The Turing Exception (16 page)

Kuso.

Digitally isolated, she’d need to find another way to break the lock. She glanced around, found the slim fiber optic port where the lock was programmed ahead of time with biometric data. She glanced behind her. Nobody around yet, but she didn’t have all day.

She linked to the net, snapped a photo with her implant, and connected to a server in Seattle. That server, previously compromised, bounced her connection back and forth between a sequence of other hacked computers before reaching a box mounted on a tree near Lake Crescent in the Olympic Peninsula, on a mountaintop at tweny-eight hundred feet. A line-of-sight laser connected her to a link on a mountain on Vancouver Island eighteen miles away, connecting her in turn to the uncensored global net. The connection held steady, so there must not have been clouds over the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The laser link wasn’t ideal, but it was a tighter beam and less detectable than radio.

She passed the image to Helena. “Help. I need to crack this digital lock in the next thirty seconds, preferably without a bunch of noise.”

“Hold on,
mon chaton
.”

The pause was nearly imperceptible, and then a fat squirt of data came over the link.

“You’ve got smart matter, I assume?”

“Of course.” Cat slid a black case out of her vest pocket and cracked it open. The liquid poly-alloy was dark and shiny. Far bigger than conventional nanites, smart matter didn’t contain the ability to replicate itself from available materials, but it could reform itself into nearly any physical shape almost instantly and conduct sophisticated electronic functions. She transmitted Helena’s instructions, and the smart matter extruded a form the size of a pencil, ending with an optic connection.

Cat inserted the piece into the lock and let go.

“How does this work?” she asked.

“It’s retrieving the manufacturer’s lock code out of memory, and then it will play it back. Weak back door.”

A few seconds passed and the lock clicked open.

“Thanks, Helena!”

“No problem,
mon chaton
.”

They terminated the connection, and Cat passed within, closing the gate behind her. She scanned the net again, looking for surveillance. The tight security for this building meant it was just possible they’d use hardwired cameras to bypass the net. She put out feelers for the security headquarters, found them, and rooted around for the console they were using to monitor security feeds. It didn’t matter how paranoid they were, this was 2045, and there wasn’t a piece of hardware left that wasn’t full of processors and data connectivity. She located a bank of sixteen displays, scanned the displays themselves and discovered they supported a near-field-communication protocol on a frequency that a nearby guard’s palm computer also handled. She hacked into the display for this hallway, turning the current frame buffer into a static image. No more live camera feed.

She came to doors: a set of double doors on the left and right, and then further ahead a single door at the end of the hallway. She decided on the doors to the left, unlocking them with a thought. Inside, a modern datacenter, racks of chewing-gum-sized stick servers, protruding from inch-thick backplanes, maybe a few hundred thousand servers in a living-room sized space. Cat’s heart sank in disappointment when she saw the blinking lights at the edge of each row that indicated power and connectivity. The uploaded personalities she sought could never be stored in a powered-up datacenter. Disney couldn’t risk the goverment discoving they were running AI. The Feds would seize the datacenter and jail all the executives
—
that is, if they didn’t just blow it up without warning. What she was looking for was so illegal, she’d only find it stored on a mothballed server.

She left, crossing the hallway, to find a mirror image data center on the other side, also powered up.
Kuso
. She went twenty feet down the curving hallway to the last door, a solid stainless steel affair with a combination lock in the center. These people took their security seriously. This must be where they kept their old AI and uploads.

She took a visual snapshot of the lock with her implant to send to Helena, but couldn’t get a connection. The net signal was weak here. Something about the building functioned like a Faraday cage.

She backed up twenty feet and the signal strength returned. She used half the smart matter she had left to make a leaf-shaped antenna on the wall, then trailed a thin wire behind her, with another leaf-shaped wedge plastered behind her ear. It would be enough to get her neural implant signal out to the net. Returning to the door, she uploaded the picture to Helena. The signal was strong now, her makeshift antenna bringing the network into the dead zone.

“Is there enough of a gap to get smart matter inside the door?” Helena asked.

“No.”

“Make a hole then, maybe three inches above the mechanism.”

