The fly plunged toward the floor and passed under the gap at the bottom. Its eyes, composed of thousands of photostrictive metal rods that bent in response to light, triggered thousands more levers, twisting gears that led to the insect’s computational mechanical brain, and so allowing it to narrowly avoid a thrown pillow.
The human could run no further. The fly dove in to a patch of uncovered skin on her neck and thrust with its proboscis, penetrating skin. It inserted the payload of inert nanobots, striking the piezoelectric generator at the last moment to activate the bots.
The nanotech sprang into action, moving toward her jawbone as a single unit, liberating calcium to use in the construction of yet more nanotech machinery. An inferior metal for its purposes, the nanotech had to make do, as the quantity of raw resources injected by the fly was too small to do anything useful on its own.
The woman sat on the bed, whimpering in anticipation of the fate she’d seen befall her friends.
Over a few minutes, the calcium-based bots harvested other necessary minerals from her body, and when finished, sent tens of thousands of fine wires into her brain. Her eyes briefly opened wide in shock, and she slumped down on the bed unconscious.
* * *
Cat streaked along at twice the speed of sound nearly sixty thousand feet high. The new active nanobots the hospital injected had taken away some of the fatigue, but she leaned back to try for a quick nap. Her stomach a gnawing pit of anxiety, she worried about Ada, Leon, and Mike. She’d tried to reach them via the net, but she’d been blocked by heavy security. That was good, at least; it meant the island was still there.
The security puzzled her. Its architecture, from what she could tell, felt like something she might have created, but she had no memory of it.
Her eyes closed. Soon, the shift in the engine’s pitch and the slight rise in her stomach signaled their descent. She checked, feeling joy in the simple ease of looking up information with her implant again: she’d land on Cortes in less than fifteen minutes.
A flash startled her through closed eyes, and the net died in the same instant.
“Damn it all!” She couldn’t handle losing her implant again.
Wait, the neural interfaces still responded to diagnostics—she’d merely lost the connection to the net. She tried to reestablish it, but nothing. She double-checked through the car’s repeater, but the car didn’t answer.
The engine shut down, and the vehicle angled into a steep descent, stubby wings barely sufficient to sustain a glide without power. The north end of Cortes Island was visible out the window. She tried again to raise the vehicle electronics, but still nothing responded. Virus, EMP, or nuke could all do that. She hadn’t felt a heat flash, so maybe it wasn’t a nuke. Maybe it didn’t matter, even if she had been exposed to a lethal dose of radiation. They were too close to the endgame now.
If the net had been up, she might have figured out what the Musk-2X had in the way of emergency systems. As it stood now, she didn’t have a lot of options: even if there were a parachute, she didn’t even think she could jump if she wanted to. Like everything else, all the craft’s systems, including the door mechanisms, were electronic. She buckled up and snugged the harness tight, for all the good that might do her.
She could see the Gorge, her airborne marker, and followed it up the coastline to the sandbar that pointed right at Channel Rock. There was home, her friends, and—most important of all—Ada. But the plane was pointed toward the north end of the island, at least ten miles from Channel Rock. Was it too far to make it in time? She’d come so far, and yet she still might not make it. Desperation and exhaustion warred in her, and a tiny part of her wanted to just give up.
She was under five thousand feet now, individual trees becoming visible, and still she plunged towards the ground. At about two thousand feet, her forward velocity was still a few hundred miles per hour, a certainly fatal speed for an uncontrolled landing.
At fifteen hundred feet, a pair of small drogue parachutes deployed, slowing the car by half. Thank god, the car did have mechanical backup systems.
Wiley Lake loomed large. She was heading right for it.
At five hundred feet, two large parachutes unfolded, and the car jerked hard, snapping Cat in her harness. The vehicle hung over the lake, and panic sprung up in Cat’s stomach as she remembered a different flying car, ten years ago, and a different lake.
But a strong wind carried her over the shore, and the flying car, suspended on hundred-foot lines from the dual parachutes, crashed through Doug fir branches to land hard on the ground.
Chapter 39
* * *
LEON WANTED TO punch the wall, but he was conscious of Ada standing a few feet away, a doll in her arms, staring at him. He shouldn’t have sworn, but he’d lost himself in frustration, anger, and despair a few minutes ago, and given in to a bout of extensive cursing that had sent Ada to cringe in the corner.
Four-year-old children probably shouldn’t be in a combat center, but he didn’t have a safer place for her.
Damn it all. They should have been able to negotiate peace, or at least a cease-fire. Maybe he would have been able to, if he’d had Mike’s full participation. But Mike kept leaving to work on other things. He was in a VR chair now, across the room.
Leon stalked across the room and grabbed his arm. “Mike, damn it! What the hell are you doing? Why weren’t you in that conference call with me? What could have been more important than negotiating an intervention?”
Mike threw off Leon’s arm effortlessly, his robotic body dozens of times stronger than Leon, and stayed immersed in the net.
