Cat didn’t have a chance to take a breath before the attack slammed into her like a thousand fists pummeling her head. The assault came too fast for her to counter, as she struggled to remain conscious. Tortured by the probing attacks and reeling in pain and disorientation, she finally attempted protocol redirects, disconnect packets, everything she had learned, but failed.
The agony didn’t stop. She fell to her knees as her ears, eyes, and body conspired to tell her a dozen different directions were up. She vomited, bile striking the floor so hard it bounced back into her face.
The attack ceased.
The big dog sat on its haunches, five feet tall, unblinking.
Cat curled up on the ground, violated and weakened, tears flowing freely. She didn’t have the strength to wipe the puke off her face. Her stomach heaved as the room continued to spin, the world’s worst hangover and motion sickness combined.
A minute passed before she had the will to speak. She wiped gunk from her mouth. “What the hell?”
“You must know what you’re up against before you enter no-holds barred combat with a war bot.”
Pain lanced through her body as she fought to stand. Cat pulled qi from the four directions, gathered data streams from ten thousand nodes, and struck back.
In a flurry of packets, Adam disappeared from the net, even though the bot was right in front of her in meat space. Her attack fizzled out. She weaved in and out of local gateways to find some trace of him. Routers filtered the data Cat streamed, nullifying her search. She tried to change the routing structure and discovered she was locked out.
She went upstream to the master servers, the authoritative sources, and repopulated the dog’s addresses, then forced a cache flush. The local routers reset and the robot reappeared. Cat defended the network infrastructure as she fought against the AI’s counter measures. She looked for openings, attacking any weakness.
Her awareness of the room dimmed as the net filled every fiber of her being. She was the packets, the data between nodes. She danced in netspace, sending qi flowing around the dog.
The dog’s qi swept toward her in Wu/Hao style t’ai chi ch’uan, a single whip form, and she countered with a simple p’eng from her own Chen method. At some level she was still routing packets, but below consciousness.
She fought perfectly, flowing martial arts moves from a dozen different disciplines. She didn’t grow tired. Every move was pristine, crisp, flawless.
They battled until she felt a shift in the direction of the fight, what Sensei Flores called osu higai, the point at which damage was done. She’d experienced it sparring, the moment when the opponent is beat but doesn’t know yet.
In that instant, everything froze. The golden qi flowing through the net vanished, her visualization dissipated, leaving just her and the dog in the empty, whitewashed room, the bot resting motionless on its haunches.
“Lesson over.” Adam stood and left.
She looked down, saw a dried pool of vomit at her feet. Every movement was agony, the pain worse than any physical fight she’d ever been in. She tried to move, but her muscles locked up and she almost fell.
She settled for leaning against the wall instead. The clock showed half the afternoon had passed. The fight seemed distant now. What had happened? Had she been about to beat Adam?
She forced herself up, ignoring the protests of muscles that held her in place for hours, and staggered back to her room.
48
* * *
“MAKE THE TRAIN STOP,” Mike whispered. Their plan hinged on getting the three-thousand-miles-an-hour Continental to halt under the Tucson emergency exit.
“I’m trying.” Leon focused, still attempting to trigger the stop.
“It’s not working,” Mike said. “We’re traveling forty miles per minute. We’ll be in New York soon.”
Another passenger glanced at them.
“Be quiet,” Leon said through a clenched jaw, “you’re distracting me.” He grappled with the train’s software architecture, afraid of alerting the AI driver. Five minutes later, Leon gave up and leaned back against his seat.
Mike’s head hung. “I thought you’d be able to stop us.”
“The subsystem is wrapped in all kinds of security and a Class II AI is driving.”
“Kuso!” Mike said. “Now what?”
“We ride to New York and try again in two hours.”
“We’ll bounce back and forth all day unless you have a specific plan.”
Leon shook his head. “I’m out of ideas. You?”
“Can you fool the sensors with an imaginary obstruction?”
“No, I tried.” They had picked a car full of humans to avoid bots with super-sensitive hearing, but a guy across the cabin kept watching them.
Mike leaned closer. “You can open the doors at the top of the egress?”
Leon checked. “Yes, but what good does that do if I can’t make us stop?”
“Hire a remote telebot,” Mike whispered. “Something dumb, no onboard AI. Unlock the ground level door, send the bot down the stairs, and throw it on the tracks.”
“Are you crazy?” Leon hissed. The same passenger stared at them again. He continued in a softer voice. “You know what would happen if this train hit a robot going forty miles a minute?”
“The avoidance sensors will detect the obstacle and stop.”
“Jesus. You’re betting everyone’s lives.”
“You have a better idea?”
They failed to think of any alternatives, so before they reached New York Leon hired a automated construction bot and delivery truck in Phoenix, using his implant to hide behind layers of other servers to disguise his identity. He juggled routing tables and encryption keys, realizing he’d never had been able to do this without Shizoko’s enhancements.
In Manhattan, the ticketing AI asked them why they were buying return tickets so soon.
“I forgot my lucky rabbit’s foot in LA,” Mike said with a straight face.
