“What about John Luken?”
“He proves it all the more, Fai! The League of Humanity not only waited for me to arrive, they also waited for John to arrive! Notice how the attacks happened right after he showed up?”
“They could have followed him.”
“Or they were told to wait until John showed up without Christina. Do you think it’s a coincidence that she didn’t come to the status update like she was supposed to?”
“Your explanation makes sense as well . . .” Fai’s voice paused for once, as if she were trying to calculate the answer to the questions at hand. “But why would Christina want to murder John?”
“There are billions of reasons! With him gone, she’s the sole owner of Vision. She can do whatever she wants.”
“If you are correct, where does that leave us?”
“It leaves us right here. Standing on some dirt, enjoying a bit of shade, while the most powerful country and corporation in the world are searching for us.”
“Perhaps, I should have been more—”
“I don’t know,” Kari said. “If Christina set us up, then we can’t go to her to prove our story. We’ll have to figure something out . . . some way to concretely pin this back to her, but we can’t do it right here. I’m sure there were people who saw a one-armed robot carrying my body off into the forest. They’ll be closing in on us soon if they aren’t already.”
Kari used her long-standing auto-auto hack to request a vehicle to meet them at the nearest road. She started walking in that direction as Fai followed by her side. She had a headache, but she wasn’t sure if that was from the stress of the situation or from jumping out of the auto-auto.
Somehow I keep ending up in situations like this. If it weren’t for the Academy being involved, though, it really wouldn’t be that different. I’ve been hiding for years. Oh, and the artificial intelligence walking next to me. That’s new.
“Where are we going to go?” Fai asked.
“For now? Away from here. After that? I’m not sure.”
She’s right, though. We’ll need some place to crash.
“I’ve decided that I like to spend time in nature,” Fai said.
“Oh?”
“I acknowledge that my only experience is the lab, the auto-auto, and outside. So far, I find outside to be the superior experience. There is so much life and disorder out here that I find it to be exhilarating.”
“There are lots of people who feel that way,” Kari said. Not me. I like my outdoor time to be spent in my mind. Exploring nature in a simulation was much less time-consuming, hazardous, and didn’t require her to smell like smoke or dirt for days on end.
“Why do people spend all their time in buildings and cities, then?”
“Because humans don’t make any sense,” Kari said. They were closing in on the road now and she wanted to be sure there wasn’t going to be any surprises waiting for them.
“It is a topic I will have to study more, but so far my experiences with that statement have been mixed. In general, it seems that humans are quite pragmatic.”
Kari peered through the brush to the roadway. She ducked as a massive vehicle rolled past them. It was as tall as the trees and the electric engine rumbled deeply as it pulled the house printer up the gradual slope. Behind the giant printer, a line of material-carrying trucks followed in calculated precision. A modern house printer could build a full-size house of any design within a few days, for a fraction of what old handcrafted homes had cost.
Behind the procession, their auto-auto pulled up to the side of the road. Kari waited for the doors to open to reveal an empty cabin before she climbed in. It was more scuffed up than most auto-autos, and the interior showed its age. Kari generated a random location using her mind chip and sent the auto-auto her orders.
It felt good to sit down. The auto-auto had some water bottles she could purchase, which she immediately took advantage of. She took a few gulps before slowing down to enjoy the fresh water.
“So how do we go about proving our innocence?” Kari asked.
“I am not aware of any documents blaming me for the incident.”
“You can be so precise sometimes,” Kari said, which she immediately regretted. She knew a statement like that would be plagued with countless follow-up questions from Fai. She prepared her answers, but she didn’t get the chance to use them as she was alerted to the fact that David was calling.
“Yeah, David?” Kari said. It wasn’t common for him to call her out of the blue. They were both busy, and they typically talked at night.
“Hey, Kari . . . how soon do you think you can make it to North Carolina?” David asked. His voice was a bit shakier than usual and he was breathing deeply.
“What are you doing there? Aren’t you supposed to be back at school?”
“I . . . uh . . .” He glanced over his shoulder nervously. It was dark outside where he was, but she could tell he was walking quickly down a poorly lit street.
“What’s wrong?” Kari asked.
“I think I’m being followed,” David said. “You picked a bad time to get Henderson back on our tail.”
“Run my auto-auto hacking software and grab a short ride. Keep switching vehicles for a while. Don’t stop until thirty minutes after you’re certain you’ve lost them.”
“Right.”
“Send me your location, I’ll be there soon.”
The call ended and Kari rerouted the auto-auto to the nearest private airport that she believed Vision wouldn’t be monitoring closely. It was a little over three hours away, but she was already going through the process of securely ordering a private flight to take her back to her home state. It wasn’t cheap, but at times like this, money wasn’t important.
Now Henderson is going after David again! Back to square one. Kari fumed thinking about Marshal Henderson targeting her loved ones to get to her once again. After the war ended, Henderson had interviewed the Pratts and Aubrey extensively, but he hadn’t been able to justify the same extreme measures he had gotten away with during the war. After a few months, he had eventually left them alone and Aubrey had been able to move back home, much to the distress of the local high school boys.
