The Last Firewall (36 page)

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

A
DAM WATCHED
C
AT,
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 signal 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

S
OMEHOW, 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 of 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!”

Mike sank down next to him. He concentrated, and Leon was surprised that he could see wispy threads emanating from Mike. A moment later, Mike shook his head. “She’s not there.”

Leon remembered how he’d woken in the clubhouse, with Cat’s hands on him, praying or meditating over him. He sat like she had, laying one hand on Cat’s forehead and one on her abdomen. He closed his eyes, took slow breaths. He called Cat back to him.

80

I
FLITTED ABOUT FOR A WHILE
,
checking nodes to make sure no trace of Adam existed. When I had checked every processor, router, and mesh node inside Tucson, I peeled open Adam’s firewall and looked outside.

My mind reeled at the impossibly rich vista, refusing to synchronize for a moment, until my perspective slowly slid into place. I found Phoenix to the north. Not only the city, but every building, computer node and router, every person with an implant, each a twinkling pixel that together built an image. I somehow grasped the grosser points, the outline of the urban boundary, highways, city blocks, even as I held the inner details too: buildings, people, the hardwired connections. Woven through all, the intent of the AI, colored borders indicating where the robots were going, who they would interact with, their level of certainty. And something new, too: fainter lines surrounding the humans, who radiated intention as well, like the AI, but at a resolution I’d never been able to interpret before.