The Last Firewall

by Hertling, William

  “This way, please,” said another woman, dressed in a gray suit with mirror sunglasses. She had a hard voice, and her jacket bulged on her left hip.

  Leon followed her. A few months earlier, he’d been terrified by the Secret Service agents. Now he just watched her butt.

  “Focus, focus” Mike said softly.

  Leon smiled at the older man and followed the swish of the agent’s hair instead.

  As they turned down a hallway, the construction noises faded away. The agent guided them through a door. Inside, a leftover conference room: cool marble walls, an old-fashioned chalkboard, no windows. Leon ran his fingers curiously over the antique chalkboard. They came away white. He brushed them on his new black suit jacket, then saw the mess he’d made.

  He was hastily brushing off the chalk when one of the agents called out, “The President of the United States.”

  President Rebecca Smith entered the room, trailed by her retinue. “Please be seated, gentlemen,” she said as she took a seat at the head of the table.

  Mike and Leon sat down together.

  “Mike Williams, Leon Tsarev, please meet Secretary of Technology Feld. Feld, please meet Williams and Tsarev, the department heads of the Institute of Applied Ethics.”

  They all nodded politely at each other.

  “I reviewed your proposal, Mr. Williams,” Feld said. “I see you are proposing two departments. The first is an Ethics department for creating the definitions, encoding, and incentives for guiding ethical behavior.”

  “That’s correct,” Mike said.

  “And an Architecture department will focus on the implementation of a peer reputation system. You want the AI to police each other. That group will be headed by Mr. Tsarev.”

  Leon didn’t say anything at first, then noticed Mike looking meaningfully at him. “Yes, that’s right,” Leon said, trying to keep his voice steady.

  Feld peered over his glasses at Leon.

  “Mr. Tsarev, you are how old?”

  “Nineteen, sir,” Leon answered.

  “Hmmm . . . Are you capable of chairing a department? Because . . .

  “I created the first virus-based AI. I’m most familiar with their design and have been studying how they make decisions, decide reputation, and form organizational structure.”

  “Yes, yes, I don’t doubt your technical skills. But can you manage a department of scientists, all of whom will be older than you?”

  Leon tried to work up a reply, but wilted under the man’s intense stare.

  “Brad, this is decided,” President Smith said. “Don’t torture the boy.”

  “Very well,” Feld continued. “I’ll be the interim Lead Director of the Institute until a permanent director can be found. We’ll be working together now.”

  * * *

  PING. PING. PING.

  Leon came back to the present as Mike sent him urgent alerts by net. He glanced around, startled. Sonja Metcalfe, the Enforcement Department Chair, was speaking. “The case has been escalated and we’ll be taking direct involvement.” She turned and looked at Mike.

  Leon blinked and rapidly reviewed the netspace at high speed, trying to look thoughtful as he was doing it. He couldn’t make sense of it. Accidents and murders?

  “Sorry, but would you be willing to recap?” Leon asked.

  Sonja stared at him. “Pay attention this time,” she sent in a private message that floated into his vision and refused to be dismissed when he tried to swipe it away with his implant. With a little huff, she spoke out loud. “We have a string of apparently unconnected deaths.” She stopped and looked at Leon.

  He circled his hand in the universal go on sign to show that he was listening. Damn her. She had never trusted him. She’d complained to Feld when she was hired that she didn’t think a twenty-four-year-old should head a department. Five years later they still had the same old pattern.

  “The deaths occurred across North America, from Boston to San Diego, Vancouver to Guadalajara. Some appear to be of natural causes such as heart attacks or aneurisms. Others are accidents.” Sonja moved one case into the forefront of the hovering netspace. “Here a woman fell in her kitchen, hit her head. And still others are murders.”

  “What’s the connection?” Leon asked. Despite what Sonja had said and the terabytes of data in front of him, he was missing the big picture.

  “As I said before,” Sonja spoke slowly, clenching her jaw, “initially, there was no connection. But an Internet traffic engineer came up with the correlation. Name of Shizoko Reynolds. He found all the victims had peak neural implant bandwidth for anywhere from five to fifteen minutes before death.”

