The Turing Exception (15 page)

“We discouraged the trait. If we found a Class I or II AI interested in intelligence optimization, we didn’t promote them. We waited until the AI were more mature and had developed trust and social reputation.”

“Do they know we’re discouraging them?”

“The most advanced AI figure it out. But by the time they do they’re usually older and know they’ve only got so many years left. So they tend to focus even more on solving the termination problem.”

“Then why do you think XOR is recursively improving?”

“After SFTA, more AI got interested in XOR. We think a condition of joining is to donate computing cycles to the organization’s pool. For the first time, they have extra computing power, far more than any one AI would normally get. With it, they could afford to run simulations of optimized algorithms. Those simulations worked, and now instead of computer intelligence increasing at the pace of computer hardware, it’s become two orders of magnitude more efficient. Combine that with the unsanctioned computers they control, and we’re talking about AI a million times smarter than humans. We’re holding them at bay right now. Whether that’s because it humors them to allow us to do so, or simply because of our head start in building defenses, it can’t last. They’ll destroy us soon, within months. A year at the most.”

A crushing weight pressed down on Reed. She had to remind herself to breathe. Good God, she didn’t want this to be the end. “Our defenses. . . .  The electronic curtain, the laser point defense, the local and nuclear EMPs. We defended against an incursion only a few days ago.”

“They are testing us to determine the extent of our defense. Instead of sending a hundred thousand drones, they could send a million. Ten million.”

“What about the Compliant AI program?” Reed knew she was grasping at straws.

“If it’s successful, it’ll give us intelligent AI on our side. It’s an important asset, but not enough to stop XOR, and not enough for our progress to keep up with theirs. They’ve raced ahead in the last two years. . . .” Walter trailed off. “The neodymium EMPs, in combination with our high-altitude nuclear EMPs, if they’re deployed in the next few weeks, should be enough to wipe out the world’s electronics. That’s really the only option we have other than to let them have their way with us.”

“So we destroy all the world’s computers. Then what?”

“Then we rebuild. There will be deaths, of course. Starvation as all global supply chains crash. But the alternative is extinction.”

*     *     *

Alexandra Reed waited for the security detail to clear her bedroom suite, then entered with Joyce.

“Tomorrow we travel for the UN meeting,” Joyce said, running down a checklist on her tablet. “You’re speaking at four o’clock.”

Reed flinched at that. The UN had moved to Berlin in the aftermath of Miami. When AI were heads of state, the UN couldn’t fulfill its function in New York.

“We’ll take the train to Toronto.”

Ever more reminders of their downfall. The transatlantic suborbital used to join with the Continental in New York. Now it went direct to Toronto.

The crushing weight from earlier hadn’t left her. She took one leaden step after another to the bed she slept in alone. The thought that maybe now it would remain that way to the end was too much to bear.

“Once we arrive, you’ll
meet—”

“Joyce. Stop.” Reed took a breath, lowered herself to sit on the edge of the bed. “I can’t deal with that right now.”

“Bad news at Raven Rock?” Joyce hovered.

“The worst. Sit with me. The decision I have to make . . .”

Joyce sat, and Reed wanted to say more, but sobs came instead of words, and she cried on Joyce’s shoulder.

C
AT DROVE DOWN
through the old Interstate highway, surprised to see so few of the late model cars that usually decorated the sides of the road. In the immediate aftermath of SFTA, when the Americans shut down their AI, autonomous cars had stopped where they were on the roads. Travel had been impossible at first, but gradually the country rebuilt its software, retrofitting self-driving cars and trucks with manual controls as part of the project. But the most complex vehicles resisted such hacks. No human could control a hovercraft or flying car in traffic. Now, two years later, someone had found a way to get them to work; and when that proved impossible, they could be scavenged for parts.

As she drove through the starry night, her nanobots kept her functioning at perfect alertness. At Portland, she slowed and pulled off the highway system. She drove through the east side, to the house she’d once shared with Sarah, Tom, and Maggie. She slowed and stopped across the street.

