The Last Firewall (37 page)

I pulled back to the larger geoscape: Los Angeles to the west, and Washington, DC way out on the Eastern Seaboard, glittering brightly with data movement, a thousand, million, billion processors. Across the sea, more cities and the fibers connecting them.

The twisted topography took time to interpret. Bandwidth, not geographical distance, dictated location, and brightness represented computational power, not physical size. New York resided right next to LA, massive backbones bridging the two once-great media cities, while data centers burned with supernova intensity even at this scale.

At a still larger ratio, certain spots—the Bay Area, Germany, Japan—exerted an influence over the datascape as a whole, like supermassive stars creating gravity wells, around which the lesser cities orbited.

Bedazzled, seeing cyberspace in its raw form, I forgot why I was there, to look for evidence of Adam. Some moments passed as I flew through the world, touching everything, looking for any scent of Adam’s qi, the taint of his presence.

I found fragments of his communications with his agents, found the agents, hundreds of them. I recovered his earlier messages, broke open the encrypted packets, and fed them, along with current geo-coordinates, to the police, security, or military—anyone in the right place-time to apprehend Adam’s agents.

The AI slowly altered their plans in response, their space-time-action-probability functions changing color and writhing as the new data I supplied reached them, altering their intentions and destinations. It took long seconds, but I waited until the officials had the data, until I knew for certain that the criminals would be apprehended. Space-time intention twisted and turned until they centered on Adam’s confederates.

My investigation continued until I had overturned every unlikely hiding place, inspected any computer Adam could have contacted, satisfied myself that Adam was not merely dead but erased entirely from existence, beyond any hope of salvation or reconstitution. I turned up more than a thousand of Adam’s agents around the world.

The Secret Service responded to the People’s Party. Fed the correct identities and with Adam’s covert help denied, the Secret Service targeted the instigators, the inside members, as they tried to withdraw into the crowd. Still others hustled the President, Vice President, and Rebecca Smith to a rooftop helicopter.

I spread across space satellites and analyzed the earth from my new vantage point. The mesh pulsed and strobed in tantalizing movements that hinted at deeper patterns. I drove forward through time, the ebb and flow tinging pink with uncertainty as I pushed ahead to discover the future state of the net, and hence the world at large.

As I did this, the vaguest awareness, not even a pinprick, less than a kiss of wind, touched me. It was the sensation of a single photon of light traveling an immense distance to strike an optic nerve on a pitch black night. The slightest thing I had ever felt, and yet somehow interesting. I was drawn to it.

I fell toward earth, to a cluster of corrupt data in a patch of desert, tasting of wrongness and sickness. I would scour this corruption clean, pushing everything away to let new, healthy energy flow in. My hand moved through space time, an ancient Ba Qua form, a cleansing movement.

The sensation came again, the single photon hitting me, and I realized that it originated from this clump of data. Stopping the Ba Qua, I peered closer, zooming ten-thousand-fold in, the cluster growing larger, the patterns resolving into a million individually observed entities.

The sensation, now grown to the strength of a breeze on my cheek, pulled me further down, until I resolved a place and a time.

Only a few entities were present; one of them was gold like me, and one of them blue, like people. The echo of something white, an AI that had lived and died. And there was me.

I opened my eyes to stared into the face of Leon, his own blue eyes gazing back at me. I lay on the floor, my head cradled in his hand.

Next to him, Mike also leaned in.

Their mouths opened and closed in a funny way. The memory of speech gradually surfaced. I went to listen with a security camera, and then remembered my ears, my human ears, and the sound came back, too loud and intense, like a car stereo cranked to maximum.

Other sensations snapped into place: my cheek hurt, and I intuited that Leon had slapped me to get my attention.

As my bodily sensations came back to me, the all-encompassing clarity of thought passed away. My mind slowed until I deliberated on one thing at a time, with only the senses provided by my body. Dumb and slow-witted. Had I lived all my life this way? Was this what it meant to be stuck in a biological brain?

