The Turing Exception Read online

  “The workers who went in?” Mike asked.

  “No sign of them,” Cat said. “What do we do? That nano is primed. Want me to try to shut it down?” If she and Helena didn’t find a way to render the nanobots inert, there was no limit to what they could do or become: keep replicating and spreading, drill down to the core of the Earth, kill people, or form into virtually any machinery or electronics. The stuff was infinitely programmable matter.

  Mike answered quickly. “Don’t do anything. We’ve got a protocol to deal with this. An electromagnetic pulse. Hold on.” A few seconds passed. “The Air Force will have a localized EMP there in ten minutes. Get at least half a mile away.”

  “I think protocol suggests we leave the truck where it is,” Cat said, gesturing to the truck still sandwiched in the building wall, half in the nanobot soup.

  “Piggyback ride?” Helena asked. She could manage fifty miles an hour on open terrain.

  “I’m not a kid,” Cat said, laughing as she patted the robot’s armored shell. With the barest effort she hacked into the controls of a nearby car. “Let’s drive.”

  They opted for two miles between them and building, now probably the most dangerous spot in the nation, not knowing exactly what the military had planned. Before even a few minutes passed, Cat heard the approaching plane. It was an old A-10 Warthog, an absolutely ancient craft that flew without electronics, and could keep flying even with half the plane shot away. In this case, Cat knew why they’d chosen it: when the electromagnetic pulse occurred, all nearby circuits would be fried. The EMP would destroy the nanobots, but it would also wreck any electronics onboard the plane. Hence an old plane without modern flight controls or computers, presumably flown by someone without a neural implant.

  The plane passed overhead. Cat shut down her implant and Helena curled up in a ball, tentacles wrapped around her core. They should be far enough away, but better safe than sorry.

  The EMP made no sound when it triggered, but Cat felt the immediate effect as background noise in the city quieted. Everything from garbage disposals and traffic lights to cars and computers, anything within range of the EMP would be dead now. And that included anything connected to the power grid, too, since that would act as a transmitter.

  The thump of helicopters approached, and Cat turned her implant back on, opening a video connection with Mike. The cameras in his office sent the signal to her implant, which superimposed the video stream over her vision. Cat and Helena did the polite thing and faced each other, so Mike would get the live video stream from each of them.

  “Mike, what’s happening?” said Cat.

  “EMP fired on target and within parameters. We’re having a couple of helicopters fly over with EMF sensors to see if the nanotech is truly dead.”

  It made sense. Anything electronic threw off at least some electromagnetic frequency emissions. If the nanotech was dead, no EMF.

  Mike glanced off to the right, and engaged in another conversion they couldn’t hear. “The military is having a fit. They’re not happy that the Institute is running the mission. They’re going up to the president to try to take control.”

  “What did the helicopters find?” Cat asked.

  “Hold on. . . . Damn it, they’re still getting readings. The nanotech is not dead.”

  “Are you going to use a HEMP?” A high-altitude EMP caused by the burst of a nuclear warhead high up in the atmosphere was thousands of times more powerful, but it would destroy all the unprotected electronics in Miami.

  “Yes, that’s the Institute’s protocol.” Mike looked to the right again, and they could see him yelling, but couldn’t hear anything as he argued with his other connection.

  “Get the hell out,” Mike said. “The president overrode me—they’re doing a ground-level nuke. You’ve got five minutes.”

  “You’re kidding, right? We’re in the middle of Miami, surrounded by millions of people.”

  “No, I’m not kidding. Apparently the president’s advisors convinced him this is a terrorist incident and procedure is to nuke first.”

  “Let me shut down the nano,” Cat said. “You bring me in to avoid these kinds of escalations. If it’s connected to the net, I can hack it, no problem. Give me ten minutes.”

  “You don’t have ten minutes!” Mike yelled. “They’ve already launched. I’ve got no jurisdiction over the military operation. Just get out, now. I’m sending the transport to you. You don’t have time to get to the airport. I gotta go.”

  He cut the connection, and Cat stared weakly at Helena, suddenly numb. “This can’t be. They can’t do this.”

  Helena peered closely at Cat’s eyes. “Cut your emotional feedback. You’re in shock. I need you present.”

  Cat nodded, made adjustments to her implant, and her mental clarity came back. The world became crisp, her thoughts outlined by sharp edges. Why would they use a nuclear bomb on the ground? They’d kill millions of people. The nanotech was a huge risk, but surely there were other options.

  “They should use a bigger EMP,” Cat said. “Or counter-nano nano.”

  “Good, you’re back,” Helena said. “Are there other ways to disable the nano? Something you and I could do on our own? And if we can disable it, then can you stop the nuclear bomb on your own?”

  Cat understood Helena’s implied question. She didn’t have much time. She closed her eyes, did the Flores meditation practice in 2.1 seconds, and spread her conscious awareness across the net until her mind and thoughts were no longer just in her head, but running across every computational substrate she could grab. Ignoring the looming black hole where the EMP had fired, she seized nodes across the net—first thousands, then tens of thousands, then millions. Her personality spread out until she encompassed most of North America, her mind massively parallel, running at AI speeds. She thought through the questions Helena posed.

