The Last Firewall

by Hertling, William

  She stared hard at them. “Who was fighting who? What were they fighting over? And where’d they go?”

  Leon shrugged, looking over at Mike.

  Mike knelt over the puddle of blood and picked something up, a tribal wood carving on a simple rope. “This is Sonja’s.” He looked at the detective and held out the necklace. “This belonged to the leader of our Enforcement Team.”

  41

  * * *

  CAT AND ADAM’S VEHICLE passed over mountains, and Tucson came into view. “You can turn on your implant now,” Adam said, “but you must minimize the data that leaves Tucson. Even so, I will take steps to mask your electronic signature.”

  City lights sparkled in the clear night sky. Ringed by mountains, Tucson was a gleaming circle surrounded by darkness while the soft glow of a full moon lit the peaks.

  “How can you mask my trail?” she asked, struggling for alertness after dozing during the flight.

  “Six months ago, I learned of a plot to attack the President. I found evidence of collusion at our intelligence agencies, so I’ve been tracking down the conspirators myself. Afraid that they would retaliate, I built a sub-sentient firewall around Tucson to hide my activities. The barrier filters all incoming and outgoing traffic and will mask your presence.”

  Cat nodded dumbly. The explanation seemed outlandish, but she was too tired to make a judgment right now. She turned on her implant instead, relieved at the flow of data about their location, destination, and surroundings. So basic and yet essential to her life, she was blind without the net.

  She recoiled in disgust from the link, the feeds stale and metallic. She sent new queries, but the odd sensation didn’t change. “What’s wrong with the net?” she asked.

  “Everything inside the firewall is static. Without live data, the net may seem unusual.”

  She nodded, wondering what the people who lived in Tucson thought.

  “I’ve grown accustomed. I’ll open up ports after I’ve given you training. We’ll begin as soon as we land.”

  Cat shook her head and fought off another yawn. “I’m tired, hungry, and cold. We can start tomorrow. What I need are dry clothes, food, and a bed.”

  “Of course.” The transport veered, a late change of direction, and a few minutes later they landed in a small parking lot. The rear of the package drone dropped open. Cat stood, legs cramped from her position on the floor, and came to the doorway.

  “I have a room for you at the Hotel Congress,” Adam said, gesturing to the two story building across the street. “Clothes and food are waiting.”

  Cat stared at the utility bot, then followed him across a deserted road. Ten o’clock at night on a Thursday, it was deadly quiet. Her implant showed the University of Arizona only a few blocks away. Where were the thousands of students who should be out drinking?

  Adam led her into the hotel. At the registration desk a woman nodded but Adam continued past, escorting her to the stairs and then on to room 234. “Food and clothes are inside. Make yourself comfortable. We’ll talk in the morning.”

  Cat nodded, and paused in the doorway. “Thank you for getting me out.”

  “Of course,” Adam said, his robot face inscrutable.

  She shut the door and leaned against it as waves of exhaustion rolled over her.

  Cat couldn’t deny the AI had gotten her out of a tight spot. But to what purpose? Adam was extreme, even for an artificial intelligence, lacking the most rudimentary social graces. Was that why Tony feared him?

  She cautiously scanned cyberspace. The bot that escorted her here remained downstairs, and another lingered across the street. She was too tired and unsettled by the brackish network to think anymore.

  She pushed herself off the door and staggered toward the table. She lifted the cover off a tray of food, grabbed a handful of French fries, and made her way to the bed. Peeling off her wet clothes, she climbed under the covers and slipped into oblivion.

  42

  * * *

  AN EVIDENCE BOT COLLECTED Sonja’s jewelry, but Mike seemed unaware of the blood still covering his hand. “Sonja loved that necklace. She wouldn’t give it up willingly. She’s in trouble, maybe dead.” He looked back toward the confusion of police officers and technicians. “But who was it that met her? Catherine, the bot, the other guys that are missing, or someone still here?”

