The Last Firewall (22 page)

She’d do it again to survive, but karate’s first principle was to avoid combat. She needed to be smarter, not let herself be maneuvered until a fight was the only option.

Yet the battle had pushed her to use abilities she didn’t know she had. She’d effortlessly rooted implants to gain access, controlled dozens of people simultaneously, even going so far to see out of everyone’s eyes at once. How had she done it? She had no answers.

In the near pitch-black conditions, she made out the outlines of other chairs in the cabin, the sleek wrap-around curve of the dashboard, and the very slight barrier of the windshield, mostly visible because of the condensation. She was afraid to wipe the water off, though it obscured what little view there was, frightened it would pop like a soap bubble.

Four percent. That’s the concentration of carbon dioxide in each exhalation. She added more than one and a half cubic foot of the deadly gas to the closed environment each hour. She tried to calculate how long it would be before the level would become threatening, but kept forgetting the numbers halfway through. It didn’t matter, she was shivering constantly now; hypothermia would kill her.

Cat heard the plop of a drop of water; seconds later she heard another. It was too dim in the cabin to make out anything so small and vague as a water leak. She wished she could boost her vision. She toyed with aggregating visual data to provide light amplification, but didn’t have the necessary algorithms.

In the midst of this she heard a distant, faint thud. With no sound other than the quiet plops of water and occasional creaking of the car, the thump was distinct. Please, let it be the AI with something to get her out of here.

Minutes passed, and something dark drifted through the dim water, then floated away.

“Come back! I’m this way!” Cat surprised herself by breaking into tears. “I’m here!” She stopped from pounding on the windshield just in time. Salty tears ran down her cheeks as she prayed for it to come back.

After anxious moments, the shadowy outlines reappeared. One passed close by, and she screamed. The shape stopped, approached, and resolved as a submersible bot. It came very near, then reached out with two manipulators and grabbed the car.

Nothing happened until another bot appeared out of the darkness and grabbed the other side. The bots trailed cables, which suddenly became taut, and the car lurched free of the bottom.

Cat smiled and took her first easy breath. She would live. She’d be out of this coffin in a few minutes.

But then nothing happened. After a few minutes, convinced there was a problem, the dread started again. It was taking too long. Was the Bugatti too heavy?

Long minutes of panic passed before she realized a slow ascent might be necessary for decompression. She settled in for a protracted wait, but her muscles convulsed with the cold. She tried to exercise in the small space, but gave up after banging her clumsy limbs too many times.

After ninety minutes of nearly imperceptible motion, the water grew lighter. Soon she saw daylight, and within a few minutes the car broke through the surface.

The submersibles guided the car near the shore. A utility bot stood on dry gravel, twenty feet away, near a flying freight drone. The bot gestured upwards with two short stubby arms.

The waterline was too high to open a door, but the ceiling had a moonroof. She fumbled with deadened hands until she flipped the emergency exit levers, and shoved. The panel popped out and fresh air blew in.

She stuck her head through the opening, breathing deep.

“Greetings Catherine Matthews.” The bot on shore amplified its voice to cross the distance. “My submersibles can’t get any closer in, and I’m afraid it’s difficult to obtain a waterproof robot body on short notice. Can you get to shore?”

Cat pulled herself tiredly onto the roof. Looking back, she realized she’d left her backpack in San Diego. She took stock, feeling with her body what was there and what wasn’t, and discovered she still had one gun in its holster under her jacket. She must have dropped the others in the fight.

She stepped onto the hood of the car and jumped into the frigid waist-deep water, then forced her frozen legs to waddle to shore.

As soon as she was a few feet away, the submersibles backed away and the car disappeared under water.

“It’s better we let it sink,” Adam said. “Less likely anyone else will find it that way.”

She sloshed out of the cold lake, wet clothes draining the last dregs of body heat from her. Standing on the shore, she stared at Adam for a moment, trying to make sense of this AI. The stubby bot was streaked with grease and paint splotches.

He saw her staring. “This is not my usual body. I needed something on short notice. I’m a Class IV.”