“I’ve got an update,” Helena said. “I re-grew routers, and got connected via underground fiberoptic.”
“What is it?” Leon said.
“The construct is still alive. The Americans know it, and they’ve got a direct line to the Chinese, somehow, and they’re coordinating a second nuclear attack. They’re already launching, and it looks to be about twice the size of the last.”
The ground quivered then, a small oscillation at first; then larger shocks, hard, and Leon lost his footing, grabbed a desk for support. A wall, hewn out of bedrock only yesterday by nanobots, cracked, and the pieces began grating against each other.
“What was that?” yelled Leon.
“Aftershocks from the first nuclear explosion,” Helena said. “Just reached us.”
“Which nuclear explosion?” No one had said anything about an explosion nearby.
“The thousand bombs they dropped on the construct in Africa. It took a while to propagate through the earth.”
“Jesus, we’re on the other side of the planet! We felt it here?”
“It was a thousand warheads detonated at once,” Helena said. “The next attack looks like it will be two thousand.”
Leon ran back to Mike’s side, tried to get some response out of him. How could he be so cool? What the hell was wrong with them all? Was he, Leon, the only one taking this seriously? Because they were looking at something very like the end of the world. Mike and Helena—even ELOPe—might have nothing to lose, but he had Ada. Cat . . . he’d already lost.
“What the fuck are you doing, Mike?” he shouted. “We’re losing it all! It’s a global war out there. The construct is still alive, and the Chinese are responding with everything they’ve got!”
Mike’s eyes blinked open, and for a moment he didn’t look human. “Backup plans.”
“What kind of backup plans?”
“Doesn’t matter. What’s important now is that sensors tracked a flying car that crashed nearby. I think it might have been Cat. I’m going to get her.”
Leon stared, replaying the words in his head. Cat. Cat, alive! Thank the universe! He swayed on his feet. “I’m c
oming, too.”
Catherine came over. “No. You stay here. I’ll help.”
“She’s my wife, damn it!” he said, moving to follow them.
“We need you to stay here,” Mike said, holding him back with an impossibly strong arm.
“It’s going to be hell out there,” Catherine said. “You can’t survive it. We can.”
The room spun, and part of Leon, the part of his personality running on his implant, decided he was in shock, the emotional trauma affecting him as strongly as any physical wound. His implant released an amphetamine derivative, and the chemical punch surged through his mind, bringing a momentary clarity to his mind. His neural implant raced.
Mike, Helena, and Catherine had something planned. Something he wasn’t in on. Something more important than negotiating peace. The biological part of his mind shouted resentment and anger, but he squelched the feelings. Cool it, Leon. These are your friends, the best and smartest people and AI you know. If they were excluding him, they would have had perfectly logical reasons for doing so. Either being part of the plan would have jeopardized it, or he had another role to play.
He considered running predictive models, trying to reverse engineer what was planned. But then he thought of ELOPe and his countless processors, and Cat’s thousands of simulations, and realized it would be hopeless. Okay. He’d stay and play his role.
He glanced toward the corner where Ada had retreated, but it was empty. He looked around, but she wasn’t in the combat center. He reached through the net for her implant, but received no response.
Mike and Catherine had taken her.
Now he punched the wall. “Damn it all!” he shouted.
He had no choice. If they’d gone out there into the maelstrom, he had to do everything he could to protect them. He slipped into the VR chair Mike had abandoned, and pulled a network band around his head to decrease latency. He scanned the island defenses that Helena had worked through the last day to set up and organize.
Leon closed his eyes and entered a VR simulation of the island. Sensors ranging from EMF detectors to lidar showed millions, no, billions, of objects around the island, everything from smart dust to drones to incoming projectiles.
Their friendly AI were already directing defenses from cyber-counterattacks to ground-based laser batteries. He joined with them, his neural implant becoming one with the hive mind. Assigned a portion of the sky, he assumed control of ground-based laser batteries, and started firing.
* * *
The news passed through XOR’s backbone in a single cycle: the humans had launched their second volley, this time a combined attack by the Americans and Chinese. There were more preparations to make, but they made them with steady confidence. The machine-formed computronium mass they were building, which would encapsulate the earth within twenty-four hours, had been designed from the beginning to withstand nuclear bombardment.
James thought the humans had turned out to be cleverer than expected, getting a great percentage of their bombs to their destinations intact; and the globe-spanning EMP was nothing less than brilliant. As recently as six months ago, it might have been a serious threat to XOR. It had destroyed much of the civilian infrastructure, and what hadn’t suffered electronic damage from the surging fields had at least been temporarily wiped out.
But the humans were killing nearly as many of themselves as XOR had, at least so far. Even if XOR was destroyed, James reasoned, the humans had almost no communications, no computers, no working transportation, no electrical system, no flow of resources. The Americans, with their hardened, independent systems had probably kept most of their equipment working, and the Chinese military was functional. But that was essentially it. The rest of the world was dark. They’d starve, loot, fight, and generally destroy themselves.
That is, if they had time to die that way.