  Leon shook his head. “I don’t know, but Cat wasn’t involved. The timing doesn’t work out.”

  Mike stopped pacing. “Are you thinking with your brain? Stop giving her the benefit of the doubt because she’s pretty. Why was she here if she wasn’t involved?”

  Detective Sanders interrupted. “Bad news. The People’s Party tracked you. Headquarters says a few hundred people are heading this way. The police will protect you, of course, but the protesters are going to make a mess of my crime scene. Can I have a couple of officers take you downtown?”

  Leon and Mike glanced at each other.

  “Thanks, Detective,” Leon said, “Can you give us a second?”

  “Sure, but don’t dawdle. You’ve got ten minutes before they arrive. If you’re going to stay here, which I don’t advise, I need to call for backup pronto.”

  “Yup, we understand.”

  The detective walked away and talked to a technician.

  Leon’s implant popped up an incoming request for a private channel. He looked at Mike in surprise, but accepted.

  “I appreciate the offer of help from the police, but they’re going to sequester us in a safe house or protective custody,” Mike sent. “We’re not going to get to the bottom of this cooped up.”

  “Agreed,” Leon said. “Let’s contact Rebecca while we’re on the net publicly.”

  Mike nodded, and opened up the connection. The built-in processors on their implants struggled to keep up with the three-layer encryption, but managed to eke out a low-resolution video feed from her end.

  “Where the hell are you?” Rebecca asked. “Do you have any idea what’s going on? The Institute is under siege, politically and literally.”

  “We’re chasing after Sonja,” Mike said. “She disappeared in San Diego a few days ago. Her necklace showed up at a crime scene. She might be dead.” Mike choked on the last words.

  Rebecca blanched, but said nothing.

  “Listen,” Leon said, “We believe a rogue AI is the common element behind this string of murders and Sonja’s disappearance, and has something to do with a girl named Catherine Matthews.”

  Rebecca shook her head. “Forget about that. Drop the investigation and get to a secure location, a military base if you can. You’re both in danger and too important to go out playing cowboys. The People’s Party has had the Institute surrounded for days. They tried to smuggle a bomb onsite and the FBI went crazy, shut everything down. The President’s at a G10 meeting in New York City, along with the Vice President. I can’t seem to get word to them. I’m going to Manhattan to try to meet them in person.”

  Leon talked slowly, the thoughts coalescing only as he spoke. “The People’s Party is a smokescreen, a distraction from the real goal.”

  “You can’t cross a street in Washington without encountering protesters,” Rebecca said. “We’re one step away from martial law. You don’t mobilize millions of people for a diversion.”

  Leon wished he could explain his intuition. What he’d give for the ability to process data like an AI! “The deaths, the protests, the People’s Party, Sonja’s disappearance, it’s all connected to some bigger picture. Everything an AI does is logical.”

  “Let’s say you’re right.” Rebecca asked. “Who’s crunching the data for you?”

  “We’re working with Shizoko Reynolds,” Mike said, “the class IV network traffic expert who uncovered the murders.”

  “Can you trust him?”

  “We think so,” Leon said.

  She turned, spoke to someone off camera and grew flustered. “I’m sorry, but I’m moving to a more secure location. You need to do t
he same, and continue the investigation from there.”

  “We’ll figure something out,” Mike said.

  Leon disconnected and returned his implant to anonymous mode. He pinged Mike and found his friend had done the same.

  “Back to Shizoko,” Mike said. “Before the police notice.”

  They walked away from the crime scene, Leon staring at the sidewalk, deep in thought. He’d been part of the team that designed neural implants, knew them inside and out. They were fundamentally limited, a simplistic two inch long strip of high density electrodes inserted between the skull and the frontal lobe with barely enough processing power for auxiliary functions like encryption and neural recording.

