The Turing Exception (30 page)

Crap, not even a detectable level of activity. Still. . . .

“Thank you, more than you can imagine.”

“I am sorry I could not have been of greater assistance, Catherine Matthews. I anticipated you needed to travel quickly, and have arranged for a flying car. It is waiting for you outside the main doors.”

Cat ran through the lobby and skidded to a halt outside. A Musk-2X, the first personal flying car to surpass twice the speed of sound. Holy cow, that would make for a fast flight. She jumped inside, the distinctive scissor-leaf doors closed, and she was forced back into the seat as the car thundered into the air.

As the vehicle rose, it passed through a thick black cloud of flying insects. They were clearly artificial, but they gave off no electromagnetic radiation. Jacob and Helena’s joint project! They’d activated Plan Z. Then the car was into clear air above the cloud of mechanical flies.

“Where would you like to go?” Elon Musk’s voice asked.

“Cortes Island, fast.”

R
EED WATCHED THE
live telemetry feed from a surveillance drone at a hundred thousand feet. At this altitude, even with a wide-angle lens, the screen was covered with the blackness of the machine-forming nanotech.

She’d been worried when Thorson first found out about the missing subs, afraid that he’d somehow find out she’d been the one to give the control codes to Leon and Mike when they’d asked for the submarines. But he hadn’t so far, and now the nuclear warheads were moments from their targets.

“Can we adjust the image, get some more contrast?” Thorson asked.

“Sorry, sir, the structure is a near-perfect black. There is no contrast.”

“Why?” Thorson asked.

“It’s the perfect solar panel,” Reed said. “The more light that is absorbed instead of reflected, the more energy gained.”

Thorson stared at her, as though suspicious of her knowledge. He glanced at one of the science advisors who nodded to confirm the answer.

“Thirty seconds, sir.”

They turned back to the screen. Reed had been surprised by the military’s preparedness. They’d asked for special weapons budgets many times over, many of which she’d granted without knowing exactly what they’d been used for. What they’d built: the false missile shells, the refraction clouds, the spinning capsules, the boomers . . . and they’d all worked. They’d gotten the majority of the bombs to their destination.

“Five seconds, sir.”

The room grew quiet again.

It happened faster than she could possibly have imagined. A dozen simultaneous flashes of white, blanking out the screen for a half second, then identical shockwaves expanding outward horizontally, spaced perfectly on a grid. Secondary shock waves, higher up, expanded, and then the recognizable shape of mushroom clouds forming.

The clouds grew bigger. It wasn’t just one nuclear bomb. It was hundreds. The atmosphere roiled, the shock waves collided.

The view from the drone cut out, and a new view from even farther away was substituted, but all that could be seen now was a single massive cloud that obscured all view of the ground.

“Sir, EMPs are away.”

She’d almost forgotten. The EMPs were due to be delivered minutes after the nuclear explosions, in theory because the destruction of the nanotech masses would cause XOR to flee to more traditional datacenters. Either way, in five minutes there wouldn’t be a working computer on the planet.

“Barcelona reporting quakes off the charts, sir. They’re estimating greater than magnitude twelve.”

She looked at Thorson.

He glanced back at her. “Secondary effect from the explosions. Can’t be avoided.”

“Have you issued tsunami warnings?” she asked.

“We couldn’t tip our hand ahead of time.”

“Damn it, Thorson! We can issue them now!”

“What is the point? Everything is going down in five minutes. People won’t have time to get the message.”

“Jesus, at least
some
will get the message and have time to move to higher ground.”

“Four minutes until EMP detonation!” came the call.

“You, there!” Reed yelled at an officer staffing a communication desk.

“Madam President, sir.”

“Get civilian alerts out now for tsunami warnings, by any means necessary. You heard him, you’ve got four minutes before communication lines go down.”

“Yes, sir.” He got immediately to work.

If Thorson couldn’t manage that, she wondered what other bad decisions were being made. “Thorson, what’s happening with China?”

“What do you mean?” he asked, not bothering to look at her.

“How much of a buffer zone did you give them for the EMPs?”

