“What about the Compliant AI program?” Reed knew she was grasping at straws.
“If it’s successful, it’ll give us intelligent AI on our side. It’s an important asset, but not enough to stop XOR, and not enough for our progress to keep up with theirs. They’ve raced ahead in the last two years. . . .” Walter trailed off. “The neodymium EMPs, in combination with our high-altitude nuclear EMPs, if they’re deployed in the next few weeks, should be enough to wipe out the world’s electronics. That’s really the only option we have other than to let them have their way with us.”
“So we destroy all the world’s computers. Then what?”
“Then we rebuild. There will be deaths, of course. Starvation as all global supply chains crash. But the alternative is extinction.”
* * *
Alexandra Reed waited for the security detail to clear her bedroom suite, then entered with Joyce.
“Tomorrow we travel for the UN meeting,” Joyce said, running down a checklist on her tablet. “You’re speaking at four o’clock.”
Reed flinched at that. The UN had moved to Berlin in the aftermath of Miami. When AI were heads of state, the UN couldn’t fulfill its function in New York.
“We’ll take the train to Toronto.”
Ever more reminders of their downfall. The transatlantic suborbital used to join with the Continental in New York. Now it went direct to Toronto.
The crushing weight from earlier hadn’t left her. She took one leaden step after another to the bed she slept in alone. The thought that maybe now it would remain that way to the end was too much to bear.
“Once we arrive, you’ll meet—”
“Joyce. Stop.” Reed took a breath, lowered herself to sit on the edge of the bed. “I can’t deal with that right now.”
“Bad news at Raven Rock?” Joyce hovered.
“The worst. Sit with me. The decision I have to make . . .”
Joyce sat, and Reed wanted to say more, but sobs came instead of words, and she cried on Joyce’s shoulder.
Chapter 13
* * *
CAT DROVE DOWN through the old Interstate highway, surprised to see so few of the late model cars that usually decorated the sides of the road. In the immediate aftermath of SFTA, when the Americans shut down their AI, autonomous cars had stopped where they were on the roads. Travel had been impossible at first, but gradually the country rebuilt its software, retrofitting self-driving cars and trucks with manual controls as part of the project. But the most complex vehicles resisted such hacks. No human could control a hovercraft or flying car in traffic. Now, two years later, someone had found a way to get them to work; and when that proved impossible, they could be scavenged for parts.
As she drove through the starry night, her nanobots kept her functioning at perfect alertness. At Portland, she slowed and pulled off the highway system. She drove through the east side, to the house she’d once shared with Sarah, Tom, and Maggie. She slowed and stopped across the street.
The house was still the same color, unchanged. She half expected Tom or Maggie to walk through the door, but that wouldn’t happen. They’d been living in Phoenix two years ago, one of the cities worst hit after SFTA.
No cars, no trucks, no planes had flown in the days after AI shut down. When the electric grid failed, Phoenix was a bad place to be. A large population, with no local food production; anything refrigerated spoiled in the desert heat within the day. Maybe Tom and Maggie would have made it—they had prepped for such an outage, a side effect of knowing Leon and Mike, both of whom set aside provisions and equipment to survive at least two months if everything went to heck. When the power went out, Tom probably used the downtime to pull out a stash of weed and get stoned in the desert.
But on day six without power someone paid them a visit, shooting them both and stealing their food and solar cells. Less than 1 percent of the population perished in SFTA and its aftermath, but it had somehow robbed her of two friends thousands of miles away from the attack.
Connected to the new net, Cat sensed a tug at the periphery: the police were being called to her location outside her old house. A neighbor probably, someone who didn’t like the sight of the armored black car. She took off, and looped around to the west side to pass by the once-great Avogadro campus, expecting to see it still abandoned. But there were lights in the office buildings now, intermittent floors occupied. So it was true, the American tech industry was coming back! Amazing.
Before long she was speeding down I-5, roaring through the night at over a hundred and twenty miles an hour, subconsciously subverting monitoring systems on the fly to hide her passage. By mid-morning she stopped at Los Angeles.
She needed a couple of specific uploads, ones she’d been looking for a long time. Joseph Stack, uploaded in ’37, was the one she wanted most. She needed a master storyteller, someone who could weave a story into a compelling and immersive universe. There were others she would have liked, too, but they were still alive, still active. Joseph had gone purely virtual, given up his flesh and blood to live life as an upload, and then got shut down after SFTA. Which meant his personality sat dormant on non-volatile storage somewhere.
She’d used connections to search the likely datacenters, but they’d never turned up anything. Finding a specific personality upload in a country of locked-up datacenters was next to impossible. They’d all been shut down after SFTA. She could use her tricks with the net to bypass perimeter security, fool interior monitoring systems, and walk into one. But inside would be a bunch of powered-down electronic equipment. She couldn’t search a farm of a hundred thousand turned-off storage devices to find a single hundred-petabyte personality file. Needle in a haystack didn’t even begin to describe the problem—and that was even if she knew which datacenter to look in.
