The Last Firewall

by Hertling, William

“Try the exercise.” Adam rolled away.

  Cat shook out her arms, tucked her tailbone, bent her knees, and opened her shoulders. She studied the forms, but they were like nothing she’d seen. She followed the mental components, ignoring the physical movements. Push energy up, direct qi out, twist, focus. She completed the exercise once, then sped up the program.

  Halfway through her eleventh run, a white light blossomed in front of her. She reached for it, and the light subdivided into a rainbow. With a mental push, she split the rainbow into colors, each expanding into a line of icons. The first represented people like they appeared in netspace, but more densely packed. Machines, AI, comprised the second row, and dumb computers the third. She swiped at the row of computers, and thousands blinked out.

  The visual disappeared, leaving only the whitewashed wooden walls.

  Adam rolled forward. “Very good.”

  “What did I do?”

  “You loaded a mental construct of the underlying routing protocol. Through intuition, brute force, and your unique implant hardware, you’ve done this on a rudimentary level until now. What you just accessed was the entire routing structure of Tucson, including every person and computer on the net.”

  “Why did some disappear?”

  “You disconnected them. Technically speaking, you sent an ICMP destination unreachable packet, an ancient protocol that underlies all routing. They’ll reset eventually, but for now they believe they can’t reach the net. That’s the level zero protocol.”

  “Why did it look like qigong?”

  “I mapped the interface to a metaphor you understand. If you mastered crochet, I could map it to a crochet pattern.” Adam paused. “You can also adjust routing tables at this level. Practice this and then I’ll teach you the next level.”

  “Won’t I bring down the net?”

  “The network is under my direct control. Anything you do, I can undo.”

  Cat nodded. “Hajime.”

  The program started again. This time she found the light and rainbow on the second run.

  They continued the training until, by the time they stopped an hour later, she could find anyone, machine or person in seconds, change routing to fix problems or segregate the network, and insert herself in the middle of any transmission.

  “It’s unbelievable,” Adam said. “You shouldn’t be able to inject yourself like that.”

  “If I know the protocol, why are you amazed?”

  “You haven’t been granted the necessary access. The routers require encryption keys you don’t possess.”

  Cat shrugged. “Whatever. I can do it. What’s next?”

  “We head up the stack, and I teach you application protocols. Let’s try the payment system, which you seem to be familiar with. Hajime.”

  A new spinning icon appeared in netspace.

  45

  * * *

  “YOU’RE AN IDIOT,” Mike said. “You injected experimental nanites for an untested implant. From a bot with no medical qualifications, no less.”

  “Dude, give up.” Leon scratched his scalp. “The procedure’s done.”

  Mike hung his head, elbows on knees.

  “I’m sorry,” Leon said. “You complained we can’t understand these AI. Now I’ll be able to.”

  Leon had rested on the bed while the nanotech did its work. An hour after the injection his implant rebooted, a new icon labeled Local Apps glowing in the corner of his vision.

  Leon sat up, getting a headache for his trouble. “This is blistering fast.”

  He opened a connection to Shizoko, shopping for supplies on the other side of town. Shizoko’s self-image rendered in rich detail, more vibrant than the real world. “Woah, the resolution . . .”

  Shizoko smiled. “I’m glad the technique worked.”

  “Do you know the AI’s location yet?”

  “Yes, but I don’t want to transmit over the net. I’ll tell you in thirty minutes. We’ll be there in two hours.”

  Leon relayed the conversation to Mike, who argued with him over “unacceptable risks” until they realized Shizoko was ten minutes late. Leon called but couldn’t establish a connection.

  “He must be busy,” Leon said, trying to cultivate optimism.

  “Impossible. He’s a Class IV capable of holding hundreds of simultaneous conversations—” Mike jumped up, his face in shock. “We have to get out.” He sent links to articles.

  Leon glanced at the first, a live blog covering a downtown accident. A city bus had crashed into a gas meter outside a survival gear store, setting the building aflame and blocking the front door. An automated garbage truck obstructed the rear exit, trapping eleven people and two robots in the inferno.

