The Last Firewall (20 page)

When the woman in the car and the robot opened fired again, Cat didn’t panic.

She looked at them through sixteen pairs of eyes plus her own, total panopticon awareness in three-dimensional space. She didn’t know how, but she could see from every perspective simultaneously, with perfect knowledge of every object’s location. Time slowed as she aimed with millimeter precision at the woman crouched in the doorway of the Honda. A single shot and her forehead exploded in a mist of blood.

Even as she pulled and released the trigger, she also controlled every person in the bar. The Korean and others pounded the first woman attacker, still on the ground, with chairs and legs.

The waitress and others went en mass after the man, clawing for his eyes and face like brainless zombies. He fired at the crowd, hitting them, forcing Cat to action.

She dove toward the doorway, and rose up to shoot him again and again, until both guns clicked on empty cylinders. The body armor stopped the rounds, but he was forced back against the wall. She ran after him and gave a snap kick to his knee, buckling it backwards. Before he could drop, she hit him in the face with the empty gun and he crumpled.

The robot and the men outside responded to the sudden activity by firing a steady barrage.

Cat hid behind the bar, reloading. The bot pushed against her mind, like hundreds of needles pressing into flesh. She struggled against the mental assault, holding her interfaces closed as she reeled in pain, dropping the gun and ammo. Her body convulsing, she crumpled to the ground. She clamped down her network connection, bringing immediate relief, but her video and geospatial feeds shrunk and dissipated, leaving her hopelessly unaware of what was going on.

Grabbing the gun off the floor, she slammed a new clip home, then peeked around the corner. The fat man, outside the newly opened hole in the wall, held a large gun in both hands. Cat remembered their encounter in the noodle shop two days ago. She didn’t want to kill him. She took careful aim, hitting him mid-thigh.

He collapsed with a scream, but the robot and the thin man heard and saw the shot and sent a new storm of bullets into the bar, glass and wood splinters showering Cat. She curled up in a ball, sure that she’d be dead within seconds, but miraculously nothing hit her.

The robot renewed its cyberattack. Her vision dimmed and brightened as weird tastes floated across her mouth and even her sense of balance distorted. On the verge of passing out, the total vulnerability of pending unconsciousness scared her into motion.

She fumbled under her jacket for the guided projectile gun, pain hindering even the most basic action. She shut down her vision altogether and the torture faded to a distant throb. Blind now, she reached around to the small of her back and groped until she snagged the holster release. The big gun with its single smart missile dropped into her hand, giving her a surge of confidence.

Knowing the robot used the visual channel to attack, she instead built a three-dimensional wireframe from street and security cameras, calculated the bot’s location, and pointed the muzzle in the direction of the window.

The three-inch rocket whooshed out, guidance fins snapping into position. It exited the bar at two hundred miles per hour and twisted hard, gunning for the bot.

Cat’s wireframe fuzzed out, right in the middle where the robot should be, and the rocket veered off. Her heart sank as it exploded against a neighboring building.

“Catherine Matthews,” boomed the robot. “Surrender. You are surrounded. I am a military-grade combat bot. You cannot hope to succeed and we do not wish to harm you.”

35

L
EON PACKED NETSPACE
with research on Catherine Matthews and street camera video feeds from the bar in San Diego until the walls of the cabin disappeared. Shizoko helped by adding visualizations of the massive fluctuations in the net.

“Five minutes until we arrive,” Shizoko said over the roar of wide-open engines.

“You’re sure Catherine is not on their side?” Mike asked.

“The timing doesn’t match,” Shizoko said. “Her public data feed reveals a perfectly ordinary life for ten years. While she’s recently done peculiar things with the net, they’re different than the disturbances surrounding the chain of murders. Nothing, until the attack in the park, would suggest she was anything but normal.”

“And this group,” Leon said, pointing at the video, “following and attacking her, puts them on opposite sides.”

“We can’t be sure that makes her the good guy,” Mike said. “Maybe they’re undercover.”

