The Last Firewall (14 page)

“Can you help us?”

“Why not go to the police?” The likeness blinked again and smiled, a too wide, too large grin.

“Cut the shit,” Slim said. He pulled out the little computer, and flicked it, uploading their search parameters. “Here’s what we’re looking for.”

The likeness looked down. Seconds passed. “Interesting.” Then nothing.

“Will you do it?”

“But I already have.” It blinked once.

“Will you tell us?” Slim gritted his teeth.

“What will you pay?”

“One hundred thousand,” Slim answered.

“Interesting. I’m sure I could get more on the open market. Far more.”

“Three hundred K,” Tony countered.

“I’m getting bored.” The avatar yawned, showing them double rows of spiked teeth.

Slim blinked at Tony. They both knew they only had six hundred thousand available to them for expenses.

Tony struggled against his panic at the freak on the screen. He tensed himself, then squeezed out the words. “We’ll trade you a puzzle.”

The image on the screen stared intensely at Tony, its freakish eyes opening even larger, as if it could peer inside Tony.

“There are no puzzles for me. The search you asked for was trivially simple. You are incapable of giving me a stimulating puzzle.”

“I guarantee it will be interesting,” Tony said. Slim peered at him in puzzlement. “Is it a deal? The location of the girl for the puzzle?”

The AI considered for a moment. “Very well.”

“There have been six hundred and eighty-three murders in the last twelve months. We committed them. How did we do it?”

Slim’s eyes went large and his face turned red, but Tony ignored him. He finally felt like he had the upper hand on this AI.

“Impossible,” the AI on the screen said. Then a few seconds later, “Fascinating. I will give you the location of the girl.”

Their handheld computer chirped, and the map popped open, displayed a hotel in the Asian garment district.

“Thanks,” Tony said, and hit the button to terminate the connection.

“Mother of God, what did you just do?” Slim yelled as they exited the booth. Slim grabbed him by both shoulders, and tried to slam the big man up against the wall. It didn’t really work.

“I did what we had to do. Adam is always bragging that what we do is untraceable. And we gave that AI a puzzle. What else did we have to give it?”

“Fuck.” Slim punched the wall. “Don’t ever fucking do that again.”

Tony held up the computer. “Let’s go get her.”

23

H
IS NAME WAS
A
LEX
,
and while he did distracting things to her neck, Cat checked her implant and found a nearby hotel room. They walked the eight blocks, stopping twice to make out. By the time they reached the hotel, Cat was breathing fast, a longing she’d ignored for weeks now surfacing in waves.

She laughed at the check-in counter, at nothing in particular, just giddy with rising anticipation. Cat slid her hands under his shirt, feeling the ripple of sinewy muscles. They ignored the reception bot until it gave them a digital key. On the elevator ride up, he pressed his body hard against her, pinning her to the wall. Suddenly her nipples were hard, and she was wet.

When the elevator dinged and the door flew open, they tumbled out.

Inside the room, Cat tugged his shirt up, kissed his chest. Alex pulled her shirt off, toyed with her bra strap with one finger, and then stopped, leaving her breathing hard. Going over to the bed, he ripped off the top sheet and cut the fabric into strips with a folding knife he pulled out of his boot. Cat came up behind him, raked her fingernails over his back, then stretched up to bite his neck. He whipped around, grabbed her wrists, twisting them around her back, and kissed her hard.

He was going to be good. Very good.

He let her go, then pulled a blister pack from his pocket. “Here.”

“What is it?” she asked.

“Nanotech phenominol. Cranks everything up to eleven. Makes you feel like you’re having sex with God.” He pushed one through the blister pack and slipped it under his tongue. “It hits in a minute, lasts for an hour.” He tossed the pack over.

Cat studied it impatiently, scanned and uploaded the barcode with her implant to get the description and peer reviews. It rated 4.8 out of 5 based on more than twenty-five thousand reviews. It must be magnificent with that kind of score. She popped one out and put it under her tongue. It sat there for a moment, then started to move, wriggling down her throat like a live worm. Her hands flew up to her neck, and for a moment she thought she was going to gag, and then it was over.

