The Turing Exception (24 page)

“Fine, you have my permission.”

“We need a signed order. Here.” On the screen, Walter swiped at his e-sheet.

Reed pulled hers closer. The electronic paper came alive and displayed Executive Order 31099. The details were completely redacted and replaced with the text: ULTRA HIGH CONFIDENTIALITY
—
PRESIDENTIAL CLEARANCE ONLY
—
NO ELECTRONIC RECORDS.

Really damn useful. She was signing a blank check.

She placed her hand down, let it read her pulse and blood pattern, and the sheet chimed. She transmitted the authorization to the Pentagon.

“Thank you, Madam President. You’re doing the right thing.”

T
HE DISTANT CHOP-CHOP
of helicopters sounded long before they became visible. Cat paddled over to the side of the river, under the cover of the trees. She slid out of the canoe and eased her body into the water. The canoe had a lifeline bag, and she ripped the lifeline out, moistened the bag, and rested it over her head. Anything to cut her thermal signature.

Cat figured she’d gone only a few miles, and if they’d scrambled helicopters that quickly, they’d be sure to find her. But as she waited in the water and listened to the drone of the helicopters, she realized they were flying a large search pattern. They didn’t know where she’d gone down. The polymers the plane had been constructed of wouldn’t show up on radar, and the searchers might not be able to find her ejection seat and parachute. She might be safe. Maybe.

Wet, she climbed back into the canoe and paddled. She felt something on the underside of her arm and checked. Ugh, a leech. Crap. Where there was one. . . .  She pulled over to the side of the river and got out of the canoe and onto the shore. What was she supposed to do with a leech? The knowledge would have been in her implant, along with a thousand other myriad tips that would be helpful right now. She was little better than an uneducated primitive human being.

She grabbed her boot knife, stripped back her clothes, and began to check for leeches. In the end, there were only a few, but that was still a few too many. She’d skip any more swims in this water if she could.

When she finished this task, tired and bleeding from a handful of surface wounds, she clambered back into the canoe and resumed paddling. She turned a bend and a town came into view, with a two-lane bridge crossing the river. The town didn’t appear to be more than a half-dozen blocks wide before the trees resumed at the other end.

She’d stand out here, an obvious outsider to anyone in the town. But she needed medical supplies, clothes, and transportation, and she’d be more likely to get those in civilization than in the middle of the wilderness.

As she grew closer, she paddled to the side of the river. She heard a distant argument on the bridge, the sound carrying easily in the open air. A couple arguing over their stopped car, and another man claiming his vehicle has stopped as well. Stranded travelers. They’d been caught within the radius of Cat’s attack. Stranded travelers would make her explanations easier.

She dragged the canoe into the brush, hiding it where she could find it again without it being obvious to anyone else. The mud covering her would be awkward to explain, but it diminished the stark whiteness of the flight suit, making it look more like a pair of work coveralls.

She walked into town, noted dozens of vehicles stopped in the middle of roads. There were no bots, hadn’t been any in the last two years since SFTA; but she suspected that if there had been, they’d be non-functional as well.

The grocery store was open though.

Inside, a middle-aged woman sat behind the counter, peering intently at a book in her hands. She looked up at the jingle of the door. “Hi honey. We can’t run credit, but if you’ve got cash, you can get whatever you need.” She stared at Cat. “You okay, honey?”

Cat glanced down at her mud-covered and blood-streaked clothes. “It looks worse than it is. My car ran into a post, and when I tried to get out, I fell out into a ditch. I just need some first aid supplies.”

“Third aisle, in the back. You can use the restroom if you need.”

“Thanks.” Cat paused. “I thought you might have been shut down. What with . . . you know.”

“No. President’s Resilience Project back in ’43: said we had to be able to stay operational even during an outage. We got a new cash register. Some NEC thing, whatever that is. Even if the power goes out, they’re good for seventy-hours. And we’ve got our whole inventory on there. And solar panels to keep the refrigeration going.”

“Huh.” President Reed knew what she was doing.

