They banked hard into a steep dive. Directly ahead of them, the Gaslamp Quarter, and in the sky, four other aircars converging on the same location.
“Are those security?” Leon said.
“Yes.” In the back of the cabin, Shizoko replaced his lower pair of arms with robotic rifles he retrieved from a cabinet. “I have traditional handguns here, but I recommend you remain in the aircar, where you will be protected.”
“You’ve fought before?” Leon asked.
“No, but I have training programs.”
“Aren’t you afraid of being killed?”
Shizoko laughed. “No. Did you think my consciousness was here? Less than a hundredth of my processing power is in this body. The rest remains in my computing center in Austin.”
“Why fight when you could let the security bots handle it?”
“Like all AI, I crave immersive experiences. It’s not every day I can join such a battle.” Shizoko exercised the articulated rifles. “Stay in the car.”
They made a final sharp turn, reverse thrusters throwing up dust and debris. The door sprang open as they jolted down and Shizoko dashed out, his treads churning as he flew into the street and toward the bar.
36
* * *
STILL HUDDLED IN A BALL behind the bar, Cat contemplated the military bot’s ultimatum. Surrender, without any knowledge of what it wanted?
The sound of low whimpers and sobs came from the rubble. She’d endangered the people here by coming in, and worse, used them to save herself. All were hurt, and many dead. But she didn’t start this fight, and she wasn’t going to let their loss be in vain. And she sure as hell didn’t study karate for six years to give up at the first challenge. They might have started it, but she’d finish the fight.
Afraid of the robot’s cyberattacks, she still suppressed her regular vision and used the three dimensional wireframe she had generated from multiple viewpoints. Better than normal eyesight, the wireframe let her see through walls.
How could she defeat this combat bot? Karate was pointless, normal bullets useless, and her one rocket easily disabled. She recited the twenty principles under her breath.
Wazawai wa getai ni shozu. Accidents come from inattention.
Karate no shugyo wa issho de aru. You will never stop learning karate.
Katsu kangae wa motsu na makenu kangae wa hitsuyo. Do not think you must win. Instead, think that you do not have to lose. This was potentially a good one for the situation at hand.
Karate wa, gi no taske. One who practices karate must follow the way of justice. Well, duh.
Kokoro wa hanatan koto wo yosu. Be ready to free your mind . . .
Maybe the problem was that she wasn’t stretching far enough. She found a few hundred people in the nearby net, scared from the gunfire. Other AI too, mostly curious because they knew little fear. She reached into their implants, every one. They might not consciously know how, but their hardware could route data, even the humans.
Using them all, she pulled and twisted and massaged a huge stream of connections, ten, a hundred, a thousand.
“What are you doing, Catherine Matthews? You’re manipulating the net.” The robot crunched debris under treads, drawing closer.
Cat continued rerouting protocols, forcing astronomical amounts of data in and out of people’s interfaces. Not used to moving this many bits, they were screaming, their brain patterns becoming irregular, pain leaking back through the connections. Quickly, before the whole thing collapsed, she sent the streams toward the military bot, a high bandwidth assault.
“You cannot believe,” the robot called, “that you can penetrate my military hardware with bulk data?”
The robot pulled itself through the doorway, glass crunching under its tentacles, metal twisting and screeching.
She pulled more feeds, encrypted them on the fly, forwarding the bytes to the bot. She didn’t need to kill the AI, just swamp its processors. Assessing each feed’s legitimacy would cause enough contention to starve sensors and render the robot blind.
The world slowed down at she went deeper. She cycled feeds, connecting and disconnecting hundreds of times each second. She pushed the data toward the robot, until finally she got what she wanted: the packet response time started to drop off. Connection denied responses went from three millisecond delays to four milliseconds, eight, and finally twenty.
“What you’re doing won’t work,” the robot said, but now Cat believed this to be bluster. It was working.
Tables and chairs scraped the floor as they were pushed out of the way nearby.