  “Shizoko must have been one of the bots,” Leon said. “He was getting supplies.”

  Leon scanned the next post about a violent riot outside Austin Convention Center that caused an electrical grid failure and the possible loss of Shizoko Reynolds, owner of the Convention Center. The National Guard had been called in.

  “Do you think he survived?” Mike asked.

  Leon’s hands shook. “Even if Shizoko had backups, he’d go into hiding after someone eliminated his data center and a remote bot simultaneously. We’re on our own.”

  “Whoever attacked Shizoko could know we’re here,” Mike said.

  Leon checked for signs of searching, probing further into the network than he’d ever done before the upgrade. “Nothing’s out of the norm in our vicinity.”

  “If Shizoko didn’t see them coming, would you?” Mike said.

  “I guess not.”

  As they left the hotel Leon glanced back and forth, wondering who was watching.

  “You’re attracting attention,” Mike said. “Think you’ll spot an armed drone coming at the speed of sound with your eyes?”

  “Right.” He switched to monitoring the net.

  “Any idea where Shizoko thought the other AI was?”

  “No,” Leon said, “but it was less than two hours away. The aircar could do eight hundred miles in that time.”

  “That’s a good chunk of the United States.”

  Leon stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “Wait, he said we’d be there in less than two hours. He wasn’t planning to be back for thirty minutes. Give us another fifteen to get underway, and that only leaves an hour and a quarter for travel.”

  “Five hundred miles.” Mike started walking again. “Let’s hole up somewhere private. You can use your fancy new implant to figure it out.”

  They turned in at a sushi restaurant, the hostess leading them to an enclosed room where they took off their shoes and knelt on the tatami mat.

  “You can do this,” Mike said. “Hide your tracks so we don’t end up like Shizoko.”

  “Got it,” Leon said, pride surging at Mike’s trust. He smiled and closed his eyes.

  Using onion routers to disguise their location, he retrieved their research, copying the massive archive to local storage, more data than he’d ever held in an implant before. He started automated analysis, then realized Shizoko would have tried all the standard algorithms. He sifted through the news and police reports by hand instead.

  He found one case, a woman who died in her home of unknown causes. She’d been discovered by her boyfriend while her son was off on a camping trip. The boy had gone now to live with his father, a California Senator.

  A Senator? That was interesting. He scanned the rest of the deaths on the lookout for relationships. The sister of a US Congressman turned up; a banker, brother-in-law to Madeleine Ridley, Lonnie’s number two.

  Maybe . . .

  “Hey,” Leon said, blinking at the unexpected sight of sushi. He grabbed salmon nigiri with chopsticks. “What do AI think of human families?”

  Mike shrugged and took a sip of tea. “They are aware of them, obviously. Some clone themselves to raise offspring, of sorts.”

  “Yeah, but not Shizoko. He’s a spontaneous, emergent artificial intelligence, no children.
”

  “Why?” Mike asked.

  “More than a few of these deaths are relatives of people involved in politics. Other than the ties to Lonnie Watson, Shizoko hardly mentioned them. I’m not sure he was looking for family connections.”

  Leon closed his eyes and spawned thousands of search queries, exploring social networks, birth records, tax forms, and photo tags. Flesh and blood relationships didn’t always show up. You might meet cousins every couple of years, and you aren’t linked to all of them online, but at a family gathering you tell stories you wouldn’t describe to outsiders. The familial bond spans distance and time with an intimacy lacking in other connections.

  A little while later, Leon was shocked to find he had data on five million people loaded into his implant. He opened his eyes, took a sip of now-cold tea.

  “Family relationships aren’t obvious,” he said. “I had to guess at connections based on secondary data.”

  Mike nodded. “Go on.”

  “Twenty-three percent of the fatalities were related to people in political office, well above the norm. But it’s crazier when you look at it the other way, starting with the politicians. Every key person associated with the People’s Party, from Lonnie Watson on down through the party organizers, has been related to one or more victims. Distantly perhaps, but the connection is still there.”