She nodded.

“Come in the drone, please.”

She followed him into the freight drone, its massive interior empty and barren.

“Sit down please,” Adam said. “I’m sorry I don’t have anything more comfortable. I didn’t anticipate the need for a water extraction, and I had to work with available resources to avoid creating new data tracks.”

Dripping wet and frozen from hours under the cold lake, Cat looked around in disappointment. “You could have brought a towel. You have towels, don’t you?”

“I’m sorry, Catherine Matthews. It will be a quick ride to my home. I will have towels and clothes waiting on your arrival.”

40

S
AN
D
IEGO APPEARED
through the windshield as Leon, Mike, and Shizoko approached. A dozen emergency vehicles, lights flashing, surrounded the scene of the fight.

“What took them so long to arrive?” Leon asked.

“Something scrambled their net connections,” Shizoko answered. “I’m still back-tracing and correlating traffic. Whoever communicated with Catherine and piloted the escape vehicle is vigilant. I’ve trace them through six packet forwarders and two obscurity clouds, but the trail is cold. I don’t have the necessary granularity of information.”

Leon switched back to netspace. “She distorted the local net,” Leon said, “rerouted ninety percent of the data in downtown San Diego. Sent it all into a three block radius around the bar.”

“If the traffic logs can be believed,” Shizoko said, “she used thousands of neural implants to form an ad-hoc mesh network and saturated their bandwidth. She probably battled an AI, which should be impossible for a human.”

Leon stared at her photo. He was infatuated, like Mike said. She was beautiful, yes, but clever too, and capable of inconceivable feats in cyberspace. He longed to meet her.

The aircar slowed as Shizoko brought them down outside the police cordon.

“I think we should go alone,” Mike said, urging Leon out the door. “We’ll get asked fewer questions.”

“Are you sure?” Shizoko said, following them. “I will be able to glean information you cannot.”

“You focus on the network traffic data analysis. We’ll talk to the police.”

“I’m a Class IV intellect. I can manage both.”

Mike turned to face the four armed bot. “Stay here. We’ll gain their confidence more easily human to human.”

Shizoko bowed his head. “Very well. I’ll wait.”

When they were out of earshot, Leon asked, “What was that about?”

Mike sighed. “I don’t know who to trust.”

“We can’t do this alone, we can’t fight AI with human brain power.”

“We made a mistake,” Mike said. “We never should have come without an Institute AI to back us up.”

“All the Enforcement team was with Sonja.”

“We could have brought Vaiveahtoish.”

“He’s the head of the
Nanotech
department,” Leon said. “He knows nothing about tracking rogues.”

They stopped outside a band of blue plastic tape stretched across the street. A police bot stood a dozen feet beyond.

Leon reluctantly took his implant out of anonymous mode to provide his real identity to the bot. “I’m Leon Tsarev from the Institute for Ethical Behavior. We’re investigating the possibility of an AI crime.”

The police bot rolled forward and bobbed its head in a polite nod. “I am honored to meet you, Mr. Tsarev and Mr. Williams. You take a great risk by being here. I presume you are aware that members of the People’s Party are advocating for violence against your persons?”

“Yes,” Mike said. “They chased us across the country.”

The bot escorted them toward the bar. “What brings you to this crime scene?”

The situation was so complex, Leon didn’t know where to start. “We sent our Enforcement Team here a week ago to investigate a series of murders we believe to be linked to an AI.”

“Sonja Metcalfe?” The police bot emitted a squeak of excitement. “Are they here? They are so elite!”

Leon rolled his eyes. He hadn’t realized Sonja had a following in the enforcement community. Then he remembered Sonja was MIA and turned grim again.

The bot halted at the entrance. “We believe that three people and a combat robot fled the crime scene before we arrived. Could Sonja’s team be part of that group?”

“I don’t think so,” Mike said. “We came looking for Catherine Matthews.”

As they spoke, a woman met them in the doorway. “Erin Sanders, lead detective. Tommy told me you were here.” She held her hand out. “It’s an honor to meet you both. What’s the Institute’s interest?”

