I guess this answers David’s question about what I am going to do next. If enforcement doesn’t get to the League of Humanity in time, then I will. Not just for what they have done today, but because Fai deserves to live a life without being hunted. I know what that’s like and no one deserves it.
“We should be there soon,” Fai said.
“Right,” Kari said.
“I’ve ordered us an auto-auto. It will meet us at the back of the parking lot of the diner just through these trees,” Fai said.
“Great, if only you ordered me some food while you were at it we’d be all set for the long drive to the Bay Area . . .”
“I did.”
Chapter Ten
Well, he’s about thirty seconds slower than I thought he would be. Kari answered David’s call and allowed the camera from her processing unit to disconnect and broadcast her image to her boyfriend.
“Hey, David,” Kari said.
“Have you seen the news?”
“Yeah . . . I saw it a few minutes ago. I’m still trying to understand what’s going on.”
The information of the attack had finally reached the news. Kari had been checking it frequently for updates and had been frustrated as they cruised across the recently reunited western states. Travel by auto-auto was not as fast as a plane or the hyperloop, but it was an effective mode of transportation as it allowed you to rest or work as the vehicle drove itself. They had only stopped once for some food in Salt Lake City and were now nearly to Reno, Nevada.
But when the news Kari had been waiting to see finally arrived on the web, it was not what she was expecting. She had been furiously checking all the different news sites and all of them reported the same bitter information.
“But you’re OK?”
“Yeah, I’m over halfway to the Bay Area already.”
“So you were there? Where the attack was?”
“Yeah, but we were able to get out without much trouble,” Kari said.
That was a blatant lie, but she didn’t want him to worry any more than he needed to. Besides, I can’t really disclose too much more with their bullet-in-the-head NDA. Of course, since they already almost got me killed, maybe that doesn’t apply anymore.
“Really? Because the news makes it look horrible . . . all the shots of the dead scientists and everything . . . I about died when I saw what happened and thought about you being there.”
You should try being there in person. I’ve been sitting in an auto-auto for hours and every time I close my eyes I see replays of the massacre.
“Well, I’m safe,” Kari said. “But I don’t know how I got blamed for everything. I wasn’t expecting that . . .”
“Me neither. I couldn’t—I can’t—believe it. The League of Humanity and Freelancer working together? It’s ludicrous! Even if I didn’t know you, it wouldn’t make any sense!”
David’s face was turning slightly red as he talked. Nothing got him worked up like discussing the way Kari’s hacker handle was blamed for everything. She had been blamed for the prison break, blamed for Joseth’s murders, and now she had been blamed for the slaughter at the Vision research lab.
“I have no idea how they even figured out I was there. I didn’t even know I was going to be there until I showed up, and I wasn’t allowed to tell anyone where I was.”
“I know,” David said. “Something is off for sure. We need to fix this . . . and fast”
A notification flashed in the corner of Kari’s mind, alerting her to the fact that Motorcad was calling.
“I need to go, David. I’ll get this sorted out.”
Kari closed the call with David and answered Motorcad’s.
“Hey, boss,” Kari said.
Motorcad was running around in a hurry, she couldn’t really tell where he was, but she suspected he was trying to remove evidence from the Academy.
“What happened?” Motorcad asked.
“I was working for Vision and the League of Humanity showed up,” Kari said. “It got dicey. News is pretty accurate, except I was running for my life. I barely made it out of there in one piece.”
“Well, I don’t know who you pissed off by surviving, but we have incoming,” Motorcad said.
“What? No! That doesn’t make sense . . .”
“Well, they are almost here. I’ve got the students helping me burn everything and the Sanchez’s should be here any minute. Where are you going? What’s the plan?”
“I don’t know,” Kari said. The only people who knew I was at the school were John, Christina, and Fai. And John’s dead. “Stay close to the school, don’t get caught, but stay close until this blows over. I’ll figure something out.”
Motorcad looked away suddenly over his shoulder.
“I have to go,” Motorcad said. He closed the call and Kari cursed.
“I am detecting elevated heart rate, blood pressure, and dropping oxygen,” Fai said. “You should breath more and try to calm down.”
“Good advice,” Kari mumbled.
She checked the news again and read more headlines about America’s most wanted hacker murdering hundreds of innocent scientists at a secret research facility with the help of the League of Humanity. The League of Humanity had publically claimed credit for the attack, but they didn’t mention anything about working with Kari. They mentioned that anyone who worked on AI could expect the same thing and that they hoped this was a learning opportunity.
It’s the biggest tragedy since the Civil War ended and somehow it’s getting pinned on me.
“Why did you lie to David?” Fai asked.
“Because that’s what he needed,” Kari said. Her tone was much harsher than she had intended it to be, and when Fai didn’t respond, Kari took a deep breath to calm down. “Sometimes it’s easier to tell people part of the truth temporarily.”
