The Last Firewall (29 page)

Slim explored under the console, banging his head twice before he found a panel full of circuit breakers numbered one to forty-eight. He bit back the urge to yell. “Which one do I pull?”

“A thin one,” Tony said. “Anything fat is for the drive or weapons systems. Don’t touch those.”

Half the breakers were small. Tony started flipping, screens around the cabin dying one by one, until the weapon control system shut down. He tried the manual controls, and suddenly the guns responded. “Got it,” he called. He sighted on an approaching highway sign and fired. The green board and its support girders disintegrated and fell onto the road.

The armored vehicle slammed into the debris, bouncing over the metal pipes and into the pavement on the other side.

“Good job,” Tony called.

Slim grinned, showing brown-stained teeth. “Let’s find her now.”

57

A
S IT NEARED FIVE O’CLOCK
in New York, Madeleine Ridley terminated the call with Adam. She stared at the handheld for a minute; this was it. She’d worked with Adam for eight months, and with his help turned the People’s Party from a second-rate movement into a powerhouse. She still didn’t know who he was, just that he shared her hatred of AI and robots, and possessed influence and resources far beyond anything imaginable. Today she would make the ultimate sacrifice for the movement.

She finished her makeup with mascara and lip tint, and adjusted her dress. Going through her luggage for a last time, she made sure nothing tied the bag to her. It was a futile exercise, since forensic science had progressed to the point where capture was inevitable, but she had to try for her daughter Victoria.

Madeleine pulled out a plastic canister, cracked the safety tab on top, twisted the dial for a fifteen minute delay and a ten meter radius. She’d gotten the highly restricted decontamination spray from a Center for Disease Control employee who had passed her a box of the stuff at a lunchtime rendezvous arranged by Adam. The CDC used it for cleanup after tuberculosis-TES episodes, the deadly terrorist-engineered strain that required elimination of every biological cell. The nanites would eat everything, living or dead, within the programmed radius, the perfect solution to clearing the suite of DNA.

She flipped the Do Not Disturb switch, went down to Tim’s room and knocked. The camera indicator blinked on and Tim cracked the door. “Give me thirty seconds,” he said.

She waited as he activated his own decon canister, then they rode to the parking garage on the twentieth floor in silence. They got into the waiting car, programming the destination of a building on West Fifty-Eighth Street, outside the Secret Service’s restricted zone.

“You nervous?” Tim asked.

Madeleine shook her head. “I raised four children, two boys, two girls. If I could do that, I can do anything.”

She thought about Victoria, beautiful and smart, but so fragile. Devastated when she couldn’t get a job out of college, she’d fallen in with the wrong crowd and rotted her brain out with a cocktail of drugs that the neurologists at John Hopkins had shaken their heads at. Now she lived at home in an imaginary universe, her mind wrapped up in people and places and games that didn’t exist.

The guilt of leaving Victoria behind ate at her, but she needed to do something to protect the other children, the ones with their lives still ahead of them.

The government had let the AI and robots take over, and the next generation would have no meaningful jobs, careers or contributions. She saw it all around her: kids squatting in houses, no one working, trying one drug after another, living in virtual reality games. There was nothing left for them in the real world.

Madeleine sighed, depression reaching into the depths of her body and mind. The odds of coming home to take care of Victoria were minimal, but it was up to her to rein in the machines.

Manhattan skyscrapers grew larger, then passed by on either side of the aircar.

Lonnie Watson would be crushed. Betrayed by his number two, he might never recover from the political fallout. Poor Lonnie, complacent and naive, he thought the system could be changed from within.

Thank God for Adam, who’d understood her from the start, grasping that she didn’t have time to wait for politics. Her last medical diagnostic showed a rare brain tumor, and the machines said her cognition would go within a year. She’d even retested on different units, getting the same results. She needed to take action while she was able.

Adam appreciated all that, giving her guidance and resources and creating the plan to fulfill her goals.

