The Last Firewall (26 page)

“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

A
DAM 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

C
AT 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.

Sure, lots of old folks who came to Tucson to retire wouldn’t have implants, nor would little kids. People living on the economic fringe couldn’t afford them. Still, between University students and mainstream adults, there should be at least a quarter million people on the net.

She returned her attention to the physical world. A few cars drove the otherwise empty streets. Somehow Tucson turned into a ghost town. Where was everyone?

She was still musing when she overlaid her view of the net and the real world and spotted six white lines of AI travel intention converging on the hotel. One of her first unusual abilities, she didn’t need to do anything special to receive and interpret the messages that autonomous vehicles broadcast to other AI. It was a routine protocol, but in this case it triggered warning bells. With so few people, cars, or bots in the city, why would multiple AI converge on her location?

She inspected the simulacrum of herself in the hotel room. It still held steady, showing her meditating, just a slight intentional leakage of her unique electronic signature.

On a hunch she swept over the city, finding a second set of lines converging on a point ten miles north of Tucson. Something was going on.

Her gut said to get out. Adam always came alone, and something must have changed for so many robots to arrive at once. She traced the trails back to their sources and found a handful of bots from the military base and two medical androids from the university. Her hands twitched; she had less than three minutes before they arrived. This was not good.

She switched to the other group, tracing the northbound AI back to their sources. More military units, all headed toward the emergency exit of the Continental. Why wouldn’t the first response be emergency services?

With a moment’s reflection, she realized Adam was threatened by the train’s arrival. If she wanted to get to the root of what Adam was, she needed to know what he feared.

Decision made, she dashed for the doorway and raced downstairs, taking the side exit rather than go through the lobby. Out on the street, she ran north and west, away from the approaching bots. She shied away from the larger downtown buildings, which would have more cameras and security, and headed across the railroad tracks on Seventh Avenue.

The intense heat and sun baked her, while the arid desert air wicked away moisture as fast as her body could generate it, clothes staying dry despite the sweat pouring down.

Two blocks north of the tracks she found an old white sedan, a granny car, behind a house on the corner of Fifth Street and Seventh. She unlocked the doors with a thought and slid behind the steering wheel. She spent a minute massaging the car’s algorithms and the vehicle transmitter stayed silent when the electric motor whined to life.

She needed to hurry. She told the car to accelerate, speeding west on Speedway, then turning onto I-5 with a squeal of tires. The old sedan reached a hundred and twenty and hiccupped. She cursed as the vehicle slowed, the charge meter dipping to zero as the worn out capacitor died under the excessive load.

She got out, slamming the door. Scanning nearby for something new, fast, and fully charged, she found a Rally Fighter X. Perfect. She hijacked the car’s computer, had it meet her on the highway.

She checked back to the Hotel Congress through the net; less than a minute until the bots Adam sent arrived. She took a few moments to weave a diversion she hoped would delay them.

With a screech of tires and smoke, the Rally Fighter slammed to a halt next to her, the door swinging up. She jumped in, the car pulling away as soon as her center of mass cleared the doorway. Acceleration forced her hard into the seat as the speedometer curved smoothly upwards. She hit a hundred and eighty racing toward the train exit in Marana, twenty-five miles and eight minutes away.

51