The Last Firewall (8 page)

“We can’t give up!” Leon walked over to Mike.

Mike turned his head to meet his gaze. “No, I am not suggesting that. We still need to get to San Diego and track her down. It’s just . . . It’s going to be a lot harder now.” He gestured at the empty room.

No one to back them up. No one to give them support. Having to get across the country without being spotted by the extremists. “Yeah,” he said, somberly. “Don’t tell Rebecca we’re going, or she’ll say no. She’ll make the Secret Service babysit us.”

Mike nodded.

“We need to talk to the AI that Sonja mentioned, Shizoko,” Leon said, after a pause. “It must have more information.”

“Shizoko Reynolds,” Mike said. “I spent some time researching it. It’s an odd duck.” Mike pushed files into their netspace. “Class IV artificial intelligence. That alone makes it hard to understand. And Shizoko is a loner, the sole tenant of the Austin Convention Center. Its origin is even weirder. At the last SXSW Interactive conference eight years ago they had a workshop on third generation AI. Apparently they spun it up based on donated smartphones.” He pushed a digital photo to the foreground.

Leon pulled it closer to inspect it, until it filled his vision. A mostly male group, wearing eyeglasses and dressed in checkered shirts or T-shirts with obscure logos. Geeks, in a word. They stood around a collection of smartphones, tablets, and old routers, their smiles frozen in place. “What was the point of it?”

“An experiment in collective algorithms. Everyone donated neural network parts, including a bunch of AI. The workshop was called AI Fusion. Two guys named Harper Reed and Ben Huh led the effort. Anyhow, this Shizoko is still that original AI, eight years later.”

Leon whistled softly. Eight years was an eternity for an AI. “You said he’s Class IV.” Leon waved at the photo. “There’s no way this cluster of antique computers is a Class IV AI.”

“No, of course he’s upgraded over the years. He’s applied for the experimental Class V license twice but we turned him down both times. His reputation score is borderline. He’s trustworthy, just odd.”

“So you talked to him?” Leon asked.

“No, that’s the problem. He only wants to talk to us in person.”

Leon wiped netspace away. “In person?” He squinted at Mike.

“Yes, I tried several times to talk to him, to email him, but he gives me a canned response saying he’ll only talk to me if I go there. To Austin.”

“
Neboken ja-neyo!
Weird, dude.”

“I know,” Mike said. “I don’t think we have a choice. We have to go to Austin first.”

12

C
AT STEPPED OFF THE TRAIN
,
sniffing curiously at the warm Los Angeles air. It was easily twenty degrees warmer than San Francisco, which she’d left just an hour earlier. She followed a small group from the train toward the electric tram stop marked Downtown.

She felt herself relax, just a little. One black boot was stuffed with anonymous payment cards and the other held a small boot knife. Over both shoulders, she carried her ever-present backpack, packed with spare clothes and a toothbrush. She carried it always, in case she needed to run again. Two weeks in California had bought her a little street wisdom and a few possessions.

She’d slept in abandoned buildings until she thought of using her implant to find unoccupied apartments by analyzing power consumption data. Financial records were encrypted, rendering them impossible to use, but smart appliances reported their power consumption in the clear. So she looked for apartments whose refrigerators and water heaters were in long-term standby. The first place she’d hacked had been a single woman’s apartment. She’d slept on flowered sheets, taken showers with perfumed soaps, and eaten organic food from the cupboards. Cat kept the window open onto the fire escape, and when she’d heard the front door knock down the pile of empty cans she’d left as an alarm, she scooted out the window and up to the roof.

In the next apartment she hacked, the owner had left his digital calendar up on the refrigerator, so Cat had known exactly when he’d come back.

But she couldn’t find it in herself to steal money from these people. So she’d stuck to stealing payment cards from dozens of different bodegas. She’d showed up at a store on Lombard yesterday, planning to steal more cards. But two men had been casing the location, their encrypted data streams visible to her from half a block away. So she’d gone eight blocks south to the next grocery store she planned to hit, only to find a security bot patrolling that one.

