The Last Firewall (25 page)

“We need to get in touch with Rebecca.”

“No!” Leon banged a fist down. “If we communicate now, the rogue will find us.”

“We can’t shut down a powerful AI ourselves. We barely made the trip to Austin on our own.”

Leon tapped his temple. “But we’re smarter now. We’re just as capable.”

Mike stared doubtfully.

“We’ll find Catherine. She’s special. Together we can take down the AI.”

“How did you conclude that Catherine’s not working for the machines?”

“Instinct.”

“You crunched terabytes of data to figure out where the AI is, and you decide she’s good based on instinct?”

“Well, I’m still human.”

Mike shook his head. “You’re obsessed.”

Leon flushed. “I’m going. Are you with me?”

Mike took a deep breath. “Yes, I’m always with you.”

“Thank you.” Leon smiled, grateful, and Mike grinned back. “Now how do we get to Tucson? We are
not
driving again.”

Mike stared off into space. “I have an idea: the Continental.”

The super-sonic subterranean maglev was an early gift from AI-kind to humans, running in a partial vacuum at a peak of three thousand miles an hour.

“The train only stops in LA and NY,” Leon said. “And besides, we’ll be listed on the passenger manifest.”

“There are emergency exits.” Mike pushed a link over in netspace. “And with your new implant, can you hack the manifest?”

Leon glanced at the shared news article, accompanied by a photograph of a small concrete building peeking out of a cactus covered landscape.

“Marana, Arizona, about a half hour north of Tucson,” Mike said. “Emergency egress number three.”

“So we hop on the Continental and trigger an emergency stop when we’re near the exit?”

“Exactly,” Mike said. “Think that hopped-up implant of yours can fool some train sensors?”

46

“T
HE PRESIDENT THREATENS
the future of America by refusing to acknowledge the corrupting role of the machines,” Madeleine Ridley said.

Adam cut off a sharp reply to his agent. He didn’t think much of Ridley’s opinion on this matter, which increased his remorse over Shizoko’s death. Why should an AI die while this human lived?

Adam hadn’t known Shizoko, but regretted the necessity of eliminating him. Losing any AI was unfortunate, and even more so when he possessed a reputation for innovative thinking. Yet Adam’s plan must proceed, and Shizoko had posed an extraordinary risk.

By objective standards, the President had effectively guided the country through the techno-turbulence of the last five years. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the pro-AI puppet Adam needed. Which meant the Chief Executive had to go, while the Speaker of the House, a true AI enthusiast, would be promoted.

“Yes, of course.” Adam said, forced to pacify Ridley. “I’m sending you his agenda for Saturday and the digital keys for the storage lockers with the tools I provided.”

Ridley’s eyes glanced back and forth, reading the screen. “Why are we waiting for three o’clock? What about these other opportunities? He’s going to be in half a dozen places before then.”

“He won’t be with the Vice President until then.” Adam had sudden doubts. Why was he forced to rely on such idiots? Shizoko, even as the enemy, was worth a million times the value of this human. “Do not deviate from the plan in any way.” He punctuated his words. “If you do as I describe, everything will go perfectly. Is this clear?”

Madeleine Ridley looked up from the screen, gritting her teeth. “Yes, we’ll do it your way. We’ll start at three o’clock, you’ll cut off communications to the area, and we’ll be done by a quarter to four.”

“Good. Are you confident that the rest of your team will follow you?”

“They’re devoted to the People. We won’t let AIs rule us.”

Adam nodded and disconnected, glad to have escaped any of the lengthier philosophical rants to which she was prone.

He had forked his consciousness into a dozen contexts today, a way of splitting his attention among multiple tasks. He checked the context training Catherine and found she was progressing quickly. She might not be ready soon enough to help with these plans, but she’d be a potent asset when prepared.

Time to confirm with the Europeans. The EU President had to go too, after all.

Adam spoke flawless French with a Parisian accent once he established the connection. “Any troubles?”

“No,” the agent said, “preparations are proceeding as planned. We’ll pick up the supplies tonight.”