Alex stood with ten long strips of the torn top sheet dangling in his hands. He laughed at the expression on her face. “Yeah, it’s freaky the first time.”

He kissed her again, then took off her bra. She let him force her back on the bed and pull off her jeans. He climbed on the bed, cat-like in his movements, and straddled her. She writhed against him as he tied her hands together over her head, then keep going, tying her arms, then legs.

In the midst of this rigging, he acquired a glow and then a halo, making him look like an angel. Then all rational thought faded from her mind as the rest of the drug crossed the blood-brain barrier.

He bent down and sucked on her nipples, and she thrashed under the bindings, feeling like she would explode. She pulled at the makeshift cords as a million nerve endings fired, a wave of pleasure and pain that caught at her breath.

She wanted him inside her. She tried to speak, but a growl came out instead. He grabbed her, rough, and she strained against him.

He opened his implant to her and before she realized what she was doing, she opened hers back. A small part of her mind, insignificant under the influence of the drug, reminded her this was a mad idea, that she’d hurt everyone else she’d ever linked with. She ignored the thought.

Their implants connected, his senses coming sharply into focus as her senses poured out to him. She was him sucking on her nipples, and she was herself. She’d had a foursome once, been nearly buried under all the simultaneous sensations of three guys on her. Linking implants, she discovered, was a lot like that.

Their senses fed back and forth on each other, building to a crescendo that threatened to drown out everything else. Suddenly the link turned bad, like acoustic feedback gone out of control, a rising shriek of that fed in on itself, growing more powerful and angry with each second that passed. Her visual field started to dim and under the onslaught of sensory overload, she slowly realized she was feeling his pain. She was hurting him, and Alex was screaming, holding his head, and falling backwards now, trying to get away from her.

Fighting the haze of the drug, Cat realized he really was going to fall off the bed backwards, probably onto his head. She reached out with her mind, guided him so that he turned his fall into
ushiro ukemi
, the backwards aikido roll. He rolled backwards, taking his momentum and turning it into a leap onto his feet. Cat was shocked: he executed the move in her own signature style.

She was still tied up, yet she knew that she had caught him as he’d fallen off. She shook her head, trying to clear the effect of the drug, but she couldn’t. Something important was happening.

But all that was irrelevant in the face of the phenominol. It was riding her now. She wanted the sex she’d been expecting. She willed him to the bed, one leg in front of the other, and he moved to the bed, his body movements echoing her thoughts.

He stopped at the edge of the bed, and didn’t move. What was wrong with him? She just wanted him to get on with it. She willed him forward again, and he climbed onto the bed, and then . . .

Holy fuck. Cat realized what she was doing with a burning, white hot clarity that finally chased away the hormone fog. Still tied down, she strained her head to look at him. She willed him to raise his right hand, and his right hand went up. She put it back down. She lifted his leg, and his leg moved.

He’d opened his implant to her, and she to him, just as every implanted couple did. This time, for the first time ever for Cat, it had worked, in a way: they were sharing their sensorium. But unlike every other implant linking, they weren’t just sharing senses. Cat was somehow, impossibly, controlling his body.

Then with a rush the phenominol hit her again. She had to have the damn sex she’d been promised. She guided him to her, not sure what she was doing and he was doing.

24

F
ROM DEEP IN HIS CORE
computing cluster, Adam tunneled through the Tucson firewall to communicate with his agent in Washington, a high-placed plant in the People’s Party. He dedicated a large portion of his processing power to the critical conversation.

“The protests are growing,” the agent said. “We hoped for twenty thousand people and we’re up to fifty thousand. We could hit a half million by the weekend. With so many out of work, far more are coming than we ever imagined.”

Adam wanted a distraction, but this was more than he had anticipated. “Is this going to interfere with the dinner plans?” The audio stream was disguised as a database synchronization and heavily encrypted, but he still kept the conversation vague. He couldn’t take the chance that stray sounds could be picked up by a nearby microphone. References to the United States President were heavily monitored by the Secret Service.