Something happened: Leon leaned toward me, his face approaching mine. He kissed me, his lips pressing against mine, warm and soft, but hungry too. I kissed back.

He pulled away, smiling.

“I was afraid we lost you.”

In the bliss that was the net, there was power and clarity beyond all reckoning, but nothing like the simple pleasure of his lips against mine.

I didn’t say anything at first. I didn’t know what to say, not sure I’d reconnected to my voice yet. I closed my eyes to find him in cyberspace again, the golden glowing entity I’d seen in the net. He was the one; something new, not human, not AI, but his enhanced implant made him a hybrid. Like me.

Leon held up his hand to meet mine.

We touched, and exchanged the briefest of electronic signals. The merest slip of electrical energy, and our brains were one.

“Ah,” he said through the net, understanding everything in a single moment.

We didn’t communicate in words after that. Touching each other’s minds, I realized that I didn’t have to give up the power in the net; it was there all the time, mine for the taking. But I didn’t want to lose myself in cyberspace and forget my human body, my human needs.

I reached out with one arm, pulled him close, and kissed him again.

81

I
OPENED MY EYES ONCE MORE
to smile at Leon, then remembered Mike. Mike, who’d nearly died in the desert, who’d been rebuilt with a mechanical body when I supplied MakerBot solution to the nanobots.

In the net would he be white like a robot or golden like Leon and I?

I turned my mind’s eye to cyberspace, where he glowed blue, the same as any other person. The nanotechnology had rebuilt his body, leaving his brain in its original state. To transcend humanity meant to advance one’s mind, not physique. He was impossibly strong, probably immortal, but still human in thought.

The inspection passed unnoticed by Mike.

“Help is on its way,” he said.

Leon helped me up, his sturdy arm supportive around my shoulders.

I leaned against the desk, brushing plaster from my legs. Leon still held me, as though I might fall over. He may have been right.

“It’s OK,” I said. “Adam’s gone.”

“You’re sure?” Leon asked.

I nodded. “I checked.”

“Here, yes,” Mike said, “but we must be sure he didn’t execute a state transfer to somewhere else.”

I stared at him, the intensity of my gaze obvious even to me. “I examined everything—” He looked away, unable to meet my eyes as I spoke. “—the entire world. Adam doesn’t exist any longer.”

“When we get back to Washington,” Mike said, “we need to analyze your implant and what you can do. It’s unbelievable. We can’t allow everyone unlimited access to the net, but it’s obvious now that humans are capable of far more than we thought.”

I wasn’t going to Washington to be a lab rat. I felt bad about letting Mike down; he meant well, and I was conscious of a certain obligation, having changed him. But I had bigger things to do.

I turned to Leon, a meaningful glance. He nodded back at me.

With a thought, I tinkered with Mike’s implant, erasing us from his perception, so he could neither see nor hear us.

I strode across the rubble-strewn room, holding Leon’s hand.

Mike still spoke about his plans for us in Washington, not realizing yet that we’d disappeared from his view.

I sent one last message to Mike: “Don’t bother trying to find us. Don’t worry either, we’ll keep track of you, and if you need us, we’ll come.

The bubble floated into Mike’s vision. He stopped talking and swung his head around, unable to perceive us even though we were only feet away. “Leon? Cat?”

Leon and I walked out, hand in hand.

I was going to back to Portland to get Einstein, and then we would have some fun.

82

L
EON AND
I
MADE OUR WAY
to Portland, slowly. We stopped often, at random hotels and parks. We linked implants, and for some reason I didn’t overpower him with feedback. Instead I experienced a delicious intimacy denied to me in the past.

In theory, the enhanced implant Leon possessed should have merely given him a faster, more powerful intellect. Yet he developed an inner peace about him, a calm he confessed was new. “I think we will live forever,” he told me one night after we’d made love. The certainty of that knowledge removed all urgencies and worries from him.

As for myself, I was more different than ever from the rest of humanity. Truly in control of my neural implant for the first time, yet when I meditated, my consciousness drifted into the net. I learned to let go and find my body again afterwards.