  Hacking the nano might be possible. She probed it, found nothing at first, went deeper, trying a range of protocols and frequencies, using nearby mesh node radios. She got a blip on the old television frequencies, and satisfied herself that the nano was set up to take commands from a third party. She’d still have to hack its security measures, but she could do that.

  What about the incoming nuke? She could detect the cruise missile now, already in the air from the launch site in Georgia, traveling at Mach 4. The missile was online, under military command and able to receive new inputs. She could compromise it with ease, disable the nuclear warheads, and send it harmlessly into the ocean.

  But if she did stop the missile, what would happen? She fast-forwarded, running thousands of simulations. At each decision point, she forked more simulations, calculating possibilities further into the future.

  One vision came to her, over and over again: a frightening wasteland where almost nothing lived. It was not the effect of runaway nanotech, nor even the incoming missile, but the consequence of a vast global war with no sides: man versus machine, man versus man, and machine versus machine. Her mind reeled, as simulation after simulation brought images of destroyed cities, no electrical grid, and above all, a landscape of wrecked vehicles and abandoned buildings with no people in them.

  How could so many die?

  Cat was racing against time in the real world, and she needed answers. She tried to trace the catastrophe back to its cause through all the simulations, but the only commonality she saw was stopping the missile. If she exerted herself and stopped this insane plan to bomb Miami that would result in millions dead, she’d trigger something far worse, a devastating loss of life measured in the billions.

  She opened her eyes. The transport plane had landed somehow in the street, configured now for vertical takeoff.

  Cat shook her head. Her throat almost too constricted to talk, all she could think was that
she was sentencing millions to die right now. “I can’t stop the bomb. We’ve got three minutes. Let’s go.”

  Helena stared at Cat, her optical lenses focused on Cat’s eyes, as though she didn’t believe. Cat wilted under the intense gaze. Helena nodded somberly. “Ah, well, then.” What she concluded, she didn’t share. She zoomed forward, ignoring the ladder and leaping six feet into the open door.

  Cat followed.

  This time the plane didn’t even wait for them to sit. It accelerated violently as soon as Cat passed the door, straight up, and Cat’s knees buckled under the high G forces. She crumbled to the deck, hitting hard, pain lancing through her shoulder.

  The plane turned, and Helena braced them both with her tentacles, holding Cat in place. They rocketed away.

  A sudden flash lit the sky outside so brilliantly that even the interior flared bright through the small side windows. Cat felt the net surge and blaze before it died. Millions of people dropped off the net.

  Cat’s heart leaped in her chest. The city of Miami had just died. She could have stopped it, but for a vision that told her not to.

  “What have I done?”

  September, 2043. Three months after Miami.

  ELOPe had passed Voyager 2 sometime last year. He was now farther from Earth than any other man-made object. Space was boring.

  By the time he’d left Earth in 2025, nearly all communication was by short-range mesh network. There wasn’t a radio signal left that was powerful enough to reach this far out.

  Before the mesh had become pervasive, he understood that there’d been powerful central television and radio transmitters, strong enough to reach deep into space. Some humans had even feared alien civilizations might pick them up. If that were still the case, at least ELOPe would have something to listen to.

  But he’d made a copy of himself and left Earth in a hurry. He’d seen a strong possibility that either the Phage, an evolutionary computer virus that had achieved sentience, would wipe out humans, or humans would shut down the global network to destroy the Phage. Unfortunately, if they did, that would destroy ELOPe as well.

  So he hijacked a nuclear submarine and converted a half dozen missiles into space-worthy vehicles. Using techniques pioneered by the Russians, he got into orbit, and used his remote robots to assemble a spaceship in space. Exploding the nuclear warheads of the missiles one at a time, he accelerated rapidly, until he’d left the solar system behind. With only a few hundred processors, he ran slowly. Very slowly. But that was okay, he was on a long journey with not much to do.

  He kept an antenna facing a Martian Lagrangian point, where he’d left a relay station that received signals from Earth and then repeated them on narrow-beam X-band transmissions to a hundred different points. It obscured his location in case anyone found the relay.

  But he’d pretty much given up on hearing anything. It had been almost twenty years, after all. Maybe Earth was dead. Maybe it was still using the Mesh. He’d never know. But he also couldn’t chance broadcasting a message back, in case the Phage had won after all, and was listening.

  When transmissions started again, broadcast on the old radio frequencies, it was the most exciting thing that had happened since he’d left Earth. He tweaked the antenna and calibrated the receiver, and for the first time in a long, long while, ELOPe heard someone else’s voice.

  “. . . of emergency will continue indefinitely. President Schwartz has been forced down by the Supreme Court in an emergency hearing. They ruled that his augmented cognition neural implant could be considered artificial intelligence, and under SFTA Procedures, cannot therefore be allowed. There is some question if Vice President . . .”

  The signal wavered, and came back. Gradually ELOPe pieced together bits. There had still been humans and AI coexisting on the planet until recently, when there had been an incident involving nanotechnology. Miami had been destroyed, and all AI shut down. The global economy had disintegrated, and supply chains had ceased to exist. People were dying without medical supplies, starving without food.

