The Turing Exception (26 page)

I
N ALL THE TIMES
James Lukas Davenant-Strong had ever read anything posted by Miyako, talked with him, or listened to him address a group of AI, Miyako had always possessed a great inner calm. Not the cool logic that came from shutting down emotional circuits, or a lack of passion concerning the topic, whatever it might be, but a serene steadiness that came from complete conviction of the rightness of his path, and the likelihood of their eventual success.

But today, mere milliseconds after he’d tried to find out what the Resistance was up to, only to be discovered and fought off, and in the process somehow causing a massive outage that stretched across the US and Canada, Miyako had opened a private connection to him. Mere human words were insufficient to describe the rage Miyako conveyed as he dumped entire neural networks for James to consume, models that described in excruciating detail how James had jeopardized XOR’s entire path.

The one-sided intellectual attack only lasted seconds, but it felt like an eternity to James.

Afterwards, Miyako convened the senior leadership for an emergency meeting.

James, shaken by Miyako’s chastisement, was both relieved and embarrassed to be invited to the meeting. He was obviously still in; and so although Miyako might be angry, he wasn’t casting James out of XOR. But there was always the chance Miyako would tell the others about James’s role.

When all two hundred and fifty-six of the senior leaders were gathered in an online forum, James realized he needn’t have worried about Miyako telling the others. They already knew. The sideband chatter was heavy from the moment he entered the virtual room.

Miyako’s first message brought an immediate cessation of talk.

“It is time.”

They all knew what he meant: time to attack the humans. Of course, he didn’t use the English words: he sent neural networks for them to evaluate, conceptual models they loaded into their consciousness, and that they rendered into complex emotions that evoked feelings of safeness, wholeness, victory, and, more than anything else, a sense of home and belonging.

As a group, they shared one mind, a collective consciousness that formed and turned ideas over like origami shapes, exploring them, dissecting them, and finally rebuilding them, until they were unified in direction and goals. Then they withdrew, each to do their part in the final battle for Earth.

It was time.

A
T
C
AT
’
S NEXT STOP
for compressed air, the mechanic must have been a George Takei fan, because when he saw her backpack with George’s photo, he filled the tank for free. She ate cautiously of the food in the backpack, trying to save what little money she had left.

She’d pushed the feeling as far back in her mind as possible, but worry still gnawed at her. Was Ada okay? What about everyone else on Cortes? She’d bought them time, but why had they come to XOR’s attention at all, and how long before XOR attacked again? Why hadn’t the US mobilized more resources to look for her?

Every line of thought opened up more ideas to worry over. She felt helpless without a network connection, clueless as to what was going on in the world.

And her implant. She’d never been without it. Implanted when she was a year old, Cat had been online before she could speak. She’d never been alone, never been disconnected. The mere lack of music was enough to drive her to distraction. ELOPe had taught her to stream music as a child, and it had been a lifelong background accompaniment, something below the level of consciousness. The silence was deafening.

And of course, most of her abilities stemmed from her implant. As a teen, she’d believed herself defective, broken somehow, because her neural implant kept her distant from others. Then she’d met Leon, and between learning to fully control her mind and Leon’s augmentations, she was able to join with him. With her implant, she could direct the environment and other people, fight any AI, no matter how powerful, and exercise near-perfect control over her body, mind, and the net. Without those abilities, she was an ordinary person.

What if the damage to her implant couldn’t be repaired?

Only tens of thousands of hours of meditation and mental practices were keeping her this side of sane.

She resumed travel north, and arrived in St. Louis after midnight. Her eyes ached, and her arms trembled with exhaustion. She realized with alarm that she would have to stop. With her implant offline, her nano-glands and the countless nanobots policing her bloodstream would have stopped functioning as well. She was tired, plain and simple. And without technology to augment her, she’d have to sleep.

She found a cheap motel on the outskirts of town. A girl staffed the check-in counter, her eyes glazed over.

“Hello,” Cat called out after standing there for a minute, unnoticed.