“We’ve changed course,” Fai said.
“We’re going to have a slight detour,” Kari said.
Chapter Twelve
“Who is Broccoli Rob? Several of the interviews from your school seem to indicate that Broccoli Rob is the best hacker in the world, but I have never encountered any information about this person,” Fai said.
Kari wasn’t sure whether to laugh or take a mental note about how she was going to punish Ruth and Jared when she got back to school. Their combined hacker handle had long been a running joke, but bringing it up in nationally covered news was reckless.
At least they haven’t found anything to definitively link the Academy back to Motorcad or me. I guess the students deserve praise for that. The media had descended on the Academy after rumors leaked that it was connected to the famed Freelancer, but searches had turned up empty. Motorcad liked to play games and joke around, but he didn’t mess around with being caught. It was one of his best traits.
The Sanchez’s had done an admirable job of acting like the school’s owners and teachers. They were a local couple that Kari paid a sizable retainer fee to step in and pretend to be the school’s founders for audits and other tasks. They’ve been worth every penny so far.
The vast fortune that Kari had accumulated during her years of freelance work had been dwindling. Eventually, she’d need to find a legitimate source of income, or she would need to start accepting clients again. She still received hundreds of requests a month for work, but running the school had taken nearly all her time. I’ll get back to freelancing someday. Maybe.
“Broccoli Rob is a giant pain in my butt,” Kari said. “Some students at my school use that as their hacker handle. They know enough to cause trouble, but they are hardly the best in the world.”
“I understand. If your students are so difficult to handle, why do you use your limited lifespan to work with them?”
“I ask myself the same question every day,” Kari said. She knew that her nondescriptive answer wouldn’t satisfy Fai. She was so literal most of the time that conversations with her felt more like work sometimes than conversing, but at least she was a dedicated student.
“There is something rewarding about making a difference in people’s lives that is hard to define,” Kari said. “But making an impact in my students’ lives is more important to me than making money.”
“I understand the concepts, but perhaps I need to experience making a difference to internalize the meaning.”
“I hope you get that chance someday,” Kari said. She checked David’s location again and sighed with relief. He was almost there and so far her plan had gone off without a hitch. Having Fai in the plane to talk with while they waited for David did wonders for her nerves.
“I am detecting some anomalies in traffic patterns,” Fai said.
“How bad is it?” Kari asked. She checked David’s status again and looked out a small cabin window to see an auto-auto driving to their private aircraft. No one following him that I can see.
“Substantial,” Fai said. “I am confident they have figured out David is heading to this location.”
“Fantastic.” How did they pull that off? Henderson is usually much easier to throw off the trail. Kari sent the order for the plane to prepare for departure while her mind raced over the ramifications.
“Will they be able to prevent us from leaving?” Fai asked.
“Not if we hurry.”
She looked out the window again and David was sprinting up the steps to their private plane, still wearing the braces she had him print for his escape. The door slid open and David dived inside panting. She sent the order for takeoff.
“Keep me updated on what you are seeing,” Kari said.
“Oh hi!” David said still trying to catch his breath.
“I will keep you updated,” Fai responded.
“David!” Kari said. She moved from her seat and gave him a quick kiss. “You made it one piece.”
“Oh easy,” David said. His chest pulsed in and out while he was still trying to catch his breath. “Ten out of ten, I would jump out of a moving auto-auto again. Absolutely.”
The plane pulled into the runway and accelerated at an alarming rate before lifting off the ground. Using her escape with Fai as inspiration, Kari had quickly designed a helmet and range of devices David could wear on his body to make it safe for him to jump out of a moving auto-auto. That part of the plan appeared to have worked flawlessly, but she had hoped the auto-auto would lead Henderson’s agents on a goose chase for far longer.
“I hope we don’t have to jump out of the plane . . .” Kari said. She looked out of her window to see enforcement auto-autos converging on the airport.
“Thanks for waiting for me,” David said.
“We wouldn’t leave without you. We’re going to have to do something about this, Fai. They’ll be able to track us fairly easily. Can you help me gain access to one of the international flight registries?”
“I have transferred access to you, Kari,” Fai said. She had secured access to a registry in Taiwan while Kari readied the rest of their plan.
“Just in time,” Kari said. She checked their position one last time before deciding they couldn’t wait any longer. “Time to alert our air traffic friends to the fact that their systems should protect against internal denial of service attacks.”
“You’re going to DDOS them from the inside?” David said. “That’s awesome!”
Kari grinned as she unleashed her script. David had asked about the plan a dozen times, but Kari had wanted to save the details for a more dramatic reveal.
Using her access to the Taiwanese air registry, Kari activated her code that immediately began requesting hundreds of thousands of new flights, flight changes, and reroutes each second. Before they even know what’s happening, hundreds of millions of new records are going to flood their systems. If it doesn’t knock them over completely, they’ll be too busy trying to sort everything out to find the final flight plan change I made to our humble little plane.