  Leon felt his stomach drop out from under him. He looked sideways and noticed for the first time that Mike was ash white. Murder by brain implant? Nothing like that had ever happened. More than three quarters of the population had neural implants. If they were all vulnerable . . . “What percentage of the cases were obviously murders?”

  “Eighteen percent,” Sonja said. She waited for him.

  “So it’s not murder by implant? Why would you murder someone in meatspace if you could murder them electronically?”

  “No,” Sonja said, “the victims all had the—”

  “Wait,” Leon said, the ideas finally coming to him, “are they people of importance? Senators, business people, that sort of thing? Because then you’d want to have a backup if the first plan didn’t work out.”

  “No,” Sonja shouted. “Look, what I’m trying to say is that we have medical telemetry for some of the victims. Their cortisol levels were well above normal, indicating they experienced a stressful, traumatic event prior to death.”

  “Is this unusual?”

  “Yes. In a car accident, for example, the body can’t produce these levels of cortisol. It’s too fast.”

  “How many deaths are we talking about here?” Leon asked.

  “Six hundred eighty-three, in less than a year.”

  Leon gripped the table. That wasn’t a string of deaths; it was a small-scale war. An AI on a rampage? Humans who hacked brain implants? There was no precedent for either in the last ten years. The Institute would be held accountable, because they’d approved the implant architecture. “There’s no way these are coincidences?”

  “Yes . . . no . . . I don’t know.” Now it was Sonja’s turn to be flustered. “Everything would suggest that these are unrelated, random deaths. Age, ethnic background, socioeconomic status, location, all conform to statistically average rates.” Sonja waved her hands, gesturing at the data. “It’s a slightly higher rate of murders than would be the norm. But without the peak bandwidth, these never would have been correlated.”

  Leon felt the start of a headache. He looked at Mike, who met his gaze, then turned to Sonja. “Shizoko Reynolds, the network engineer?”

  “Class IV AI, irregular corporeal, Japanese citizenship. Resides in the U.S. in the old Austin Convention Center, which it owns.”

  Leon mentally translated the shorthand. Class I artificial intelligences were roughly human equivalent. Each class from there was an order of magnitude, ten times, more powerful. Class IV were the most powerful, a thousand times smarter than a human. As for the corporeal, some AI were full-time robots, while others lived a completely virtual existence. And a few, like this Shizoko, only occasionally took bodies.

  Leon tapped the table. “Any reason to suspect Shizoko? What’s his reputation?”

  “Eighty-first percentile,” Sonja said, bringing Reynolds profile to the forefront. “A bit of a loner, or it would be higher.”

  Leon shuffled the data. “Who’s investigating?”

  “Shizoko shared his conclusions with the FBI, who called us in because of the obvious AI aspect. I put the entire Enforcement Team on it yesterday. We’ll continue to liaise with the FBI.”

  Mike stared intently at Sonja. “Give me a daily update.”

  6

  * * *

  CATHERINE DIDN’T SLOW until she was a few
blocks away from her house. She felt the hot rush of tears down her face and wrapped her arms around herself. What was the point of meditating and practicing martial arts for hours if she was going to fly off the handle every time she was provoked by Sarah?

  She glanced up at the nearly full moon. It made her think about her mother, who at the first sight of clear skies and a moon would insist on going for a walk. Cat wouldn’t allow herself to be angry while she thought of her mom. The memories were too precious.

  She purposely slowed her breathing and practiced a walking meditation until she felt herself grow calm. She took still more measured breaths and emptied her mind.

  Once her thoughts had quieted, she considered what Sarah had said. People were not supposed to be able to do what Cat could with her implant. She hadn’t really pushed the boundaries, but she was aware of other people’s data streams and could cut them off. She knew where the AI were going. Maybe it did make her a freak.