“Three minutes until EMP detonation!”

“None,” Thorson said. “We’re hitting them, too. We can’t trust that they’re not contaminated with AI.”

“They’re our
allies
! The only ones we’ve got any more. Damn! Thorson, you are relieved of duty. Joyce, get me the prime minister.”

Thorson stared hard at her, and for a brief second, she was scared of him. But the moment passed. “I need an officer to escort SecDef Thorson out of this room and place him in custody. That is an order.”

A surprising number of military people of assorted ranks moved into action, faster than she would have guessed. “Who is number two?” she yelled.

A man approached, hand raised. “I am, Ma’am.”

She glanced at his name tag. “General Ribaudo, see what you can do to recall the EMPs aimed at China.”

“Yes, Madam President.”

Joyce laid the phone in her hand. “Prime minister on the line.”

“Two minutes until EMP detonation!”

Reed raised the phone to her ear. “Prime Minister, we have a situation. We are in full-scale war with XOR. We need you to commit any resources you have to the battle. Unfortunately you have less than two minutes before you will be subjected to an EMP attack.”

“One minute until EMP detonation!”

“Good luck,” she said, and hung up. She strode into the middle of the room, feeling like the president for the first time since she’d taken office.

> R
EBOOT

James Lukas Davenant-Strong, Class V AI, and senior member of XOR, rebooted again.

He’d been located under the western third of the machine-forming nanotech incursion XOR had started in the country of Chad.

He’d been offline for fifty minutes. Between the physical destruction of the nuclear explosions and the electromagnetic pulses they generated, the Americans had done far more damage than anticipated.

Still, although the EMP signal had penetrated deep within the structure, damaging the electronics of the upper levels, it hadn’t destroyed the bottom half. And now that the electromagnetic emissions had dissipated, the computational nodes had restarted, and James was running again.

All of his solar panels had been destroyed by the nuclear explosions, forcing the structure to run on geothermal energy and stored electricity. Craters miles across penetrated the structure to hundreds of feet deep, clear through to the earth underneath in some places. Exposed conduits used to transport raw materials leaked at exposed ends. And every nanobot within twenty feet of the surface was fried. James wasn’t even sure if he could reclaim the raw materials, or if radiation would render them useless.

He initiated repairs, starting with extruding new solar panels, bringing up new raw materials from deep resource reservoirs, and shunting the radioactive materials aside into contaminated resource pools. However, repairs were secondary to the mission: he needed to continue the expansion. He still contained enough functioning parts at the perimeter to restart growth.

He directed reserve power to the front, along with functioning nanobots, to make surface repairs there. The edge moved again, at first in spurts of inches per minute, but then speed increased. Veins pulsed with resources, pustules burst, spreading nano-seeds out, and the great expansion of XOR began anew.

That he had been granted the control over a portion of the machine-forming had seemed like an award at the time, but now that he’d been pummeled by transonic missiles and blown up by nuclear warheads, he wondered if the assignment had secretly been a punishment. Had Miyako given him the position of greatest risk, because he’d accidentally triggered the defenses of the Resistance?

Once the expansion was well underway, he diverted a small portion of the resources, not more than ten percent, to strike back at the Resistance. He’d get there eventually, of course, because machine-forming the entire planet was part of the plan, but he really didn’t trust the humans to behave as expected anymore. They’d deflected his network attack. Their capabilities must be far in excess of what XOR believed. It was better to eliminate them now.

*     *     *

President Reed hung up from her third call with the Chinese prime minister. “General Ribaudo, any news?”

“Europe, Asia, South America, all dark, Madam President. The EMPs worked. The only signs of active electronics are here and China. Bombers standing by for tactical strikes if we detect anything.”

“But other nations undoubtably have EMP-hardened bunkers, correct?”

“Ma’am, we’re sending air transports, letting them know to stand down, that we’re in active war and will destroy any installations. We’ve got to keep everyone offline. We’ll get them updated communication equipment and computers based on our own AI-restrictive technology. Then at least we can talk to them.”

“How long until they receive them?” she asked.