“I understand,” Fai said. “Do humans lie to one another often?”
“Yes, they do,” Kari responded, even though her mind was busy working on solutions.
“There were eight physical indicators that you were not telling the truth,” Fai said. “It seems like lying would be easily detectable.”
“Most people aren’t as perceptive as you are.”
“You are concerned with the misinformation regarding the attack on the research lab.”
“Of course I am, Fai! I am being blamed for hundreds of innocent people being murdered. It’s a big deal.”
None of the scientists had been especially welcoming, or kind to her, but thinking about them gunned down at work was depressing. No matter how rude Adrian and his staff had been, they didn’t deserve any of this. She had looked over the reported list of causalities and every name she read broke her heart even more.
“But you are innocent,” Fai said. “That can be proven if you give an account.”
“It’s not that easy sometimes,” Kari said. “The court of public opinion doesn’t worry about facts.” And right now the public still blames me for part of the Civil War assassinations.
“Why do you think there was no mention of Artificial Intelligence in any of the reports?” Fai asked.
“I don’t know,” Kari said. Nothing makes sense anymore. Maybe it will at Vision headquarters. No. I need to talk to them.
“Do you have the direct contact information for Christina?” Kari asked.
“Yes, I do. It was in a database that I gained access to as we fled the research lab.”
Without waiting for her to ask for it, Fai sent Kari Christina’s information. Time to get some answers. Kari called Christina and started thinking about how she wanted the conversation to go. Christina answered and Kari wished she had waited just a minute longer until she had figured out her plan.
“Freelancer?” Christina asked.
“It’s me,” Kari said.
“How dare you call me? I will kill you for what you’ve done! I’ll burn your pathetic little school to the ground!”
“Are you crazy?” Kari asked. Christina’s attac
ks filled Kari with the rage that rendered her incapable of controlling her mouth. “I almost died in there! In your lab! I did everything I possibly could to save John and Fai, and then you are going to blame me for what happened? You’re pathetic.”
“You actually want me to believe that you weren’t involved in any of this?”
“Why would I do anything like that? The League of Humanity? It’s . . . it’s asinine!”
“We hired you to work for us and two weeks later everyone is dead! I told John not to trust you!”
“If I wanted to work with the League of Humanity why would I save Fai?”
“Wait . . . Fai is with you?”
“Yes. We made it out . . . barely. John wasn’t so lucky . . .”
The conversation calmed suddenly. Christina no longer was shrieking at her and Kari felt her head cool off slightly.
“I didn’t know . . . I hadn’t heard anything.”
“Well, she’s right here next to me. She’s a little banged up, but we’re both doing fine. Trying to recover from . . . that.”
“That’s . . . wait. How did the League of Humanity know where to find the lab?”
“I don’t know,” Kari said. “A hack? Or someone leaked it? Or maybe they followed John there?”
“How am I supposed to trust you?” Christina asked. “There was no camera footage, no evidence of what happened besides the bodies. The feeds cut out minutes before the attack started.”
They knocked out the security cameras? How would they do that without hacking the system or having access? This was supposed to be a redneck militia, but they didn’t fight like one. But who would be able to take the cameras down?
Fai. She had access to the entire system. She also knew when John was going to arrive. She could have done this whole thing as a way to free herself. Kari glanced over to the peaceful-looking one-armed robot sitting across the auto-auto from her.
“Fai has records of everything that happened.”
“She does?”
“Yes, I built her body to record everything that happens to her. I thought it would be valuable for various reasons, I mean not anything like what happened yesterday, but still.”
“Oh . . . I didn’t know that.” Christina paused. She looked calculating as she took in the new information.
“End the call,” Fai said. Her voice was much softer usual.
Why would you want me to stop talking to her? I was just getting somewhere. Kari looked over to Fai and felt a twinge of fear.
“End the call,” Fai repeated. This time she was more insistent.
“I need to go,” Kari said.
“We’ll talk about this more when you arrive,” Christina said, just before Kari ended the call.
“What is it, Fai?” Kari pulled up Fai’s V2 body design in her mind chip and started reviewing it. If this goes to a fight I don’t have a chance. Who am I kidding? Kari executed her auto-auto hacking software and quietly took control of the vehicle.
“We need to leave,” Fai said.
“Why is that?” Why is it that when I mention that you have recordings you start to get nervous? Is it because you set me up? Kari tried to control herself, but the fear inside her was starting to grow.
“There is a blockade down the road,” Fai said. “They are not enforcement officers, from what I can tell.”
“What?” Kari didn’t have any drones she could use to verify the story. “How do you know?”
“The public auto-auto registry shows a traffic anomaly ahead.”
“How do you know it’s a blockade?”
“Do you trust me?” Fai asked.
Kari paused.
“Yes.”
The door to the auto-auto slid open while it was still racing down the street.
“We will need to jump,” Fai said. “And quickly.”