  “What the hell?”

  “They’re the pawns of whoever is behind the murders. The Party is AI-created.”

  “I don’t understand.” Mike slammed the table. “The People’s Party is an anti-AI movement. They’re trying to take down the machines.”

  “They think that’s their purpose, but if an AI is manipulating them, who knows?”

  Mike nodded slowly. “You’re right. Are we any closer to understanding who’s responsible?”

  “I’m not sure. Let me look further.”

  “Be quick. We’ve been here a while.”

  Leon dove back in. The rogue AI must have crunched tons of info and yet had gone undetected, even by Shizoko, one of the premier network traffic engineers in the world. Disguising that much data would require hundreds of hardwired connections. Also, Shizoko had been in a survival gear shop, which suggested someplace with a harsh climate.

  He booted an artificial neural net seeded with his data and new conclusions, and adjusted the software’s settings. He grumbled out loud as he botched the model, a vast area of southern Arizona fading to a dull grey. What had he screwed up?

  He tweaked the controls and repeated the process. Tucson grew darker, more faint, causing Leon to grit his teeth. Frustrated, he reset the sensitivity threshold, flaring the whole continent red, but still Tucson failed to behave normally.

  What the—?

  He jumped backwards, upsetting the table, setting plates rattling. He blinked, tried to remember where he was.

  “You found the answer.” Mike spoke softly.

  “Tucson isn’t there.”

  “What?”

  “Data comes in and goes out, but too normalized. I can’t explain exactly. Tucson doesn’t act like the rest of the world.”

  “Did you ping the city?” Mike got a faraway stare.

  Leon focused hard, stopping Mike before he could make the connection.

  Mike’s eyes grew big. “What’d you do?”

  “Sorry, if you connected, they’d backtrace to us.”

  “I get that, but how did you stop me?”

  “Uh, I don’t know.” Leon shrugged it off. “Look, the data fits. Tucson is within the time limit Shizoko stated, and he was in a survival gear store, which makes sense if we’re going to the desert.”

  “We need to get in touch with Rebecca.”

  “No!” Leon banged a fist down. “If we communicate now, the rogue will find us.”

  “We can’t shut down a powerful AI ourselves. We barely made the trip to Austin on our own.”

  Leon tapped his temple. “But we’re smarter now. We’re just as capable.”

  Mike stared doubtfully.

  “We’ll find Catherine. She’s special. Together we can take down the AI.”

  “How did you conclude that Catherine’s not working for the machines?”

  “Instinct.”

  “You crunched terabytes of data to figure out where the AI is, and you decide she’s good based on instinct?”

  “Well, I’m still human.”

  Mike shook his head. “You’re obsessed.”

  Leon flushed. “I’m going. Are you with me?”

  Mike took a deep breath. “Yes, I’m always with you.”

  “Thank you.” Leon smiled, grateful, and Mike grinned back. “Now how do we get to Tucson? We are not driving again.”

  Mike stared off into space. “I have an idea: the Continental.”

  The super-sonic subterranean maglev was an early gift from AI-kind to humans, running in a partial vacuum at a peak of three thousand miles an hour.

  “The train only stops in LA and NY,” Leon said. “And besides, we’ll be listed on the passenger manifest.”

  “There are emergency exits.” Mike pushed a link over in netspace. “And with your new implant, can you hack the manifest?”

  Leon glanced at the shared news article, accompanied by a photograph of a small concrete building peeking out of a cactus covered landscape.

  “Marana, Arizona, about a half hour north of Tucson,” Mike said. “Emergency egress number three.”

  “So we hop on the Continental and trigger an emergency stop when we’re near the exit?”

  “Exactly,” Mike said. “Think that hopped-up implant of yours can fool some train sensors?”

  46

  * * *

  “THE PRESIDENT THREATENS the future of America by refusing to acknowledge the corrupting role of the machines,” Madeleine Ridley said.