Cat raised her eyebrows. She had the smallest bit of raw nanotech, but she didn’t want to risk using it if she didn’t have to. She also didn’t really want to shoot in here, but that was probably the lesser of two evils. She pulled out her gun, a 12mm anti-bot Olympic Arms, with tungsten carbide armor-piercing rounds. They’d penetrate the door. Hell, they’d go through half-inch armored steel on a good day. She slid a stubby noise suppressor out of her cargo pocket. It wasn’t a quiet gun under the best of circumstances, but it would take the edge off the roar.

Backing up three paces, she aimed with a two-handed grip, shooting for a few inches above the dial, and fired. Even with the silencer, the noise was deafening in the hallway. Anyone on the floor would have heard. She had to pick up the pace now.

She held the rest of her smart matter up to the hole and sent Helena’s instructions to it. The blob oozed inside and disappeared, and a few seconds later the rotary dial began to spin. With a click, it unlocked, and Cat spun the wheel to disengage the security bolts.

The door swung open, and Cat blinked in surprise at another datacenter, its indicator lights flashing. She’d been sure this would be where they kept their AI. She reached out to connect to the network inside the room, and felt the immediate presence of others.
Holy shit! They had their AI powered on
. They were still making freaking movies in here with AI and uploaded minds. This was insane! If the government found out. . . .  No wonder they’d wrapped the whole area with a Faraday cage, armed guards, and bank vault doors.

Cat glanced back to the antenna wire draped over her shoulder and down the hallway, outside the signal loss zone. Her pulse quickened; she ripped the antenna off her head and commanded the smart matter to condense. Crap, she’d brought an antenna in here, which meant that for a few seconds the network inside this room had connected to the global net.
Kuso, kuso, kuso
.

Well, one part of her job would be easier. She closed her eyes, extended both arms down low, and pulled them slowly up in front of her, the qigong movement to raise earthly qi. She passed her hands down in front of her hair, sending qi washing over her body, and brought her hands together, palms up and overlapping in front of her abdomen. She’d normally spend more time in ceremony, but now seconds mattered. With a deep breath, she blanked her mind and focused only on the net. She pulled in everything, a datacenter spanning sucking of network traffic, filling her mind and augmented implant with everything happening in the datacenter. She let her subconscious sift through the data, feeling for what she needed. A block of bytes tugged at her attention, and she focused on it.

Elation surged through her. Joseph!

Within the span of an eyeblink, she spun her implant up to maximum speed, moved her consciousness into the local net, and spanned the compute instances. She traced the electronic bits back to their origin, Joseph Stack’s personality upload running on a few stick computers. On a CPU tick boundary, she froze the cluster’s computing, took a snapshot of Joseph’s personality, and copied it to solid state storage on a nearby computer.

She let computing in the lab return to normal, feeling the perturbations in the net as the uploaded personalities in the room sensed changes. Ignoring their worries, she unplugged the gum stick server and stuffed it into an EMF-proof pocket in her vest. She turned and left the room, starting down the hallway.

A squadron of armed guards and a man in a suit stood on the other side of the security gate, three of them training guns on her through the bars. Two guards fumbled with the lock, unable to open it since she’d hacked it and enabled only her own authentication.

“You’ll never get out of here,” the man in the suit said.

Cat didn’t waste time. “You’ve got ten seconds to clear the hallway or I alert the Feds you’re running AI.”

“We’re jamming. You can’t transmit.”

Cat checked, realized the net was gone in a haze of white static, but also realized he couldn’t be sure of what her capabilities were. “You think your toy jammer can stop the person who got past five layers of security?”

The man in the suit cocked his head, stared at her, and slowly nodded. “Clear out of the hallway,” he told his men.

They backed out into the foyer. Cat put her makeshift smart matter key in the gate’s fiber optic port, and passed through, her weapon drawn and covering the men.

“What did you take?” the man in the suit said, looking merely curious.

“Joseph.”

“Good choice.”

“Good for me, bad for you. I didn’t know they’d be powered up, and I accidentally extended an antenna into the Faraday cage.”