The agent smiled and nodded. “Ah, yes, superstitions. Humans are cute.”
“Dude, that was the lamest excuse,” Leon said later.
“Confirmation bias works with AI, too,” Mike said, smiling.
On the ride west Leon researched their maximum deceleration. He needed to time the telebot’s arrival to trigger a three gravity stop, causing the train to end up under Tucson. Early, they’d be too far from the station to make a quick getaway. Late, they’d lose consciousness from the high G forces, or worse, hit the robot at speed, killing people.
Leon used his implant to force open the steel doors of the concrete egress bunker and sent a long series of instructions to the waiting robot, knowing he’d lose connectivity once it started down the fifty flights descending into the earth.
The tension built until the bot popped back online using the tunnel’s built-in net as it rolled to a stop outside the first set of airlock doors. Leon checked the train’s position and speed one last time, then triggered the next steps.
The robot punched through the outer airlock, triggering a rush of air into the chamber. Once the pressure equalized, it entered the vestibule and drilled into the next door. The hole was minuscule compared to the volume of the tunnel, but Leon distantly noted alarms sounding.
The bot crossed the second airlock onto a walkway that paralleled the maglev. Leon waited for the correct moment, then nudged the machine over the edge, where it fell lengthwise across the tracks, as much as he could have hoped for.
The real world returned with a jolt as Leon found himself pressed hard into his chair, many times his normal weight. His armrests had automatically risen up to push his arms in, which lay across his chest like sacks of wet sand. He tried to budge them but couldn’t. His headrest folded around his head, holding him perpendicular to the direction of deceleration.
“Nice work,” Mike sent over the net.
“Thanks,” Leon sent back.
“How long do we have to put up with this?”
“Another thirty seconds.”
At two hundred miles per hour the train switched from maglev braking to friction brakes. A tremendous moan shook the car until, with a final screech, they halted. All was still.
Mentally prepared to move, Mike and Leon grappled with seat belts and struggled out of their chairs. Leon’s legs were jelly after the stress of rapid deceleration. They made their way to the door, stamping their feet to increase circulation. They were out before any of the shocked passengers had risen from their seats.
Leon passed through the wrecked airlock and craned his neck up at the unpainted square concrete chamber with metal stairs twisting up out of view. A momentary pang of despair at the task ahead tugged at him, but he continued. No choice but to go up. He started with Mike right behind him.
He climbed rapidly, his feet slapping against the metal steps and echoing off the bare walls. When he got to the twelfth landing he stopped. “Mike?” he called out.
“Coming.” Mike’s head appeared in the gap between the stairs, a flight below. “How much farther?”
“Thirty-eight.”
“Good grief. I’ll need a medical bot at the top.” Mike caught up, sweaty and breathing hard.
“You’ll make it.”
Mike nodded. “Yes, but next time I’m not going along with your crazy ideas.”
“This was your idea!” Leon followed after Mike as he passed by.
“Never mind.”
Fifteen tense minutes later they emerged from the last set of stairs and collapsed onto a concrete floor. Leon’s legs burned from the fifty-flight sprint.
“We have to keep going,” Mike said after half a minute. “We can’t get caught here. It’s too obvious. They’ll be sending emergency workers or worse.”
They forced themselves to their feet and opened the metal doors. Hot wind assaulted them, like the world’s largest open-air furnace. The sun was at its peak, a scorching ball of fire in the sky. The dirt road in front of the bunker was still clear.
Ignoring the path, they walked off into the desert between a pair of saguaro cacti.
49
* * *
ADAM DIDN’T KNOW what to do with Catherine. She would have won their sparring exercise had he not halted the program. A girl who could defeat a bot after a day of lessons was too dangerous for further training.
Of course Adam had thousands of bots at his disposal and could overwhelm her with numbers, but her cyberspace abilities were more fluid and nuanced than any human or AI he’d met.
Intelligent, combat-skilled, and able to manipulate the net as well as an AI while embodying the natural unpredictability of humans, she would have made a powerful agent for Adam’s cause. With the founders of the Institute investigating the murders, he needed a distraction.
Unfortunately, the same qualities that made her a wonderful weapon also created a potent threat. Given her rapid advancement, he weighed probabilities and reluctantly decided the risks outweighed the potential benefits.
What to do with Cat?
Releasing her was out of question, and she’d escape from mere imprisonment. Death eliminated future risk, yet he hesitated to take irreversible action. He might wipe her conscious mind and use her body as a remote, but her unique abilities wouldn’t survive the process.
One path minimized danger and kept her available for the future: a medically induced coma. With higher brain function halted she’d pose no risk, and he had the option to resuscitate her if needed.
Adam’s thoughts derailed as an alarm he’d never before seen signaled. Cross-referencing the input, he found the Continental made an unplanned stop due to a track obstacle directly under the Tucson emergency egress. He checked historical data; in seven years of operation this had occurred only once before.
He forked an instance to take care of the girl, allowing his master context to focus on the train. He instructed the digital clone to operate two medical robots and a dozen combat bots to bring her to the hospital.