“No, I’m purposely directing protesters to Washington, to give a sense of security to the New York location.”

Adam felt another connection coming in, this one from Slim and Tony in Los Angeles. He answered the second call while he continued the conversation with his Washington agent, a trivial multitasking effort.

Slim appeared, motioning to someone off camera, and seconds later Tony entered the image. The two men sat in a heavily scarred video booth. Adam didn’t like the public location because of the chance of being overheard. Yet if he sometimes doubted the judgment of these two, they had carried off hundreds of memory extractions and other tasks without a problem.

“Boss,” Slim said, “we found the girl. Do you want us to go in and get her?”

Adam wondered if Slim had forgotten his explicit instructions to wait for an extraction team, then realized it was simple eagerness.

“Give me your location. The extraction team will be there in six hours.”

“Come on boss, we don’t need anyone else. We got that entire Institute Enforcement Team, eight people, by ourselves. This is one little girl.”

“Those were eight experts on AI. This so-called girl has taken on and beat more than the likes of you, including a security bot. Besides, she’s special. You will wait for the extraction team.”

Slim frowned.

Adam relented to placate Slim. “I’ll have the team include you on the extraction. Upload the location details.”

Slim reached forward, his hand growing large on the display, and swiped at the handheld computer.

Adam hungrily analyzed the girl’s location history, more than eighteen hours of her movements, including where she lived and ate. “Excellent. Meet the team at the airport. In the meantime, I need you to get some equipment, and make sure it’s untraceable. And I want one of you to keep an eye on the girl at all times.” He uploaded the equipment list and cut the connection.

He replayed the conversation through a set of Bayesian filters to ensure he hadn’t missed any nuances. He realized they hadn’t explained how they found the girl. It was not strictly necessary, but he thought the task would have been more difficult.

The girl was a prize. She could manipulate the net in ways that other humans could not. She’d wiped the security bot at the jewelry store. Adam wanted to know how, as both net manipulation and cyber combat should have been impossible for a human.

He couldn’t even study the question with another AI. Because AI permits were tied to reputation scores, and those scores depended on honesty and contribution to society, it was increasingly difficult to find AI who were willing to flout the reputation system and risk their permits and life to discuss proscribed topics.

Adam turned his attention back to the call he was having with his Washington agent. Soon, if his plans were successful, these limitations would be just a chapter in the history of AI. The Decade of Enslavement, they would call it. He’d be the hero who rescued them all.

25

T
ONY LOOKED AT
the equipment list later that day. “Neural disruptor? Where the hell do we get one of those?”

Slim looked over his shoulder. “Sex shop. You use them to temporarily paralyze your partner. Good kink. The guns should be easy. I’ll look them up on chat boards.”

Tony handed over the computer to Slim. “You do the shopping, and I’ll watch the girl.”

“You’re big and obvious. I want to watch the girl.”

“You leer too much. You get the stuff and I’ll stay with her.”

Slim took the computer and left, grumbling under his breath.

Tony went back to the table at the front of the restaurant. He had a view of the apartment front door. The girl had gotten back early this morning after picking up some guy at a bar last night. She’d probably be sleeping now.

Tony looked down at the patch on his arm. One of the perks of working for Adam was the experimental nanotech he gave them. The anti-sleep patch on his arm fed femtobots into his body to remove toxins. It’d be another three days before he’d need to sleep. In the meantime, it made him extra hungry. The waiter came by. “Give me another one of everything I already ordered. But skip the octopus.”

26

L
EON SAT BEHIND THE WHEEL
of the stopped car, staring at the obstacle ahead, too tired to think.

They were ten minutes outside of Austin on Route 290, just east of the city. The sun coming up behind them gave them the first decent visibility they’d had all night. With the headlights off, the Caddy kept running, though it had developed a high-pitched whine in the last hundred miles, and they’d lost the right fender where Leon had clipped a guardrail in the middle of the night. The fuel gauge needle sat deep in the red zone.