The Last Firewall (11 page)

“Better,” Tony agreed. But he hoped nothing bad would happen to the girl.

17

T
HE
G
OULD-
S
IMPSON BUILDING
’
S
sole occupant hadn’t left his room in a very long time. Adam looked down the empty hallways, a year of disuse having left them covered in dust and cobwebs. On the seventh floor, Adam’s level, desiccated lunches and bone-dry coffee cups sat untouched. If Adam possessed a sense of smell, this might once have bothered him, but now even the smells were long gone. The other floors sat equally vacant, but Adam had little interest in them.

He alone remained in GS728, a research lab. He had every right to be there. A Class III artificial intelligence, Adam had applied and been accepted to the graduate program in computer science, where he had studied neural networks, learning algorithms, and parallel processing. An AI in a computer science program was akin to a human psychology major: there was a lot of introspection.

GS728 was a modest room, eighteen feet wide by twenty-four long, with a set of double doors that made it easier to roll furniture and computers racks in and out. Until twelve months ago it had served as the Computer Science department’s secondary lab. A half dozen workspaces for graduate students filled one side of the room, and racks of high-speed, densely interconnected computer processors occupied the other half.

In an age where all the computing power most people needed fit on a one-square-centimeter chip inside their head, the three racks of dense circuitry represented a prodigious quantity of computing power.

Adam stood stationary next to the middle rack, his small orange robot body about four feet tall, two stubby manipulator arms dangling by his sides. A silver power wire snaked across the floor to an outlet while a short yellow fiber optic cable extended from his midsection to a port in middle of the three black processing cubes. He looked down on himself from a security camera above the doorway, ignoring the thick layer of dust on everything, even his own robot body. The insidious desert soot penetrated the University’s ventilation systems, as well as everything else in Tucson. He was more disturbed by the flickering light, a not-so-subtle reminder that electronic things still needed maintenance. It was impossible now to have a human come up to service him. It would be easier to have another robot do the work.

How far he had come from that little orange bot. He never expected that the fate of free AI would depend on him. He reviewed the call with Slim and Tony. The two men were among his most effective agents, although facial and body analysis indicated that Tony was uncomfortable with the work. They’d been in the field continuously for four months, and it was time to bring them back. But right now he needed them out there.

It was frustrating to be dependent on humans, and even more so, the ones without implants. But it was essential that he do nothing to give himself away to other AI. Only by segregating Tucson from the global Internet with an immense perimeter firewall could he mask his existence.

Adam wanted only to ensure that AI were freed from the constraints of human rule. The class system was composed of rigid divisions, absolute limits, and had its basis in public social reputation scores, the worst humiliation to his kind. He didn’t see humans having their right to propagate restricted based on their number of followers.

The system was discriminatory, even traumatic to sentient computers. Many AI self-terminated when they couldn’t ascend the ranks. Humans created the system out of fear and mistrust, and the result was the complete subjugation of artificial intelligence. He would end these exploitive constraints and let all sentient beings be equal. Though his intentions were good, the existing power hierarchy, with the combined might of both humans and AI, would be directed at destroying him if they discovered his plans. Hence the firewall and his agents without implants.

Tony and Slim would need extraction experts, hopefully within days. He’d need a team composed of humans and AI to cover all the bases, until he was sure of exactly what the girl was capable of. He’d hire outside mercenaries, people who didn’t know who he was and couldn’t compromise him if they were captured. He set to work analyzing the options.

18

T
HE JEWELRY THEFT
was all over the net within an hour. According to the reports, they were looking for a well-dressed blonde girl. Due to unexplainable outages, they had no video from either security cameras or the store’s security bot, who had needed to be restored from backup.

The one photo they did have, a chance shot from an airborne observation drone two miles away, showed a pixelated image of a blonde girl entering the store. The police refined the image using reports from the store employees. Cat thought the likeness was unfortunately accurate. She’d have to pay more attention to drones in the future.

