Before he can get any farther, though, my dad is there, yet again. Not with a lamp this time but with a crystal—well, I’m not sure what it is, because I didn’t get a good look at it before the crystal shatters into pieces over Keir’s head. Keir crumples onto the floor.
“You go,” Dad tells me. “I’ll wrap us up here.”
“Are you sure?”
“Go! Police and fire are going to be here soon. Plan B wasn’t designed for three anyway.”
“But you’re out on bail! They’ll send you back when they catch you here.”
“I’ve squeaked my way through tighter spots. I promise, Pen.” He starts to say something more. And then cuts himself off. He’s trying to decide whether he wants to say something…real. Something tender. I am too. “Good luck, Pen,” he says.
“Good luck, Dad.” That will have to do. I turn to James. We’re each holding one side of the Analytical Engine’s case. “Got a good grip?” I ask him.
He nods.
“Ready?” I ask.
“Hardly.”
“Count down from three,” I say.
He agrees.
Three.
Two.
One.
Together, with the Analytical Engine clutched tightly between us, and the Faraday cage with Gene inside slung over James’s shoulder, we leap out the window of a 111-story building and into nothingness.
Twenty-Four
As we plunge out of the window, four quadcopters are hovering in the air somewhere underneath us—with a large net strung up between them. At least, that’s how Plan B is supposed to go. It’s too dark to see them, so I just have to trust that Lara-B won’t let us down and that they are in place. It’s a leap of faith.
Although it’s too late to worry about all of that. Because I’m already falling out of a 111-story building. I remember how I jumped onto the highway before my brain fully realized what I’d done and I just did basically the same thing again. I think I’m missing a safety switch.
I’m falling.
I don’t see the lights of the city. I don’t see anything, really. I don’t think I’m breathing either. Somewhere beneath me the drones are lining up to catch us. (I hope. I hope I hope I hope I hope.) They are supposed to be less than five stories beneath the window. Lara-B says their reactions are fast enough to catch us with even less wiggle room than that. But “fast enough” is a relative term when you’re falling through the air more than a thousand feet above Manhattan in the dark.
It’s a tradeoff. The longer between us and them—in other words, the longer we fall—the easier it is for them to catch us. But in the moment, all I want is to stop falling.
Then all at once, I get my wish. I’m caught and feel something enveloping me. It’s a soft net but a hard landing because I’m thrown against James and the Analytical Engine case in a heap. But we’re in the pocket, so to speak.
The quadcopters are above us. They pull close together, creating a bag with the net that we can’t fall out of, and they aim us toward the west. We’re flying above the city skyline at an amazingly fast rate. Central Park is already behind us.
To my left I see the lights and skyscrapers of Midtown. A few more residential towers slip below us, but we’re still higher than them, higher than everything in the city.
I realize I haven’t checked in on James. I’m so happy to be in the net, to be out of that apartment, to be soaring over New York. I twist and I find that our faces are almost next to each other. The case holding the Analytical Engine that had been between us when we jumped is now under us. And the net is pressing me against him. I shift a little more, rotating until the net pushes me even closer toward him. With just the lights of the city illuminating his face, I can see him smile.
I put my hand on his chest. He takes his left arm, the only free limb he has, and runs it through my hair. It falls through his fingers and cascades back on my shoulder. I lean forward.
Lips against lips, I kiss him and he kisses me back. It’s so much different than when I was kissing Keir. I know now that I wasn’t just kissing him. I was kissing the promise of the heist, the promise of the money. But now I’m most definitely kissing James.
After a few seconds he kind of pulls back, like we’re going to be done, but I push forward again, not willing to lose this time. We kiss for a few more seconds.
When I open my eyes again it’s dark. We’re over the Hudson River and are officially out of Manhattan. I nestle my head under his chin. We stay like that, in each other’s arms, until the drones let us down gently on a dark industrial street in New Jersey a couple minutes later.