That’s when it hit her: for all the sophistication of Cat’s theft, it was still going to show up on corporate ledgers. She’d been using her human brain to pick which grocery stores to rob, and unconsciously she had conformed to a pattern. AIs loved patterns. They had obviously figured out hers.

After that, she panicked at every bystander, bot, and camera. She abandoned the stuff she’d left in the current apartment, comforted that she at least had the backpack, and headed instead for the train station. She took the southbound train, part of a vague plan in the back of her mind to work her way to Mexico. Now here she was in Los Angeles.

The tram squealed to a halt, and she boarded following a woman lugging a baby and a stroller with three quiet kids in tow. When it was her turn to pay, Cat kept her implant ID in anonymous mode and used a payment card. She went for the rear, having a better understanding after a few weeks on the run of what it meant to keep your back to the wall.

Hugging her backpack on her lap, she forced herself to be calm. She had an hour until they reached downtown, then she’d find herself a flea-bit hotel and get a job. She’d spent the last two weeks in some never-never land, with no thought of the future. She couldn’t steal payment cards forever.

The tram was quiet, the other passengers silent, wispy data streams showing them reading, watching video, playing games, or communicating. She closed her eyes, shut down her implant, and started qigong forms in her head. She might not be able to do the physical movements, but she could still visualize them. The more perfect the visualization, the more perfect the practice.

She started with Liu He’s Jade Woman form, followed with Ba Duan Jin, and finished with Hu Lu Gong. She checked her implant and saw she had thirty minutes left. She moved onto karate, starting with the Nihaichi kata, then mentally rehearsed knife fighting.

The mental practice abruptly brought back memories of the fight in the park. All the loss and pain and loneliness surfaced, but she pushed aside the thoughts. She’d had enough of them during the long nights in San Francisco.

The tram finally lurched to a stop downtown. She shaded her eyes from the brilliant sun, more used to Portland’s persistent clouds. She slung her backpack over both shoulders and started the search for a hotel. She wanted something cheap, near high bandwidth net access, and preferably off the main strip.

She felt safe in the crowd, once more anonymous and untraceable. She glanced at the time—mid-afternoon on a weekday. People would be at work. She trudged along, watching people’s clothing. She ignored anyone in business attire, the hip, and the casual. She looked for the poorly dressed, the hookers, the homeless. When she saw someone who fit the description, she headed in their direction. She wanted a crowd where anonymity and secrecy were the norm. The density of what she was looking for gradually increased until she found herself off First Street. Once an upscale Asian neighborhood, now boarded windows spotted the storefronts, druggies huddled in doorways, and a long line marked a rice kitchen.

A hooker in a nonexistent skirt and impossibly tall heels called out to her. “Coming to slum, honey? I got what you want.”

Cat shrugged further into her hooded sweatshirt and kept going. The hooker was right. She wanted to disappear among these people, but even after two weeks she still looked too clean for the street.

At the corner of Rose, she stopped beside a sign advertising rooms by the week. Underneath the peeling paint and barred first floor windows, it looked like it had once been an upscale condo. Now rooms went for less than the price of dinner. Cat did some quick math and realized that with the payment cards in her boot, she could stay here for a week, even counting food expenses. She could look for a job and have a real place to stay instead of squatting in other people’s vacant apartments.

Cat followed hand painted wooden signs to what passed for an office. A toothless man with a few hairs poking out of his otherwise bald head squinted at her behind an old-fashioned e-paper sheet. No implant then.

“You want it for an hour?” he asked.

Cat didn’t want to think about what he assumed she’d do with a room for an hour. “I’ll take one for a week.” She paused. “Something with a fire escape.”

He made choking sounds, which she gradually realized was a laugh. “It’s two hundred extra for a fire escape. You want it?”

She slowly shook her head. That’d leave her nothing for food.

“I give you the third floor, and if there is a fire, you just jump.” He cackled some more.

Cat handed over the bulk of her payment cards. Her boot felt empty.

The old man handed her a digital key on a chain.

“No ID locks?” she asked.

He laughed again. “Room 317c.” He pointed down the hall toward an elevator.