The likelihood of an emergency occurring in the same week of his planned assassinations was less than one percent. Ergo, this was almost certainly an attack on him.
He tunneled through the firewall to the outside world, wormed through routers, and hacked into the passenger manifests. Seven hundred and thirty passengers on the Continental, including thirty-eight without implants or identification, but none of the identified an apparent cause for concern.
He’d decided to put Catherine Matthews in a coma because of the potential danger. Now he thought that the train making an emergency stop was also threatening. They appeared to be logical conclusions, but he couldn’t rule out the effect of his own machine dementia: he could be seeing threats were there were none. He ran a quick analysis of his neural nets, finding a two percent degradation since his last check. There was nothing to do now except see his plans through before the disease worsened to the point of total dysfunction.
Whether the train stop was an attack or not, he needed to treat it as one to reduce risk. It was an unlikely vector for a government agency or the military to take, since they’d most likely strike in force if they discovered his plot rather than concoct a deception with the train. But it could be Leon Tsarev and Mike Williams, operating on their own since he’d shut down the Institute and killed Shizoko.
He needed to be cautious. Wantonly killing the train’s passengers would be hard to disguise if it turned out to be a legitimate emergency, yet he couldn’t allow Leon and Mike to expose him so close to the culmination of his plans.
Adam checked the bot inventory at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, selecting eight of the least threatening combat bots, humanoid units intended for light guard duty. He deployed the combat team, then waited five minutes and dispatched civilian emergency services.
50
* * *
CAT WALKED DOWN to the hotel lobby, smiling at the ever-present receptionist, who ignored Cat, simply staring off into the distance.
She crossed the tiled foyer, shrugging off the unsettling interaction, and entered the Cup Cafe, disappointed to find the little restaurant empty. Adam had sent up meals yesterday, but tired of being kept in her room, she wanted out. She’d spoofed the local net nodes carefully so she appeared to be in bed.
A blonde came to take her order. Alarm in her eyes, she mumbled a greeting and waited for Cat to speak.
“Can I have the huevos rancheros and coffee?”
Without a word, the girl nodded and scurried to the kitchen.
“And a Herradura Aneja, neat,” Cat called after her.
She wanted something for the lingering soreness in her neck and back. Her mom wouldn’t approve of tequila for breakfast, but she figured being squirreled away by a paranoid, dysfunctional AI counted as an extenuating circumstance. Qigong would probably be better, but after yesterday’s training she feared that practicing might accidentally trigger a change in cyberspace.
The waitress poured tequila and coffee behind the bar and brought them back.
“Wait, don’t go,” Cat said as the girl turned once more to rush away. She looked at her long hair, waifish form, the fear behind her brown eyes. “Don’t you talk?”
She shook her head and left.
Cat scanned, but the waitress had no implant.
She rubbed her face, trying to figure out what was going on. She didn’t trust this city, didn’t like the way the net tasted in her mind, how it reminded her of the cloying stench of a long abandoned refrigerator. And the people! Scared, blank-faced, or simply absent.
Most of all, she did not like Adam, her neck tightening at the mere thought of him. He was an effective teacher, but no true sensei would have done what he did yesterday—to cut off their sparring when he did. It was almost as if . . . he was afraid.
After a lengthy absence the waitress reappeared with her food, apparently the chef as well as wait staff and bartender, then returned to the bar and resumed looking out the window.
Cat ate, barely tasting a thing, until she
’d cleared half her plate. In a smooth motion, she stood and walked toward the swinging door.
The waitress squeaked and moved to block the entrance, but Cat was already through. The spotless kitchen was empty, not a lick of food visible. Cat glanced left and right, then flung open the door of the industrial refrigerator, finding a single carton of eggs, milk, a little meat and veggies. Nowhere near what should be present in a restaurant. She stalked out of the kitchen, startling the waitress again.
She ate her last few bites standing up, then swallowed the coffee. One thing she’d learned in her new life was not to waste food or drink.
Cat walked upstairs, found the staircase to the roof and threw wide the maintenance door, getting blasted by the heat and blinded by the sun. At not quite noon, the temperature was past ninety. When her eyes adjusted, she crossed to the eastern edge. From this third floor vantage she saw over nearby structures, toward the center of town and the tall buildings of the University of Arizona.
She performed the flower meditation, weaving a defensive shield of white roses to protect against detection from Adam. If the petals grew dark, she would blow them west. She kept up the meditation while she carrying out a derivative of Soaring Crane. Soon the network topology appeared. She sorted through the net, working methodically and disguising her requests among the background data. She steered clear of the menacing firewall that loomed dark around the city.
Cat scanned through the people, careful not to ping or disconnect anyone, actions visible to Adam. Instead she searched local net nodes for the list of who had connected in the last twenty-four hours.
She accumulated logs and cross-referenced IDs to eliminate duplicates. When she was done, the numbers didn’t make sense. Less than ten thousand people and only a thousand AI.
Tucson should have half a million humans, and if it was anything like the rest of the country, one AI for every ten people.
The Last Firewall Page 20
