“She took the entire Enforcement Team,” Mike said, worried. “We only have the eight investigators. There’s no one else to send.”
“I’ll message the San Diego Police and the California AI Police. That work?”
“That’s a first step. But I have a bad feeling about this.” Mike shook his head. “Sonja’s investigating a series of murders disguised so well that they eluded every police department in the country. Then she disappears? An AI has got to be behind this.”
“It’s impossible,” Leon said. “We designed the system. Every AI is subject to ethics scanning and every AI is monitoring every other one. Unless they’re all in on it together, I don’t see how such a large-scale crime could be possible. We haven’t had a major AI problem since we built the new architecture. Isn’t it possible she’s just deep undercover?”
“Something’s up,” Mike said flatly.
“What do you want to do?”
“Let’s go to San Diego. Tomorrow.” He looked at Leon. “Can you?”
“Sure, but don’t you think we should do a little investigating here first? Let’s access Sonja’s files, see what she found.”
“We can do that from the road.” Mike frowned at Leon’s reluctance.
“We can’t talk to everyone in the office. She may have said things to other people in the Institute. We also really need to talk to Shizoko, the AI that discovered the murders. It’s a class IV, we can’t just do that raw. We need filters.”
Mike toyed with the food on his plate. Leon was right. The AIs grew increasingly difficult to comprehend as their intelligence went up. It wasn’t a language barrier; they could speak English flawlessly. But they spoke in terms of concepts and models that humans couldn’t begin to understand. A Class IV AI would prefer passing a complete neural network to the alternative of articulating it at length in English. The Institute had special filtering software to make inter-species communication easier.
“Yeah, you’re right,” he said slowly. “We’ll go to the Institute tomorrow, talk to folks there, and the AI, then catch an evening flight.”
10
* * *
CAT WAITED AT THE SIDE of I-5. At two o’clock in the morning, there wasn’t much human traffic. Her face and stomach hurt where she’d been hit, but Cat found it better to focus on the pain than to think about what she’d done. She’d never meant to do anything but defend that robot. She blinked back tears.
It had been easy enough to avoid the police for the last few hours. So easy, in fact, it was a little scary. She could see them coming and going in netspace, their cars’ autopilots giving them away long before they could ever see her. And she knew enough to keep her implant in anonymous mode so no one could track her.
She didn’t know where to go. She couldn’t go home and she wouldn’t turn herself in. People who went to jail . . . They didn’t come out the same.
It wasn’t clear if the police even knew it was her. But her implant had been on as she entered the park. They’d know everyone who was in the vicinity, and she had to assume she’d be a suspect. She needed time and space to think, to make a plan, but she couldn’t get that in Portland. She could evade the police for now, but eventually they’d spread photos of their suspect list across the net. Eventually someone here would recognize her. Surely they wouldn’t start a nationwide manhunt for a couple of thugs who’d been killed in a fight. If she went somewhere far away, she’d be less likely to be recognized. That made the decision for her; she had to leave.
She walked to the highway and looked for an automated shipping truck headed south. She’d never done anything like it, but maybe she could hijack one with her implant.
She reached out in netspace. When a truck approached, she closed her eyes and focused on it. She pushed and nudged in cyberspace until she felt the brakes trigger. She mucked around more, intuitively trying things, until she found the speedometer and GPS data. She fudged the data feeds so it would look like the vehicle was still in motion.
When the truck halted in front of her, she unlocked the doors and climbed inside the unoccupied cab. She let it accelerate and gave it a series of commands to gradually bring the speedometer and GPS telemetry back into sync. The stop would be unobserved.
Inside the vast empty truck cab, she numbly watched the road drift past.
Her whole life she’d tried to be good. But hijacking the truck had been easy, as had evading the authorities. The thought of the police brought back the image of the dead men, and she felt sick. She curled up, wrapping her light jacket around herself. Where could she go?
Her mom had been dead for three years, her father gone for nine, and she’d never heard from him since. Boyfriends never stuck around because she wouldn’t link implants. Her only friends in the world were at home, and she couldn’t go back there now.
The loneliness and fear welled up inside her until it was hard to breathe or think. She sat, cold and shivering, in a state of limbo until the drone of the road and the pulse of lights passing by lulled her to sleep.
* * *
When she woke the sun was coming up and the tractor-trailer was crossing into California. She forced a stop so she could relieve herself on the side of the road. After she climbed back in, the autopilot resumed its route.
She checked the software’s waypoints, finding that the vehicle was headed for San Diego. She sat, watching the evergreens go by, gradually forming a plan. She’d let the truck keep going, but she’d get out in San Francisco. That was a big city, a place where she could hide out for a while.
Cat inserted a fake delivery in Menlo Park. Hours later, nearing lunchtime, the truck slowed and exited the highway. When it came to a standstill, she climbed out of the cab. She sent a final set of data packets, fixing up the GPS monitors to disguise the unscheduled stop. The truck crossed the road and got back on the highway.
She needed a bathroom, water, and food, more or less in that order. Hiking down the exit ramp, she was frightened by how little she had. She’d left the house with no plan other than to get away from Sarah, and with nothing but the clothes she was wearing.