“No,” Shizoko said. “Their reputation scores suggest they’re hired mercenaries, and they mounted an assault on the bar without calling for police backup. “

“Undercover cops use faked IDs with bad reps,” Mike said. “Look, we’re trying to rescue this girl without knowing enough about her.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Leon said. “She’s being attacked. Why wouldn’t we help her?”

“You think she’s cute and you want to play the hero.” Mike shook his head. “You’ll keep playing with the data until it tells you what you want.”

Leon felt himself flush with embarrassment and anger. She was pretty and smart, and nothing would be better than riding to her rescue. But that didn’t change the facts: she was literally surrounded. He decided to ignore Mike. “Shizoko, what will you be able to do against the mercenaries? You’re not a military bot.”

“I’m armed, but I also hired private security to meet us. I tried to notify the police, but another AI, a big one, is blocking me.”

“Another Class IV?” Leon asked.

“No, it’s bigger. After this encounter, I’ll analyze the network traffic to determine point of origin.”

Leon and Mike stared at each other. There shouldn’t be any AI more powerful than a Class IV.

They banked hard into a steep dive. Directly ahead of them, the Gaslamp Quarter, and in the sky, four other aircars converging on the same location.

“Are those security?” Leon said.

“Yes.” In the back of the cabin, Shizoko replaced his lower pair of arms with robotic rifles he retrieved from a cabinet. “I have traditional handguns here, but I recommend you remain in the aircar, where you will be protected.”

“You’ve fought before?” Leon asked.

“No, but I have training programs.”

“Aren’t you afraid of being killed?”

Shizoko laughed. “No. Did you think my consciousness was here? Less than a hundredth of my processing power is in this body. The rest remains in my computing center in Austin.”

“Why fight when you could let the security bots handle it?”

“Like all AI, I crave immersive experiences. It’s not every day I can join such a battle.” Shizoko exercised the articulated rifles. “Stay in the car.”

They made a final sharp turn, reverse thrusters throwing up dust and debris. The door sprang open as they jolted down and Shizoko dashed out, his treads churning as he flew into the street and toward the bar.

36

S
TILL HUDDLED IN A BALL
behind the bar, Cat contemplated the military bot’s ultimatum. Surrender, without any knowledge of what it wanted?

The sound of low whimpers and sobs came from the rubble. She’d endangered the people here by coming in, and worse, used them to save herself. All were hurt, and many dead. But she didn’t start this fight, and she wasn’t going to let their loss be in vain. And she sure as hell didn’t study karate for six years to give up at the first challenge. They might have started it, but she’d finish the fight.

Afraid of the robot’s cyberattacks, she still suppressed her regular vision and used the three dimensional wireframe she had generated from multiple viewpoints. Better than normal eyesight, the wireframe let her see through walls.

How could she defeat this combat bot? Karate was pointless, normal bullets useless, and her one rocket easily disabled. She recited the twenty principles under her breath.

Wazawai wa getai ni shozu.
Accidents come from inattention.

Karate no shugyo wa issho de aru.
You will never stop learning karate.

Katsu kangae wa motsu na makenu kangae wa hitsuyo.
Do not think you must win. Instead, think that you do not have to lose. This was potentially a good one for the situation at hand.

Karate wa, gi no taske.
One who practices karate must follow the way of justice. Well, duh.

Kokoro wa hanatan koto wo yosu.
Be ready to free your mind . . .

Maybe the problem was that she wasn’t stretching far enough. She found a few hundred people in the nearby net, scared from the gunfire. Other AI too, mostly curious because they knew little fear. She reached into their implants, every one. They might not consciously know how, but their hardware could route data, even the humans.

Using them all, she pulled and twisted and massaged a huge stream of connections, ten, a hundred, a thousand.

“What are you doing, Catherine Matthews? You’re manipulating the net.” The robot crunched debris under treads, drawing closer.

Cat continued rerouting protocols, forcing astronomical amounts of data in and out of people’s interfaces. Not used to moving this many bits, they were screaming, their brain patterns becoming irregular, pain leaking back through the connections. Quickly, before the whole thing collapsed, she sent the streams toward the military bot, a high bandwidth assault.