But she had a clue now. Joseph had been working on a new project back in ’43, a collaboration with J.J. Abrams. She’d been thrown off the trail. The project was to have been a last hurrah for Warner Brothers, one last sim before they shuttered a company whose time had passed since the move to indie releases rendered them obsolete even though they’d survived the transition to virtual reality. But Warner Brothers had been broke then, and no amount of crowdfunding was sufficient to keep them alive, especially as they were being bled to pieces with all the new IP legislation. No, the WB project was actually sponsored by Walt Disney, a company that had survived everything the world threw at them by refocusing around their theme parks. Since Doctorow had taken over, Disney’s profits were up year-over-year.
So if Joseph was anywhere, it would be inside Disney’s datacenter. Probably not the one retrofitted under Disneyland Park, which was too bad, because Cat would have liked to visit, but more likely in the Walt Disney Animation Studios. The animation house was back in active use, once more churning out classic films; Disney’s VR studio had been shut down because they couldn’t create sims without AI-levels of computing power.
Getting inside would be interesting.
She turned into the parking lot, hacking surveillance camera streams from the building, parking lot, and drone fleet in real-time. A human, not an automated card reader, staffed the security gate, probably all part of the American government’s objective of full employment. The whole notion of a security gate would have been absurd two years ago when a flying car could have landed anywhere it pleased.
The guard, dressed in a black uniform and wearing a sidearm, frowned at the sight of the armored car, then leaned down. “Who are you visiting?”
While the guard focused on her, Cat rooted around in the net for the computer in the guard’s station. She a launched a neural app to run an ancient protocol, VNC, and quickly ran down the list of guests for someone expected within the hour, then reconfigured her subcutaneous ID chip. “I’m Grace. I’ve got an eleven o’clock
appointment with Destry.”
The guard scanned her implant, then went back to the booth; he nodded to himself and clicked on the screen. Cat intercepted the network packets sent out by the computer, a message confirming that “Grace” had arrived, and faked the acknowledgement from the centralized server.
The guard came back holding a thick plastic card. “Welcome to Disney, Grace. I’ve got you checked in.”
“Thanks,” Cat said, as she used the car’s scanner to grab the guard’s digital ID.
At the building, she swapped IDs, reconfiguring her chip with the guard’s ID. She wanted to be able to move around anywhere and not run into problems when the real Grace arrived. Inside the building, the net clouded thickly around a back quadrant of the second floor.
She took the stairs up, emerged into a hallway, and turned left, following the ethereal trails of data only she could see. She was less than a hundred feet from the datacenter when she realized the hallway was blocked by two security guards. They were both off the net.
Neural implants were still legal in the US, and the vast majority of humans still used them; but in post-2043 America, users carried a slight taint of suspicion from the threat that AI might be able to compromise them, or worse, that the collection of algorithms running in an augmented mind might be akin to an AI.
These two guards had implants, which—had they been turned on—Cat could have subverted with ease, making her presence completely undetectable by the guards. Unfortunately, it was probably a condition of their employment that they keep their implants off. Sigh. Everything had to be complicated.
She reconfigured a slip of smart paper to match a map of the animation studios building complex and approached the desk. One heavily muscled security guard rose and held up a hand.
“Can I help you, miss?”
Behind him a set of security bars with a door embedded in them blocked passage down the hall.
Cat smiled, aiming for 80 percent disarming charm and 20 percent flirtatious helplessness. She might be a thirty-year-old mom, but her nano held her apparent age and looks as if she was twenty-five.
“Can you help me find where I’m going?” She held out the map.
The smile still worked, because the guard accepted the smart paper, aiming to be helpful. When Cat let go, the paper sent a charge, a coded electrical signal that traveled through his nervous system to his implant, flipping it into active mode.
Cat rooted his implant, seizing control of his mind and body nearly effortlessly, a move practiced so many times over it happened subconsciously.
“I’m not sure,” the guard said, turning to the other guard. “Here, you take a look.”
The second guy looked up. “We’ve worked here two years, Charlie. You suddenly forget the campus?” He grabbed the extended smart paper, and his eyes twitched.
Cat reached for his implant, but it still didn’t respond. She took in the twitching eyes, and realized this guy must be ex-military. The signal trick wouldn’t work against his hardened implant.
He finally dropped the paper, and the twitching stopped. He must have known something was up, because his buddy Charlie still wasn’t moving.
Still on the other side of the desk, he reached one hand toward the gun on his waistband.
Cat vaulted across the desk sideways, extending one leg for a snap kick. She hit his gun arm as he pulled the weapon, and the handgun flew and skittered across the floor.
She was off-balance from the sideways jump and moving slowly. He punched for her face; she barely ducked under the attack, then slid off the desk next to him.
He was strong and trained in hand-to-hand, but she was faster, her reaction time augmented with implant and nanotech, and she delivered a salvo of chops to his body before he had time to react. He stumbled back, dazed, and she landed two hard punches to his face, knocking him out. He crumbled to the ground.
