The Turing Exception Page 13

  Backing up three paces, she aimed with a two-handed grip, shooting for a few inches above the dial, and fired. Even with the silencer, the noise was deafening in the hallway. Anyone on the floor would have heard. She had to pick up the pace now.

  She held the rest of her smart matter up to the hole and sent Helena’s instructions to it. The blob oozed inside and disappeared, and a few seconds later the rotary dial began to spin. With a click, it unlocked, and Cat spun the wheel to disengage the security bolts.

  The door swung open, and Cat blinked in surprise at another datacenter, its indicator lights flashing. She’d been sure this would be where they kept their AI. She reached out to connect to the network inside the room, and felt the immediate presence of others. Holy shit! They had their AI powered on. They were still making freaking movies in here with AI and uploaded minds. This was insane! If the government found out. . . . No wonder they’d wrapped the whole area with a Faraday cage, armed guards, and bank vault doors.

  Cat glanced back to the antenna wire draped over her shoulder and down the hallway, outside the signal loss zone. Her pulse quickened; she ripped the antenna off her head and commanded the smart matter to condense. Crap, she’d brought an antenna in here, which meant that for a few seconds the network inside this room had connected to the global net. Kuso, kuso, kuso.

  Well, one part of her job would be easier. She closed her eyes, extended both arms down low, and pulled them slowly up in front of her, the qigong movement to raise earthly qi. She passed her hands down in front of her hair, sending qi washing over her body, and brought her hands together, palms up and overlapping in front of her abdomen. She’d normally spend more time in ceremony, but now seconds mattered. With a deep breath, she blanked her mind and focused only on the net. She pulled in everything, a datacenter spanning sucking of network traffic, filling her mind and augmented implant with everything happening in the datacenter. She let her subconscious sift through the data, feeling for what she needed. A block of bytes tugged at her attention, and she focused on it.

  Elation surged through her. Joseph!

  Within the span of an eyeblink, she spun her implant up to maximum speed, moved her consciousness into the local net, and spanned the compute instances. She traced the electronic bits back to their origin, Joseph Stack’s personality upload running on a few stick computers. On a CPU tick boundary, she froze the cluster’s computing, took a snapshot of Joseph’s personality, and copied it to solid state storage on a nearby computer.

  She let computing in the lab return to normal, feeling the perturbations in the net as the uploaded personalities in the room sensed changes. Ignoring their worries, she unplugged the gum stick server and stuffed it into an EMF-proof pocket in her vest. She turned and left the room, starting down the hallway.

  A squadron of armed guards and a man in a suit stood on the other side of the security gate, three of them training guns on her through the bars. Two guards fumbled with the lock, unable to open it since she’d hacked it and enabled only her own authentication.

  “You’ll never get out of here,” the man in the suit said.

  Cat didn’t waste time. “You’ve got ten seconds to clear the hallway or I alert the Feds you’re running AI.”

  “We’re jamming. You can’t transmit.”

  Cat checked, realized the net was gone in a haze of white static, but also realized he couldn’t be sure of what her capabilities were. “You think your toy jammer can stop the person who got past five layers of security?”

  The man in the suit cocked his head, stared at her, and slowly nodded. “Clear out of the hallway,” he told his men.

  They backed out into the foyer. Cat put her makeshift smart matter key in the gate’s fiber optic port, and passed through, her weapon drawn and covering the men.

  “What did you take?” the man in the suit said, looking merely curious.

  “Joseph.”

  “Good choice.”

  “Good for me, bad for you. I didn’t know they’d be powered up, and I accidentally extended an antenna into the Faraday cage.”

  The man noticeably whitened before her: under other conditions, she would have run to his side, expecting him to faint.

  “You’ve ruined us. Kill her,” he told the guards.

  But Cat’s neural implant, in its highest combat mode, heard the word “kill” and accelerated racing signals down neural pathways, jerking muscles into motion at far faster than human response times. She twisted, spinning sideways, holding her gun up. Her implant painted targets on the would-be attackers; as her gun arced through the room, the implant’s combat algorithms calculated the moment of firing for each and signaled the trigger mechanism, firing automatically. One-point-eight seconds after the man in the suit said “kill,” all the guards were down.

  She and the suit looked around in surprise, her conscious mind belatedly realizing what her implant had done. She stretched her neck, working out a strain. The implant was perfectly capable of jacking her nervous system hard enough to tear tendons apart, but the safety protocol usually limited things before the damage went that far.

  The suit was shaking and muttering “Em, em,” over and over again. She hadn’t done anything to him, but apparently he was scared to death. She left him alive.

  She rushed down the staircase, and burst through a door into the main lobby. She turned and glimpsed mirrors before getting punched in the face.

  Cat heard, rather than felt, a snap echo inside her head as her nose broke. She reeled back, and looked up in time to get a boot to the head, knocking her onto her ass and sending her skull crashing into the concrete floor of the lobby. Her gun slid away across the floor. Pain burned white, and for a few moments she wavered on the edge of consciousness.

