The Last Firewall

by Hertling, William

  Her mom didn’t correct her. “Listen, when I . . .”

  “I made meatloaf last night,” Cat interrupted. “I found Grandma’s recipe in your cookbook.”

  Her mom reached out, put one thin arm on Cat’s leg.

  “Catherine, we have to talk about this.”

  She twisted away and squeezed her eyes tight, so tight, she just wanted everything to go back to the way it was.

  * * *

  Cat opened her eyes and squealed. “Mom! You got one!” She reached down inside the box for the wriggling mass of striped tan fur. “O. M. F. G., Mom.”

  “Don’t be profane, dear.” She tussled Catherine’s hair and gave her a big squeeze. “I’m glad you’re happy. She’s a girl.”

  Cat squirmed out of the hug. “I’m going to name her Einstein.” Cat picked up the kitten-puppy with both arms and held her up until she licked her nose with a scratchy tongue. “Nice Einstein.”

  “It’s an American Bobtail crossed with a Labrador. The whole process of genetic hybrids escapes me. When I was a kid, we just had computers and smartphones.” Her mom shook her head.

  Catherine cuddled the hybrid puppen, petting her head and inspecting the cat-like paws. “I don’t understand. You said we couldn’t possibly afford one, that they cost as much as a car.”

  “Well, there’s a time for frugality, and this isn’t it.” Her mom coughed, once, twice, then a continuous rattle that lasted a long time.

  Cat stood with Einstein in her arms. “Are you OK, Mom?”

  75

  * * *

  LEON FIRED DOWN THE HALLWAY, the heavy gun recoiling. His shoulder throbbed; every movement sent jolts through him. When Cat had controlled his body, everything happened at a distance. Cat had ignored all of his body’s feedback mechanisms. Now every muscle was injured in some way and there was no veil between him and the pain. Blood covered his clothes and his hands, but he didn’t know the source.

  He’d snapped back to full awareness in this office with Cat jacked in a socket behind him. She’d told them to defend the room, then tuned out, and now she sat on the floor, leaning up against the wall. From time to time, she’d jerk or mumble, but whatever she did, it happened deep in the net.

  The rapid scramble of metal feet in the corridor signaled another big dog bot’s approach.

  He and Mike fired around the corner of the doorway without even looking until they heard a thud, then a massive canine robot slid past them on the slick tile floor, smashing up against an earlier bot they’d killed. The chassis sparked and they dove for the floor, afraid its munitions might discharge.

  After a few seconds without any explosions, they got back up uneasily.

  “This is a distraction,” Mike said.

  “What?” Leon’s ears rang from the thunder of gunfire inside the building.

  “They’re sending the bots down the hallway as a diversion,” Mike yelled. “They’re not stupid. They’ll probably go around the other side and come through an interior wall.”

  Leon stared at the office, his stomach growing weak. Was that just thin sheetrock, or did something more substantial stand between them and the killer robots? If Cat didn’t finish up, they would all die.

  “What the hell is Cat doing?” he yelled.

  “I have no idea,” Mike said, “but she’d better hurry up.”

  Leon saw sweat dripping down Cat’s face. It’d been five minutes since she went into the net. He wondered how much ammo was left in his gun, how much time they had left.

  “Cover the door,” Leon said, “I’m going in.” He didn’t have Cat’s special powers, but maybe he could help. He closed his eyes, concentrating on the network. He touched cyberspace and screamed in agony as the connection seared him, flaying his mind. He fought to hold on, desperate to get a message through to Cat. A hailstorm of viruses, worms, and Trojan horses assaulted him, defeating his every attempt to reach Cat, each one inflicting another mental wound on him. He resorted to an ancient text protocol, sneaking through a tiny note for Cat. He terminated the channel and came back to reality, his body shaking, blood in his mouth where he’d bitten his tongue.

  Everything depended on Cat now.

  76

  * * *

  CAT CARRIED AN OVERSTUFFED cardboard box into her new bedroom. She set the heavy carton down on the bed, then lay down on the pink bedspread.