Tucking a wisp of blond hair behind one ear, she pushed him under the desk, where he wasn’t visible from the hallway. Meanwhile, the other guard still stood at attention, frozen in place under Cat’s control.
“Stay here,” she said, patting him on the shoulder as though he had a choice.
The security gate was made of thick, powder-coated steel. Nothing short of an explosive was going to open it up. But the lock was digital, and she could fool that easily. She connected to the net, but the lock wasn’t there in cyberspace.
Kuso.
Digitally isolated, she’d need to find another way to break the lock. She glanced around, found the slim fiber optic port where the lock was programmed ahead of time with biometric data. She glanced behind her. Nobody around yet, but she didn’t have all day.
She linked to the net, snapped a photo with her implant, and connected to a server in Seattle. That server, previously compromised, bounced her connection back and forth between a sequence of other hacked computers before reaching a box mounted on a tree near Lake Crescent in the Olympic Peninsula, on a mountaintop at tweny-eight hundred feet. A line-of-sight laser connected her to a link on a mountain on Vancouver Island eighteen miles away, connecting her in turn to the uncensored global net. The connection held steady, so there must not have been clouds over the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The laser link wasn’t ideal, but it was a tighter beam and less detectable than radio.
She passed the image to Helena. “Help. I need to crack this digital lock in the next thirty seconds, preferably without a bunch of noise.”
“Hold on, mon chaton.”
The pause was nearly imperceptible, and then a fat squirt of data came over the link.
“You’ve got smart matter, I assume?”
“Of course.” Cat slid a black case out of her vest pocket and cracked it open. The liquid poly-alloy was dark and shiny. Far bigger than conventional nanites, smart matter didn’t contain the ability to replicate itself from available materials, but it could reform itself into nearly any physical shape almost instantly and conduct sophisticated electronic functions. She transmitted Helena’s instructions, and the smart matter extruded a form the size of a pencil, ending with an optic connection.
Cat inserted the piece into the lock and let go.
“How does this work?” she asked.
“It’s retrieving the manufacturer’s lock code out of memory, and then it will play it back. Weak back door.”
A few seconds passed and the lock clicked open.
“Thanks, Helena!”
“No problem, mon chaton.”
They terminated the connection, and Cat passed within, closing the gate behind her. She scanned the net again, looking for surveillance. The tight security for this building meant it was just possible they’d use hardwired cameras to bypass the net. She put out feelers for the security headquarters, found them, and rooted around for the console they were using to monitor security feeds. It didn’t matter how paranoid they were, this was 2045, and there wasn’t a piece of hardware left that wasn’t full of processors and data connectivity. She located a bank of sixteen displays, scanned the displays themselves and discovered they supported a near-field-communication protocol on a frequency that a nearby guard’s palm computer also handled. She hacked into the display for this hallway, turning the current frame buffer into a static image. No more live camera feed.
She came to doors: a set of double doors on the left and right, and then further ahead a single door at the end of the hallway. She decided on the doors to the left, unlocking them with a thought. Inside, a modern datacenter, racks of chewing-gum-sized stick servers, protruding from inch-thick backplanes, maybe a few hundred thousand servers in a living-room sized space. Cat’s heart sank in disappointment when she saw the blinking lights at the edge of each row that indicated power and connectivity. The uploaded personalities she sought c
ould never be stored in a powered-up datacenter. Disney couldn’t risk the goverment discoving they were running AI. The Feds would seize the datacenter and jail all the executives—that is, if they didn’t just blow it up without warning. What she was looking for was so illegal, she’d only find it stored on a mothballed server.
She left, crossing the hallway, to find a mirror image data center on the other side, also powered up. Kuso. She went twenty feet down the curving hallway to the last door, a solid stainless steel affair with a combination lock in the center. These people took their security seriously. This must be where they kept their old AI and uploads.
She took a visual snapshot of the lock with her implant to send to Helena, but couldn’t get a connection. The net signal was weak here. Something about the building functioned like a Faraday cage.
She backed up twenty feet and the signal strength returned. She used half the smart matter she had left to make a leaf-shaped antenna on the wall, then trailed a thin wire behind her, with another leaf-shaped wedge plastered behind her ear. It would be enough to get her neural implant signal out to the net. Returning to the door, she uploaded the picture to Helena. The signal was strong now, her makeshift antenna bringing the network into the dead zone.
“Is there enough of a gap to get smart matter inside the door?” Helena asked.
“No.”
“Make a hole then, maybe three inches above the mechanism.”
Cat raised her eyebrows. She had the smallest bit of raw nanotech, but she didn’t want to risk using it if she didn’t have to. She also didn’t really want to shoot in here, but that was probably the lesser of two evils. She pulled out her gun, a 12mm anti-bot Olympic Arms, with tungsten carbide armor-piercing rounds. They’d penetrate the door. Hell, they’d go through half-inch armored steel on a good day. She slid a stubby noise suppressor out of her cargo pocket. It wasn’t a quiet gun under the best of circumstances, but it would take the edge off the roar.
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