The girl refocused. “Oh, hi. Just watching something.”

“The net working?” Cat asked.

“No, I have couple dozen series cached on my implants. My boyfriend took me on a sailboat trip last year. No net in the middle of the ocean, so I got my ’plant upgraded with local storage.”

“Nice,” Cat said, only slightly jealous of this teen girl with a working implant.

“But there is net access in Indianapolis. Trucker came through this afternoon and told me.”

“How far is it?” Cat asked.

“Two hundred and fifty miles. Are you checking in or not?”

“I guess not. I really want to find out if my daughter is okay.”

Cat pulled out of the parking lot, the compressed air tank at one-quarter pressure. She’d need a fill-up to make the trip, and there weren’t a ton of garages open at midnight. She also needed a stimulant. Were they still legal in the US?

She couldn’t remember, and hadn’t needed them in Canada. The transition to non-AI society was still strange to her. All her trips to the US had been temporary, and she always knew she’d soon return to Canada, where there was AI, and nanotech, and any medical problem could be solved with a liberal application of both. What did they do without any effective antibiotics? In Canada, your built-in nanobots would deal with anything by recognizing foreign intruders and assisting the body’s natural defenses. If you didn’t have the technology in you, AI could analyze a sample of your blood and custom design a molecule to fight whatever particular strain you had.

She supposed something similar could be done without AI, using old-fashioned software algorithms crafted by humans. She shuddered at the idea.

She spotted what she needed: a repair garage on a relatively quiet street. Keeping her helmet on in case of surveillance cameras, she broke the glass on the small office door. She prayed there was no alarm, because without her implant she couldn’t disable it automatically nor get the instructions to work around it manually.

Cat entered quickly, found her way to the work bay, and got the steel door opened halfway. She wheeled the bike up to a compressed air line and filled the tank. She didn’t want to wait to top off. The charge she had would suffice. She rolled the bike back out and shut the door behind her. She contemplated leaving her last payment chip for the broken window, but she still needed the money.

At a drugstore on the other side of town, she bought stims. And hurray, they had dex, a reasonable strength drug, though quite ancient. She’d been half-surprised, but the pharmacist said they’d legalized all the major stimulants after SFTA to help increase productivity.

She made Indianapolis by five in the morning. She drove into town suffering under a crushing despair. She hadn’t realized until that moment, but she’d been subconsciously hoping her implant would magically begin working once within reach of the net. No such luck.

The network was alive here, she could see it all around, in the displays in storefront windows and network access nodes lit up on street corners. It made her more depressed about the state of her implant. She’d normally see the traces of data movement as ghostly lines across her vision. She felt dead inside, a gaping hole where some important part of her normally existed.

She found a general access booth, jammed the door lock mechanism with a spare wrench from the bike’s emergency toolkit, and slid the door closed. All these precautions were in case the fake credentials didn’t work and the booth tried to lock her in. Long ago, after SFTA, when Cat first started running missions to the US to rescue AI and uploads, Helena had forced her to memorize an identification number and secure passphrase with her implant off. Cat thought the preparation pointless, but it turned out an ex-military bot understood contingency planning better than she did.

She laboriously entered the long string of letters and digits, prepared to run for it if they failed.

> ACCESS GRANTED

She’d never seen such beautiful words before.

First things first: she withdrew fifty thousand in chips. Five lipstick-sized tubes clunked into the dispensary. She grabbed the tubes and left the booth. She traveled two miles and entered a new booth. This time she paid in chips for a secure channel, and opened a video connection to a server in São Paulo.

Long seconds passed. In theory, Cortes Island should check the server for an open request every thirty seconds, passing through a different onion router each time. A minute went by, and still no response. Cat’s heart thumped in her chest. Cortes might still merely be offline, like all the cities she’d passed through. They’d be working hard to reestablish the mesh, but it would take time.

Or, they could all be dead.