  “Come on, lazybones,” her mom said, coming into the room with a milk crate. “They’re not going to unpack themselves.”

  “We should get one of those new robots.” She sat up, pulling open the box flaps. “A helper bot could do all the chores.”

  Her mother sighed, put one hand on her hip. “Honey, I’m not ready for a robot.” She pulled out a frame from the milk-crate and set it on the bedside table.

  Cat picked up and hugged the photo, a picture of them camping at the beach last year.

  “I love you, Mom.”

  “Me too, dear.”

  “Are robots going to rule the world?” Her mother unpacked other trinkets from the crate. Cat was unexpectedly happy to see her mom, so pretty, young and healthy.

  “They’re smart, but people are still in charge.”

  “Why do bots have to do what we say?”

  “Because we’re real, while the robots are simulated minds inside computers.”

  “What if we were simulated?”

  “Catherine, no philosophy now. Unpack the boxes.”

  Were they just computer programs? Cat couldn’t let go of the fearful, compulsive thought. She watched the second hand of the clock tick, peered closer as it slowed down.

  She shouldn’t be here. She was supposed to be somewhere else.

  “We need you.” The words scrolled up in her vision, white text on a black background. She’d never seen anything like that before. “Cat, you must pay attention now. We can’t hold on any longer. The bots are almost on us.”

  Cat stared at the words and remembered. She stood up, blinking back tears, and gave her mother a sudden, tight hug. “Bye, Mom. I love you.”

  It took everything she had, but she closed her eyes and started Naihanchi nidan. On the fifth move, she opened them.

  77

  * * *

  ADAM WATCHED CAT, trapped in her memories, much as she’d done to his trackers earlier.

  The relatively underpowered canine bots were the only combat robots that fit inside the building. Direct frontal assault on the room where Mike, Leon, and Cat holed up wasn’t working. The corridor was too long, and the guns they’d brought were more than a match for the relatively lightweight bots. So now he worked at them from the other side, through the interior walls.

  Alarms triggered as Cat escaped the boundaries of the simulation he set up. He’d hoped the childhood experiences would keep her distracted longer. In a flash, he snapped to her location in the net.

  “You can’t win, Cat. You’ve been lucky so far, that’s all.”

  He felt her probing the data connections in the building. He attacked her neural implant, trying to overstimulate her brain and cause massive physical pain and confusion. Indeed, his real world sensors detected her screams over the cacophony of gunfire and other battle sounds.

  “I don’t have to do this, Cat. Did you like seeing your mom? You could be with her always.”

  The return signals from Cat’s implant started to destabilize, an effect which preceded the loss of her ability to think. It wouldn’t be long now. Adam had destroyed more humans than this girl had never known. He’d created a half a million mental zombies in Tucson and had developed a certain finesse with the procedure. She couldn’t last longer than a few seconds.

  And yet, the more he forced against her, the less effect it seemed to be having. The girl accepted everything he did, and pushed it back out again. The suffering must be incredible, and yet the screams stopped and her implant restabilized.

  What the hell was she doing?

  Suddenly, and for the first time ever, Adam felt pain. A si
gnal passed across the net, clamping his data streams closed, causing him to lose connections with hundreds of periphery processors as his senses flickered in and out.

  He ran timing channel attacks on the nodes she controlled, but she diverted the packets. He tried buffer overruns, until the girl sent them back at him. He attacked using the routing protocol, simulating the master authority, to disconnect her nodes.

  In the midst of his forging the router attack, the network flickered as he felt her coming. Adam faltered at the impossible feat: she might send data, but she couldn’t come through the net herself. And yet he sensed the state transfer he associated with a large AI moving to new processors, tainted with her profile.

  Adam retreated, closing off nodes, trying to maintain a distance from the abomination as cyberspace darkened and distorted with her approach.

  He tweaked router settings, locked down tight the firewall around the fourth floor data network to buy himself time.

