“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.
Chapter 30
* * *
“MADAM PRESIDENT,” 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.
Chapter 31
* * *
CAT MADE MILWAUKEE 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.
The road stretched on, and finally she came to the new shore of Lake Michigan at the mobile dock that moved east each year. Boats stretched off in all directions, and then she found what she wanted: a line of float planes at one end. It was mid-afternoon, and the docks were moderately busy. She spent twenty minutes wandering around and getting a feel for things.
Cat left, grabbed dinner and a few essential tools in town, and came back after dark.
She parked the motorcycle and dismounted. She patted it twice. “Thanks for the ride.” She left the keys in the ignition and the helmet hanging from the seat hook for whoever might come along.
She followed the docks to the float plane section. A chain-link fence topped with razor wire appeared to be the limits of security. You can only do so much on a dock.
On the next dock over, she untied a small sailboat, straightened the rudder, gave it a hard push, and jumped on board. She walked the deck to the other end, and when it reached the next dock, jumped off. She grabbed a line and tied the boat up. No point in letting it drift away.
She searched for the oldest planes, ones with a minimum of electronics. She found a short line of Cessna Caravans of the right vintage, all painted with the same company logo. She’d flown them before, when she had an implant guiding her. Her knowledge was imperfect now, since much of the skills and memories resided on her implant, but she thought she still had enough to get into the air.
The hardest part was hot-wiring the plane. Of course, she didn’t have her implant to give her the easy answers. Her heart fell at the mess of wires under the dashboard. Crouched in the cockpit, flashlight in her mouth, she tried looking for patterns. When that didn’t work, she tried organizing the wires and tracing them back to their source. After fifteen minutes of fruitless work, tears started to come.
Without her implant, she was a nobody, incapable even of rescuing herself, let alone her baby, Ada. Was Ada okay? Had she hugged her before she left? She couldn’t remember now, couldn’t even pull up a crisp photographic memory of Ada in her implant. Instead, what came was a memory of Ada hugging her leg as she practiced karate, and of herself laughing as she tried to do the forms balanced on one leg.
She’d seen the way Ada looked up at her, the way Ada thought Cat was perfect. She’d said something about needing to practice, and Ada had said Mommy didn’t need to practice, Mommy was already a karate master.
She dried her eyes on a sleeve, and turned back to the wires. If Ada believed she was so perfect, then she’d try to live up to that, implant or not.
She grabbed a bunch of wires, wires that went somewhere behind the dashboard, trying to puzzle out which went to the key switch, and then she laughed. She might not be able to figure out the wires, but she still knew how to pick a lock.
Cat dropped the wires, and hunted through the backpack, digging through for tools she could use. She found a tiny screwdriver she’d use for torsion, and a thin metal strip she’d have to somehow use as the world’s crappiest pick. Fortunately the lock mechanism was low quality, the tolerances poor, and within two minutes she had the lock turned to the on position.
After stowing her bag in the copilot’s seat, Cat untied the plane and reentered the cockpit. She ran through the preflight checklist as best she could, but kept the avionics master switch off. That left her with no radio or navigation, but also no transponder signal or electronic emissions to betray her location. Fortunately these were labeled in the fuse box.
She started the engine and pulled away from the dock. She still had to refuel, and she needed to be quick now, because the noise of the engine would be obvious to anyone on the dock. Taxiing to the spot nearest the refueling hose, she killed the engine, leaped out onto the float, and wrapped the dock line quickly around the mooring cleat.
She retrieved the crowbar from her backpack and pried the lock off the refueling station. She turned on the pump, dragged the hose over to the plane, and started the flow of synthetic biofuel. Then she waited. Three hundred gallons involved a long wait. She stood nervously glancing around. If anyone came, would she run for it? Or take the plane? Once her implant would have calculated hundreds of possibilities, crunched the data, and given her the answer.
But she didn’t have to exercise either option. The gurgle in the line changed and she killed the fuel pump. Leaving it there on the dock, she untied, got back in the cockpit, and started the engine.
Pointing due north, she throttled up, skimming over the lake till the Caravan reached takeoff velocity and pulled itself up out of the water. As soon as the floats cleared the surface, she throttled back.
Now came the tricky part. She kept the plane ten feet above the water, its headlights glinting off the black waves. She’d have to fly this way all the way to Canada. She glanced down at the compass from time to time, but mostly focused on maintaining her low altitude: at a hundred and sixty knots, even a minor downdraft could send her crashing into the water unless she responded almost instantly.
From Milwaukee, an hour and a half brought her to the Hiawatha National Forest, a narrow bridge of land less than fifty miles wide that separated Lake Michigan from Lake Superior. The unpopulated forest would mean few observers.
The dark waters of Lake Superior came into view. Here, less than a hundred miles from the border, the great ionizing shield put up by the Americans was visible, a man-made aurora spreading across the horizon.
Cat ripped her eyes from the mesmerizing sight and focused on the water in front of the plane. The shield surrounding the US was created by generators spaced twenty miles apart on land. But here at Lake Superior was a gap of almost a hundred miles between generators. The aurora was still present in front of her, but considerably reduced. She hoped that in the very center, at only a few feet above ground, the effect would be low enough that she could fly through without frying the plane’s electrical systems.
The aurora dominated the view now, casting changing hues within the cockpit. She still focused only on the reflection of her lights off the water. The plane’s indicators fluctuated in wider and wider oscillations as she approached the ionizing shield. The light surrounded her, and a tingling passed through her body. The lights on the plane brightened. Afraid they might burn out, she looked for the switch to kill them. Her fingers brushed the metal toggle, and a shock passed through her.
> NEURAL IMPLANT INITIALIZING
Cat yelped in surprise. Her implant was working! She pinged it, but it was still booting.
Suddenly the night grew dark again. She was on the other side of the ionic shield, in Canadian territory, or almost there at least. And then the signal from her implant faded. What the hell?
The power supply of her implant, microscopic blood
fuel cells, must be faulty. She could have burned them out during her defense against XOR. She’d been striving to reach the ground transmitters directly, which must have been well beyond the normal range, even with her extra antennae.
Oh god, she was going to be okay. Her implant was okay. She just needed power.
Chapter 32
* * *
A MACHINE, THE SIZE of a single grain of sand, constructed on atomic scales, encompassed every aspect of a pico-factory. Instructions coded as DNA weighed less than a thousandth of a gram and contained two hundred gigabytes of data.
This particular machine, one object of approximately eight billion grains of sand in a cubic meter, of one trillion cubic meters of sand in Chad, started into motion. Fractal arms extended in all directions, scraped nearby sand, and fed the factory, building structures tailored to use silicon dioxide. Dozens of minutes passed, and then there were nine nearly identical copies. Less than a thousandth of the carefully scripted DNA instructions were utilized, but all were passed on.
A sphere of pico-machinery grew outward, its rate of expansion growing shorter as surface equipment increased in size and scale. Soon tiny shovels, visible to the human eye, funneled sand inward, where specialized nodes processing incoming silicon turned it into the desired components before pumping the finished product back out via a network of channels and ducts.
Solar panels blossomed above, molecule-perfect, operating at optimal conversion rates to power the ever-growing process. The edge, always chaotic, churned at ever-increasing rates, kid-sized shovels gradually being replaced by industrial-scale conveyer belts to feed the fabricators building large-scale devices.
Meanwhile, at the center, no longer needed for expansion, a darkly iridescent patch of computronium dilated: a solid, unchanging surface, stillness at its core.
The Turing Exception Page 21