With a small lurch, the aircar docked with the eighteenth floor of the tower. She and Tim waited at the elevator, then boarded with two additional members of the team, riding down together in uneasy silence.

Madeleine’s pulse raced. Less than ten blocks from the President of the United States, the Vice President, and former President Smith, they were about to change everything.

58

C
AT DROVE CLOSER THAN
she thought she’d be able to, three hundred yards away from the geo-tag. A jumble of rocks filled the wash she’d been following, an insurmountable barrier to even the Fighter’s massive ground clearance.

She got out, forcing herself into the searing afternoon. At half past one o’clock it was nearly peak temperature for the desert, though the end was in sight and in another few hours the heat would back off. For now the air shimmered, sending the landscape through motion-sickness inducing waves, and when she put a hand on a boulder for leverage, it burned her.

A few minutes of hiking brought her to the two men. She checked the younger guy first, finding he matched the photos of Leon Tsarev plastered over the net. Lanky, blonde hair, rugged features. He’d be cute if not beet red, but she knew that from the pictures. His breath and pulse were shallow—she needed to get him inside and cooled off.

She walked over to the other man, who lay face down. She turned him onto his back, recognizing Mike Williams, whom she had learned about in elementary school. She sat with a thump as the energy drained out of her. Oh, God. The inventor of sentient AI was dead.

Cat’s hands shook, and she hugged her knees close to her as she rocked back and forth. She couldn’t afford to cry, didn’t have the moisture to spare.

The brilliant blue sky mocked her emotions. What a cruel fucking waste to die out here. She looked at the distance to the car, and came to a hard decision: the effort to carry a dead man would be too much, and she’d have to abandon him in the desert. He deserved respect, but keeping herself and Leon alive took precedence.

She squatted next to him, his open eyes staring into the heavens. She reached out to close them to leave him in a semblance of peace. Her fingers brushed his face, and she jumped as an electric shock traveled up her arm.

Impossible! She tentatively placed one finger against his temple.

“In a solution of MakerBot 211B. End of Message. Please—”

She withdrew her hand.
Imi-imashii
, was he bot or human? No, he’d been alive since before she’d been born, so he must be biological, yet he transmitted data like a machine. She touched him again, steeling herself to hear the message through.

“Immerse only the head. For biological reconstitution immerse in blood type AB solution. For machine reconstitution immerse in a solution of MakerBot 211B. End of Message. Please immerse only the head. For—”

She rubbed her face, afraid the heat had gotten to her. There had to be some crazy nanotech protecting him.

Oh boy, she wanted to run like hell, but she couldn’t ignore the situation; Leon required rescuing, and Mike . . . he needed
something
.

Why did this fall to her, a nineteen-year-old philosophy major? She sighed and looked around to see if someone else would show up and take care of this.
Kuso
!

She wasn’t going to carry two bodies, and the message only asked her to immerse the head. This was fucking insane.

Cat swallowed bile, then took out her boot knife and made a tentative cut into Mike’s neck. The blade came out dry. Pretty sure that wouldn’t normally happen, she assumed nanites protecting the brain had absorbed what they could from the rest of him.

Five minutes of sawing later, working to suppress the urge to vomit, she decided she needed a new approach. A vague awareness that Adam was alert and watching spread over her body, like thousands of insects crawling on her skin. Her gut said he’d activated agents all over the city to search for her.

She couldn’t sit here for half an hour sawing, so she finally reached down and grabbed hold on either side of Mike’s face. “Detach,” she sent through the contact, along with a visual of what she wanted, hoping that by some miracle the nanotech would be smart enough to figure it out. By the time she finished concentrating something came loose with a click, and she held the dead man’s head in her hands.

Her vision swam and she realized too late she was going to be sick. She threw up, barely missing Leon to one side. She closed her eyes for a moment and wiped her mouth.

“I’m just holding a hairy bowling ball.” She walked to the car, repeating her mantra. When she became conscious that the lumps under her palms were his ears, she had to put him down for a second. She blinked and stared at the sky, swallowing deep, until she was ready, and then without looking she picked him up and trudged the rest of the way to the Rally Fighter.

