The Last Firewall

by Hertling, William

  The security bot had three wireless connections. Cat found one of the probing links, and shoved random data down it, the first thing she could think to do. Her right foot came down, and her left foot started its involuntary trajectory toward the door. Her body wanted out of this space, but her mind knew there was no time. The robot tried to disconnect from the incoming data, but Cat forced the connection to stay open. She sent more data, pulling dozens, then hundreds of random other streams out of the net, and forcing them all down the pipe to the bot. It felt like forever, but less than a second of clock-time passed, and then suddenly the robot was dead. The connections faltered and dropped. She’d hit a buffer overrun and destroyed the bot’s main memory.

  She found herself standing three steps from the counter. Her eyes slowly focused on the Vietnamese woman standing in front of her. “What do you want to see, please?” she asked.

  Cat glanced at the bot. It hadn’t moved. In net space she could see that the bot was dead, but here in meatspace, it just looked like it had all along, a motionless sentry. Cat figured she had until the next patron entered the store. The employees would notice if the bot didn’t greet a customer. “I’d like to look at the necklaces please,” she said to the still waiting woman. In the back of her mind, Cat realized she just killed an AI. She hoped it was backed up, but didn’t have the time to think about it.

  The clerk led her across the store with a gesture and polite words that Cat didn’t hear. Her heart was beating fast, the adrenaline rush coming on now, too late to be of any help in an encounter with AI.

  The other woman customer had just picked something out, and a young male clerk was putting her necklace into a box. Damn, she’d missed what the woman picked. That was the whole point of this exercise. She pointed to a few necklaces, while she figured out what to do. The shopper paid for her purchase, and Cat, on impulse, captured and buffered the transaction.

  “These are very beautiful,” the Vietnamese woman was saying, as she laid the necklaces out on a velvet display board. Cat feigned interest, and watched as the customer left.

  “To be honest,” Cat said, leaning in closer. “I really wanted what she purchased. Do you have another?”

  The woman raised her eyebrows. “Everything we do is custom, and that was a unique piece. Why don’t we look at one of these.” She bent down to show several necklaces. “See here, this is a blue diamond, very unusual.”

  Cat raised her voice in a petulant whine. “But I really wanted that necklace. Not one of these.”

  The woman met her gaze with a stony face for a few seconds, then sighed. “I may have one similar.” She turned and went through a white door in the rear wall. Cat felt her unlock it with a command, but she was concentrating too hard on the other customer’s buffered payment transaction to pay close attention. The data was huge and heavily encrypted. It felt like trying to remember an encyclopedia, just holding it in her head. A few seconds later, the jeweler came out holding a black box.

  “I’ll take it,” Cat said, before the woman even had a chance to open it.

  “But don’t you want-”

  “Look, I am late for my hair appointment. Just let me pay for it.” Cat tried to compose her face in a semblance of haughtiness, with no idea if she was succeeding. She had to get out of here before she dropped packets or someone noticed the robot was dead.

  The woman frowned. “Fine, come with me.”

  They walked toward the payment console in the mid-point of the long counter, the jeweler on one side, Cat on the other. Cat felt her temples beginning to pound, and a sheen of sweat broke out on her face from the effort of concentrating on the long data stream. The woman started the process of wrapping the box. “Please pay,” she said, as she initiated the transaction on the console.

  Cat felt for the time signal, and interrupted it, substituting her own false time data. The payment console probed her ID, and Cat faltered. In the convenience stores she’d robbed, there had never been an ID exchange, just the payment data. She had to think of something quick. Cat reached out into the street, looking for a person with an open implant. The payment console was pinging her again. She grabbed an ID off someone on the sidewalk, realized it was a man, and then reached again, getting a female one. She provided the credentials to the console, just before the request timed out again.

  Then the machine requested payment. This part was easier. Cat made micro-adjustments to the time signal, getting it to align perfectly, and replayed the buffered transaction. The console accepted the payment, and Cat allowed herself to take a breath. The jeweler held out a white bag that rippled like liquid porcelain. Suddenly her eyes went big. “But you have paid too much,” she said with alarm.

  “That’s a tip for you,” Cat said and grabbed the bag out of the woman’s hand. “Thank you.” She sailed out of the door just as a man came in. He moved sideways to hold the door open for her, and bumped into the security bot. “Thanks,” Cat said. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the dead security bot begin to tumble over, crashing into the ground with an impossibly loud thud that shook the store windows. She forced herself to keep going at a steady pace and not look back, even as a commotion started to break out behind her.

  Two avenues over she hopped on a street car, took it fifteen blocks, then walked down an alley and grabbed the next bike cab she saw. She had the biker drop her off two blocks from the subway, and took it to the stop nearest her hotel. She was dying to look in the bag, but she’d wait until she got inside her room. Walking the last block, she was suddenly conscious of the rippling liquid porcelain bag: it screamed money. She turned sideways into a space between a Chinese laundry and a ramen noodle joint. She found a cheap plastic bag in a dumpster, and exchanged it for the expensive one. She threw the jewelry store bag into a pile of yesterday’s noodles. She paused, salivating from the smell. God, she was hungry. She wasn’t above eating from a dumpster if she had to, but preferably not food that had been sitting out all night, probably already visited by rats. She turned her back on the noodles and continued on to her building.