“I’ll die!” Kari said.
“No, you won’t.”
Fai wrapped herself around Kari and they moved toward the door together. The roadway raced beneath them in a blur and Kari felt sick. If this doesn’t work, then I am going to die one painful death.
“We’ll be fine,” Fai said. “This is successful in an overwhelming percentages of my simulations.”
“What’s the percent?” Kari asked, but she was too late.
Fai pushed them out of the speeding auto-auto and into the air above the course road. She screamed as they hung in the air for a moment. She involuntarily closed her eyes as Fai’s arm wrapped around her head and held it tightly against her chest.
Chapter Eleven
“It’s called Chronic Traumatic En . . . dopathy? Or something. CTE, and it’s no joke,” Kari said.
“Encephalopathy,” Fai said. “It is linked to repeated concussions. I understand your concern now that I have studied the subject. However, my readings show you only have an elevated possibility of experiencing adverse affects later in life.”
“Oh, is that all?” Kari said. I guess being alive now is worth whatever happens later in life. She rubbed her head as she sat up and looked around. The light wasn’t too much different than she remembered when they had jumped out of the auto-auto, which meant she had not been unconscious for long.
“We evaded the blockade and I brought us here. I concluded that when they found our auto-auto empty they would search in the opposite direction. We are likely safe here.”
“Do you know who was behind the blockade?”
“I do not know for sure, but the most likely answer is that it was performed by Vision’s private security organization.”
“How would they know where we were going?” Kari asked. As soon as she asked the question she remembered Christina telling her they would discuss things more when they arrived at Vision’s headquarters. But I never said anything about coming in.
“My decision to use John Luken’s identification to request our auto-auto appears to have been a gross mistake.”
“You ordered it with John’s credentials?” And here I was worrying that you were already too smart for me.
“He was dead, it didn’t seem like there would be a conflict.”
The scenery had changed dramatically from when Kari was previously awake. Instead of a desert they were in a forest. It was much cooler up here, but Kari found herself looking for a drink. She didn’t see one in sight, so she got to her feet and decided to focus on bigger problems.
“So what do we do now?” Kari asked. She didn’t expect Fai to have an answer for her, but she had grown accustomed to thinking out loud when Fai was around.
“The most rational course of action would be to try to prove your innocence to Christina and Vision.”
“Why’s that?” Because you want them to catch me? No. Fai is on my side; I have to stop thinking like that. Trusting people was hard; trusting an AI was new territory.
“Vision is a powerful international organization with vast resources at their disposal, avoiding them long-term is unlikely.”
“I’ve managed to evade the US government for a few years . . .” Kari mumbled. Her body was sore, but she had experienced worse. I should have skipped the hacker lifestyle and gone straight to teaching. There are more headaches, but fewer head injuries.
“I’ve reached the constraints of my external data access for the time being, but it appears that the government has also vowed to bring you to justice. They even appointed a Tsar to personally—”
“Let me guess, Henderson?”
“That’s correct.”
Kari rubbed her head again and sighed. That guy carries a grudge like no one I’ve ever met. You’d think I shot him in the back with a cheetah or something.
“My previous research of your history indicates that you have a past with this man. Several significant events, in fact.”
“Oh, he’s an old friend,” Kari said. Fai’s acknowledgement of her previous study of Freelancer before they had even met prevented her from properly reminiscing.
“It seems likely that you don’t mean that in
the normal fashion, but you are harder to read than other people I have interacted with.”
“Why did you request me to work on your body?” Kari asked.
“My access to information has been very limited. At first, I was not allowed to gather information externally. But over time, those limitations have slowly been expanded. Not long before Adrian informed me that they were going to begin work on my body, I read information about the famous Freelancer. It was a logical step for me to seek to meet you.”
It was a decent answer, but it didn’t connect things in Kari’s mind like she had been hoping. Still, there’s something not right about the whole thing. In fact, there’s a lot that isn’t right.
“Doesn’t that seem a little coincidental?” Kari asked.
“What do you mean?”
“With all your restrictions, you just happen to find me as a subject to research shortly before they are going to begin the project.”
“It does not appear to be illogical to me.”
Of course it doesn’t! Everything that happened has a rational explanation behind it. A story that would make sense, but even better, a story that would sell!
“But then the attack on the hidden research lab happens after we had been working together for a few weeks.”
“The attack could theoretically occur at any time. Are you suggesting that the League of Humanity waited for your arrival to attempt to eradicate me?”
“Yes, I am,” Kari said. She took a deep breath, surprisingly hesitant to sound like a conspiracy theorist to Fai. “Why else would I be blamed for the attack? Christina set me up! She forced me into working with them, brought me to the lab not because they needed me, not because they wanted some phony marketing bump when they announced you to the world, she brought me in on the project so she could blame the attack on me!”
Kari kicked the ground in frustration.
“Stupid!” Kari shouted into the woods.
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