Just off the ramp she found a trucker’s restaurant. Ignoring the stare of the white-haired waitress, she headed for the bathroom in back. After she used the toilet, she looked in the mirror. Her T-shirt and jeans were crumpled with sleep, and her hair was a mess. She washed her face and ran wet fingers through her hair. She walked to the front of the restaurant, feeling presentable again.
The waitress looked at her. “Got cash, honey?”
Cat took a deep breath. “I have an implant. . . .” She started indignantly, but trailed off with a whimper. She needed coffee, she wasn’t thinking clearly, she couldn’t use her ID or they’d track her down. “Sorry, I’ll be back.”
“Alright honey, come back when you have money.”
Cat turned around, her face hot with embarrassment, and headed for the door. The smell of eggs, bacon, and coffee made her stomach grumble and almost brought tears to her eyes. Outside, she looked back into the restaurant, salivating over an imagined plate of food.
She turned her back on the restaurant and walked along the road. She was twelve hours and seven hundred miles from home, on the run, with no access to her money or even anything to barter. What the hell had she been thinking?
Cat suddenly remembered that Einstein was at home. Her mom had given her Einstein before she’d died. The intense longing for her puppen, her last connection to her mom, overpowered her. She collapsed onto the curb, hugging her knees. But after a minute of this, she forced herself to stop. Maggie would take care of Einstein until somehow, someday, Cat found a way to go home. In the meantime, she couldn’t afford to be weak if she was going to survive. What she needed right now was money so she could get food. She stood and continued along the road.
Her neural implant had a public key, and the usual way for implanted people to pay for things was by digital authorization on the spot using the key. Kids and the unimplanted had payment cards
, little squares of electronics that did much the same thing, just anonymously. Cat hadn’t ever had one. She knew that Tom used them when he bought drugs. But where did he get them?
She supposed bank machines must offer them. But if she went to one and tried to transfer funds, the police would trace her. She thought for a moment, wondering if the tricks she could play in netspace would work on a bank.
Looking up, she noticed that she was hiking through slums, a street sign indicating this was Sand Hill Road. The oversized buildings were boarded up, surrounded by heavily rusted chain link fences. Whatever prosperity had once visited this place, it was long gone.
On the north side of the road, smoke rose from one of the fenced-in compounds, and the smell of cooking drifted over. Cat crossed the street and peered through the chain-link. She could hear kids playing, but whoever was there was hidden. Squatters probably, living in the abandoned office complex. She guessed that Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers didn’t need that space anymore, whoever or whatever they once were.
She hiked on. Orange trees grew in the spaces between buildings. Hungrier than ever, she walked over to one, but the oranges were just tiny green globes, nowhere near ready.
Half a mile further, she came to a small white and yellow building, the hand-painted sign proclaiming the structure to be a bodega. A Mexican man disappeared inside. Cat studied the storefront. Food was inside there. Her stomach rumbled. She felt in her empty pockets again. A stenciled poster in the window advertised payment cards. If only . . .
She squatted under a tree at the edge of the parking lot. She carefully turned on her implant, squelching her ID and preventing the implant from automatically connecting to the net. She just observed the building.
At a level lower than consciousness her implant connected to local network nodes, filtered the encrypted traffic, correlated the data streams, slowed them down and built a visual representation, and then fed it to her neocortex. What Cat saw was a data stream she isolated down to the bodega from all the other network traffic. She separated out the low bandwidth stuff, and watched for a bigger burp of data, something with heavier encryption. Sure enough, a chunk of data flew over the wire. A minute later, the Mexican left the store, carrying a bag of groceries.
Cat turned the data over and over in her head, trying to understand it. She knew it had to be the man’s payment. She had no hope of decrypting the packet to see what was inside. Probably no one could, except maybe the monster AIs with tens of thousands of processors. She couldn’t decrypt it, but could she replay it? She’d need to purchase the same things in the same quantities as a previous customer, and reset the time signal so the store would accept the payment . . .
She thought she could do it; now she just needed some customers. She waited. The traffic was light and no one came. Her stomach grumbled. Then, all at once, two people approached on foot and another in a beat-up electric pickup. She stood and walked into the store in the middle of the pack. She pretended to browse while keeping an eye on the other customers. The owner stood behind the counter watching her, but she ignored him. One woman went to the back of the store, picking up beer and other groceries. A man poured himself coffee. The last customer, a woman, was near the front register. She picked up two $50 payment cards and presented them to the owner.
At the sight of the payment cards, Cat stopped, motionless, and focused on the transaction. The owner swiped the cards in the register. Data streamed white in Cat’s vision and she grabbed the digital packets as she synchronized the stream with the precise time of the transaction.
The woman left, and Cat went up to the register. She picked up two of the same payment cards, and handed them to the owner. He looked at her suspiciously. She didn’t say a thing, but concentrated on keeping the integrity of the data in her head. He swiped the cards, then nodded at the ID reader.