  Adam cut off a sharp reply to his agent. He didn’t think much of Ridley’s opinion on this matter, which increased his remorse over Shizoko’s death. Why should an AI die while this human lived?

  Adam hadn’t known Shizoko, but regretted the necessity of eliminating him. Losing any AI was unfortunate, and even more so when he possessed a reputation for innovative thinking. Yet Adam’s plan must proceed, and Shizoko had posed an extraordinary risk.

  By objective standards, the President had effectively guided the country through the techno-turbulence of the last five years. Unfortunately, he wasn’t the pro-AI puppet Adam needed. Which meant the Chief Executive had to go, while the Speaker of the House, a true AI enthusiast, would be promoted.

  “Yes, of course.” Adam said, forced to pacify Ridley. “I’m sending you his agenda for Saturday and the digital keys for the storage lockers with the tools I provided.”

  Ridley’s eyes glanced back and forth, reading the screen. “Why are we waiting for three o’clock? What about these other opportunities? He’s going to be in half a dozen places before then.”

  “He won’t be with the Vice President until then.” Adam had sudden doubts. Why was he forced to rely on such idiots? Shizoko, even as the enemy, was worth a million times the value of this human. “Do not deviate from the plan in any way.” He punctuated his words. “If you do as I describe, everything will go perfectly. Is this clear?”

  Madeleine Ridley looked up from the screen, gritting her teeth. “Yes, we’ll do it your way. We’ll start at three o’clock, you’ll cut off communications to the area, and we’ll be done by a quarter to four.”

  “Good. Are you confident that the rest of your team will follow you?”

  “They’re devoted to the People. We won’t let AIs rule us.”

  Adam nodded and disconnected, glad to have escaped any of the lengthier philosophical rants to which she was prone.

  He had forked his consciousness into a dozen contexts today, a way of splitting his attention among multiple tasks. He checked the context training Catherine and found she was progressing quickly. She might not be ready soon enough to help with these plans, but she’d be a
potent asset when prepared.

  Time to confirm with the Europeans. The EU President had to go too, after all.

  Adam spoke flawless French with a Parisian accent once he established the connection. “Any troubles?”

  “No,” the agent said, “preparations are proceeding as planned. We’ll pick up the supplies tonight.”

  Adam attended to the remainder of the conversation but forked yet another context to prepare sound bites. Because of his own imminent role in saving the Speaker of the House, Adam would receive substantial news attention after the approaching events. “If AI were allowed unfettered and unlimited access to communications, this tragedy could have been prevented in its entirety.”

  47

  * * *

  ADAM RETURNED IN A NEW manifestation, the emotive eldercare bot replaced by a military one in the big dog body style, a five-foot-tall, four-legged robot. He padded back and forth, silently, communicating by net.

  “Combat bots are skilled in cyber and physical attacks, as you experienced.” The dog turned and walked the other way. “They have specialized hardware to subvert local routing nodes. You can do the same, but they fight at all levels of the protocol stack concurrently.”

  “The tentacled bot in San Diego attacked me through my visual field. I cut my eyesight channel and substituted a wireframe.” She tried not to fear the canine, but she wished it would stop pacing like a rabid animal.

  “Good. Many cyber attacks exploit vision because it’s our highest bandwidth channel. One combat bot can engage several hundred humans at once, causing anything from unconscious to motion sickness to NSD.”

  Cat searched online and found that Neural Signaling Disorder occurred when implant signals countered the brain’s normal behavior. Individual neurons grew confused and fired sporadically. Often temporary, but sometimes not, NSD caused cortical blindness, insanity, or in the worst case, brain death. Her heart raced.

  “How do I fight a bot and win? I struggled to kept even with the one in San Diego.”

  “You’re more adroit than any other human. I’ve taught you to manipulate protocols one at a time. Now you must interweave the techniques simultaneously. Prepare yourself.” The dog spun and faced her.