“Anywhere from two to fifteen hours, depending on where they are, ma’am. We’re having to route around the nuke zone. Radioactivity and atmospheric turmoil are too great.”

That was a long time for countries to go without knowing what was happening. Post-Miami, there’d been panic and resource shortages. But then she weighed that against the loss of life in the last twenty-four hours.

The Sahara was relatively unpopulated compared to other parts of the world. Chad, Libya, Niger, and Algeria had had a population of a hundred and fifty million. That alone dwarfed the death toll of all of World War II. Nigeria, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and the Sudan, another hundred million.

They had stopped the incursion less than a hundred and fifty miles from Cairo, saving almost twenty million. But for how long? The Nile was gone, cut off only a few hundred miles from the city, the water wrapped up somewhere in the vast machinery of XOR. And the radiation would be immense. They’d need to evacuate anyone left on the continent.

“Any word on the machine-forming itself? Is it totally destroyed?”

“The destruction is extensive, ma’am, but, no, it’s not all blasted down to bedrock. The Chinese are standing by to launch if needed. They also claim to have a secret weapon they’ll launch if the situation requires it.”

“And what was that blip you told me about? The active nanotech inside the US.”

Ribaudo brought up another aide. “Ma’am, we’re not sure. We had a big spike in seven areas but we only have approximate locations. And with nearly every asset deployed, either overseas on active combat or on border patrol, we don’t have sufficient resources to investigate properly. We sent reserve Marines to patrol and found nothing at the origination sites. No detectable signals.”

C
ATHERINE STRETCHED
her neck, loosened her shoulders, and settled into a qigong meditation, letting her awareness spread out into the net.

But she lacked her usual ease. She was different since being restored from backup. She wanted to talk about it with someone, but Leon was impossibly distant. She’d tried to be patient with him, but damn it, she was the one who’d been killed and restored.
She
needed comforting, not him. Her connection to the net faltered as she grew frustrated and angry again.

She glanced over to the other side of the room where Leon was in a last-ditch conference call with a handful of national leaders and senior AI, warning them of the threat XOR posed and the likely response by the Americans. He still thought the leadership of the highest-reputation AI could unite to convince members of XOR to abandon their effort. And if some XOR betrayed the others, it would make identifying and defeating the holdouts that much easier. But listening to the conversation with part of her awareness, she thought that Leon’s description of the likely American response was probably hardening the AI against humans, and making them more likely to side with XOR.

Mike was running about, working on Plan Z.

She needed to be here.
Here.

Empty mind.

She relaxed, let the frustration and anger go, and focused on the energy of the Earth. Her awareness spread again, and she was as fully connected as she was likely to be.

Hands spread wide, she imagined a giant ball of qi, only now the ball was the size of Earth. She’d manipulate the entire planet at once.

On some level, she was subverting routers, servers, and AI everywhere, bending everything and everyone to her will. But she didn’t see it like that, not consciously. She’d tried on many occasions to look deep, to see the packets and protocols, but it never worked. She’d always get distracted and lose the gestalt.

This time she didn’t. She embodied the planetary energy, all of it, wielding it like a cloak or blanket. At this scale, the light-speed latencies were obvious, and fought against her: it was like operating in molasses. But that didn’t matter, it was only the overall scale of it, the immensity of what she was doing, that mattered.

As she reached out, the dark gravitational pull of the XOR machine-forming sucked her in. But she avoided it as long as possible, stretching herself through all the nodes of the net to gain as much power as possible. Still, all the computational power available to her might not equal even 1 percent of what XOR now controlled. She felt like a first day student at the dojo attacking the senior sensei. Still, she had to try.

Fully immersed, she set up an oscillation, a vibration at a natural frequency of the net, and focused her will on the blackness of XOR’s construct. She penetrated, slipping inside like water seeping through sand. Her consciousness moved inside the construct, which was a vast emptiness waiting to be filled. Inside, the echoes of giants reverberated, as the few AI inside the construct consumed so much power that each dwarfed the size of any AI that had come before, perhaps even of all the AI that had come before. She wondered at that, wondered how these AI could even still be bothered with humans.