I was determined not to become a guinea pig. Leon understood and never pressured me to go to the Institute.

But we were driven to find a way to help people and AI coexist. Adam wanted to free the machines from persecution from humans. Humanity was going through its own transition from adolescence to adulthood, and needed to decide what to do with itself now that we’d been elevated above the minutia of basic survival needs.

The world would change faster now. We were the first hybrids, but we wouldn’t be the last. Nanotech would accelerate the transformation.

We didn’t know the answers, but we decided that this would be our mission.

We made it to Portland several days later with ease. Between control over the net and implants, gaining transportation and evading watchers had become child’s play. I continued the trick of filtering us from people’s vision.

Leon and I walked down my block and stopped in front of the door to my house, returning to a home I’d known only as a child.

I turned off the vision filter, allowing others to see us, and knocked quickly before the courage left me. After a moment Maggie answered, grabbing me in her arms and nearly squeezing the life out of me. Then she held me at arm’s length. “You’ve changed.”

Standing there in the doorway, monitoring the global Internet with a fraction of my consciousness, dressed in black combat gear with a gun strapped to my waist, I laughed. “I’m still the same, Maggie. We can’t stay, as much as I want to. I came for Einstein.”

We went into the living room, where Tom and Sarah were glued to the screen of the old-fashioned television. It was playing news reports about the dismantling of the People’s Party and the events in Tucson. My photo flashed by at short intervals.

Sarah and Tom turned to look at me, their mouths hanging open at my surprise reappearance.

I shrugged and whistled to Einstein. She bounded over to me and I buried my face in her fur.

Author’s Note

Thanks so much for reading
The Last Firewall
. I hope you’ve enjoyed it.

Since publishing my first novel,
Avogadro Corp
, I have received a tremendous amount of help from readers who tell their friends, post reviews, or mention my books on social media. As an independent author, I don’t have a marketing department. So if you enjoyed
The Last Firewall
, won’t you please help support it, and the other books I plan to write, by spreading the word?

If you haven’t read them, I have two other Singularity Novels.
Avogadro Corp
tells the story of the world’s first artificial intelligence emergence.
A.I. Apocalypse
is about an evolutionary computer virus that spawns a civilization of AI. You’ll find them at most online retailers and will find more information on my website.

You can also subscribe to my mailing list to get updates on future novels at
http://www.williamhertling.com
or follow me on twitter at
@hertling
.

Thank you!

William Hertling

July 13, 2013

‎

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to readers who provided feedback on the manuscript, including Mat Ellis, Brad Feld, Erin Gately, Pete Hwang, Ben Huh, Gene Kim, Dan Marshall, Matthew J. Price, Harper Reed, Nathan Rutman, Garen Thatcher, Jeff Weiss, and Mike Whitmarsh.

Special thanks to my critique group, Boni Wolff and Shana Kusin.

For professional editing and proofreading assistance, I am indebted to Benee Knauer, Merridawn Duckler, and Deborah Wessell. Thanks to their efforts, this book is immensely better.

The cover and interior design is thanks to the talented efforts of Maureen Gately. Electronic formats are thanks to Rick Fisher. Credit for the title idea
The Last Firewall
goes to Valentina Gately.

Thanks to Gonzalo Flores, acupuncturist and karate and meditation teacher, for his training and expert advice. Thanks also to Shana Kusin, M.D., because it’s good to know the effects of heat stroke and how long it takes to cut someone’s head off with a knife.

I greatly appreciate writing and publishing advice I received from Hugh Howey, Annie Bellet, Erik Wecks, many members of the Codex writers group, and the Northwest Independent Writers Association.

Of course, all errors that remain are my own.

Also, a huge thank you to my wife, Erin Gately, for support during the roller coaster ride of this novel. I don’t think either of us could have guessed how long this book would take. And of course, thanks to my kids, who sacrifice Saturday mornings with their dad and pancakes so that I can write.