“I haven’t seen one of those in years,” Cat said, with a nod toward the book.

The clerk smiled. “I know. Paperback book. It was sitting in the closet for years and I never picked it up. Want to feel it?” She held the book out.

“Sure,” Cat said, and ran her fingers over the yellowed pages. She liked the touch of the paper, but was disappointed she couldn’t feel the letters themselves. “Cool.”

Cat made her way to the first aid section. The real question was, duct tape or sutures? Duct tape would hold only if she shaved her head, which would be difficult since her dreadlocks were actually fibrous antennae for her neural implant. She got bandages, peroxide, a small mending kit with needles and thread, toothache gel, food bars, water, and a half-price backpack with George Takei’s picture on it. She brought everything up to the register and paid with thumbnail-sized hundred-dollar chips.

“Of course. In the back. You sure you don’t want a doctor to check you out? You look pretty bad.”

“I’m fine. I’ve got to make Dallas. My sister’s having a baby. You think anyone in town has transportation that works?”

The woman smiled. “Check out Skel’s. He’s got an antique motorcycle shop.”

Cat brought everything to the restroom, and washed up as best she could. Looking at the supplies lined up on the sink, she thought back to the little general store in Whaletown on Cortes Island. They’d have sold a tube of general-purpose healing nanobots, and it would have taken care of everything. Of course, those nanobots might be burned out now.

Luckily Cat had been born before nanotech, and she still remembered her mom bandaging her. And she knew the principle of suturing, even if she’d never done it. She squirted the toothache gel all over the wound, and the pain abated instantly. She cleaned the wound with water, then disinfected it with peroxide. She pulled a needle from the mending kit and bent it into a curve using the faucet as a guide. Then she dipped it in peroxide, doubled up the white thread, and tilted her head toward the mirror.

Standing there, with the needle millimeters from her scalp, she felt a momentary fear. She instinctively reached for her implant to dampen her emotional response and steady her hand. No implant.

She took a long, slow breath instead, and began a meditative chant in her mind. With her right hand, she aligned the edges of her scalp, and slid the needle into her skin. The gel had worked well: she couldn’t feel a thing. She just needed to stay focused. She made the first stitch, tied it off, and started on the second. She needed eight stitches in all to close the three-inch-long wound.

When she finished, she sat on the toilet to recover for a minute, trying to suppress the urge to vomit. When the feeling gradually passed, she tossed the used supplies into the trash, threw everything else into the backpack, and left to find Skel’s.

*     *     *

Four blocks over, on the last street before the town became fields again, she found the motorcycle shop. An old gas station, bolts in the ground where pumps once stood. She knocked twice on the window.

The owner, a skeletally thin man in grease-covered overalls, didn’t believe she’d buy a motorcycle. But after swapping most of her roll of emergency credit chips for a bike, she rode out on a compressed-air conversion of a sixty-year-old Honda CBX, with an old-fashioned paper map tucked into her backpack.

On instinct, Cat headed east, the opposite of her former direction of travel.

She felt confused without her implant, struggling along with a fraction of her accustomed power, memories indistinct and thoughts sluggish. She needed to get back to Vancouver Island to ensure her family was okay, fix her implant, and see what damage XOR had caused, and whether it would affect their plans.

But she couldn’t get caught in the process. Normally she would have run dozens of predictive models in her implant, figuring out the best course of action. Not today.

Another helicopter flew by, low and slow, following her road. It passed overhead without changing direction or speed. Then it hit her: they probably didn’t know what they were looking for. They might guess an AI or a weapon of some sort, but they’d never consider a girl on a motorcycle. The tension in her shoulders released. As long as she didn’t make any stupid mistakes, they’d probably overlook her.

She pulled over to inspect the map. Her options were to try to make it all the way back to Canada on her own, or to call for help. Without her car, ELOPe, or her implant, trying to go it on her own was dumb. But calling for help required net access. So she’d have to drive north and hope to find a working connection somewhere.

Two hours later she stopped in Magnolia, Arkansas; the pressure gauge showed a quarter-tank left.