“You cannot believe,” the robot called, “that you can penetrate my military hardware with bulk data?”

The robot pulled itself through the doorway, glass crunching under its tentacles, metal twisting and screeching.

She pulled more feeds, encrypted them on the fly, forwarding the bytes to the bot. She didn’t need to kill the AI, just swamp its processors. Assessing each feed’s legitimacy would cause enough contention to starve sensors and render the robot blind.

The world slowed down at she went deeper. She cycled feeds, connecting and disconnecting hundreds of times each second. She pushed the data toward the robot, until finally she got what she wanted: the packet response time started to drop off. Connection denied responses went from three millisecond delays to four milliseconds, eight, and finally twenty.

“What you’re doing won’t work,” the robot said, but now Cat believed this to be bluster. It was working.

Tables and chairs scraped the floor as they were pushed out of the way nearby.

Cat leaped to her feet, turned her vision back on, and came face to face with the robot, both guns raised. She fired point blank, emptying the guns into the sensor pods, blinding the bot.

The tentacles lashed out, but lethargically, as the robot’s overloaded processors struggled to get enough cycle time to operate its body.

Cat, her reflexes maxed, ran around the bot, leaping over bodies and tables and onto the hood of the Honda.

The thin man watched her.

She raised one gun, no rounds left, but he didn’t know that.

He lowered his gun and backed away.

She probed for other attackers. Nothing in the immediate block, but she tasted the hard iron of more military bots in the net, approaching fast from all directions. Air traffic data showed a circle of aircars closing in less than a minute.

Seeking escape, she ran to the middle of the street, passing the fat man in a pool of blood.

A voice came from the parked black and silver Bugatti. “Catherine Matthews, can you hear me?”

Catherine didn’t say anything. She was thinking about the approaching aircars. A net coming down around her.

“Cat, I know what you can do. These people are from the Institute for Ethics. They’re afraid of you, what you can do. They’re coming to arrest you, to experiment on you.”

Cat ignored the voice.

“If you don’t believe me, check the IDs of the two men in the aircar approaching from the northeast. I am on your side. I will shelter you from them. I am not afraid of you.”

Cat used her implant to scan the approaching aircar. It contained two people. Mike Williams and Leon Tsarev. Of course she knew who they were. She checked against their public keys. They appeared to be authentic. But that could be faked.

“You survived that attack, but now they are bringing more security bots. You barely bested one, can you beat sixteen?”

“Who are you?” she said.

“You can call me Adam.”

This was Tony’s boss, the AI that’d been following her. Tony was scared of him, so Adam must be dangerous. Cat glanced toward the bar. The bot inside was hardly beaten, merely blinded and starved of data. Given a minute, it would find some way to come after her. The other aircars, less than a thousand feet away now, all contained bots.

“I’m starting this car. I’m going to drive by you. If you jump in, I can get you away. But if you wait, they’ll be on top of you and escape will be impossible.” The aircar fired up engines and rose off landing gear.

Cat shook her head. She desperately wanted more time, to think. She shouldn’t trust this AI, but she was out of options. It was either an unknown and dangerous AI, or sixteen bots led by the Institute for Ethics. She glanced at the guns she held, the ruins of the bar, and the Institute vehicle touching down half a block away, weighing her options.

The black aircar approached, massive ductwork bulging out the corners of the car, the door opening by itself, the interior empty. The voice continued from a speaker. “Get in Catherine.”

Down the block, a huge bot flew out of the Institute car, articulated rifles pointed in her direction.

“Dammit.” She jumped in and the door swung closed. The engines went to full power, acceleration slamming her against the seat.

“Sorry, Catherine Mathews. Do your best to hold on, as the next few minutes will be tricky.”

The Bugatti accelerated hard, twisting and turning. Cat rolled across the cabin, slammed her shoulder into the wall, finally reached out and grabbed a seat leg, nearly getting her arm yanked off when the aircar veered again. She levered herself into a seat and buckled up as the engines screamed. Cat reached into the net, pulled up the locations of their pursuers.