“Thanks,” Mike said, returning the handshake. “We’re investigating a potential AI crime. We thought this might be related.”

Behind the detective, paramedics carried a moaning woman on a stretcher.

“Come outside, let’s get out of their way.” She led them out again as an assortment of police bots, officers, and medics scurried around with equipment. “Sorry about this, but I’m going to query your IDs.”

Leon felt her probe, granted access, and waited.

Next she pulled out a portable hand scanner. “Now biometric too, please.” She scanned their hands, and glanced at the output. “OK, you are who you say. So how is this related?” She gestured at the wreckage of the bar, the pool of blood in the street, the car wedged halfway through the wall.

“I’m not sure,” Mike said. “The Institute’s enforcement team came out to San Diego a week ago, investigating a series of murders.”

“They were here?” she asked.

“I don’t think so. We actually showed up because we’re on the trail of Catherine Matthews.”

“The murder suspect from Portland? She’s behind this?”

Mike shook his head. “Probably not.”

“Look,” the detective said, a tone of frustration coming into her voice. “We had a major gunfight here, and we didn’t hear hide nor hair of it until ten minutes after it was over. Half our officers were on a wild goose chase on the north side of town. If you know something useful, spit it out.”

“Our enforcement team came out here to investigate a series of murders we suspect were committed by an AI,” Leon said.

Erin’s eyes went big, but she nodded for him to continue.

“We hadn’t heard from them in a week, so we came out here to look for them. On the way, we detected signs of two forces manipulating the network. One may have been the AI we’re looking for, and the other was Catherine Matthews.”

“She was here, and left in an aircar,” Mike said. “We tried to pursue but she got away.”

“Why didn’t you call us?” Sanders asked.

“We couldn’t get a connection to the police,” Mike said. “Now we have no idea where the girl, the Enforcement team, or the AI is, or who is going to try to kill us next. Now, what can you tell us?”

The detective looked back and forth at them, then shook her head in puzzlement. “Three bodies inside are known British mercenaries. They had a dozen pieces of tech we’ve never seen before.”

She paused, sighed, and continued. “We found two people who could talk. They complained someone took control of their bodies, turned them into puppets. Is this possible with implants? I never heard of it, not even in the war.”

Leon and Mike looked at each other.

“It shouldn’t be,” Leon said. “And I worked on the implant design, so I should know.”

She grunted in response. “Half the network nodes and most of the computers in this neighborhood are cooked. I haven’t seen anything like it since China, and that was with over a hundred battle bots fighting.”

She gestured toward the street. “Come with me.” She picked up a few bullet casings from the hundreds scattered around. “Some are high caliber rounds meant to kill bots, the others are commonly used by robotic rifles.”

She dropped the casings. An evidence bot squawked and zoomed up to collect them. She walked toward the pool of blood, holding up one arm so they wouldn’t step into the puddle. “It must have been a fucking war down here. So far as our AI can reconstruct, there’s a battle bot and three people missing. One wore women’s size six boots, about five foot two, which matches your Catherine Mathews.”

Leon nodded.

She went on. “The second person missing from the scene is a man, size thirteen shoe. The blood is probably his. We think he’s pretty big, maybe two fifty or three hundred pounds. The last guy’s a size ten. Given the tracks, the bot’s a Durga Mark III. It’s a two-year-old model, big bucks, a fucking nightmare in the war. Good at cyber warfare, but not good enough to kill all the network nodes and computers.”

She stared hard at them. “Who was fighting who? What were they fighting over? And where’d they go?”

Leon shrugged, looking over at Mike.

Mike knelt over the puddle of blood and picked something up, a tribal wood carving on a simple rope. “This is Sonja’s.” He looked at the detective and held out the necklace. “This belonged to the leader of our Enforcement Team.”

41

C
AT AND
A
DAM
’
S VEHICLE
passed over mountains, and Tucson came into view. “You can turn on your implant now,” Adam said, “but you must minimize the data that leaves Tucson. Even so, I will take steps to mask your electronic signature.”