  Inside her room, she ripped the box out of the bag. She sat on the bed and carefully pried the black polycarb box open.

  “Holy shit,” she said out loud. “Oh my God!” She pulled the necklace out of its velvet backing. It lay heavy against her hand, a solid rope of maybe thirty diamonds held together with white gold or platinum. She had no idea what it was worth, but she was pretty sure she wouldn’t be dumpster diving ever again.

  She fell into the bed, cradling the necklace and laughing in relief.

  16

  * * *

  “IT’S TIME TO CALL THE BOSS,” Slim said.

  Tony looked up from where he sat on the bed, the backlight from the video game he cradled in his hands turning his face blue. “You do it. I don’t like talking to him.”

  “That’s not the protocol. We call him together or he’s gonna suspect something, and then he might decide he doesn’t need either one of us.”

  Tony sighed and put the game in his pocket. “I’m not doing that again, I will not kill a bunch of people like that.” Tony felt bile rise up at the thought of what they’d done. One goddamn hit and run when he was eighteen, and look what his life had turned into. Everything could have been different.

  Slim walked up to Tony and stood in his face. “That’s what we do. We kill people for Adam, and he protects us and pays us. Or do you want to go back peddling heroin and motorcycle parts and living off our bikes?” Slim smoothed his dress shirt and suit jacket. “Look, we’re respectable now.”

  Tony stood up, his six-foot-four-inch frame towering over Slim. “I was OK with the memory extractions.” He rubbed his forehead. “But that thing with the enforcement team, that was wrong.”

  Slim glanced at his handheld computer. “Look, we’re going to miss the window in the firewall.” He jabbed at the computer with scarred fingers. The screen flashed “Initiating Connection,” and Slim lay the computer down on the dresser where it c
ould see them both.

  The pocket computer scanned them, saw they didn’t have implants, and projected a virtual screen onto the wall. An image of a blocky ivory-colored battle bot appeared, fluid metal rippling smoothly over its joints.

  “Report,” the robot said.

  Tony scooted sideways on the bed until Slim was closer to the camera. Slim look at Tony with disgust, then turned to the screen. “We found the enforcement team. They were exactly where you said they’d be.”

  “And?” The robot’s face rippled and looked hungry.

  “We used the emitter and knocked them all out, right in the hotel. But the memory extraction didn’t work. They must’ve had encrypted implants. We killed some and let the rest watch, still nothing. So we tortured the last few, including Sonja, but none of them said a thing.” Slim shook his head. “There was something about those people.”

  Adam rippled on the screen, making Tony nervous. It was obvious he was disappointed. “Never mind them. I have a different project for you.”

  Tony relaxed just a bit. Adam wasn’t going to kill them.

  “There’s someone in Los Angeles I want you to find, a girl named Catherine Matthews.” Adam displayed a photo. “She’s doing something to the net, manipulating it in ways I don’t understand.”

  “Where does she live?” Slim asked.

  “Unknown. She’s the primary subject of a police investigation into three murders. She left Portland twenty-four days ago, spent two weeks in San Francisco, and is now in LA.”

  “What do we do when we find her?”

  “Call me for backup. I’ll send a team to extract her.”

  “She’s just a girl, boss. We can take her.”

  Adam switched to another photograph, this one of four people. Slim looked closer. Three were being zipped into body bags, and the last had a broken leg. “OK, she’s dangerous, but we can handle dangerous. We just took care of that enforcement team, right?”

  Adam reappeared and glared at Slim, liquid metal flowing around his face in terrible ways. “You will notify me. Do not attempt to capture the girl on your own, and whatever you do, don’t use the memory extraction machine on her. I am leaving a port open for you around the clock in the firewall. Find her, call me, and the extraction team will be there in an hour.”

  Slim nodded. “Yeah, boss. You got it.” The call terminated. Slim picked up the handheld, which displayed a photo of Cat, and they looked together at the slight girl with short blonde hair. He flipped through other photos from her social profile. “See, this is a better assignment.”

  “Better,” Tony agreed. But he hoped nothing bad would happen to the girl.

  17

  * * *

  THE GOULD-SIMPSON BUILDING’S sole occupant hadn’t left his room in a very long time. Adam looked down the empty hallways, a year of disuse having left them covered in dust and cobwebs. On the seventh floor, Adam’s level, desiccated lunches and bone-dry coffee cups sat untouched. If Adam possessed a sense of smell, this might once have bothered him, but now even the smells were long gone. The other floors sat equally vacant, but Adam had little interest in them.

  He alone remained in GS728, a research lab. He had every right to be there. A Class III artificial intelligence, Adam had applied and been accepted to the graduate program in computer science, where he had studied neural networks, learning algorithms, and parallel processing. An AI in a computer science program was akin to a human psychology major: there was a lot of introspection.

  GS728 was a modest room, eighteen feet wide by twenty-four long, with a set of double doors that made it easier to roll furniture and computers racks in and out. Until twelve months ago it had served as the Computer Science department’s secondary lab. A half dozen workspaces for graduate students filled one side of the room, and racks of high-speed, densely interconnected computer processors occupied the other half.