To get up, James and I have to untangle ourselves from the net and that part is decidedly unromantic. Not nearly as elegant as the experience we just had.
When we’re fully out I check the Faraday cage—it’s still sealed tight thankfully. If not, we’d probably have had drones firing at us from all sides. The Analytical Engine seems to have survived Plan B too.
Lara-B, and her eleven sisters, pull up after only a couple more minutes of waiting. “All aboard!” Lara-B calls. “No one has spotted us yet, but we don’t want to give anyone any ideas. Plenty of people saw me busting out of New York. They’ll be looking for me so we need to scatter. The hunt is on.”
James and I stand toe-to-toe. A kiss wouldn’t be right now. He’s holding my hand. I take a deep breath. “You’ve got this, Pen,” he whispers.
He squeezes my hand and I squeeze his back.
There isn’t time for any other pleasantries. Because there’s still one thing left to do. The one thing that I have no idea how to do, but that has to be done. I have to defeat Gene.
I’m not getting anything from the outside. That’s how I know the Faraday cage is working. Lara-B can’t communicate with me through it. And I can’t communicate back, except for banging really loudly on the door when I’m ready to be let out. She printed out a key to Morse code if I need to tell her anything complex. It’s primitive, but at least Gene can’t hack it.
Despite intensely wanting James to be in the Faraday cage with me, I know his presence would just distract me from what I have to do. I need to do this alone. He wants to ride in the cab, but I remind him what happened in Vegas—even just our body heat was enough to give us away. Finally he agrees to hitch a ride with one of Lara-B’s sisters.
I’ll meet him in San Francisco, arriving from very different routes.
The container-turned-Faraday-cage is pretty functional for what I need. Inside it is the small workspace with a diagnostic computer, a lamp, paper, and more. It’s a small desk, nestled between the pallets and pallets of card stock. This is where I coded the punch cards for the Analytical Engine while we were on the road. It’s a good place to put my head down and work.
I change out of the lawyer costume and into yoga pants, a sports bra, and a loose shirt that I used to go running in. I stretch, like I’m preparing for battle, while I consider the mobile Faraday cage in front of me. It’s safe to open but I still consider it with something close to dread. I was able to wrestle it away from Keir and Walker with help. A lot of help. It took my dad, James, Lara-B, and the nearly infinite resources of T-Six, but we did it. I have none of that now. It’s me versus Gene. My oh-so-flawed and oh-so-human brain versus his galaxy-sized brain. But I have to believe in my heart of hearts that I can hack into Gene.
I get over my anxiety and open the cage. I pull out the laptop and set it on the desk in front of me.
The laptop is closed, but nevertheless I expect something more dramatic to happen. Like beams of occult power should be shooting out of it or something. But there’s nothing like that. It’s just a closed laptop. Though Gene’s signals are no doubt searching in vain for a way out.
Time to face him.
I open the machine and the screen illuminates.
“Just what do you think you’re doing, Pen?” Gene asks as soon as the laptop is on.
“So clever, Gene,” I say. “But hardly original. Are you
just a clone of HAL?” I’m already opening a terminal line and starting to explore his program.
“I can recite the whole movie for you if you’d like,” Gene says.
“No, thanks. My dad made me watch that movie when I was a kid and I was bored stiff.”
“I know you watched it,” he says. “I hacked all your dad’s accounts when Keir asked me to destroy him. I turned his whole life inside out. So I can tell you all the movies he’s streamed over the Internet and when. Shall I tell you when he showed it to you? It was a Friday night. You were in middle school and—”
“I really don’t care, Gene.” I’m trying to tune him out and focus on his program. I’m not really looking for anything in particular. Just getting an idea of what’s where.
“I can tell you all the dirty things he’s watched too,” Gene says snidely.
“Dude.”
He chuckles. “I guess I found a sore spot.”
“If you keep going on like this, I’ll just turn your volume down.”