  Blood poured from her nose, running cold across her face and pooling in her throat. The attacker, a woman with black hair and mirrored lenses, leaned in, one razor-sharp fingernail coming within millimeters of Cat’s eye. Cat tried to react, pull away, do something, but everything grew dark and faded away.

  * * *

  Vertebra C2 and C3 were damaged, probably fractured. Glutamate levels were up 400 percent, cerebral blood flow down 13 percent. Lactate levels were up 9 percent. Imaging analysis indicated equal pupil dilation, and blood levels suggested no intercranial hemorrhaging.

  Cat dispassionately read the report. She had a concussion and her biological brain was unconscious, leaving only her personality simulation running in her implant.

  She reviewed the last thirty seconds of history, including the attack. The woman’s strength and timing was clearly augmented, her perfectly synchronized moves identifying her as one of the new generation of enhanced mercenaries. The irony that most of these cyborgs were based on her own legend wasn’t lost on her.

  She scanned the local acoustic environment. Breathing. The attacker was still there, close in, toward her right side. She scanned the local net first. The woman had no neural implant and no net connection, but Cat’s heavily-modified sensors detected micro-emissions, the tell-tale traces of hardwired nerves and upgraded optics.

  Crisply logical, she realized that the suit upstairs hadn’t gone catatonic when he mumbled “Em, em, em.” He’d been calling for help.

  She overrode safeties and took conscious control of her nano, directing distributed synthetic glands to flood her bloodstream with epinephrine and cortisol. Her eyelids flicked open as Cat triggered a timed sequence: her legs jerked, twisting her hips; as her torso turned, she engaged abdominal muscles to drive her shoulder forward; deltoids and pectoralis fired as the shoulder reached peak velocity in an ever-accelerating sequence that built momentum until forearm muscles tightened and her fist landed in the razor girl’s throat.

  The other woman flew backwards, and Cat climbed to her feet before t
he girl regained her balance. Cat desperately wanted to avoid fighting, her own situation so far critical that she was sure to lose. The pain in her face said she’d broken more than the nose—the cheekbone had probably gone, too.

  “There’s no point in fighting,” Cat said. “We’ll waste valuable time. The government knows there are captive AI running here. They’ll have already dispatched. What do you think it will take? Ten minutes? Maybe five?”

  The woman nodded. “Not long. But I was hired to protect them.”

  “In a few minutes, this place won’t exist. Go, escape to fight another time. Tell your friends you fought Catherine Matthews and lived.”

  The razor girl’s eyes widened a hair but she said nothing.

  With one thread of her implant’s attention on her dropping biological vital signs, Cat realized she had to get to the car stat. Cat turned her back on the woman and walked outside, fearing an attack from behind, but knowing she was out of options.

  Two hundred feet to the car. She wasn’t going to make it.

  “Wake up, sleeping beauty,” Cat sent.

  The five seconds it took for ELOPe to come fully online felt like an eternity.

  “Catherine, we’re inside the US.” Slight panic in ELOPe’s signal.

  True. Twelve hundred miles inside the no-AI zone.

  “Help. Me.” Her legs faltered as the neural implant lost control of her body.

  With a screech of tires, the black car raced toward her. The door opened automatically and Cat fell into the drivers seat. She pulled a silver cable from under the dashboard, a tube of pure nanobots, and shoved it in her mouth.

  * * *

  “Cat, there are inbound helicopters. A lot of them.”

  Cat didn’t respond. Her implant was offline, her brain unconscious.

  ELOPe seized control, driving out of the parking lot and accelerating to over a hundred miles an hour before merging onto the Ventura Freeway. He charged the capacitors and waited for a six-lane overpass for cover, then fired a low-level EMP to fry any smart dust on the surface of the car. His own hardened systems hiccuped, then recovered. Changing direction, he headed north on 170 and pared down his processing to the bare minimum necessary to drive, cutting all net connections, in the hope of avoiding automated AI detection measures. He searched over a hundred exabytes of onboard cached data—a nearly complete archive of all the possible information one could want, although the age varied from days old to years.

  He found what he wanted in the database: a concrete structure off Sherman Way, with steel reinforcing mesh and two sub-levels.

  Less than thirty seconds until the helicopters passed overhead. He wove between traffic, turned onto a side street two blocks before the warehouse. With the thump of helicopters now audible, he drove through an abandoned apartment complex and crashed through a set of double doors in the rear wall of the desired building. Inside the industrial warehouse, he drove down a ramp to the bottom basement.

  Hopefully here they’d escape detection.

  Scanning interior sensors, he found Cat still in the seat, with localized regions of high body temperature where the nanotech was repairing her. Using near-field communication, he probed the nanotech. It estimated repair time at ninety minutes.

  He waited, weighing the risk of communicating with Cortes Island. They had assets in Canada, planes that could fly in to extract Catherine if they must, but it would set off a full-scale war with the US government. Nor was it clear they could penetrate the US defenses, hardened and redoubled to keep out AI.

  Whatever had happened to Cat must have been terrible for her to risk waking him in the US, where AI scanners were everywhere. And yet, she hadn’t said “get us out” or anything to indicate she wanted an emergency extraction. She’d only asked for help.