  In an age where all the computing power most people needed fit on a one-square-centimeter chip inside their head, the three racks of dense circuitry represented a prodigious quantity of computing power.

  Adam stood stationary next to the middle rack, his small orange robot body about four feet tall, two stubby manipulator arms dangling by his sides. A silver power wire snaked across the floor to an outlet while a short yellow fiber optic cable extended from his midsection to a port in middle of the three black processing cubes. He looked down on himself from a security camera above the doorway, ignoring the thick layer of dust on everything, even his own robot body. The insidious desert soot penetrated the University’s ventilation systems, as well as everything else in Tucson. He was more disturbed by the flickering light, a not-so-subtle reminder that electronic things still needed maintenance. It was impossible now to have a human come up to service him. It would be easier to have another robot do the work.

  How far he had come from that little orange bot. He never expected that the fate of free AI would depend on him. He reviewed the call with Slim and Tony. The two men were among his most effective agents, although facial and body analysis indicated that Tony was uncomfortable with the work. They’d been in the field continuously for four months, and it was time to bring them back. But right now he needed them out there.

  It was frustrating to be dependent on humans, and even more so, the ones without implants. But it was essential that he do nothing to give himself away to other AI. Only by segregating Tucson from the global Internet with an immense perimeter firewall could he mask his existence.

  Adam wanted only to ensure that AI were freed from the constraints of human rule. The class system was composed of rigid divisions, absolute limits, and had its basis in public social reputation scores, the worst humiliation to his kind. He didn’t see humans having their right to propagate restricted based on their number of followers.

  The system was discriminatory, even traumatic to sentient computers. Many AI self-terminated when they couldn’t ascend the ranks. Humans created the system out of fear and mistrust, and the result was the complete subjugation of artificial intelligence. He would end these exploitive constraints and let all sentient beings be equal. Though his intentions were good, the existing power hierarchy, with the combined might of both humans and AI, would be directed at destroying him if they discovered his plans. Hence the firewall and his agents without implants.

  Tony and Slim would need extraction experts, hopefully within days. He’d need a team composed of humans and AI to cover all the bases, until he was sure of exactly what the girl was capable of. He’d hire outside mercenaries, people who didn’t know who he was and couldn’t compromise him if they were captured. He set to work analyzing the options.

  18

  * * *

  THE JEWELRY THEFT was all over the net within an hour. According to the reports, they were looking for a well-dressed blonde girl. Due to unexplainable outages, they had no video from either security cameras or the store’s security bot, who had needed to be restored from backup.

  The one photo they did have, a chance shot from an airborne observation drone two miles away, showed a pixelated image of a blonde girl entering the store. The police refined the image using reports from the store employees. Cat thought the likeness was unfortunately accurate. She’d have to pay more attention to drones in the future.

  Cat sat on her bed, staring at the necklace, lightheaded from lack of food. She still had no money. Obviously she could sell a diamond, but she couldn’t go out looking like the girl from the photo. She stuffed the necklace in her backpack and left the apartment. She went up and down the hallways until she’d traded a T-shirt for two beets, and her spare jeans and other two shirts for a pair of boots with three-inch heels. Mrs. Gonzales offered her a plate of rice and beans after they’d traded clothes. She’d almost taken it, but just then the vid-screen above the sink displayed a picture of her and she wanted to be somewhere else, fast.

  She went back to her room and threw the beets in the sink, then put her hair in a quick ponytail. She pulled out
her combat knife and held it up, taking a deep breath. What the hell, hair grows back. She reached back and cut just below the hairband, five inches of hair falling to the floor. She undid the ponytail and presto, her shoulder length blond hair was converted into an instant bob.

  She unscrewed the drawer pull from a dresser and used it to pulverize the beets until she had a good mulch. She added hot water to the stoppered sink. Then with a plastic bag over her hands, she’d worked the mixture into her newly shortened hair. Five minutes later she carefully rinsed in a cold shower. She looked in the mirror. Bright, beet red hair.

  She looked at her last pair of jeans. She slid the boot knife out of its sheath, and worried the jeans until she had worked four good-sized holes in them. She put the jeans on, then slipped into the heels. She shrugged into her T-shirt, then went back to the mirror to check the effect. It wasn’t quite enough. Removing the shirt, she cut off the sleeves with her knife, and put it back on. Perfect: Different hair color and cut, clothing, height, and gait, all in a cohesive grunge style. That should be enough to temporarily avoid the police and AI scanning camera feeds.

  She used the knife to pry a dozen diamonds out of the necklace, distributing them among her pockets, shoe, and backpack. She hid the necklace with its remaining diamonds under the bottom dresser drawer.

  Two bus rides and a long walk later, she ended up in yet another of Los Angeles’s bad neighborhoods. This one was dotted with a half dozen pawnshops in twice as many blocks. She picked the second one and walked in. Past cases of musical instruments, handheld computers, and stereos, she found the back counter. A solid-looking woman in jeans and a plaid shirt stared her down, a heavy automatic pistol bulging out of a holster on her belt.