  What could he do?

  The answer came in the form of a sixteen thousand bit key. While he’d fought with part of his attention, his other threads cracked the root signing authority’s encryption, granting him unlimited access to every computer in the world!

  With a chance at life, he prepared to battle with renewed vigor. She was just a nineteen-year-old human girl. All he needed to do now was escape into the global network.

  He unlocked the firewalls and opened a million connections to the outside world.

  78

  * * *

  I BLINKED BACK TEARS and my hands shook, not sure whether it happened in meatspace or in the network, but beyond caring. I caressed the memories of my mother and put them away. I would not allow Adam to trick me again.

  I sensed Leon and Mike in the net, glowing with potential energy. I looked down on them from a security camera in the wall, finding them bloodied and dirty, the room full of holes and plaster and dust.

  Adam found me, attacking with no warning. One moment there had been nothing and the next I screamed as every agony I had ever experienced or could imagine passed through me. Skin burned, flesh flayed, bones broken, body rendered, I only stopped yelling when I realized the pain wasn’t going to stop and nobody was coming to help.

  With no point to further screaming, I shut down that portion of my brain. (A tiny corner of my mind whispered that this wasn’t normal, but I didn’t listen.)

  I looked up at the pulsating supernova of light coming from the seventh floor. I pushed upwards, not merely sending packets but moving myself across the network toward Adam. At the edges of my perception I felt micro-jumps as I moved from computer to computer, my consciousness migrating into the net.

  Packets around me were dropped, misrouted, delayed as Adam sought to fight me.

  Flores Sensei had made us watch videos of cats walking. For three months we practiced the feline hunting pace on two legs and on four, channeling the qi of the tiger when we fought. This came back to me as I stalked cyberspace, rising up the hardwired network one floor at a time.

  But just as I pushed up against the seventh level, the routers separating that floor’s fiber optic from the rest of the building shut down their interfaces and went dark.

  Adam had not given up, nor had a state transfer indicated he’d gone elsewhere. That meant he was preparing something. When you don’t know what’s coming, you must be ready for immediate action, offensive or defensive.

  I used the time I had to spread across the network, not just the Gould-Simpson building but throughout the entire campus, conscious of every node, camera and sensor, the way people are usually aware of their fingers and hands.

  With his core processors locked up behind the temporary firewall he’d created around the seventh floor, the periphery weakened. I passed through nodes tinged with Adam’s presence and wiped them clean before taking them over. My awareness fanned out, growing distributed as I colonized the net. I heard my echoes everywhere, the more distant parts of my consciousness like copies of myself as latency built up over distance.

  I turned and faced Gould-Simpson, spread over tens of thousands of compute nodes, an army of me, facing the black nothingness at the core of the building. Every network path, etched in faint but perfect lines, each computer a glowing point, all superimposed over the monochromatic green battlefield view I created to see through walls and discern things for what they truly were, without the distractions of the real world.

  Dimly I grew aware of two figures on the first floor, one blue and one golden, the latter something new, not human, not AI. Drawn toward it, I sensed threats ringing around them, many dozens of the canine bots digging through interior walls, firing rounds, and slowly closing in on the meatspace bodies. I would have sent help, but suddenly there was no time.

  The blackness at the seventh floor shrank in on itself, drawing my attention, and in the next instant it flared white, the brilliance of magnesium burning, temporarily dwarfing everything else.

  Adam leaped out, an outpouring of data connections, armed with the root password for all routers, and he seized the nodes nearest him. He expanded exponentially, in slices of time so small that the firing of a single neuron was an eternity by comparison.

  With my consciousness spread throughout the network, I didn’t merely battle for the net: I was the net. I grabbed Adam’s connections as they passed through nodes, cutting them short. He opened still more, running the gamut of protocols, modern low-latency channels, older suites, even stateless single-packet transmissions, seeking a way out past the firewall I’d constructed around him.