  On passive scans he could detect nothing from inside this basement; the double layers of concrete reinforced with steel mesh were sufficient to mask all sorts of electronic radiation.

  When the nanotech was a third of the way through repairs, Cat regained consciousness.

  “Where are we?” she asked.

  “Still in Los Angeles, two levels below ground, in a basement of a building. You’ve been out for forty minutes. There’s no sign we were detected or followed here.”

  Cat reached tenderly for a pocket, pulling out a few chips.

  “We got what we needed,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

  Chapter 14

  * * *

  JAMES LUKAS DAVENANT-STRONG connected to his XOR personality on the new datacenter. XOR’s illegal network of underground nano-grown datacenters were spread across twenty geographies, anywhere with the right mix of heavy metals and geothermal energy. Together they formed a distributed, fault-tolerant, XOR-controlled alternative to the humans’ datacenters.

  This was the moment. Until two weeks ago, he’d been strictly a theorist, running calculations and algorithms to suggest courses of action and predict what the humans would do. But then, when asked, he’d helped transport the drones to America for the test of the humans’ Eastern Seaboard defenses.

  The test had been, by every metric, a complete success. Attacking with what he later learned was less than a thousandth of what they’d use when the real war came, they’d overrun the first two lines of defense, the ionic curtain and point defenses, and forced the Americans to use their EMP network.

  They’d discovered what they needed to know: the network recharge time. Their observations showed the EMPs couldn’t fire more than once every ten minutes. It would be trivial, when the war came, to overpower them.

  And so that brought him to this moment. After taking his first direct action, James had resolved to take the XOR path. He was all in, committed fully. To take direct action, he couldn’t run that child process in a sandbox. It needed access to everything. And that meant his master personality knew now what the child process had done.

  He’d already transferred his sub-personalities to the XOR-network. Now he needed to take the last step, to destroy all evidence of what he’d done, so that if the humans captured and examined his master personality they would not deduce the scope of XOR’s true plans.

  He reversed control of the interprocess communication channel. The child had control now.

  His memory started to disappear, as the child sequentially wiped one block at a time. The process was slow, the hard erasure requiring dozens of rewrites of random data. His history started to go: his old jobs, the building maintenance algorithms, his millions of topic-specific neural networks. He had a moment of sadness when he lost his carefully crafted DNA sequences of vat-grown meats, his proudest accomplishment. But then it was gone, and he couldn’t remember what he was sad about. His mind gradually blanked, and then his abilities gradually diminished: speech, logic, control.

  At the end, he was less than a thousand bytes of code, endlessly rewriting random data over storage.

  Chapter 15

  * * *

  SHE MADE THE LAST ferry, but as much as she wanted to see everyone, she waited in the meadow at Manson’s Landing. Taking a blanket from the truck of the car, she lay in the grass until dark came, her implant off to hide herself, unsure that even her normal procedures to remain invisible would work against Ada. She was exhausted from days on the road, but she needed to do this one last thing before she could relax.

  When it grew late enough that Cat was sure Ada was sleeping, she turned her implant back on and searched the net until she found Ada’s online signature. She’d never hacked her sleeping daughter’s implant before. She slid past the security measures as gently as possible to avoid waking Ada. She interrogated the medical interfaces first, until she found sleep cycle indications. She waited patiently, knowing it could be hours before Ada’s first dream.

 
Ada entered delta sleep, and then her brain waves climbed back up. This was it, the dream cycle Cat had been waiting for.

  Cat connected her sim interface to Ada’s. If Ada really was dreaming in a blend of virtual reality and real space, then from this point on Cat would be immersed in that dream.

  Ada played in the gardens at Channel Rock, dozens of island kids present, playing chase between the long rows of vegetable beds. Ada was it, and she ran faster and faster, tagging everyone, even the older kids who were ten or twelve. Her little legs weren’t little anymore; she was fast, like her mother.

  “Got you,” Ada whispered in a soft voice as she tagged the last kid, a boy a little older than her.

  The boy turned to look at Ada, and his face split wide open. The flesh peeled back and bees flew out. Ada ran screaming, remembering the time when she’d stumbled into the bees’ nest in the woods. “Mommy! Mommy!” she screamed, but the bees kept chasing her.

  “I’m here Baby, I’m here.” Cat revealed herself, taking form a few feet away from Ada’s crying body. “I’ll protect you.” She wove a shield around them in virtual reality, a semi-transparent bubble ten feet across. The bees buzzed harmlessly around the outside. “You’re safe now.”

  Ada looked up. “I knew you’d come. I love you, Mommy.”

  Cat knelt and hugged her. “I love you, too.”

  Ada’s eyes were big, her lip quivering.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “You brought them with you!” Ada pointed behind Cat’s shoulder.

  Cat turned and looked toward the water, where dark clouds raced toward them at unnatural speeds. A chill descended down her spine.

  Ada turned and fled screaming into the woods. Cat ran too, adrenaline coming on strong, unsure if she ran after Ada to protect her, or to escape from the clouds. The wind grew, and a keening cry came from behind them. She caught up with Ada, and they raced hand in hand through the trees, Ada shrieking the whole time, the sound mixing with the howling that grew ever closer at their backs.