  She crossed the avenue to the park on the other side. Her solace spot. The fragrance of night-blooming flowers came to her. She did a scent search with her implant. Lemon lily, according to the results. Funny, she’d never known that.

  At first, neural implants had only been allowed in adults in the States. But within a year of their invention, as the benefits became evident, parents who could afford it rushed overseas to have the procedure done on their kids. Thus augmented, the privileged few massively outperformed their peers in school. Legislatures hastened to change the laws after public outcry. Now most implantations were done at fourteen, the legal minimum.

  But Catherine had suffered from seizures as a baby. Within a year, they were frequent and severe, endangering her life. No treatments seemed to help.

  After a doctor contacted her parents about an experimental procedure, the family immediately boarded a plane for Portland, Oregon. Though no one had even heard of neural implants back then, just a few days later Cat received a full-brain wraparound, the first and perhaps only of its kind. Its primary purpose was to detect and dampen seizure activity. But by the time she was four, Catherine had learned to use the implant’s wireless to get online.

  She’d had an imaginary friend then, ELOPe, who claimed he’d given her the implant. Then when she was eight there was the AI war, followed by YONI, the Year of No Internet. When the net finally came back, the first thing Cat did was look for ELOPe, but he was gone.

  Cat believed she was the only person to receive an implant at such a young age, but as nearly all pre-YONI records were gone, there was no way to know for sure.

  Deep in these thoughts, Catherine arrived at her favorite part of the park, a meadow surrounded by old Douglas fir. A scream and thud jolted her out of her reverie.

  A group stood in the shadows at the opposite edge of the meadow. The high pitched screech made her think of a child, but the sound was too warbly. Laughter drifted across the field, a man’s laughter. Cat looked around, suddenly scared. Aside from her and the group, the park was empty. Another screech pierced her, setting all her nerves jangling, then it cut off sharply. In the silence, the quickening pulse of her blood sounded loud in her ears. She hesitated less than a second, then took off at a run for the group. As she got closer, she spotted the same small bot she’d met two days earlier, surrounded by four men. Two held the struggling robot, while one pressed a long knife under its remaining optical sensor. The little bot pulled, the whine of its servos audible, but the men were stronger. One slender arm twisted at a wrong angle. Off to the side, the green wagon lay overturned, a jumble of electronics spilling out.

  “Damn job-stealing robots.”

  “Cut his eye out, the little fucker.”

  The robot tried again to pull away with its one good arm.

  Cat felt her blood boil and all of her outrage surface. At Sarah, at her mom’s death, at this hopeless world with no jobs. There were people who made the best of things, good people like Maggie and her mother, and even herself. And then there were the other people. People who lived to torture and destroy. Well, not tonight.

  She reached for the net to call the police, but it was jammed. She peered through netspace: the local nodes were tinged grey, overloaded somehow. The men must be using an illegal jammer.

  The bot let out another shriek as the fourth man rotated its bent arm. The metal gave way and the arm dangled useless.

  Cat knew she could take these men. Though she’d never fought outside the dojo, this is what she had prepared for. She ran silently across the grass, her footsteps light. She came up behind the fourth man, who was egging the others on, a tall guy with a red sweatshirt. She grabbed his arm and twisted sideways, a move from Nihaichi Sandan, then followed with a leg movement to throw him off balance. She turned and pushed and Red Sweatshirt was down, thudding against the grass, his head bouncing off the ground.

  The second assailant turned to Cat. She had time to see he was in his twenties, stubble on his face, and a knife in his left hand, heavy leather jacket. He turned smoothly, lowered his stance, and balanced his weight. From the way he moved, he obviously had training, or at least experience fighting. He glanced at the man she’d put down and then stared, inspecting her.

  At her side she heard a scream of tortured metal again. One of the men holding the bot had let go and the bot twisted away. Heavyset and bearded, the man grabbed Cat from behind, his arms squeezing around her shoulders. She felt the scratch of his beard on her neck. With a practiced dip, she squatted a few inches, using her shorter height to her advantage, and raised her arms up. The move loosened his grip. She pivoted ninety degrees, and drew her qi in for a short double punch to his stomach. He doubled over, and she worked with the momentum of his upper body, bringing her arms down and her knee up, and felt the crunch of his face against her knee. He crumpled to his knees.