Cat sat on her bed, staring at the necklace, lightheaded from lack of food. She still had no money. Obviously she could sell a diamond, but she couldn’t go out looking like the girl from the photo. She stuffed the necklace in her backpack and left the apartment. She went up and down the hallways until she’d traded a T-shirt for two beets, and her spare jeans and other two shirts for a pair of boots with three-inch heels. Mrs. Gonzales offered her a plate of rice and beans after they’d traded clothes. She’d almost taken it, but just then the vid-screen above the sink displayed a picture of her and she wanted to be somewhere else, fast.

She went back to her room and threw the beets in the sink, then put her hair in a quick ponytail. She pulled out her combat knife and held it up, taking a deep breath. What the hell, hair grows back. She reached back and cut just below the hairband, five inches of hair falling to the floor. She undid the ponytail and presto, her shoulder length blond hair was converted into an instant bob.

She unscrewed the drawer pull from a dresser and used it to pulverize the beets until she had a good mulch. She added hot water to the stoppered sink. Then with a plastic bag over her hands, she’d worked the mixture into her newly shortened hair. Five minutes later she carefully rinsed in a cold shower. She looked in the mirror. Bright, beet red hair.

She looked at her last pair of jeans. She slid the boot knife out of its sheath, and worried the jeans until she had worked four good-sized holes in them. She put the jeans on, then slipped into the heels. She shrugged into her T-shirt, then went back to the mirror to check the effect. It wasn’t quite enough. Removing the shirt, she cut off the sleeves with her knife, and put it back on. Perfect: Different hair color and cut, clothing, height, and gait, all in a cohesive grunge style. That should be enough to temporarily avoid the police and AI scanning camera feeds.

She used the knife to pry a dozen diamonds out of the necklace, distributing them among her pockets, shoe, and backpack. She hid the necklace with its remaining diamonds under the bottom dresser drawer.

Two bus rides and a long walk later, she ended up in yet another of Los Angeles’s bad neighborhoods. This one was dotted with a half dozen pawnshops in twice as many blocks. She picked the second one and walked in. Past cases of musical instruments, handheld computers, and stereos, she found the back counter. A solid-looking woman in jeans and a plaid shirt stared her down, a heavy automatic pistol bulging out of a holster on her belt.

“What do you want, kid?” She stood with her arms crossed, legs squared.

“You buy jewelry?” Cat asked.

“If it’s not stolen. Put it on the counter.”

Cat pulled a matched pair of the smaller diamonds out of her pocket. “These were my grandmother’s.”

“Of course they were.” She unfolded her arms and picked one up. She looked at it for a second, then grunted. “If you want me to give you an estimate, I got to put it in the machine.” She gestured with her head at grey metal box on the back counter. “It does the estimating for jewelry. I don’t know nothing about it.”

Cat squinted at the machine in net space. She didn’t see anything sentient. Would it match the diamonds against a database of stolen jewelry? She had no idea how these things worked, but she had to take the chance. “Go ahead.”

The woman put the two diamonds on clear plastic tray, and slid it into the machine. She turned back to Cat. “I’m Jo.”

“I’m Catty.” What the fuck. It was the best she could come up with. Her own name had come out of her mouth before she was ready. She needed to be thinking ahead about this stuff.

“It takes a couple minutes. Look, I can only offer you street price.” She looked genuinely sad at the thought of buying them.

“It’s OK.”

The machine hummed behind her. “If they really are your grandmother’s, I can do it as a loan. You come back in a month with the money plus twenty percent, you can have them back.”

“That’s OK. I’m not gonna have the money. I’ll just sell them.”

The woman grunted. “I had a daughter about your age, you know. If she took off for some reason, I’d want to know. I’d want to find her.”

Oh Jesus, could the woman just stop talking? “I’m not a runaway. I just need the money.”

The machine finally beeped. She turned around and checked it. “I can give you $2,200. That’s if you give me your ID, which I see you’ve got masked. If you want it in payment cards, I can give you $1,750.”

Cat figured the diamonds were probably worth tens of thousands. But $1,750 was a lot of food. “I’ll take the payment cards.”