The house was still the same color, unchanged. She half expected Tom or Maggie to walk through the door, but that wouldn’t happen. They’d been living in Phoenix two years ago, one of the cities worst hit after SFTA.

No cars, no trucks, no planes had flown in the days after AI shut down. When the electric grid failed, Phoenix was a bad place to be. A large population, with no local food production; anything refrigerated spoiled in the desert heat within the day. Maybe Tom and Maggie would have made it
—
they had prepped for such an outage, a side effect of knowing Leon and Mike, both of whom set aside provisions and equipment to survive at least two months if everything went to heck. When the power went out, Tom probably used the downtime to pull out a stash of weed and get stoned in the desert.

But on day six without power someone paid them a visit, shooting them both and stealing their food and solar cells. Less than 1 percent of the population perished in SFTA and its aftermath, but it had somehow robbed her of two friends thousands of miles away from the attack.

Connected to the new net, Cat sensed a tug at the periphery: the police were being called to her location outside her old house. A neighbor probably, someone who didn’t like the sight of the armored black car. She took off, and looped around to the west side to pass by the once-great Avogadro campus, expecting to see it still abandoned. But there were lights in the office buildings now, intermittent floors occupied. So it was true, the American tech industry was coming back! Amazing.

Before long she was speeding down I-5, roaring through the night at over a hundred and twenty miles an hour, subconsciously subverting monitoring systems on the fly to hide her passage. By mid-morning she stopped at Los Angeles.

She needed a couple of specific uploads, ones she’d been looking for a long time. Joseph Stack, uploaded in ’37, was the one she wanted most. She needed a master storyteller, someone who could weave a story into a compelling and immersive universe. There were others she would have liked, too, but they were still alive, still active. Joseph had gone purely virtual, given up his flesh and blood to live life as an upload, and then got shut down after SFTA. Which meant his personality sat dormant on non-volatile storage somewhere.

She’d used connections to search the likely datacenters, but they’d never turned up anything. Finding a specific personality upload in a country of locked-up datacenters was next to impossible. They’d all been shut down after SFTA. She could use her tricks with the net to bypass perimeter security, fool interior monitoring systems, and walk into one. But inside would be a bunch of powered-down electronic equipment. She couldn’t search a farm of a hundred thousand turned-off storage devices to find a single hundred-petabyte personality file. Needle in a haystack didn’t even begin to describe the problem
—
and that was even if she knew which datacenter to look in.

But she had a clue now. Joseph had been working on a new project back in ’43, a collaboration with J.J. Abrams. She’d been thrown off the trail. The project was to have been a last hurrah for Warner Brothers, one last sim before they shuttered a company whose time had passed since the move to indie releases rendered them obsolete even though they’d survived the transition to virtual reality. But Warner Brothers had been broke then, and no amount of crowdfunding was sufficient to keep them alive, especially as they were being bled to pieces with all the new IP legislation. No, the WB project was actually sponsored by Walt Disney, a company that had survived everything the world threw at them by refocusing around their theme parks. Since Doctorow had taken over, Disney’s profits were up year-over-year.

So if Joseph was anywhere, it would be inside Disney’s datacenter. Probably not the one retrofitted under Disneyland Park, which was too bad, because Cat would have liked to visit, but more likely in the Walt Disney Animation Studios. The animation house was back in active use, once more churning out classic films; Disney’s VR studio had been shut down because they couldn’t create sims without AI-levels of computing power.

Getting inside would be interesting.

She turned into the parking lot, hacking surveillance camera streams from the building, parking lot, and drone fleet in real-time. A human, not an automated card reader, staffed the security gate, probably all part of the American government’s objective of full employment. The whole notion of a security gate would have been absurd two years ago when a flying car could have landed anywhere it pleased.

The guard, dressed in a black uniform and wearing a sidearm, frowned at the sight of the armored car, then leaned down. “Who are you visiting?”