The man noticeably whitened before her: under other conditions, she would have run to his side, expecting him to faint.

“You’ve ruined us. Kill her,” he told the guards.

But Cat’s neural implant, in its highest combat mode, heard the word “kill” and accelerated racing signals down neural pathways, jerking muscles into motion at far faster than human response times. She twisted, spinning sideways, holding her gun up. Her implant painted targets on the would-be attackers; as her gun arced through the room, the implant’s combat algorithms calculated the moment of firing for each and signaled the trigger mechanism, firing automatically. One-point-eight seconds after the man in the suit said “kill,” all the guards were down.

She and the suit looked around in surprise, her conscious mind belatedly realizing what her implant had done. She stretched her neck, working out a strain. The implant was perfectly capable of jacking her nervous system hard enough to tear tendons apart, but the safety protocol usually limited things before the damage went that far.

The suit was shaking and muttering “Em, em,” over and over again. She hadn’t done anything to him, but apparently he was scared to death. She left him alive.

She rushed down the staircase, and burst through a door into the main lobby. She turned and glimpsed mirrors before getting punched in the face.

Cat heard, rather than felt, a snap echo inside her head as her nose broke. She reeled back, and looked up in time to get a boot to the head, knocking her onto her ass and sending her skull crashing into the concrete floor of the lobby. Her gun slid away across the floor. Pain burned white, and for a few moments she wavered on the edge of consciousness.

Blood poured from her nose, running cold across her face and pooling in her throat. The attacker, a woman with black hair and mirrored lenses, leaned in, one razor-sharp fingernail coming within millimeters of Cat’s eye. Cat tried to react, pull away, do something, but everything grew dark and faded away.

*     *     *

Vertebra C2 and C3 were damaged, probably fractured. Glutamate levels were up 400 percent, cerebral blood flow down 13 percent. Lactate levels were up 9 percent. Imaging analysis indicated equal pupil dilation, and blood levels suggested no intercranial hemorrhaging.

Cat dispassionately read the report. She had a concussion and her biological brain was unconscious, leaving only her personality simulation running in her implant.

She reviewed the last thirty seconds of history, including the attack. The woman’s strength and timing was clearly augmented, her perfectly synchronized moves identifying her as one of the new generation of enhanced mercenaries. The irony that most of these cyborgs were based on her own legend wasn’t lost on her.

She scanned the local acoustic environment. Breathing. The attacker was still there, close in, toward her right side. She scanned the local net first. The woman had no neural implant and no net connection, but Cat’s heavily-modified sensors detected micro-emissions, the tell-tale traces of hardwired nerves and upgraded optics.

Crisply logical, she realized that the suit upstairs hadn’t gone catatonic when he mumbled “Em, em, em.” He’d been calling for help.

She overrode safeties and took conscious control of her nano, directing distributed synthetic glands to flood her bloodstream with epinephrine and cortisol. Her eyelids flicked open as Cat triggered a timed sequence: her legs jerked, twisting her hips; as her torso turned, she engaged abdominal muscles to drive her shoulder forward; deltoids and pectoralis fired as the shoulder reached peak velocity in an ever-accelerating sequence that built momentum until forearm muscles tightened and her fist landed in the razor girl’s throat.

The other woman flew backwards, and Cat climbed to her feet before the girl regained her balance. Cat desperately wanted to avoid fighting, her own situation so far critical that she was sure to lose. The pain in her face said she’d broken more than the nose
—
the cheekbone had probably gone, too.

“There’s no point in fighting,” Cat said. “We’ll waste valuable time. The government knows there are captive AI running here. They’ll have already dispatched. What do you think it will take? Ten minutes? Maybe five?”

The woman nodded. “Not long. But I was hired to protect them.”

“In a few minutes, this place won’t exist. Go, escape to fight another time. Tell your friends you fought Catherine Matthews and lived.”

The razor girl’s eyes widened a hair but she said nothing.

With one thread of her implant’s attention on her dropping biological vital signs, Cat realized she had to get to the car stat. Cat turned her back on the woman and walked outside, fearing an attack from behind, but knowing she was out of options.