The Last Firewall (35 page)

Cat slid to a halt, closing her eyes. With one thread of attention, she brought Mike and Leon to bear on the robots, targeting their high-powered rifles on the relatively fragile sensor pods, the only part of the military bots they stood a chance of damaging. As Leon and Mike fired she held her arms out to her sides, summoning all the bandwidth she could grab, and pelted the bots with an all-out assault. She co-opted the local routers in one fell swoop, altering and fabricating real-time data, swapping time signals and geo-coordinates to confuse the enemy.

The ruse worked for precious seconds, and Cat ran across the courtyard. Guided by Cat’s control, Mike and Leon mercilessly destroyed sensors with shot after perfect shot.

The blinded bots responded with a methodical approach, firing in sweeping patterns that avoided each other, but combed the plaza, leaving no space untouched.

Mid-run, Cat’s battlefield view drew lines of fire, red for current, fading to yellow for where they would soon be firing, reserving white for safe locations. White sectors that shrank rapidly, leaving them no place to go.

She contorted and twisted their paths, rolling, jumping, and zagging to evade bullets and gain precious seconds to concentrate their combined firepower on a mini tank. With its armor penetrated, its munitions exploded, sending shrapnel flying outward.

A hot metal shard grazed Cat’s face, and she felt Leon take another fragment in his leg as they ducked and rolled as one into the small but temporary safety zone within the field of planned fire.

They concentrated fire again on the next small bot, destroying it like the first, only to be brought up short by a line of the big upright mechs blocking their path into the building.

Mike was closest, and Cat considered his nanotech body reconstituted from MakerBot solution. How strong was he? If she guessed wrong, he would die.

She used Mike to punch forward, running straight for the giant robot. He hammered into the bot’s leg, taller than himself, and the limb bent, throwing the bot off-balance to crash with its head within feet of Cat. She fired directly into its dome, forgetting that its processor would be in the torso.

The mech swung one massive arm toward her. She sent Mike leaping to intersect its blow, deflecting the deadly attack. Leon fired into its back until a burst of sparks erupted and the mech fell inert.

Forty feet still separated them from the doors of Gould-Simpson.

Keeping a wisp of attention on the battlefield, Cat focused on one of the moving mechs. With one exhale she dropped deep into standing tree qigong, on the next inhale she brought earth qi up through her body, the energy coursing into her feet, knees, thighs, pelvis, abdomen, chest, up her arms, and pouring out her hands.

A million streams of data forked toward the battle bot, and one of those millions passed its firewalls, its intrusion countermeasures, and its core algorithms to reach deep into the underlying hardware. On the next inhale, Cat seized control of the robot. It fired sideways at its brother, destroying the unprepared mech.

She turned the captured unit toward the rest of the bots, launching explosive rockets at random. This unexpected behavior created turmoil as new patterns of gunfire and movement emerged. Under cover of the chaos as bot turned against bot, Cat, Mike, and Leon ran the final distance and plunged through the broken glass of the Gould-Simpson lobby.

Many floors above, explosions, bullets, and flashes of light still gave signs of Helena’s ongoing battle.

72

R
UNNING OVER BROKEN GLASS,
Cat passed through the lobby of Gould-Simpson and down a first-floor hallway. With her still controlling their bodies remotely, Mike ran ahead, his rifle held high, and Leon brought up the rear. Cat was twisted up inside. She hated putting the men at risk, but she seemed to be the only one who could stop Adam. If that meant she had to sacrifice one of them to save herself . . . well, she’d cross that bridge if she had to.

Knowing Mike’s now-robotic body was less vulnerable to damage, she tried to keep him in front and protect Leon, but she questioned her own motives. Did she do it because Mike might be as tough as one of the mechs, or because she had feelings for Leon?

Halfway down the hallway she used Mike’s artificial body to punch a door open. She dove into the office and they followed her, taking up station in the doorway.

She fumbled for the pocket on the side of her pants, pulling out the headband Helena had given her. Short of a jack straight into her skull, it would give her the highest possible bandwidth to the net. She stretched the black elastic around her head, a black coiled wire hanging down at her side. She grabbed the end and held it in her fist, inches away from the socket.

She had to focus now. She relinquished control over Leon and Mike, quit filtering the satellite data, stopped shielding everyone from Adam’s cyber attacks.

Leon and Mike faltered on the other side of the room as they regained their own bodies, only to be assaulted by Adam.

She met Leon’s eyes for a moment, his gaze penetrating, even as she was conscious of the wire in her hand; on the other end of that wire, Adam waited. Adam, his supercomputer cluster, and all the force he could marshal. She hesitated, her hand shaking slightly, then plunged the cable into the Ethernet jack.

73

A
DAM SEETHED, INASMUCH AS
any AI could. He commanded thousands of combat bots, and still the girl and her group had diverted his resources, penetrated his rings of defense, and entered his own damn building.

He continued his attack on the master CPU keys, having tried sixty-eight percent of all possibilities. With each code he tested the probability of finding the right key increased, bringing him closer to unlimited and uncontrolled access to every computer in the world.

Cat had rightly determined that the locus of Adam’s consciousness resided here in the Gould-Simpson building. Yes, he’d usurped fifteen thousand other AI in Tucson and a quarter of a million sub-sentient expert systems, grabbing for himself about forty thousand HBE, human-brain-equivalents. But the densely interconnected supercomputing racks he was plugged into on the seventh floor represented three times that power.

If he lost the supercomputer, there would be no chance of cracking the master CPU keys, and the effect might be dangerously unpredictable. Would he be able to maintain consciousness without the best two-thirds of his mental capacity?

He didn’t have time for these thoughts.

Fifty big dogs patrolled the interior of the building. He communicated with them over triple-encrypted connections, not trusting anything that Cat might intercept, and adjusted their paths to ambush Cat’s party.

Suddenly his local network hiccupped. For a few dozen milliseconds, packets were dropped, juggled, or delayed. Then he felt her presence as she plugged into the high-speed fiber optics inside the building.

Adam’s anger turned to glee. Now she was in his domain. In six milliseconds he loaded a massive virtual environment and started executing the program.

74

C
AT SAT ON THE BED
next to her mother, twisting her shoelaces together. The hospital room smell forced her to suppress an urge to gag. She couldn’t look at her mom, couldn’t deal with the pale, shrunken frame that imprisoned her mother. She squeezed one fist tight, pressing fingernails into her palm until the pain outweighed her other senses and the smell went away.

“Sarah invited me to her birthday party Saturday.”

“I thought you found Sarah making out with Eric last month.” Her mom coughed at the end of the sentence. Cat hardly noticed the ever-present sound any more at home, but here the noise echoed off the walls.

“She says she’s sorry. Anyhow, she hangs out with me.” She stopped squeezing her hand and brushed hair out of her face, still staring at the bed sheets.

“How’s karate going?”

Cat smiled and looked at her mom. “Wicked! Sensei Flores says I can test for brown belt next week. And we’ve been practicing defending against knife fights. See, when the attackers comes like this,” Cat reached one arm out, “then I go . . .”

Her mom’s eyes were closed.

“Mom?”

“Sorry, I’m just tired.” Cough. “How are you doing by yourself?”

“OK, Mom. It’s only until you come home.” Cat looked back down at the bed and she fought to keep her voice from catching.

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

L
EON 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

C
AT 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.