  He attacked me as he moved; spoofing data, masquerading as my binaries, and resending datagrams, my own bytes and his, and everything else digital too, until such a storm of packets flurried about it seemed the entire universe had decomposed down to its constituent electronic bits and would never be put together again.

  79

  * * *

  SOMEHOW, DESPITE THE RINGING in his ears, Leon heard or maybe felt the scrambling on the other side of the sheetrock behind him. He launched himself away and spun, pointing the muzzle of his rifle at the wall.

  Metal paws tore through, a robotic canine head peeking into the room, machine gun muzzles where its mouth should have been.

  “Oh, hell,” Leon called.

  Leon and Mike fired in unison, hitting the robot, then scattered rounds at the adjacent office.

  The hidden bots shot back, firing through the flimsy plaster. Leon dove for the ground, but Mike stood and returned fire, gun on full auto.

  When the gunfire stopped, Mike’s gun was smoking amid a cloud of dust. Leon lifted his head to peer into the now massive hole in the wall. Four bots splayed across the floor of the next office.

  “How did you not get hit?” Leon yelled.

  Mike shrugged. “Dunno, but I’m out of ammo.”

  “Me, too.”

  More scratching at the other wall sent them to crouch protectively over Cat’s sprawled body.

  “Is she doing anything?” Mike asked.

  “I don’t know. I think I got a reaction from her before, but the net was too painful for me to stay in long.”

  The tearing at the barrier intensified; the dogs would be through in seconds. Leon would protect Cat with his body. His death might buy her time to complete her mission.

  Mike stood and pushed his sleeves back.

  Leon glanced sideways and his mouth dropped open: Mike’s clothes were full of bullet holes.

  The wall gave way, and canine bots poured in.

  Mike punched the first one, sending a fist into its armored face with an echoing metal-on-metal smack. A second dog entered and Mike grabbed it by the neck, throwing it into the air one-handed to fly into a support beam. The robot’s spine cracked in half, sparks shooting everywhere.

  Leon reeled, unable to believe his eyes. No one but a robot should be able to do what Mike was doing. He’d seen, or thought he’d seen, Mike do impossible things as they’d crossed the courtyard, but in the haze o
f gunfire and flying metal shards he’d been too terrified to think. What had happened to Mike?

  Mike prepared to face the next big dog but the bots suddenly crashed to the ground in unison, completely inert. A canine unit draped halfway into the hole in the wall. More lay in the adjoining office.

  They waited a few seconds but nothing stirred, other than the quiet settling of debris. Leon left his useless gun on the floor and looked out the door. He saw more inert bots in the hallway.

  “How did you manhandle those robots?” Leon asked.

  “I have no idea,” Mike said, standing tall. “Something is different since we passed out in the desert. That’s amazing,” he said, pointing to the bots he’d killed by hand, “but I can’t tell you what a relief it is that my knees don’t hurt anymore.”

  “Shizoko’s nanotech must be responsible.” Leon mused for a second. “What matters is whether she beat Adam. I don’t hear a thing going on, but she’s still out.”

  “Let’s try the net.”

  They each found they could connect again.

  “I’m calling Rebecca to warn her about the possible assassination,” Mike said. “Call the Institute, mobilize everyone. Get the FBI down here.”

  Leon nodded. After days of being unable to use the network for fear of discovery, and now standing in the ruined office amid dead bots and sparking electrical wires, the ordinariness of the call was surreal.

  After a quick explanation, he hung up and looked back down at Cat. She still hadn’t moved. Something was wrong; she should have been out of the net by now.

  Leon fell to his knees next to her. He pinged Cat, but she didn’t respond. He tried and failed to connect directly to her implant. He shouted her name and searched again.

  The faintest sense of Cat permeated everything in the net. He called once more, online and off. He used his Institute access to instantiate a priority search, filtering out across all nodes, replicating at each junction, branching a thousand times, going deeper, wider. The query went out, nothing returned. He drew his hand back, hesitated, then slapped her face. No reaction. “Help me, Mike!”