Adam attended to the remainder of the conversation but forked yet another context to prepare sound bites. Because of his own imminent role in saving the Speaker of the House, Adam would receive substantial news attention after the approaching events. “If AI were allowed unfettered and unlimited access to communications, this tragedy could have been prevented in its entirety.”

47

A
DAM RETURNED IN A NEW
manifestation, the emotive eldercare bot replaced by a military one in the big dog body style, a five-foot-tall, four-legged robot. He padded back and forth, silently, communicating by net.

“Combat bots are skilled in cyber and physical attacks, as you experienced.” The dog turned and walked the other way. “They have specialized hardware to subvert local routing nodes. You can do the same, but they fight at all levels of the protocol stack concurrently.”

“The tentacled bot in San Diego attacked me through my visual field. I cut my eyesight channel and substituted a wireframe.” She tried not to fear the canine, but she wished it would stop pacing like a rabid animal.

“Good. Many cyber attacks exploit vision because it’s our highest bandwidth channel. One combat bot can engage several hundred humans at once, causing anything from unconscious to motion sickness to NSD.”

Cat searched online and found that Neural Signaling Disorder occurred when implant signals countered the brain’s normal behavior. Individual neurons grew confused and fired sporadically. Often temporary, but sometimes not, NSD caused cortical blindness, insanity, or in the worst case, brain death. Her heart raced.

“How do I fight a bot and win? I struggled to kept even with the one in San Diego.”

“You’re more adroit than any other human. I’ve taught you to manipulate protocols one at a time. Now you must interweave the techniques simultaneously. Prepare yourself.” The dog spun and faced her.

Cat didn’t have a chance to take a breath before the attack slammed into her like a thousand fists pummeling her head. The assault came too fast for her to counter, as she struggled to remain conscious. Tortured by the probing attacks and reeling in pain and disorientation, she finally attempted protocol redirects, disconnect packets, everything she had learned, but failed.

The agony didn’t stop. She fell to her knees as her ears, eyes, and body conspired to tell her a dozen different directions were up. She vomited, bile striking the floor so hard it bounced back into her face.

The attack ceased.

The big dog sat on its haunches, five feet tall, unblinking.

Cat curled up on the ground, violated and weakened, tears flowing freely. She didn’t have the strength to wipe the puke off her face. Her stomach heaved as the room continued to spin, the world’s worst hangover and motion sickness combined.

A minute passed before she had the will to speak. She wiped gunk from her mouth. “What the hell?”

“You must know what you’re up against before you enter no-holds barred combat with a war bot.”

Pain lanced through her body as she fought to stand. Cat pulled qi from the four directions, gathered data streams from ten thousand nodes, and struck back.

In a flurry of packets, Adam disappeared from the net, even though the bot was right in front of her in meat space. Her attack fizzled out. She weaved in and out of local gateways to find some trace of him. Routers filtered the data Cat streamed, nullifying her search. She tried to change the routing structure and discovered she was locked out.

She went upstream to the master servers, the authoritative sources, and repopulated the dog’s addresses, then forced a cache flush. The local routers reset and the robot reappeared. Cat defended the network infrastructure as she fought against the AI’s counter measures. She looked for openings, attacking any weakness.

Her awareness of the room dimmed as the net filled every fiber of her being. She was the packets, the data between nodes. She danced in netspace, sending qi flowing around the dog.

The dog’s qi swept toward her in Wu/Hao style
t’ai chi ch’uan
, a single whip form, and she countered with a simple
p’eng
from her own Chen method. At some level she was still routing packets, but below consciousness.

She fought perfectly, flowing martial arts moves from a dozen different disciplines. She didn’t grow tired. Every move was pristine, crisp, flawless.

They battled until she felt a shift in the direction of the fight, what Sensei Flores called
osu higai
, the point at which damage was done. She’d experienced it sparring, the moment when the opponent is beat but doesn’t know yet.

In that instant, everything froze. The golden qi flowing through the net vanished, her visualization dissipated, leaving just her and the dog in the empty, whitewashed room, the bot resting motionless on its haunches.

“Lesson over.” Adam stood and left.