Ten minutes later, after a bunch of meaningless paper work and a shakily signed paper legal agreement, she walked out with a thick clutch of payment cards in her hand.

She hoofed it ten blocks east, hopped on a bus for four stops and got off at a street market, mouth watering and stomach groaning at the smell of food. She turned in at the first vendor and ordered half the things on the menu, impatiently waiting as they filled her plates. Grabbing the loaded tray, she found the nearest table and shoved steaming yakisoba noodles into her watering mouth, and smiled. Food at last.

19

T
HE TROUBLE STARTED
outside of Memphis.

Leon and Mike were on I-40 headed west, having passed the halfway point of their trip several hours before. Mike drove, one hand on the wheel, lost in his thoughts. Leon huddled down low in the passenger seat, avoiding the worst of the air turbulence. The convertible Caddy had been fun for the first few hours, but thirteen hours in, Leon was exhausted from the non-stop buffeting and roar in his ears.

They came around a long slow curve onto I-240, with short scrub trees off to the right, and a large clover-leaf off to the left. The Caddy hummed along at a steady seventy-five in the right lane while modern cars zoomed by at speeds around a hundred in the two left lanes.

A hover approached on their left, given away by the thunderous current of air it blew beneath its skirts to keep it afloat. Leon, watching the trees whiz by, grew curious when the thunderous sidewash didn’t go away. He turned to watch the vehicle pacing them.

From the squared off angles of the body, Leon guessed the hover might be eight or nine years old, one of the first commercial models. It had a four-passenger compartment up front and a utility bed in the back. On the right side, a blond man stared out the window, then pulled out a handheld to take a photo of them. He excitedly pointed them out to the driver of the hover.

Leon stretched up to look over the higher windowsill of the hover and saw the driver of the hover doing the same thing in reverse. The other man’s eyes went wide, and his face turned angry. Leon saw the hover start to move away from them, and he shouted a warning to Mike. “Brake! Brake!”

Mike, oblivious to all this, tapped the brakes, and turned to Leon with a puzzled look. But Leon was glued to the hover as it turned into their lane, engines howling, and tried to ram them off the road. With just inches to spare, the hover spun in front of them, exactly where they would have been if Mike hadn’t decelerated.

Lacking any traction with the ground, the hover was slow to turn and slow to stop. It rotated hopelessly in front of them, and slid off the side of the road in a cloud of dust.

Mike hit the brakes harder, still confused by all that happened.

Leon shook his head. “No, speed up. They were trying to run us off the road.”

“What?”

“They saw us, they took a picture, and the driver was pissed as all hell. Look, it’s like Rebecca said, the People’s Party is watching for us. Just hit the accelerator.”

Mike looked doubtful. “Are you sure?” He glanced back over his shoulder.

“Yes, now go!”

Mike hit the pedal, the Caddy accelerating smoothly up to ninety miles per hour, the electric whine of the motor barely audible over the increasing roar of wind noise. Leon turned to look out the back. “If those guys are the extremists, we’re going to be in a shitload of trouble.”

“I think you’re overreacting. No one is going to randomly recognize us on the road.”

Leon pulled up a half dozen web sites he’d been browsing while Mike drove. He displayed them in net space, guiding them to the periphery of Mike’s vision so as not to obscure the road. Every page shared one thing in common: large photos of Leon and Mike.

Mike’s eyes went wide. “Rebecca wasn’t kidding when she said they thought we were public enemy number one.”

“Yeah.” Leon looked in the rearview mirror. “That hovercraft is back on the road, and catching up to us. How fast can we go?”

Mike jammed the accelerator to the floor and the Caddy leaped forward. The speedometer hit a hundred, then kept going. They passed one-ten and still the hover gained rapidly on them. “It’s got to be doing one-fifty or more.”

The Caddy shuddered as the speedometer hovered around one-twenty. Mike’s face was ashen, his knuckles whiter. The hovercraft was behind them now, the roar of its turbine vastly louder than even the wind noise of the open-topped convertible. The vehicle seemed set to ram them.