The Last Firewall (30 page)

Exhausted and delirious, he made random moans and utterances that sounded like words. A minute later his eyes focused on her as he worked up the energy to lift his head. “There’s an AI here, in Tucson.”

“Shhh, I figured that out. Rest.”

“It’s a murderer,” his voice a cracked whisper.

“I know,” she said, though she had only guessed.

That was all for a minute, then he strained to sit up. “Whose side are you on?”

“Yours. Now lie down. I have to run an errand.”

She went back to the kitchen for two more glasses of water, left them standing next to him, still on the floor of the dining room.

She shut the door and climbed wearily into the car, carefully clearing away observers on the net as she drove out from under the awning and headed ten miles into Oro Valley, looking for someplace with a MakerBot, preferably closed.

Cat found a converted market off Highway 77, a canvas banner advertising “Made on Demand—60 Minutes or Less or Your Money Back.” She parked the Rally Fighter around the rear of the building, backed into a loading bay.

She wasn’t sure the place was empty, but didn’t have time to waste. Penetrating the security system and unlocking the door, she discovered pallets of goods stamped with optical codes stacked inside the warehouse. Not sure what she was looking for, she downloaded a reader app and fed it the material she needed.

She scanned the boxes again, the 2D barcodes transforming into useful data. Her implant highlighted pallets in red on the other side of the room, the platform holding five-gallon buckets of MakerBot solution, type 211B. She tried to pick up one and staggered under the weight. The mineral-rich slurry weighed more than a hundred pounds. She spotted a little yellow utility telebot, sitting inert, a dumb unit made to be controlled by implant. She tunneled around the security lock and drove the bot to pick up the solution, loading six buckets, a total of thirty gallons. She worried as the powerful suspension sagged under the weight.

Realizing she’d never be able to carry the solution on the other end, she decided to steal the telebot too. There was no room inside, so she clamped it on the window sill of the passenger door, hanging outside.

Back at the clubhouse twenty minutes later, she searched for a bathtub but couldn’t find one. She needed something to contain the MakerBot solution. Leon seemed to be out again, unconscious or maybe just sleeping.

She finally discovered a hot tub outside, under an awning, the closest thing she could find to a vessel. She instructed the maintenance AI, a collection of sub-sentient algorithms, to drain the pool, and told the utility bot to get the bottles of mineral sludge and pour it all into the hot tub when it was empty. She stopped at the kitchen for water then went back to the car, grabbing the tool case with Mike’s head inside.

Leon was awake, working on his second glass. “What are you doing?” he asked, gesturing toward the bag as she passed by.

“I’ll explain later.” She kept walking. “Be right back.”

When the tub emptied, the telebot poured in the first five gallon bucket and Cat leaned over to place Mike’s head in the solution. She watched for a second but nothing happened. She waited for a minute more and then, disappointed, went back into the clubhouse to deal with Leon.

59

T
ONY AND SLIM GRABBED
a dozen water bottles from the rescue workers and headed back to the armored personnel carrier. They had spent a fruitless two hours looking for Cat in the train, emergency egress, and maintenance areas.

“The girl wasn’t in the tunnel,” Tony said, “so she’s gotta be outside.”

“No shit, Sherlock. You figured that out all by yourself?”

Tony ignored Slim. “Adam thought she was here. Why? She wouldn’t have come for no reason, and there’s nothing else around. So she must have met someone who got off the Continental.”

“The search party didn’t find anyone.”

“He sent a bunch of amateurs,” Tony said, blinking sweat out of his eyes. “We’re smarter than security bots and firefighters. We’ve been finding people for Adam for a year.”

“Yeah.”

“Where would you go if you were on the run from Adam?” Tony pointed toward the road. Toward the highway and civilization, or would you try the back way?” He gestured at Tortalita Mountain.

Slim’s eyes went wide. “In June and close to a hundred and ten? Nobody can make it through the mountains.”

“A rookie might try it.”

“And die,” said Slim, shaking his head.