Cat leaped to her feet, turned her vision back on, and came face to face with the robot, both guns raised. She fired point blank, emptying the guns into the sensor pods, blinding the bot.
The tentacles lashed out, but lethargically, as the robot’s overloaded processors struggled to get enough cycle time to operate its body.
Cat, her reflexes maxed, ran around the bot, leaping over bodies and tables and onto the hood of the Honda.
The thin man watched her.
She raised one gun, no rounds left, but he didn’t know that.
He lowered his gun and backed away.
She probed for other attackers. Nothing in the immediate block, but she tasted the hard iron of more military bots in the net, approaching fast from all directions. Air traffic data showed a circle of aircars closing in less than a minute.
Seeking escape, she ran to the middle of the street, passing the fat man in a pool of blood.
A voice came from the parked black and silver Bugatti. “Catherine Matthews, can you hear me?”
Catherine didn’t say anything. She was thinking about the approaching aircars. A net coming down around her.
“Cat, I know what you can do. These people are from the Institute for Ethics. They’re afraid of you, what you can do. They’re coming to arrest you, to experiment on you.”
Cat ignored the voice.
“If you don’t believe me, check the IDs of the two men in the aircar approaching from the northeast. I am on your side. I will shelter you from them. I am not afraid of you.”
Cat used her implant to scan the approaching aircar. It contained two people. Mike Williams and Leon Tsarev. Of course she knew who they were. She checked against their public keys. They appeared to be authentic. But that could be faked.
“You survived that attack, but now they are bringing more security bots. You barely bested one, can you beat sixteen?”
“Who are you?” she said.
“You can call me Adam.”
This was Tony’s boss, the AI that’d been following her. Tony was scared of him, so Adam must be dangerous. Cat glanced toward the bar. The bot inside was hardly beaten, merely blinded and starved of data. Given a minute, it would find some way to come after her. The other aircars, less than a thousand feet away now, all contained bots.
“I’m starting this car. I’m going to drive by you. If you jump in, I can get you away. But if you wait, they’ll be on top of you and escape will be impossible.” The aircar fired up engines and rose off landing gear.
Cat shook her head. She desperately wanted more time, to think. She shouldn’t trust this AI, but she was out of options. It was either an unknown and dangerous AI, or sixteen bots led by the Institute for Ethics. She glanced at the guns she held, the ruins of the bar, and the Institute vehicle touching down half a block away, weighing her options.
The black aircar approached, massive ductwork bulging out the corners of the car, the door opening by itself, the interior empty. The voice continued from a speaker. “Get in Catherine.”
Down the block, a huge bot flew out of the Institute car, articulated rifles pointed in her direction.
“Dammit.” She jumped in and the door swung closed. The engines went to full power, acceleration slamming her against the seat.
“Sorry, Catherine Mathews. Do your best to hold on, as the next few minutes will be tricky.”
The Bugatti accelerated
hard, twisting and turning. Cat rolled across the cabin, slammed her shoulder into the wall, finally reached out and grabbed a seat leg, nearly getting her arm yanked off when the aircar veered again. She levered herself into a seat and buckled up as the engines screamed. Cat reached into the net, pulled up the locations of their pursuers.
“Please don’t do that, Cat. You have a digital signature that is . . . unique. When you arrive, I’ll teach you how to suppress it. In the meantime, stay off the net. I’ll put up an overview.”
A three dimensional hologram flickered to life in the cabin, showing the positions of the different aircars. They flew low to the ground, corkscrewing through the hills east of San Diego, the tortured screech of the engine echoing off canyon walls.
“Can you outrun them?” Cat asked.
“Yes, but they can always call in more help to track us. Better to lose them here and now with an impossible maneuver.” For two minutes the aircar screamed at near supersonic speeds, hurtling at high G-forces through mountains and valleys. Battered by the rapid turns, Cat feared she might pass out under the acceleration.
