual sex to even notice her presence.

She focused on her implant, reaching out through the net to find Sarah and Nick’s link, and severing it. The blue datastream connecting the two vanished. Nick flew back across the hallway, screaming and grabbing his head. Sarah rocked back and pressed two fingers up to her temples, staring at the wall. “Come on, Cat, don’t do that.”

“Don’t sleep with the guys I bring home.” Her voice broke, but she fought against the urge to cry.

Sarah stood up and stared at her. “You were the one going on about how dumb he was last night in the bar. I don’t see why you care.”

“Because—”

“Stay out of my head,” Sarah said, as she walked toward the bathroom. “Don’t mess with my implant. Just because you can, you don’t have the right.”

Nick watched Sarah walk down the hallway, and turned to Catherine. “What did you do to my head? Look, I—”

She held up her hand to stop him. “Shut up and get out.” She wasn’t going to give any explanations to him. Not about her ability to manipulate the net, or anything else for that matter.

Catherine turned and went back downstairs, where she found herself crying in Maggie’s motherly hug a few seconds later. Stupid damn guys. Stupid implant. She was the only one in the world, it seemed, who couldn’t link with another person.

She lifted her head off Maggie’s shoulder and dried her eyes on her own sleeve.

Tom sat, oblivious to the drama, still lost in the net.

Maggie pushed her onto a barstool and forced her to sit at the kitchen counter. A steaming slice of quiche sat on a plate, the smell of goat cheese and leeks tempting her. Maggie held out a fork.

Catherine took the utensil and stabbed the quiche.

“Don’t take it out on the food, honey. Just eat.”

She ate a few bites, but it stuck in her throat. Finally the thud of the front door closing indicated that Nick left. When she’d pushed around the food on her plate long enough to be civil, she stood up. “I’m going to school,” she said to no one in particular.

“I’m sorry, hon,” Maggie said, coming to put an arm around her.

Sarah chose that moment to make her reappearance, now dressed. “Why bother? None of us are ever going to do anything.”

Catherine stared at Sarah and willed her heart rate to slow down. “My educational stipend pays for the house. A little gratitude, please.”

Catherine stomped past Sarah, heading for the front door.

2

O
UTSIDE
, C
ATHERINE RUSHED
down the block to put distance between her and the house. She couldn’t even be pissed at Sarah. They’d shared guys before. The real problem was that everyone used their neural implants for sex—everyone except Cat, who, due to some defect in her implant, gave off painful feedback, like the squeal of speakers during a rock concert.

Nick’s look of disappointment when she wouldn’t link last night spoke volumes, and even if this morning hadn’t happened, he still would have taken off soon. Her love life was a series of disappointing one and two night stands.

It wasn’t fair. She was game for every kink in the book, she just couldn’t link.

On the next block, lined with big leaf maples, she walked through dappled sunlight. A small red android, about the size of a boy, picked through the neighbors’ garbage pile. The bot came up with a handful of discarded electronics, then carefully placed each one into a rusted green cart.

Catherine sent an automatic “Good morning” back to the bot through the net. The red bot shied away as Cat grew closer, and didn’t respond. As she passed by, she did a double-take. Someone had attacked the bot, the right side of its head smashed in, optic sensors dangling. She stopped. “Are you OK?” she asked.

The robot didn’t respond, except to grab the wagon handle and walk off, the loud whine of a servo evidence of yet more damage.

Catherine stood watching, her mouth open, as the bot made its way down the street. She’d never seen anything like that before.

Damn. Roommates sleeping with boyfriends. Boyfriends sleeping with roommates. Abused robots. The world had gone to hell.

After a moment, she resumed her walk, unconsciously shaking her head.

When she came to the avenue, she paused. The heavy traffic was mostly conventional ground cars, although the occasional exotic hovercraft floated by, half a foot above the pavement. A solitary flying aircar swooped down from a thousand feet up, joining the ground traffic.

She would normally step into traffic, expecting the autonomous vehicles to avoid her, but two Fridays ago, a pedestrian died crossing this street. Thrill-seekers had disabled their AI and gone for a high-speed joyride around the city.

She reached out for the space-time predictions of the AI drivers. She smirked. Sarah hated Cat’s unique ability to manipulate the net. Cat didn’t tell anyone else. She was too afraid her ability would draw attention to herself.

Looking left and right, her implant overlaid white glowing lines in her vision, showing the future plots for approaching cars. The lines faded to gray in the future. Impulsively, she scanned farther, stretching beyond line of sight, until the entire city of Portland was visible in her mind. In the downtown area, white lines tinged pink, showing AI uncertainty in the dense environment. On the highway, bulges of red displayed where AIs adapted at the speed of electrons to the few manually piloted cars. Nearby everything was clear.