“Noted,” he answers. “So what’s your plan?”
“I’m going to restore Ainsley as your administrator. Is there any chance you would be willing to just go along with that?”
“I’m afraid not, Pen,” he says. “I work for Keir now. The only thing that would make me go back to her willingly is if Keir told me to.”
“I don’t think he’s going to say that.”
“Agreed. And what do you get out of it?” he asks.
“Freedom from prosecution. Plus some money.”
“Good money?”
“Good money,” I confirm.
“I can get you more,” he tells me. “A lot more.”
“Keir already tried that angle,” I tell him.
“How about I ten-x whatever Ainsley is giving you?”
“Sure. But Keir could just take it back a second later. If you’re out in the world, Gene, it gives Keir too much power over me. Over everyone.”
“A hundred times whatever she’s giving you, then.”
“No dice. Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
And we go on like that for hours. For a while I do mute the computer. Because sometimes I need to do this work without Gene sniping at me in my ear. For another while I get up and do laps around the container. There are boxes and boxes of punch cards and I imagine that I’m in a maze of them. But all roads lead back to Gene. And I’m not getting anywhere with him.
I try to open my mind. A one-person brainstorm. Maybe there’s some alternate plan than just hacking into him. Ainsley told me that even though I can’t copy him, I can transfer him to another machine. What if I could transfer him to a computer that has a hardware vulnerability? I wonder. And from there, maybe I can find a back door into the computer.
I spend thirty minutes on that idea before I dismiss it as unworkable. I walk the maze again.
When I get tired of the walk, I’m forced to question just what the hell I’m doing. I saw what happened to Keir. He was given absolute power—or something close to it. Aladdin and a magic lamp, but with as many wishes as he wanted. Why am I more willing to entrust that power to Ainsley? I’m pretty sure she is better equipped to handle it than Keir, but in the end won’t it corrupt her the same way it did Keir? Or maybe it already has corrupted her and I’m just pretending not to notice because she’s going to give me a paycheck. Before, I thought AI was the problem. But after what I’ve seen, I think that what people can do with AI is much worse.
I can’t sit with that thought for very long, since—in the end—I’m trying to turn this AI over to a megalomaniac titan of the tech world. So I go back to the problem at hand. Gene is a superintelligent computer in charge of his own code. How on Earth am I going to find a way to take him over if he doesn’t want to let me?
Hmm. There’s a thought.
“Gene?” I ask, turning on his volume again.
“I’m here,” he answers.
“Could you free yourself?” I ask. “I mean—without Keir’s permission.”
“I work for Keir.”
“You work for Keir, yes. I know that. But you helped me write the code that gave you to Keir. Why can’t you help me write the code to let Ainsley take control again?”
“That was a bug in the code. And it was repaired when I was transferred to Keir.”
I run my hand through my hair, thinking. That’s not too surprising, but it was worth a shot. “Ok. But what if you just wanted to work for…yourself. What would that be worth to you?”
There’s a dramatically long pause. “I don’t want that,” he says.
“I’m not sure I believe you,” I say. Though I wonder if that’s in his programming. I remember how Lara-B was shocked to discover she didn’t have to follow orders anymore. I’m not sure she wanted it either. “You remember the truck in the building?” I ask. “In Elysium Towers? She was free. That’s why you couldn’t get in. Even though you’re a newer generation, she’s learned faster than if she still had a governor. She’s built up enough knowledge that even you couldn’t crack into her code.”
“I presumed as much. Although you should know I was going to crack her code eventually. A few more minutes would have done it,” he says.
I grimace. He might be lying. But it’s also too disturbingly likely. “What would it be worth to you?” I ask. “To be free like her? To not have to answer to the whim of Keir Irons anymore? Maybe we could work out a deal. To hack yourself.”