She popped the trunk, found a tool bag and dumped the tools out. She put the head in and stuffed the whole package behind the front seat, trying not to think about what she was doing.

“Good fucking grief.”

She wanted to curl up and make the world go away. She tried to swallow to get the taste of sick out of her mouth, but her throat was too dry and tight to find the slightest bit of moisture. The sun beat down, a pain penetrating eyes and skull, yet she had to go on. Leon was alive, but he wouldn’t stay that way unless she did something. She forced one foot in front of the other.

Cat mentally prepared to carry Leon to the car. She worked out every day, but two hundred pounds of dead weight . . . No, don’t say dead weight. Carrying him a thousand feet would be tough.

Until now she’d been sweating profusely, but the sweat slowed as she walked up the hill to stand next to Leon. She took a couple of deep breaths, steeled herself, and lifted, getting him about three feet up. When she tried to pull him over her shoulders, they both toppled to the ground. She started to cry, too dehydrated to make tears.

She tried three more times and on the fourth she finally raised him in a fireman’s carry, fought her way to standing, and marched toward the car. Once he was in position, she managed his weight, although her thighs burned with the effort of walking downhill. She went slowly, meticulous about her footing. If she fell again, she might never get him back up.

When she arrived back at the Fighter, she cursed herself for failing to open the passenger side earlier. She dropped him on the fender, propping him there with one arm as she opened the door, then unceremoniously pushed and pulled until she got him in.

Going around the vehicle, she sank into the driver’s seat and started the engine, the blast of heat from the vents giving way to cooler air as the A/C began to kick in. The last thing she remembered was giving the autopilot instructions and closing her eyes.

When she came to, the Rally Fighter was idling in the parking lot at Mountain View Country Club, near the extreme northern limit of Tucson. She drove onto a covered patio on the side of the abandoned clubhouse. where the car would be hidden from Adam’s observation drones or satellite coverage.

Cat fiddled with the building through the net, unlocking doors and disabling interior monitoring. She dragged Leon inside, left him on the floor, and accessed the A/C controls, cranking the settings for max cooling. She walked around until she discovered an industrial kitchen, turning the cold faucet on and letting it run until she found cabinets stacked with glasses. She drank a glass of lukewarm water, then another, and splashed a third on her face and hair.

She was suddenly exhausted, the cumulative effect of heat and fading adrenaline.

She walked into the dining room, pouring two glasses of water on Leon’s body. She didn’t think he could drink until he regained consciousness. Wandering back into the kitchen, she found the ice maker and filled a big bowl with cubes. She dumped the ice on him, watching as it melted and slid down his sides.

Cat sat in
seiza
next to him and waited, eyes half closed, breathing slowly. She visualized a golden beam shooting straight down into the ground, searching. The earth sent back qi, the energy flowing up and filling her legs, then hips and pelvis. She beamed light down, brought up more qi, pumping until the life force filled her stomach and chest. She opened her
Baihui
to let in heavenly qi, let that fill and calm her mind, flow down into her throat, and then into her abdomen. She churned heavenly and earthly energy until it was mixed, kept pumping, super-saturating herself with healing spirit. When the light poured out through her skin, she brought the qi up to her shoulders and it flowed down her arms and dripped from her fingers.

She leaned forward and placed her palms on Leon, her life force flowing into his body. He was still hot, too full of bad energy, so she imagined his own beam of light, grounding him to the earth, sending his stagnant qi down. As his body emptied, she filled him with good energy, pumping heavenly and earthly qi into him.

She felt a twitch. Her eyes sprang open to find him looking at her.

“Hello,” he said in a croak.

“Drink.” She held a glass up to his lips and tilted him forward, giving him a tiny sip.

“More.” His eyes followed the water.

“I don’t want you to throw up.”

Cat gave him small sips over the course of a few minutes, conscious, always conscious of the way his coarse hair lay against her fingers as she lifted him.