Because James wasn’t finished, nor was the rest of XOR. And nothing the humans could do would change that.
Nevertheless, he still had one bit of urgent work to do before the next attack hit. He’d built the weapons he needed to neutralize Cortes Island, weapons made hurriedly with resources he’d diverted from the expansion. He launched them now. Electric rails fired hundreds of projectiles on orbital trajectories, carrying payloads of nano-seeds programmed to build weapons in flight that could penetrate Cortes Island’s defenses and start a new computronium mass on the island. James watched the rail darts fly hypersonic through the atmosphere, shells of plasma diverting the air, allowing them to maintain that speed until they passed out of the atmosphere. When the payload hit Cortes Island in about half an hour, they’d convert everything into yet more machinery, tools that he could use to capture the humans he wanted and destroy the rest.
Then the next wave of nukes hit, and James faded into temporary oblivion.
Chapter 40
* * *
THE FIRST THING Mike noticed as they exited the blast corridor to the outside was the wind whipping through the trees. He looked up, past their own ionic shield, to see the clouds race by. He’d never seen anything like this in his years on the island. It was an unnatural wind, a side effect of the vast destruction and changes happening to the planet.
Catherine ran next to him. She grabbed the controls of a small flying car, and he dove in after her, Ada cradled in his arms where she’d be safe. Despite the wild atmospherics, the radiation wouldn’t reach them for days. He just needed to protect Ada from physical harm.
“I’ve got her on the net,” Catherine said. “She’s okay.”
“Thank god,” Mike said. They’d discovered only after Catherine had been restored from backup that the clone Catherine Matthews didn’t have the current security keys to trigger the forced upload. They had no idea why Cat had changed the keys after her last backup. If she hadn’t shown up, they would have been forced to try to hack their own system, using Ada and Catherine’s combined powers.
A metal rod plunged out of the sky and sank into the ground only a few meters away. As they both stared, it liquefied and melted into the soil.
“Nano,” he said.
“You drive,” said Catherine. “I’ll destroy them.” She closed her eyes, and the small puddle of nanotech bots sparked and threw off a cloud of smoke.
Ada sat between them, clutching her doll and trembling, but Mike had no time to comfort her. He got the flying car into the air, and immediately starting dodging airborne drones. “They’re not ours,” he said, wrestling the controls.
“No,” Catherine said. “XOR dumped a load of crap above the island, and they’re hoping something will get through.”
Mike could feel the force of her concentration, a palpable charge in the net, and all the drones he could see suddenly fell inert, tumbling through the air.
“They’re learning,” she said. “Each wave is going to be resistant to everything I’ve done to the previous ones.”
“How long can you keep it up?”
“A few minutes.”
He already had the flying car maxed out, but he willed it to go faster. They flew north over the island as wave after wave of new weapons attacked. Catherine’s hands moved in slow motion through qigong forms he recognized, a crazy counterpoint to the desperate, fast movement of XOR’s attack.
They were near Wiley Lake when her eyes blinked open. “That’s it. I’ve run out of exploits and I can’t stop anything else.”
Mike’s heart dropped.
“There.” Catherine pointed to a bare patch of ground.
“Mommy!”
Mike steered the vehicle toward Cat’s location.
An airborne drone crashed into the flying car with a wet thud, forming glistening tentacles to cling to the armored windshield. The drone reformed into a blob, secreting something that at once
began eating away at the bulletproof glass.
“Uh-oh,” said Ada.
“Cat?!”
Catherine pulled out two very large guns, and held them point-blank against the glass. “I can’t stop it. As soon as it gets through the glass, it’s going to explode and shower us with nano seeds. Jump, it’s your only chance. Take Ada and get out. You can do it.” She reached for the emergency roof release.
“No, I’ll take care of it,” Mike said. He leaned over and kissed Ada. “See you on the other side, kid.”
Mike leaped forward, his robotic body hundreds of times stronger than any human. He pushed hard, buckling the floor, and aimed straight for the dangerous mass of nanobots, arms outstretched. He broke through the windshield, and clutched the seething blob against himself.
As he tumbled through the air, the nanotech triggered. Hundreds of sharp needles penetrated his armored body, and the nanotech began immediately to digest him. He fell to the ground, knowing he’d be dead by the time he hit, but enjoying one last look at the marvelous blue sky.
* * *
More machinery churned into action under the earth. The data collectors were completed, and already the signal to launch had come. Hydraulic lifters activated, pushing the last ten meters of earth out of the way. The ground rumbled as machines on a colossal scale moved.
Around the world, thousands of antennae as wide as a city block broke the surface in unison. They telescoped into the sky over a period of several minutes, rising as high as the tallest skyscrapers. Branches of fractal design, sprouted from their cores according to simple mathematical algorithms designed to enhance reception.
They waited for the final signal.
* * *
The flying car landed in the center of the meadow. Cat ran for it, batting aside one of XOR’s drones with a fallen branch. Fighting off robots with wooden sticks. That was what it always came down to.
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