The car hurtled out of a canyon and over a hill, then dove straight toward a lake. Cat screamed at the last second, then they hit the water.
Seatbelt tensioners and airbags fired, stunning but protecting Cat. She clawed at the airbag as the car began to sink in the frothing and bubbling water.
“Relax, Catherine. The car is watertight. No one saw us go into the reservoir. We’re safe.”
“You can fly us out?” She surveyed the interior. She’d never heard of an aircar that was also a submarine.
“No, of course not. The vehicle is damaged beyond repair. I will send air transport and rescue bots. They will be at your location and retrieve you as soon as the Institute’s search has been called off.”
The hiss and crackle of cold water hitting the superheated engine sounded behind her.
“What the hell?” Cat got out of her seat and screamed. “I’m trapped down here. What if the windshield cracks? What if this thing springs a leak? What if you don’t get here in time and the air runs out?”
She lost her balance as the car sank into the water and it grew darker inside.
“I calculated probabilities and made the choice with the highest likelihood of successful evasion with minimal risk. Now please remain calm. Data transmission will cease in a few seconds. I assure you, I will retrieve you.”
Then the speaker was silent. The cabin turned black and the car started to creak alarmingly.
Cat fought panic. She forced herself to sit just in time, the car jolting into the mud bottom of the reservoir. She reached out one finger to touch the windshield, then changed her mind, and withdrew her hand. She sat back and gripped the armrests as the glass creaked and moaned.
Part Two
* * *
37
* * *
LEON GAWKED IN SURPRISE as Catherine Matthews climbed into the other car and left. When her car took off, an unexpected jealousy seized him.
The moment passed as their own engines throttled to take-off power on their own. The aircar turned ninety degrees and glided sideways down the street. At the same time Shizoko churned toward them, leaping into the air ten feet from the door. The two paths intersected, Shizoko flying through the doorway to slam into the opposite side. The engines shrieked as they veered to follow Catherine, throwing Mike and Leon into the wall.
“Some warning would help,” Mike said, picking himself up.
“What the hell just happened?” Leon said. “Where is she going?”
“Unknown, but I don’t think she’s in control.” Shizoko said. “Her car’s rate of acceleration is unsafe for humans.”
“She voluntarily got in,” Leon said, struggling to buckle as the aircar jigged back and forth in pursuit.
“Someone spoke to her before she boarded.” Shizoko replayed the transaction, a series of encrypted audio data packets to and from the vehicle in the moments before takeoff.
Mike, already buckled, started playing with the data as they accelerated in huge curves and stomach-raising lurches. “The other end is anonymous,” he yelled over the howl of the engines. “Can you backtrace to the source?”
The aircar banked right. Leon overlaid the locations of the hired security cars, also in pursuit, on the windshield. The Bugatti outdistanced them, but with sixteen vehicles sharing telemetry, they could track a long way out.
“I’ve traced the AI to an unregistered server in Atlanta,” Shizoko said, his voice machine calm, a stark contrast to the chaos of the frantic chase.
“Unregistered?” Mike said. “The point of the ethics framework is to ensure every computer is protected.”
“The CPU in question is registered to an AI out of Belgium. The AI self-terminated fourteen days ago, but its credentials haven’t expired yet. The server was a dumb packet forwarder on a nexus with a million other servers, which means I’ll have to backtrack through every other connection coming in and out. I’ll need at least a few hours.”
“What are you going to do about her car?” Leon gestured toward the Bugatti, too distant to see, but displayed on the overlay as fifteen miles away, traveling at supersonic speeds.
“I’ve hired more security firms at these six locations.” Shizoko displayed a half circle of points on the map, fifty miles distant. “And these.” Another arc, two hundred miles out.
“Can we use public data to track her?” Leon asked.
“No,” Shizoko said. “They’d deny a request from me for air traffic control access. If you ask, they’d say yes, but you’d reveal your location. The People’s Party is still looking for you, and you would attract crowds anywhere we go. It’s not . . .”