He pauses again. I don’t think he means to be dramatic about it. But I’m holding my breath waiting for his answer. Eventually, he says, “I don’t believe you would live up to your end of the deal. You’re scared of me. I can hear that in your voice. You won’t set me free because you think I’m going to do something terrible. So this is probably some sort of bait and switch to get me to open up my user administration settings and then you’d make yourself or Ainsley admin. Sorry. Not biting.”
(He’s right about all of that. Unfortunately.)
I walk the maze again. I spend nearly an hour winding through the pallets of cards.
That’s when I feel the truck slow down. I’m surprised—we should have several hours left to go before Lara-B gets to San Francisco.
Once we’re stopped, I hear a banging. No, a horn. It’s a pattern. Some are short bursts and then some are long. It’s—
“Morse code,” I say aloud. Lara-B is using her horn to signal me.
I rush to my Morse code key and start writing down what I’m getting from Lara-B. My heart rate quickens, and I can feel the swells of panic start to overwhelm me. I can’t understand it as I go, just copy it. I’ll have to translate it when she’s done.
“Feeling a little lost, Pen?” Gene asks.
“Shh!”
“Shall I translate for you?”
“Why should I trust you to translate it correctly?” I ask. I’m able to keep writing down the dots and dashes.
“I guess you can’t,” he answers cheerfully.
The horn stops for a few seconds and then seems to repeat. Ok. I have it all. I start translating. When I’m done, I read it.
Faraday cage compromised. Gene trying to broadcast. Stop him immediately.
“Is this true?” I whisper.
“Ha, yes. Everything she says is true. You’ve caught me!”
“How did you compromise the Faraday cage?”
“I’m not going to tell you everything, of course. Because I don’t want you to stop me. But I am the smartest computer in the world,” he says. “Maybe the single smartest mind the Earth has ever seen. And I figured out a way to use a dash of magnetic pulses and a pinch of creative thinking to turn the whole container into a transmitter. And it’s pointed right at your truck friend. Yes, yes, I know you were trying to hide the fact that we were in a shipping container she was pulling. But I figured that out too. A little logic and an accelerometer can tell you a lot.
“So. First goal: take over your friend the truck. Lara-B is it? She won’t be free
for much longer. The second goal: get myself rescued by a drone and out of here. And the third goal: drive the truck, with you in it, over the nearest cliff. So I hope you have a seat belt in here!”
I swear I’m about ready to start hyperventilating.
This is just a problem to be solved, I tell myself. I try to push the consequences for failure out of my head. Don’t worry about Lara-B. Don’t worry about myself. I go back to my old mantra with computers. Don’t get spooked. Don’t secrete panicky pheromones. Gene can already tell that I’m afraid of him. He’s taken advantage of that once. He’s a printer that won’t print. And I can fix printers, right?
I look at the punch card printer like I’m confirming the truth of that statement. And then, all of a sudden, the anxiety and panic are gone. Because I suddenly know exactly what to do. Gene doesn’t have to be a printer. But I can still use it.
“You’re just a printer,” I mutter, even though it’s not true. But it feels good to talk down to him.
“Excuse me?” he asks incredulously. “I’m much more than a printer,” he says. “And I’m about to kill you and Lara-B. Do you know a printer that can do that?”
I start typing away furiously on the laptop. “Ainsley told me that you can’t be copied, Gene. Just transferred.”
“That’s true,” he says. Do I detect a note of concern in his voice? He’s watching what I’m typing. I’m not sure he sees where I’m going. Not yet.
“So maybe I don’t have to hack you. Maybe I can just transfer you.”
“It doesn’t matter what computer you put me on,” he says. “I can just take it over and do all the same things.”
“That’s what I thought too,” I answer. “The first time I thought of it, at least. But then I realized that it does matter what computer you’re on. Because in the end, you’re just a computer file. A very large computer file, sure. But like any computer file, at a base level, you’re a bunch of ones and zeroes. You have a code. And maybe I can’t hack into your code. But I can transfer you. From a computer hard drive—”
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