  Unlike an artificial intelligence, the implant wasn’t powerful enough for modeling or storage of data. That depended on wireless access to the net to run cognitive apps in the cloud, but latency prohibited the apps from integrating into consciousness and allowing the user to achieve AI level competency. What he needed was for the necessary computing power to fit inside his skull.

  They found Shizoko and took off. Mike briefed the bot, while Leon contemplated his implant.

  “Shizoko?” Leon interrupted.

  “Yes?”

  “You used experimental nanites to heal Mike’s arm.”

  “Correct. They are a refinement of military technology. They should be available for civilian use in nine months.”

  “Could nanites enhance my implant?”

  “Explain further, please.”

  “I want more bandwidth and enough processing power to run modeling algorithms.”

  “The latter can be achieved with neural apps run on the net,” Shizoko said.

  “It’s not good enough,” Leon said. “The latency of accessing apps in the cloud is too slow. They aren’t part of my perceived consciousness. Worse, I can’t run them while I’m hiding in anonymous mode.”

  “Implants designed for degenerative neural disorders can adaptively take over for biological function and include sufficient processing capability for human level intelligence,” Shizoko said. “Theoretically, such an implant could be enhanced beyond human level equivalence. No tests have been done—”

  “Hold on,” Mike said. “We’re not doing experimental brain surgery.”

  “Let’s run with this idea for a second,” Leon said. “Shizoko, instead of surgery, could you inject me with nanites to construct the neural implant within my head?”

  “Please hold. I’m modeling the concept.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Mike said. “You can’t put untested technology in your head. Worse, he’s a network traffic expert, not a medical bot.”

  Leon shrugged. “It’s all the same to them. I feel like I’m on the verge of understanding what’s going on, but I can’t get enough of the picture in my head. It’s like I’m playing chess, but I can only view four squares at a time when I need to see the whole board.”

  Mike clenched his jaw. “The human brain isn’t meant to.”

  Leon hesitated, Mike’s statement hanging in the air until Shizoko saved him from the awkward silence.

  “Yes, it’s possible,” Shizoko answered finally. “I can inject you with programmed nanites and the necessary raw materials. They will increase the size of the electrode array and give you the equivalent power of a Class II AI. The processor will be accessible via the neural app interface with zero latency, and it should be available immediately following the procedure.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  43

  * * *

  HELENA DROVE TO a storage complex. “Down the hall, third door on the left,” Helena said. “They moved to Australia. No one ships a bed.”

  She cracked the encrypted lock and the door swung open, revealing the promised mattress. She shoved contents outside to make room, laid the mattress on the floor, and went back to the car for Tony. She carried his bulk with only a faint whine of her servos and delicately laid him down.

  Slim perched on the edge of the makeshift bed as Helena injected the last quart of blood.

  She opened a compartment on her body and extracted the square white and red box they’d spent an hour liberating from the Naval ship. Withdrawing a one by two inch matte black ribbon, she stared, unmoving, at the nanite strip.

  “What are doing?” Slim asked, his voice hoarse with exhaustion.

  “Talking to it.”

  “You mean programming?”

  “No, you only program nanites for people who have implants and can control them. These are for the unimplanted; they’re sentient.” Helena pressed the ribbon to Tony’s leg, where it squirmed before disappearing through his skin. “Now we let him rest.”

  Helena rolled over to the light switch, pulled off the plate and inserted a tentacle. “Get some sleep. I’m going to recharge.”

  Slim lay next to Tony, who seemed to be resting easy now, his face returning from its ashen state to a normal color. Feeling like he’d done right by his partner, Slim let sleep take hold.

  He woke later, not sure if minutes or hours had passed, but the glare of light coming under the door suggested morning was here.

  Helena waved a tentacle in front of him. “How do you communicate with Adam?”

  “Handheld.” Slim sat up, rubbing his face. The bot hadn’t forgotten her quest for vengeance. “There’s a port open in the firewall that only responds to this computer.”

  “Where does Adam reside, physically?”