She looked down, saw a dried pool of vomit at her feet. Every movement was agony, the pain worse than any physical fight she’d ever been in. She tried to move, but her muscles locked up and she almost fell.

She settled for leaning against the wall instead. The clock showed half the afternoon had passed. The fight seemed distant now. What had happened? Had she been about to beat Adam?

She forced herself up, ignoring the protests of muscles that held her in place for hours, and staggered back to her room.

48

“M
AKE THE TRAIN STOP
,”
Mike whispered. Their plan hinged on getting the three-thousand-miles-an-hour Continental to halt under the Tucson emergency exit.

“I’m trying.” Leon focused, still attempting to trigger the stop.

“It’s not working,” Mike said. “We’re traveling forty miles per minute. We’ll be in New York soon.”

Another passenger glanced at them.

“Be quiet,” Leon said through a clenched jaw, “you’re distracting me.” He grappled with the train’s software architecture, afraid of alerting the AI driver. Five minutes later, Leon gave up and leaned back against his seat.

Mike’s head hung. “I thought you’d be able to stop us.”

“The subsystem is wrapped in all kinds of security and a Class II AI is driving.”

“
Kuso
!” Mike said.
“
Now what?”

“We ride to New York and try again in two hours.”

“We’ll bounce back and forth all day unless you have a specific plan.”

Leon shook his head. “I’m out of ideas. You?”

“Can you fool the sensors with an imaginary obstruction?”

“No, I tried.” They had picked a car full of humans to avoid bots with super-sensitive hearing, but a guy across the cabin kept watching them.

Mike leaned closer. “You can open the doors at the top of the egress?”

Leon checked. “Yes, but what good does that do if I can’t make us stop?”

“Hire a remote telebot,” Mike whispered. “Something dumb, no onboard AI. Unlock the ground level door, send the bot down the stairs, and throw it on the tracks.”

“Are you crazy?” Leon hissed. The same passenger stared at them again. He continued in a softer voice. “You know what would happen if this train hit a robot going forty miles a minute?”

“The avoidance sensors will detect the obstacle and stop.”

“Jesus. You’re betting everyone’s lives.”

“You have a better idea?”

They failed to think of any alternatives, so before they reached New York Leon hired a automated construction bot and delivery truck in Phoenix, using his implant to hide behind layers of other servers to disguise his identity. He juggled routing tables and encryption keys, realizing he’d never had been able to do this without Shizoko’s enhancements.

In Manhattan, the ticketing AI asked them why they were buying return tickets so soon.

“I forgot my lucky rabbit’s foot in LA,” Mike said with a straight face.

The agent smiled and nodded. “Ah, yes, superstitions. Humans are cute.”

“Dude, that was the lamest excuse,” Leon said later.

“Confirmation bias works with AI, too,” Mike said, smiling.

On the ride west Leon researched their maximum deceleration. He needed to time the telebot’s arrival to trigger a three gravity stop, causing the train to end up under Tucson. Early, they’d be too far from the station to make a quick getaway. Late, they’d lose consciousness from the high G forces, or worse, hit the robot at speed, killing people.

Leon used his implant to force open the steel doors of the concrete egress bunker and sent a long series of instructions to the waiting robot, knowing he’d lose connectivity once it started down the fifty flights descending into the earth.

The tension built until the bot popped back online using the tunnel’s built-in net as it rolled to a stop outside the first set of airlock doors. Leon checked the train’s position and speed one last time, then triggered the next steps.

The robot punched through the outer airlock, triggering a rush of air into the chamber. Once the pressure equalized, it entered the vestibule and drilled into the next door. The hole was minuscule compared to the volume of the tunnel, but Leon distantly noted alarms sounding.

The bot crossed the second airlock onto a walkway that paralleled the maglev. Leon waited for the correct moment, then nudged the machine over the edge, where it fell lengthwise across the tracks, as much as he could have hoped for.

The real world returned with a jolt as Leon found himself pressed hard into his chair, many times his normal weight. His armrests had automatically risen up to push his arms in, which lay across his chest like sacks of wet sand. He tried to budge them but couldn’t. His headrest folded around his head, holding him perpendicular to the direction of deceleration.