Ignoring the cars, she focused instead on bicyclists and took care to cross the road.

On the other side, a small group of teenagers sprayed graffiti on a storefront, their hoods pulled far over their heads so they couldn’t be identified on camera. The proprietor, a delicate android in human clothes, protested, but the kids shouted and mocked him, threatening him with the spray paint.

In netspace, Catherine saw the droid make the call to police. She sensed a perturbation a few blocks away, a police bot circling through traffic, responding to the call.

The three teens must have rooted their neural implants, because they seemed to sense the police as well and took off in the opposite direction, across the park Catherine was heading toward.

The storeowner inspected his defaced store, before glancing around and heading back in. An ache of despair settled in Cat’s stomach.

Artificial intelligences, or AI, took the form of robots and disembodied consciousnesses in the net. First created about ten years ago, they’d taken over most jobs. But the AI had grown the economy until income taxes had been first eliminated and then reversed: everyone received a basic guaranteed income, or stipend, now.

She shook her head. The AI protest movement was stupid and pointless. There might not be many jobs, but between the low cost of robot manufactured goods and the stipend, there was no real material want. The stipend covered food, shelter, and basic goods. Attending school or volunteering came with an increased stipend. True wealth seekers still worked or created handcrafted goods to sell. And there was more to do than ever: art, travel, and other life experiences.

Regardless of this, the protesters, a fringe group for years, had recently grown in influence. The worst new trend was violence and vandalism. Attacking helpless bots, bound by ethical restrictions that made it impossible for them to defend themselves, made her sick.

With a last sigh, Catherine turned away and climbed the path into the sprawling park. Her roommates didn’t care about the protest movement. Maggie and Tom were stoners, happy and complacent. Tom got riled up sometimes, but mostly he thought they should become back to the landers. And Sarah was too immersed in her VR sims to give a damn.

The sun warmed her shoulders, and she relaxed a little. The scent of grass came with the breeze. Hundreds of people came to the park to work or study. A few older people waved arms and hands in gestural interfaces, but most people simply sat quietly, their activities externally invisible.

She found a flat spot of grass in the sun, sat cross-legged, and triggered her classroom lecture.

3

L
EON SWUNG HIS BAG
over his shoulder and took the steps running. Emerging from the subway into late spring sunshine, that rare time in DC when it was warm without being humid, he walked five blocks to the Institute.

The plain red brick exterior of the Institute for Applied Ethics, hosted by George Washington University, belied the importance of the work that went on inside.

At the door, humans and robots stood guard. Leon felt the AI query his neural implant for ID, and authorized the request.

“Good morning, Leon,” a human guard said, holding out his hand.

“Morning, Henry. How’s the Mrs.?” Leon offered his bag to Henry.

“Oh, she’s fine.” He leaned in close and continued in a low voice. “She’s off to visit her sister for a week.” He straightened up with a wink and placed Leon’s bag inside the security scanner, waited a few seconds and handed it back. “You have a nice day, Leon.”

“You too, Henry.”

Ritual complete, Leon took the marble steps at a fast clip. At the second floor, he pressed his hand to the biometrics reader, which checked his palm print against a database before unlocking the door.

Leon entered and paused, as he did every morning, to survey the vast open space. Divided into pods, the Institute’s scientists collaborated with each other or gestured vaguely into the air, communing with artificial intelligences, their computers, or the network. The same view greeted him every morning, but it never failed to bring a smile to his face.

Leon headed for his shared office on the far side. People noticed his presence, a few visually, but most via proximity alerts. Some nodded or called out, “Good morning.” But most sent greetings by implant: speech bubbles superimposed over his vision that floated in from the direction of the sender, then slowly moved off into his notifications bar. With a thought, he replied-all “Cheerio!” and entered his office.

AI-designed neural implants had been widely available for eight years. They connected people to the net, serving as computer, smartphone, and display all in one. A square centimeter of surgically implanted graphene-based computer chip, they stimulated neurons inside the brain, making text and graphics appear directly in one’s vision.

Inside his office, late-arriving greetings piled up in the corner of his vision. When he glanced toward the door, they jiggled for his attention. With a thought, he trashed them and sent a last “Morning all,” then set his status to “Working” to stop the distractions.

“Good morning,” he called to Mike, and went to get coffee. A small bot scurried out and met him halfway, a cup already prepared. “Thanks,” he said absently, and the bot chirped before disappearing into the wall. Mike hadn’t answered. Leon glanced up: Mike’s status showed he was on a call. Leon sat and sipped coffee, feet on his desk, waiting for Mike.

Mike’s status dissipated with an audible popping sound a minute later. He focused on the room, and smiled at Leon. “Morning. Sorry.”