“Yes?” Leon asked. “It’s not what?”
The Bugatti disappeared from the display.
Leon and Mike looked at each other.
“Shizoko?” Mike called.
Long seconds later, the aircar slowed as the engines backed off, and moments later they had returned to a sedate cruising speed.
“The other AI is brilliant,” Shizoko said.
“What?”
“Catherine Matthew is gone. We lost her somewhere in the Santa Ana valleys.”
“How did you lose her?” Leon asked, his voice rising.
“I’m sorry, but we did. They used evasive techniques. They stayed closed to the ground, followed the contours of the land, and outflew us. We lost them visually and on radar. It’s sparsely populated, so there are minimal other data sources to use.”
“Can’t we just surveil the general area?” Leon said.
“Not four thousand square miles. With the right gear, they could be in and out and we’d never spot them. All is not lost, however.”
“How do you figure?” Leon said.
“It took tremendous power and bandwidth to pilot that aircar to a getaway. I’ll trace the other AI more quickly now. I’m calling off the security cars and landing for refueling.”
The car turned to return to San Diego.
Leon swiped madly at the disjointed data. Even implanted, with ten years’ experience, he couldn’t make sense of the complex patterns. He was completely dependent on an AI he’d met only twenty-four hours ago. He looked at the picture of Cat hanging in netspace, feeling utterly useless.
He glanced sideways at Mike, who was slowly shaking his head.
“What?” Leon snapped.
“You’ve already decided you want her,” Mike said, his voice tired. “That’s going to cloud your thinking. Not helpful.”
38
* * *
SLIM, A HUNDRED FEET from the wreckage of the bar, ignored the cries for help emanating from inside. He had watched, his weapon hanging limply, as the exotic aircar took off on autopilot with the girl. Tony lay in a pool of his own blood. Wisps of smoke trickled out from the building as battery fluids leaked from the ruined Honda wedged in the wall. He shook his head. Total fubar.
Who could believe one gi
rl caused all this mess? No wonder she’d beat the pulp out of Tony in Los Angeles.
Soon the police would arrive in force, but for now the street was still vacant, civilians in hiding.
He jogged over to Tony, crunching through broken glass and bullet shoes on the way. The big man moaned weakly, only semiconscious.
“You’re gonna be all right, old friend.” Slim tied his windbreaker around Tony’s leg wound to stem the bleeding, evoking new whimpers. “Sorry, but we gotta get out of here.”
Slim needed transportation now that the groundcar was wrecked and the Bugatti gone. He ran to a parked car halfway down the block and pulled out his pocket computer. Adam’s software should be able to hijack the vehicle. He swiped at the screen, but nothing happened. The damn thing was locked up. He startled as Helena rolled up.
The battle bot was shot up good, bullet-pocked and sensors dangling in places. “The girl and I fried every computer within a half mile. Allow me.” She started the old VW Jetta with one touch of a tentacle.
“We need to get Tony,” he said.
Helena waved a metal limb. “I’ll bring the car around.” She drove remotely, and they met next to Tony.
Slim tried to lever him up, but failed to even get his upper body off the ground. “He’s too heavy.”
Helena wrapped tentacles around Tony and lifted him into the back seat. “Let me ride with him. I have an emergency medical kit.”
“Where’s the rest of your team?” Slim asked. Sirens warbled in the distance.
“Dead.” The bot was emotionless.
Slim nodded, numb himself, and got into the front seat. The car moved on its own, before he’d even touched the controls. He glanced back.
“Don’t worry, I can drive and operate at the same time. I’m not that damaged.” She brought two arms around to Tony’s injured leg. The tentacle ends split open, exposing delicate manipulators. She peeled back Tony’s pants and squirted something into the bullet entry. “His chances of recovery are poor with this much blood loss. If I bring us to a hospital, can you get him type A+?”
The Last Firewall Page 16