On the third floor, she tried to find 317c, getting lost in a maze of mismatched doors. The original apartments had been broken up into smaller rooms. She finally found it, entering to find a small bedroom with a microscopic bathroom. She walked over to the window. She tried opening it, but it wouldn’t budge. Four screws told her why. She looked out toward the street. She didn’t think she’d be jumping three floors anyway.

Domicile secured, it was time to look for a job. She stared at her backpack, self-conscious. She’d look less like a vagrant without it. To most people, the bag held almost nothing: clothes, toothbrush, some energy bars. But it was everything she had, and her stomach lurched even at the thought of leaving it behind. She caressed the bag with one hand, swallowing hard. She turned to the door, leaving it on the bed.

13

“I
’
M TIRED OF THIS
,”
Tony said. “It’s not right.”

“Shut up and help me,” said Slim. He carried the woman, his slight frame struggling with her weight.

Tony reluctantly took one arm and dragged her across the room. Her head drooped and her mouth hung open, still unconscious from the neural stun.

The solid wooden chair faced the window. They left it that way as they wrestled her limp body into the seat. She was heavier than she looked at first glance, heavily muscled under her now rumpled clothes. When they had her positioned, Slim got out a roll of duct tape.

Tony looked on, depressed about the whole situation. “None of the others told us anything.” He glanced over at the memory extraction machine on the table, just a little aluminum box with a couple of positionable antennas protruding from the rear. “They can block us somehow.” The neural stunner had worked fine, but the memory extraction failed to function against their hardened, military grade implants.

“We don’t know that,” Slim said. “This one, I think she’s the leader. She’ll tell us something.”

Tony shook his head but said nothing. He hadn’t liked Slim’s plan from the start. And repeating something that didn’t work the first seven times was dumb. Slim had certain skills, but thinking wasn’t one of his strong suits. He broke open an ammonia smelling salt under the woman’s nose. The pungent odor overwhelmed the room immediately and her head jerked up.

“Hello, Sonja,” Slim said.

Sonja moved her body violently but ineffectually. Slim had duct taped her legs, arms, and body to the chair. She struggled, but there was no give. When she realized the effort was futile, she stopped and looked at the two of them. “I must be getting close.”

“Very good, Sonja,” Slim said. “You are. But now we need something from you, the records of your investigation.” Slim was silhouetted by the cheerful sun coming in the window. “We want to know what you know.”

Sonja said nothing, just stared off past them. “Let me go.”

Slim bent down in front of her face. “Just tell us, Sonja. It’s not hard. You’re investigating some murders.” He caressed her neck. “We already know you are. So it can’t hurt to tell us what you know.”

She grimaced again and tried to pull her head away. She was wearing a necklace, some kind of tribal carving. Slim looked at it and yanked it off. “Answer me. How did you find out about the murders?”

Sonja didn’t reply.

Tony looked over to the aluminum box on the table. Yellow indicator lights blinked. The box would block any attempt for her to connect to the net.

Slim put the necklace in his pocket. “Turn her around,” Slim said, looking out the window.

Tony reluctantly trudged over to the woman. He really hadn’t signed up for this. He didn’t mind the killing or the extracting memories. It beat dealing with junkies, who were as likely to try to stab you as to pay you. But this torturing business made him uncomfortable. A man’s gotta draw the line somewhere. Sighing, he put his hands on either side of the seat, and turned it around so that Sonja faced the opposite wall. The chair slowly pivoted on two legs, and Sonja gasped as the rest of the Enforcement team came into view.

“You fucking bastards,” she screamed. She fought against the duct tape again, her head jerking back and forth. She succeeded only in rocking the chair until Tony put his hands on the back to steady it.

The bodies of the seven other members of the Enforcement team were piled up over the hotel furniture, two or three deep on the clothing dresser and suitcase holder. They were frozen, gap mouthed, ugly in death. At the left end the bodies were clean, without a mark on them. Then, as the extraction machine had failed, one after another, to get useful information Slim had tried increasing levels of physical torture. At the far end of the dresser, a fair-haired boy sat, crumpled, bloody lines leading up his lap to his fingerless hands.