Magnolia was a mid-sized town of single-story homes on concrete slabs. Poor when it was built and poor still, judging from the weathered exteriors. Or maybe that was the effect of nanotech deteriorating. Before Miami, buildings had been coming alive. A coat of nanotech paint, a mineral-rich slurry sprayed on thick, would have penetrated the walls, repairing damage, strengthening junctions, even converting old electrical wiring into superconducting circuitry. But they’d shut all that down, using the kill-switch built into the tiny robots. What did nanotech do two years after being turned off? Nobody knew. Then again, maybe they’d never been able to afford it here in the first place.

Sure enough, a garage in town was happy to top off the bike’s air tank from their supply of compressed air. “It’s good you came by when you did, because without electricity, the compressor can’t run. By this time tomorrow, we’ll be out of air unless they restore power.”

“I would have thought you’d have gotten solar panels as part of the president’s Resilience Project.”

The garage owner smiled bitterly. “Not high enough on the priority list. But the general store’ll still have frozen ice cream because they did get the panels. ’Cause we all know ice cream is more important than transportation.”

He offered the air for free, and she took it, because between the supplies at the store and the motorcycle, she had only three hundred in chips left. Enough for two dinners out, or maybe two days of supplies at a grocery store. Once, living on a shoestring had caused her no end of emotional angst. But she’d done it and survived. Although then she had an implant that worked.

L
EON WAS IN THE
Cob House, making dinner with Helena when the attack came.

He might not have even noticed, since he had his implant off for a few hours of quiet. Except he did notice, because Helena went from calmly dicing vegetables with a kitchen knife to bristling with weapons, tucking into a ball, and rolling out through the floor-to-ceiling window in full-on combat mode in under five seconds. And that was before Ada screamed from the garden.

Leon booted his implant, which to tell the truth was in hot-standby anyhow, not fully powered down, as he raced out.

He was instantly overcome by a chaotic storm of packets. The order of the net was gone, replaced by a flurry of data that reminded him of Tucson, ten years ago, when Cat had fought Adam in the net.
What was happening?

He tried to reach Helena over the net, but he couldn’t get a connection
—
not to Helena or anything else. The network had become hostile. He felt something reaching, probing for his implant, seeking a back door. He executed countermeasures, hardened algorithms designed by Helena and Cat that should defend against even the best military attacks.

“What’s going on?” he yelled to Helena, who was already halfway across the garden to the salad beds where Ada usually played.

“XOR attack on the island,” she called back.

“Can you stop it?”

“No, I’m powerless against it or them. They’re too strong, saturating the local network. Their computational power must be incredible. But Ada is keeping them at bay.”

He ran through the garden, catching up to Helena, who was crouched protectively over Ada. Ada’s toys were strewn across the ground and she stood, staring into the distance, her face contorted in fierce concentration. Her little limbs began to shake.

Leon rushed to comfort her, but Helena blocked his way with an impassable tentacle. “No, if you break her concentration, the consequences would be. . . .”

She trailed off as they both felt the force of Ada’s effort, manifest in the net. The maelstrom suddenly flipped, packets marching in lockstep order. If Leon wasn’t mistaken, the packets were moving to the tune of “The Wheels on the Bus Go Round and Round” as they went through the net. The forced sequencing appeared to do the trick. By constraining everything to regular patterns, many of XOR’s attacks were nullified.

It meant that Ada had control over the net, maybe even more than Cat. His little four-year-old girl had taken control over all the routers from an entire collective of AI.

But her concentration faltered for a millisecond, and XOR was back, the attack redoubled. Leon’s connection sputtered, and then suddenly he wasn’t in control of his implant anymore. Something alien was probing his mind, taking his thoughts from him.

Ada turned ghostly pale, and the shaking in her body worsened. “Mommy,
help!
” she called, and collapsed.

Leon tried to reach for her, but his body was locked in position. XOR had complete control. He struggled, every ounce of will bent toward Ada, but nothing budged. He screamed against XOR, but his voice only echoed in his head.