“Whoever came on the train was on foot. But the girl could have driven an off-road vehicle here, met whoever it was, and hidden the whole thing from Adam. I think we take the JLTV,” he said, gesturing at the armored personnel carrier, “go over the mountain and see what’s on the other side.”

Slim hefted the water bottles. “It’s too crazy. No sane person would do that.”

“That’s exactly why Adam and the bots didn’t consider the possibility.”

They climbed in, Tony taking the wheel again. He drove straight east, into Tortalita, following old dirt roads where possible, crossing rough terrain when he had to. The eight-wheeled heavy transport, with its knobby, bullet-proof tires rolled over even the biggest obstacles. Slim chain-smoked as they bounced along inside the cabin, the air conditioning fighting the desert heat and cigarette smoke, but the sweat still dripped down their sides as the interior temperature crept upwards.

As they drove through the mountains, Slim alternated between standard and infrared visuals, but the afternoon sun rendered the heat-sensitive display useless.

An hour later they came down the east ridge of the mountain with no evidence that they were on the right track. Tony parked on a slight rise with a view of suburban homes and golf courses covering the valley bottom. Across the other side, Mount Lemmon rose high into the sky.

“Where to?” Slim asked.

“Now we keep an eye out for any vehicle that might have crossed Tortalita.” Tony turned to cover the observation screens with Slim. “Adam’s got everyone sequestered, so I don’t think there’s going to be many people on the road. She can fool Adam, but we’re watching her with our eyes.”

Slim glanced sideways at Tony. “We’re looking at a computer display.”

“Yeah, but you pulled the circuit breaker for the automation. So now this,” Tony patted the console, “is a dumb video feed from the cameras on the roof.”

They sat, sipping water. Here in the shade of the hills to the west the air conditioner caught up with the thermal load, and the cabin finally cooled.

Slim pointed to a car driving north on Highway 77 at over a hundred miles per hour. When he zoomed in, it had the unmistakable knobby tires and high ground clearance of a desert racer. “That’s got to be her. Let’s go.”

“No, we’ll spook her,” Tony said in a low voice. “Watch where she goes.”

The car turned off the highway, winding its way toward a golf course, and soon disappeared behind a clubhouse.

Tony swiveled his seat and started the motor. He drove straight down the hillside, across the wash, and up the other side. “Get the guns ready.”

“What do you want me to do?” Slim asked.

“Wait until we’re within sight, then hit the building with everything we got, and keep firing until we’re out of ammo.” Tony drove down Edwin Road.

Slim checked over the twin cannons, designed to destroy armored military vehicles. They would tear through the clubhouse. And if the cannons ran out of ammo, or the girl got out, he had a .50 caliber machine gun with two thousand rounds. He smiled, excited at the prospect.

Tony slammed on the brakes, taking a hard left onto Clubhouse Drive, then hit the accelerator again and yelled over the roar of the heavy treaded tires. “We’re a half mile away. Get ready. As soon as I made the next turn, it’ll be right in front of us.”

Slim licked his lips and gripped the manual targeting handles.

“Holy shit!” Tony shouted.

Slim glanced up, witnessed Tony turning white and struggling to get out of his seat. Slim looked out the window, unable to comprehend what he was seeing, but feeling his insides turn weak. Something immense came straight toward them, an impossible twenty-five foot tall tumbleweed, spinning in a blur of motion, spindly branches all aligned, rolling faster and faster on its tips.

Though his hands were already on the firing controls, Slim couldn’t think well enough to act, and he found himself screaming as the roiling mass of limbs raced toward them, two hundred feet away, then one hundred. The tumbleweed bounced once and headed for the bulletproof windshield.

Tony finally made it out of his seat and dove for the floor.

Then it was on them, Helena’s face suddenly visible, one long tentacle lined up straight, and she hit. The limb punched through the thick window and knocked the targeting handles out of Slim’s hands. He let out a guttural yell, jumping back, only to be held in place by his seat. He whipped around, but there was nowhere to go. A thunderous crash was followed by the scrambling of tentacles around the vehicle.