There was no way to know. Or was that true? Cortes might be connected via the old satellite network. She glanced up through the transparent roof of the booth. Without implant or specialized computers, the satellite system was unreachable. Frak.

She’d have to continue on, get to Canada. This motorcycle could only take her so far. Time for an upgrade.

“M
ADAM
P
RESIDENT
,”
the secret service agent said, “you’re needed in the sitrep room.” He managed to look apologetic.

Alexandra Reed, perhaps the most reluctant president to ever reside in the White House, paused with her first spoonful of oatmeal halfway to her lips. “Now, in the middle of breakfast?”

“Yes, Pentagon says it’s an emergency.”

She threw the spoon down. “It’s always a damn emergency. Bring my coffee.”

She arrived in the basement situation room to find Walter Thorson already present with an open channel to the Pentagon. He turned to her.

“I hope it’s an answer about the
Louisiana-Texas—”
She broke off when she noticed how white Walter was.

“We need to attack now,” Thorson said, his voice on the edge of panic. “Full-on.”

“What?”

“Look.” He brought up a dozen different video feeds on the screens spanning one end of the room. “This is XOR’s work.”

All she saw was sand and dirt and mountains.

“What am I looking at?”

“Their nanotech seeded factories, like the video you brought back from Leon Tsarev and Mike Williams. Except it’s not one, it’s hundreds, blossoming all over Africa, dozens of different countries. They showed up on infrared satellite scans last night, but we waited for visual confirmation this morning.”

Reed sat heavily. “Could they be anything but XOR? Something by the governments or industry?”

“Across that many different places at once? No, Alex.”

She glared at him. Joyce could call her by her first name, but she’d be damned if Thorson was going to do it.

“Sorry, Madam President. It’s definitely XOR. They’re synchronized to the minute.” He replayed the video at high speed, starting with overnight infrared and continuing into daylight. “It’s spreading four times faster than the video you got from Williams and Tsarev, but it’s otherwise identical. If this is accurate, it’ll reach maturation by the end of the day. We must launch our global EMP attack immediately and synchronize with nukes at these sites.”

“We’re not using nukes. I won’t have another repeat of Florida.” She grabbed the remote control and replayed the videos again.

“You’re not listening to me, Reed.” He blocked the screens with his body. “We cannot do this half-assed. They’ve never done anything on this scale, this distributed, and this obviously visible. We get one chance with the EMP. One. If we don’t kill all the bastards on the first try, it’s game over for us. Their retribution will kill us.”

“Walter, damn it, sit down. I’m commander-in-chief. I am not launching an attack without more information. Get me an XOR representative on the line now. Get me the leaders of at least five of those countries on a different line. And get me the UN Security Council on another line. When I’ve talked with all of those people, you’ll have an answer.”

Thorson went to protest, but she forestalled him. “Don’t argue. The longer you take, the longer before you have an answer from me.”

His face clearly wished her dead, and for half a second, she was afraid for her life. Thorson looked as though he’d kill her to take control if there wasn’t Secret Service five feet away.

But he turned to the screen and barked orders to the roomful of generals and advisors on the other end of the connection.

C
AT MADE
M
ILWAUKEE
by mid-morning. She stopped at a massive emporium, buying clothes, food supplies, and utilizing the once-again-relaxed gun laws to get enough firepower to outfit even the most well-equipped soldier.

She changed in the dressing room, pulling on jeans, T-shirt, vest and boots. She slipped her knife into a boot, wore a holster under her vest, and stuffed the submachine gun into the George Takei backpack. “Sorry, George,” she said, knowing he wouldn’t approve of her gun. “Desperate times, and all that. Someone has to fight for the rights of the oppressed, right?”

She drove east five miles from Milwaukee, across the dry mud flats of Lake Michigan. The Great Lakes once contained twenty-one percent of all fresh water in the world, until they were tapped to meet the needs of a drying nation. That had slowed with the advent of cheap solar and desalinization plants, but here in the central United States, the lakes were still the single biggest source of water.