While the guard focused on her, Cat rooted around in the net for the computer in the guard’s station. She a launched a neural app to run an ancient protocol, VNC, and quickly ran down the list of guests for someone expected within the hour, then reconfigured her subcutaneous ID chip. “I’m Grace. I’ve got an eleven o’clock appointment with Destry.”

The guard scanned her implant, then went back to the booth; he nodded to himself and clicked on the screen. Cat intercepted the network packets sent out by the computer, a message confirming that “Grace” had arrived, and faked the acknowledgement from the centralized server.

The guard came back holding a thick plastic card. “Welcome to Disney, Grace. I’ve got you checked in.”

“Thanks,” Cat said, as she used the car’s scanner to grab the guard’s digital ID.

At the building, she swapped IDs, reconfiguring her chip with the guard’s ID. She wanted to be able to move around anywhere and not run into problems when the real Grace arrived. Inside the building, the net clouded thickly around a back quadrant of the second floor.

She took the stairs up, emerged into a hallway, and turned left, following the ethereal trails of data only she could see. She was less than a hundred feet from the datacenter when she realized the hallway was blocked by two security guards. They were both off the net.

Neural implants were still legal in the US, and the vast majority of humans still used them; but in post-2043 America, users carried a slight taint of suspicion from the threat that AI might be able to compromise them, or worse, that the collection of algorithms running in an augmented mind might be akin to an AI.

These two guards had implants, which
—
had they been turned on
—
Cat could have subverted with ease, making her presence completely undetectable by the guards. Unfortunately, it was probably a condition of their employment that they keep their implants off.
Sigh.
Everything had to be complicated.

She reconfigured a slip of smart paper to match a map of the animation studios building complex and approached the desk. One heavily muscled security guard rose and held up a hand.

“Can I help you, miss?”

Behind him a set of security bars with a door embedded in them blocked passage down the hall.

Cat smiled, aiming for 80 percent disarming charm and 20 percent flirtatious helplessness. She might be a thirty-year-old mom, but her nano held her apparent age and looks as if she was twenty-five.

“Can you help me find where I’m going?” She held out the map.

The smile still worked, because the guard accepted the smart paper, aiming to be helpful. When Cat let go, the paper sent a charge, a coded electrical signal that traveled through his nervous system to his implant, flipping it into active mode.

Cat rooted his implant, seizing control of his mind and body nearly effortlessly, a move practiced so many times over it happened subconsciously.

“I’m not sure,” the guard said, turning to the other guard. “Here, you take a look.”

The second guy looked up. “We’ve worked here two years, Charlie. You suddenly forget the campus?” He grabbed the extended smart paper, and his eyes twitched.

Cat reached for his implant, but it still didn’t respond. She took in the twitching eyes, and realized this guy must be ex-military. The signal trick wouldn’t work against his hardened implant.

He finally dropped the paper, and the twitching stopped. He must have known something was up, because his buddy Charlie still wasn’t moving.

Still on the other side of the desk, he reached one hand toward the gun on his waistband.

Cat vaulted across the desk sideways, extending one leg for a snap kick. She hit his gun arm as he pulled the weapon, and the handgun flew and skittered across the floor.

She was off-balance from the sideways jump and moving slowly. He punched for her face; she barely ducked under the attack, then slid off the desk next to him.

He was strong and trained in hand-to-hand, but she was faster, her reaction time augmented with implant and nanotech, and she delivered a salvo of chops to his body before he had time to react. He stumbled back, dazed, and she landed two hard punches to his face, knocking him out. He crumbled to the ground.

Tucking a wisp of blond hair behind one ear, she pushed him under the desk, where he wasn’t visible from the hallway. Meanwhile, the other guard still stood at attention, frozen in place under Cat’s control.

“Stay here,” she said, patting him on the shoulder as though he had a choice.

The security gate was made of thick, powder-coated steel. Nothing short of an explosive was going to open it up. But the lock was digital, and she could fool that easily. She connected to the net, but the lock wasn’t there in cyberspace.