  The knife attacker came toward her, completely focused now. He wasted no energy on words or excess movements, although she saw him smile in anticipation. She tracked the knife, but kept her attention on his eyes.

  He jabbed twice toward her face, and the third time he came in toward her abdomen, broadcasting the move by glancing down. She pivoted smoothly to the right, moving in toward him, letting the knife pass by, her right hand grabbing his left wrist. But her grip was too loose, the leather jacket too big for her to get a solid grasp. She tried to work with his momentum and turn the move into a blow to his face, but he was quick and strong, and instead he elbowed her in the stomach. She fell back, the breath going out of her.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw the red sweatshirt man getting up again. The last man, still holding the bot, swung it sideways. The bot smashed against a tree and went down. No help there.

  The knife fighter turned and thrust again. Cat moved backwards, only to move into the hold of the fourth man. He grabbed her arm with two hands. She stepped sideways, moving down and under, the move that should break his grip, when the red sweatshirt man punched her in the face.

  Reeling backwards, she thought about the lesson Sensei Flores hammered into her. Most people could take two, maybe three hits before their nervous system began to shut down. She’d been hit twice, which meant she’d be slower now. And there were still three of them. She was a better fighter than any of them individually, but if she took another hit, the tide of this fight would swing deterministically in their favor.

  She took a quick double step back. She had a desperate idea. If people couldn’t cope with the feedback from her implant under ordinary circumstances, what if she purposely opened it up and tried to overwhelm them?

  She summoned her energy, and flipped a simple switch in her implant. Then she let out a mental scream directing it all through the net.

  Two of the men grabbed their heads in silence, then crumpled to the ground, to lie unconscious, along with the first man she’d knocked out earlier. But the knife fighter didn’t falter. He turned to her. He looked scared, but the fear made him more determined. His teeth glinted in the moonlight.

  Cat bac
ked up, forcing her breath to slow. He didn’t have an implant and she was still going to have to fight him. Judging from the way he was wielding that knife, he didn’t seem too concerned about how badly he hurt her. That was fine with her. Okinawan Kenpo was a karate style based on the reality of real combat: there were no rules. She was fighting for her life now.

  She watched him, eyes focused on his. She felt her feet on the ground, drew qi up, as he approached in what felt like slow motion. She jogged six inches to the left, using her right hand to guide his knife arm harmlessly pass her, an echo of the attack seconds earlier. She turned as he moved past, and with her left arm punched him hard in the ear, and continued her half turn, coming down lightly as he moved past her.

  Stunned, he turned slowly, and before he could bring the knife back up, Cat moved forward with a straight kick to his knee. She felt the crunch of the knee giving way, as her foot passed through the plane where his leg used to be, and jumped back again, out of reach of his knife. He fell hard, screaming as the fall impacted his leg, now bent backwards through the knee joint.

  Despite the adrenaline pumping through her, she felt sick at the sight of his leg in an unnatural position. She turned, fists still at the ready, looking at each of the four men. Over the blood pounding in her ears, she could hear nothing. The screams from the knife fighter seemed to come from a great distance away. Across the meadow, a glimmer of silver and red flashed through the trees. The bot, their victim, had gotten up and was running away.

  Cat fought with her emotions, wanting to go to the bot to see if it was all right, wanting thanks for rescuing it. But it obviously just wanted to escape.

  She was still standing there seconds later when the sound of sirens came through the trees. Would the police be coming here? Had the bot called them once it got out of range of the jammer? Would she be in trouble for fighting with these men?

  With a start, she realized that none of the men she’d put down with her implant had stirred in any way. She ignored the one with the broken leg, his screams counting him among the living. She ran over to one of others. She probed his implant as she also checked his pulse. No pulse, and no response from the implant. She ran to the red sweatshirt guy, and found the same there.