She focused on the net, tweaked the register to send out a request for payment, overrode the time signal, and replayed the encrypted packets. The register beeped an alarm.
“No es bueno. ¿Tienes dinero?” the storekeeper said, shaking his head.
“Try again,” Cat said, nodding toward the register, her hands sweating below the counter.
The storekeeper grumbled under his breath, and pressed a button on the register. The ID reader lit up again, and Cat tried a second time, keeping the time signal and data stream perfectly synchronized.
The register beeped a happy tone and the owner slid the cards to her. “Gracias. Buen día.” His gaze slid onto the next person in line.
Cat took the cards with shaking hands and forced herself to walk slowly outside. She continued away from the store, trembling and half crying. “I’m sorry, Mom,” she blurted out, when there was no one to hear her. She stumbled down the dirt road, clutching the payment cards in a tight fist. She’d promised her mother in the hospital, the day before she died, that’d she’d be good. She tried so hard in this world where nobody knew what to do, and still she strived to honor her mom. Yet in twenty-four hours, somehow, her entire life had become derailed. She’d killed three men and now she was robbing convenience stores. She fought the urge to vomit, her reptilian brain driving her to get further away from the store. She got a quarter mile down the road and then collapsed against the side of a building, sobbing.
She lay there in the dirt, curled up in a ball, feeling like her future was being torn away from her. She would have stayed there forever but her stomach growled painfully, again and again, a reminder that present needs trumped the future. The hunger pains brought a grim smile to her face. She would find food. That at least she could do. She picked herself up, put the hard-won payment cards in her jeans pocket, and walked down the road to find another store.
11
* * *
LEON SWAYED WITH THE MOTION of the subway on the way to meet Mike. He tried to review what he knew of the murders, but was too distracted by the protesters crowding the car, who were amped up, holding signs and banners with a palpable tension. A man in a business suit stood in front of Leon, gesturing off into space, but he too was one of them, and wearing a button that said, “Jobs are for people.”
Leon stared at the wall, trying to do nothing to attract their attention. He recalled President Smith’s words a few days earlier: “The anti-AI movement sees you and Mike as the inventors of AI, and therefore as the cause of their unemployment and every social problem from drug use to reckless behavior. To them, you are public enemies number one and two.”
When the train slowed at his stop, the demonstrators pushed hard toward the door and exited first. Leon slowly followed, nervous that they were getting off at the same station.
He climbed the stairs, emerging into an even bigger crowd at street level. A girl in a hooded sweatshirt bumped into him, nearly beaning him with her sign. An army veteran in uniform stomped by yelling. The stream of protesters from the train grew louder and unruly as they met others already on the street, joining their chants and shouting new ones.
It was six blocks to the Institute, and by the time Leon had walked three, the crowd had grown so dense that he could hardly move. He worked his way past a group of older women his mom’s age; could even have been her friends for all he knew.
Many of them were obviously from out of town, carrying backpacks and sleeping bags. He shook his head in frustration. This was bigger than a local protest, and it wasn’t going to go away overnight if people were coming from outside the city.
Amid the chanting and press of the crowd, he hopped up on the bumper of a car and looked toward the Institute. A line of police, human and robotic, surrounded the building.
Leon jumped down and brought up a live video stream on his implant from bloggers covering the rally. He watched this superimposed over part of his vision as he cut across a small side street, heading to the next corner. The Institute shared a city block with another university building housing International Studies. A common courtyard, hidden from the street, connected the two.
On
the next block, the crowds were sparser, but there was a steady influx of new supporters. The video stream in the corner of his vision showed protesters pushing up against the police. In the video, he could see Institute security behind the glass front of the building. The two thin lines of defense seemed insufficient against the rapidly growing crowd.
Leon had serious doubts that he should head into work. He pinged Mike for a location check but didn’t get a response. He tried the local network nodes, but they were sluggish, under assault from the crowd. Even the live video stream was degrading now. He paused for a moment and decided it was crazy to go further. He would go home and try Mike from there. He turned around, then suddenly halted, fighting the urge to run or hide as he confronted hundreds of people streaming toward him. Would these people recognize him? Rebecca seemed to think so. He couldn’t walk face-forward through this crowd. If just one person spotted him, they’d all attack.
Leon reluctantly changed his mind and decided to keep going to the Institute. It seemed the less risky option. He worked his way forward, keeping his face in the same direction as everyone else. At least the photo they were sharing of him online was a three-year-old social media shot. He looked different now, he hoped. He finally reached the International Studies building and made his way to the entrance. Security was doubled, and police stood ready to back them up.
He showed his ID and let them scan his neural implant, then the guard checked his bag. “It’s not going to take long before this crowd figures out there’s a pass through.” He handed the bag back. “You might not want to spend all the day in there.”
Leon nodded and hurried through the building toward the enclosed courtyard. He crossed the plaza, a simple concrete pad with a few trees in planters. He could still hear the chanting of the crowd outside.
He came up to the rear door, mentally provided his ID, and passed into the quiet interior of the Institute. At least here, near the back of the building, he could hardly hear the protests.
The Last Firewall Page 5