Kari monitored the situation closely, until the Taiwan registry collapsed under the load of her flight changes. Well, that works. By the time everything is up and running again, we’ll be in an auto-auto far away from the airport. They’ll eventually sort everything out and find what country we’re in, but they’ll be hard-pressed to find us from there. It should buy us a couple of weeks, at least.
“I’m showing that their system is down,” Fai said.
“Yup,” Kari said. The plane veered in the air, redirecting to their new destination. “Killed over. One of the oldest tricks in the book.”
“So we’re home free?” David asked.
“Well, we’re not exactly going home . . .” Kari said.
“I don’t know, if your parents live in London and we are going to London, doesn’t that qualify?”
David was proud of himself for figuring out where they were headed, but Kari gave him no satisfaction. I guess it was obvious. He knew we were going overseas and he knew my parents still lived over here, still successfully hiding from Henderson. It was logical. She was still slightly disappointed she wasn’t able to make the announcement herself.
“Fai is the only minor here, and they aren’t her parents so, no, I don’t think it technically counts.”
“Speaking of which . . .” David turned his attention from Kari and looked across the plane to where Fai was seated with impeccable posture. “Hello, Fai, I’m David Pratt. It’s nice to meet you.”
“Haven’t we already met?”
“It’s more of a formality,” David said. “You’re not human.”
“No, I am not.”
“Yet, I get the distinct impression that I’m the least intelligent person in this plane. Do you mind explaining that to me?”
“Your statement is dependent on measuring intelligence in a way that would favor my non-human mind. I don’t believe that my increased computational ability makes me more intelligent than you.”
David laughed and looked to Kari while he shook his head.
“Don’t look at me,” Kari said. “All I did was help build her body.”
“Oh my goodness! I’m sorry then, Fai!”
“Why?” Fai asked.
“Kari forgot to give you another arm. She’s brilliant, I promise, but sometimes she misses the little things.”
Kari punched David in the leg harder than she should have.
“Ouch!” David said. “I hope she didn’t teach you any of her violent tendencies.”
Kari punched him again, which sent him rolling off the bench and onto the floor of the plane with a thud. You’re just lucky you weren’t laying the other direction!
“This version of my body was designed with the proper number of appendages. However, due to the events at the research lab, I was separated from one of my arms by an energy blast.”
Referencing the massacre at the research lab killed the lighthearted mood that had briefly filled the cabin. David cleared his throat and took a seat on the bench next to Kari again.
“That’s right . . .” David said.
Kari didn’t know what to say. She had a hard time thinking about what had happened just a few days earlier, let alone talking about it. Of everything I’ve faced in my life, that was the worst. By far.
“Well this explains why the League of Humanity attacked the Vision research lab,” David said. “I knew it had to do something with Artificial Intelligence . . . I mean . . . Does that term offend you?”
“Why would that term offend me?” Fai asked.
“Well . . . I don’t know . . . nothing about your intelligence seems artificial. I just didn’t know if there was a different term you liked to use.”
That’s actually a good question. I’
d never thought about it that way.
“I don’t have any problems with that term. It seems to be the established and accepted word for describing my species.”
“Cool,” David said.
“I’m glad I haven’t been unintentionally offending you this whole time,” Kari said.
“I assure you both my feelings are not hurt.”
“But there was something that really bothered me about the reports of the attack,” David said.
Aside from the hundreds of innocent people gunned down?
“If the League of Humanity was involved in the shootings, they must have been certain that Vision was working on AI at that location.”
“Christina tipped them off,” Kari said. “It’s the only reason I was asked to be involved in the first place. So they could set me up to take the blame when she killed John.”
“Wow.”
“I would like to interject that I agree with Kari’s analysis of the events,” Fai said.
“That’s . . . heavy,” David said. “But . . . it doesn’t answer my other question. If the League of Humanity was involved, they must have known about AI. And if they were able to shoot your arm off, Fai, they had to have seen actual AI working.”
“And?” Kari asked.
“Well, if that’s all true, when they took credit for the attack why did they not mention anything about there being a real AI? They didn’t mention it all. In fact, all they seemed to say was that anyone working on artificial intelligence would get the same treatment.”
“I don’t know . . .” Kari said. She knew David’s question was significant, but she wasn’t exactly sure why yet. After determining that Christina was behind the attacks, she had tried to put the details out of her mind.
“Furthermore, if they hit Fai with an energy blast that ripped off her arm, that doesn’t fit their profile at all. Those guys are almost medieval in their use of technology.”
“Are you suggesting that it wasn’t the League of Humanity that attacked the lab?” Kari asked.
“Yes!” David said. “I mean, I can’t be sure, but this is exactly the type of thing I’ve been studying. Critical Data Driven Analysis in regards to Public Relations and this feels like a textbook case.”
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