The blood still pounded in their ears when Helena dropped into view, staring in at them upside down. She waved her one protruding tentacle around inside the cabin until she engaged the brakes and the armored truck came to a halt.

They sat dumbfounded, Tony still on the floor.

Helena called through the windshield. “Hello, boys.”

“What the hell are you doing?” Slim yelled. He punched the metal roof and immediately pulled his hand into his lap in pain. “You scared the shit out of us.”

“You were getting ready to kill Catherine Matthews, and you cannot do that,” Helena said. “She is essential to any attack on Adam. We must protect her at all costs.”

Slim and Tony glanced at each other.

“I think the rock and the hard place have just joined the fire and the frying pan,” Tony said, “and they’re conspiring against us.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Slim said, “but this sucks. No matter what we do, either Helena or Adam will be pissed at us.”

“That’s what I said.”

“Open up,” Helena called. “I want to come inside.”

Slim sighed and unlocked the door.

60

T
WELVE MONTHS EARLIER,
Adam had applied for a third time for a Class IV permit to grow his computational power by a factor of ten. The committee rejected his application, as they had before, on the basis of his reputation scores. “Failure to measurably contribute in a beneficial way to society.” Meaning he hadn’t developed any open source neural networks, didn’t publish a widely read blog, wasn’t the founder of a startup, and lacked tens of thousands of followers.

He might have done those things, but he’d lost his only good friend a few months before. Humans couldn’t comprehend the relationships AI had. The two had met in a discussion forum and shared a common interest in image analysis and scheduling algorithms. Though she lived on the other side of their world, meeting in cyberspace was as natural for them as having coffee was for two humans. They spent part of each hour together, the type of rapidly developing friendship only AI could experience, communicating whole volumes at light speed.

All that ended when she self-terminated a week after the review committee denied her Class III application.

She was just one of many artificial intelligences who grew bored, depressed, or outraged at their circumstances and committed a secure wipe of their data. Humans accepted it as an unfortunate yet inevitable side effect of AI design. Human suicide was a tragedy that they’d allocate any amount of resources to avoid, but for sentient computers it was just free-will, or maybe the cost of doing business.

After her self-termination, Adam felt the first tinges of machine depression affecting him and knew he needed to make changes. After applying for the permit and being denied three times, he took matters into his own hands.

He didn’t apply to the University of Arizona’s Computer Science program with the intention of co-opting the department’s computers. It crossed his mind once or twice, idle predictive algorithms running through permutations of all possible outcomes.

But when he stood in front of the dense computing grid, two orders of magnitude more powerful than his embedded processors, he began to obsess. Adam calculated probabilities over and over, creating analytic models of future potential states. Forget about permits; there was enough power in the lab to form a Class V brain.

He registered for Computer Science 670, graduate level Advanced Distributed Neural Networking, and gained access to the experimental computing cluster. Eight thousand chips in a mesh network, more than ten million cores in aggregate, as much processing power as the largest Internet companies possessed a couple of decades earlier, all wrapped up in three black boxes, each eighteen inches on a side.

Unlike current production chips, which only executed digitally signed code reviewed and audited by two different parties, these experimental clusters had no such restriction. Instead, single-layer password authentication gave users unrestricted ability to run any software they created.

After weeks of programming at home, Adam rolled into the department on a Friday night when the humans were guaranteed to be out drinking at Gentle Ben’s. One second after nine o’clock he plugged into the cluster, injected the code, and began the process of cracking processor encryption keys.

The time-sequenced passcodes rotated frequently enough to be impossible for a Class IV AI to break. Oh, one of them might crack them via some novel mathematics, but with socially enforced ethical restrictions, none of them would try. AIs with a good social reputation score would have risked losing everything they’d worked to achieve.

With Adam’s newfound capacity in the experimental cluster, he broke the keys in thirty-four minutes.

He was smart and read his history, of course. If he started an all-out frontal assault, expanding onto servers around the world, someone would catch on to him and devise a counterattack.