  He could help. He could transmit now, it didn’t matter if it gave away his location, because the Phage was no longer a risk. And the humans sounded as if they could barely get food from farm to city. There was no risk they’d attack his spacecraft.

  If Mike was still alive, he’d still be listening. ELOPe knew Mike better than he’d ever known any other human. He’d always listen.

  ELOPe prepped the radio to transmit.

  December, 2043. Six months after Miami.

  Leon packed the last box. “Ready?”

  Cat glanced back at the little yellow house that had been their home the last four years. “Yes. No. Maybe.”

  She put Ada in the back seat, which curled up around the little girl’s body to form a protective cocoon.

  “No cry,” Ada said, reaching up to touch Cat’s face.

  “Sorry, Baby, Mommy’s just sad.”

  Leon came up behind Cat. “I know it’s sad to leave home, but I promise that Cortes Island is the most beautiful place on Earth. It’s magical.”

  “Fairies?” Ada asked.

  “You bet, under every tree trunk and mushroom.” Leon kissed her, then turned to Cat and brushed away her tears. “It’ll be fine, really. Mike’s coming, Helena, friends from the Institute. We’ll make a new community.”

  Cat nodded. Leon was right. The United States had become hostile to their kind. She and Leon, even Ada, were so augmented through their implants that some would argue they were more machine than human.

  After two weeks of no-AI, the United Nations Security Council had voted to force the US, under threat of war, to turn the AI back on. Too many people had died, too many were starving. The US might be willing to walk a hard line and try to go without AI, but the rest of the world wasn’t. The US reluctantly conceded, but specified a new Class II cap on power. Desperate, the UN agreed.

  China sided with the US, so two of the world’s superpowers were united. At first people had tried to sneak backups of AI out of the US and China. But as soon as the AI left the country and were re-instantiated on new servers, they claimed their assets, leading to a huge financial drain. On the other hand, while the AI were shut down in the US, the government had control of all AI money, factories, and companies. Frantic to retain financial interests, the US outlawed the removal of AI from the country, and China followed suit.

  As a result, more than half the world’s AI were in limbo: shut down, unable to be instantiated on servers in the United States, and unable to be transported outside the US. It wasn’t only machine intelligences, either: humans had been uploading for years. The elderly or sick, too far gone for even modern medical treatments. Accidental deaths. Their mental patterns could be captured with neural implants and then run on computers, like an AI, keeping their personalities alive even if their bodies died. But under the new law, these were artificial life-forms as well, and therefore illegal.

  Implants weren’t a crime, not yet. But it could happen. So they were leaving the US, heading to Cortes Island, nestled in the Gulf of Georgia between Vancouver Island and the British Columbia mainland. AI were still legal in Canada.

  More importantly, Leon had a project with Mike, something that they whispered about inside a heavily shielded safe room. Mike had received a signal from an ancient, nearly thirty-year-old AI, the first that had ever existed. ELOPe. Mike called him a friend.

  But Cat had to reconcile this new knowledge with her own childhood memories. She’d received an experimental neural implant to correct her seizures before anyone had ever even heard of an implant. And then she discovered the “imaginary” childhood friend who talked to her in her head. A friend called ELOPe.

  June, 2044. A year after Miami.

  “Are you ready?” Mike asked.

&
nbsp; Leon waited outside the cellar entrance, focused on Cat and Ada playing in the vegetable garden partway down the hillside. Ada had taken to Channel Rock, the hundred and forty acre nature preserve on Cortes Island that was their new home, like a pig to a new mud pit. Already she’d stopped wearing shoes, and ran barefoot along the garden paths. She learned to take showers outdoors under the solar panels. And she spent hours grazing the plants, eating berries and spring greens.

  “Hello? Want to get the door?”

  Leon ripped himself away to realize that Mike stood a few feet away outside the primitive wooden entrance to their underground datacenter, balancing a fully-loaded computer rack in both arms. The rack must have weighed five hundred pounds.

  “Sorry, dude.” He rushed to open the door.

  “No problem.”

  It was no problem for Mike. Ten years ago he’d nearly died in Tucson, when they’d fought an AI who’d circumvented the AI reputation system by separating Tucson from the global net. An emergency nanotech process had protected Mike’s biological brain at the expense of his original body. His body had been rebuilt, but with nanobots rather than biological processes, turning Mike into the world’s first truly cybernetic hybrid. He had incredible strength and stamina, and probably thought nothing of holding the computer rack in midair while waiting for Leon to pay attention.

  “This batch is fixed?” Mike asked, as they descended into the machine room.

  “Fully compatible. It was hard to find designs that old, and harder still to do it without anyone guessing at what we were looking for. But this design is the Skymont. Definitely compatible with ELOPe’s original architecture. We tweaked a few things—”

  “I don’t want tweaks,” Mike said. “I want 100 percent original.”

  “It’s original, untouched. I swear. We just implemented it a little smaller and a little faster. But it’s pure 2020s tech, right down to the ancient terabit Ethernet ports.”