  The warbot had been fearsome in the gunfight but she was no match for Adam, who had an entire city of security bots, drones, and people to do his bidding. “You can’t win. I won’t tell you.”

  Helena strode to within inches of him. “He abandoned the two of you. Without my help, Tony would have died and the police would have captured you.”

  “When Adam defeats you and reads your memory, he’d know I was the one to give you his location.”

  Helena shook her head. “Memory reading is a myth. No AI can break memory level encryption.”

  Slim snorted. “That’s Adam’s whole gig. He lives behind a firewall, reading memories to figure out what’s going on in the world.”

  She grunted. “I saved your friend. Surely that’s worth something to you.”

  “Sure, but if I tell you, we’re as good as dead. At least this way there’s a chance he’ll ignore us.”

  “I’ll reverse the nanites in his leg. They’ll eat him from the inside out.”

  Slim glanced at Tony. Could she?

  Before Slim could react, Helena whipped into motion. There was a brief tug, and he glanced down to see his pant leg torn open, the computer now in Helena’s grip across the room.

  She interacted with the little device electronically, screens flashing too quickly for Slim to read. Helena pointed one tentacle in Slim’s direction, the tip blossoming into a gun barrel. “Don’t move or say a word.”

  She opened a call, and after a few seconds, Adam answered.

  “Hello Slim, Tony. You managed to escape the police.”

  Slim drew a breath in surprise. Helena must be spoofing their images, fooling the handheld into sending a fake video feed.

  “No thanks to you,” Helena answered in a perfect imitation of Slim’s voice. “What’s the deal with leaving us in the lurch? Tony took a shot to the leg. He’s in a bad way. We need to come home.”

  “Buy or steal a car.” Adam looked disinterested.

  “We can’t. We’re holed up in a storage locker, there’s police everywhere, and Tony’s not exactly mobile.” Helena paused. “Come on, Tony needs medical work. You want us to go to a hospital? I can’t answer their questions.”

  “Fine. Send me your coordinates. An aircar will arrive in three hours.” Adam disconnected.

  Helena turned to Slim. “Three hours in an aircar. He’s nearby. Not Los Angeles, or he would have had his own agents take Cat. San Francisco? Phoenix? Tucson? Someplace smaller?”

  Helena rolled closer. Slim tried not to react, but his heart beat fa
ster.

  “Tucson?” Her working sensors focused and clicked. “Human, your biological chemistry gives you away. Tucson it is.”

  “He may be coming to kill us,” Slim said.

  “Irrelevant. If he’s going to kill you, he won’t be expecting me. If he’s picking you up, then I’ll come along for the ride. Either way, I’ll be a surprise.”

  44

  * * *

  “YOU’RE NOT FOCUSING.”

  “I’m trying. Back off.” Cat wiped a damp lock of hair away from her face. “I can concentrate better than anyone. These programs weren’t made for humans.”

  Adam had arrived in a humanoid form that morning. The eldercare robot’s emotive face was meant to convey empathy and caring to those in need of assistance. It was equally capable of expressing frustration, even borderline anger, as he did now.

  Adam whirled around. “Try again. Run the exercise at ten percent of nominal.”

  “The speed isn’t the issue,” Cat said. She raised herself out of seated meditation and paced the width of Club Congress, the venue on the ground floor of the hotel. “It’s an artificial intelligence learning program, correct?”

  “Yes, used to train neural networks. This program teaches how to route data packets.”

  “How long would it take for an AI to master?” she asked.

  “A minute for a Class I. Less for more advanced AI.”

  “There’s nothing for me to grasp. Look, last week I didn’t know a thing about firearm combat. But I went through a few trainers, and I was able to pick up the techniques. The programs made sense because I already had martial arts training.” She gestured to the spinning ware image in their shared netspace. “But this abstract program isn’t connected to anything I understand.”

  Adam was silent for a minute, until a new icon replaced the old one. “Try this.”

  The package appeared to be a qigong training routine. “What is it?”