The Last Firewall (27 page)

T
HE MEDICAL NANITES
that Slim and Helena liberated from the Navy had worked on Tony’s injured leg, but the big man wasn’t quite conscious yet.

Within an hour of Helena’s deceptive call to Adam, the car arrived. Slim stared with a disbelieving eye at the autonomous medical ambulance. He’d been sure Adam had written them off.

Slim didn’t want to be anywhere near Helena or Adam, never mind in the middle of a fight between them. But Helena had saved Tony’s life, and she’d probably kill him if he tried to back out. Reluctantly, he turned to her. “Let’s carry Tony together.”

They worked in unison to get Tony into the coffin-like chamber. The med unit went to work on him, cleaning and wrapping the wound, giving him a transfusion and filtering impurities from his blood.

Two hours into the trip, the top opened and Tony sat up, smiling and back to his usual self.

“When do we eat?” he said.

Slim grunted. He couldn’t forget Helena outside. She’d taken one look at the high tech interior and figured Adam might monitor the vehicle. So she had grabbed onto four mount points with her tentacles and held on as they flew toward Tucson.

A nervous trickle of sweat ran down Slim’s side. Adam would merely shoot them out of the sky with a missile if they were lucky. The other options were worse: torture, a new type of memory extraction that worked without implants, or forced implantation so Adam could turn them into zombies. He’d seen it all over the last months, done much of it himself. He couldn’t figure a way out.

“Adam did right by us,” Tony said, climbing out of the med unit and into a regular seat, oblivious to Slim’s concerns. “I had my doubts, but I’m fine now.”

“It’s not like that,” Slim said, jaw clenched.

Tony raised his eyebrows, clearly planning to out-wait Slim.

“Adam abandoned us. He took the aircar, convinced the girl to get inside, and brought her back to Tucson. He was going to leave us for the cops to pick up. You were dying on the street, would have kicked the bucket if we didn’t close the wound and get you blood.”

“Who’s we?”

Slim mouthed “Helena” in case Adam was monitoring them.

“Who?”

Slim waved his arms like wild tentacles until Tony’s eyes got big for a second. “How?”

“She patched you up and drove us to the hospital. I snuck in and stole blood, then did the same at the Navy base to get medical nanites. She said the bone was pulverized. You wouldn’t have walked right again.”

Tony rubbed his leg, and shook his head back and forth, coming to terms. “What’s happening now?”

“I wanted to lay low, hope he forgot about us, but she wants vengeance for the rest of her crew. So she tricked Adam into sending this car for us.” He gestured toward the rear, leaned close and whispered, “She’s out back, hanging on.”

“What the hell?” Tony hissed. “Adam’s gonna kill us if we bring someone to town.”

“No shit. It’s not like she gave me a choice. Now that you’re all patched up, enjoy the last few minutes of your life.”

52

C
AT MASSAGED THE NET,
inspecting Adam’s activities as she disguised her location. Back at the hotel, the combat bots closed in. She set her simulacrum in motion, giving it a fast paced walk and an avoidance protocol so its path wouldn’t run into the robots.

The ruse might not hold for long, but every minute counted. She prepared a backup plan: if caught, she’d claim her excursion was merely to practice the skills Adam had taught. Didn’t he tell her to train? She smiled grimly, returning her attention to the drive.

The Rally Fighter’s engine, a powerful hydrogen-electric hybrid, throbbed as the car wove around the sparse traffic on the highway. Cat suppressed other cars’ sensors so they wouldn’t react to the Rally’s passage; no clues to give them away. She didn’t notice any human drivers, but at nearly two hundred miles an hour, everything passed in a blur.

Now on to the bots approaching the train. She checked their positions and swore when she found them less than a mile away, already within visual range of the egress. She picked one of the identical robots at random and piggybacked on its sensors, optical data trickling in until a live video feed popped up.

The combat units rode in a military transport, not much more than two I-beams on wheels, each bot holding onto the top beam while its treads rested on the bottom. The truck stopped in a cloud of dirt, the bots dismounting and spreading out as the dust drifted away.

One bot passed through the open double doors in a squat concrete structure, but no one was in sight above or below ground. Her hijacked unit exchanged data with its peers as they dispersed in a search pattern.

Cat snapped to her own perspective, keeping the video feed in a corner of her vision. She was less than a minute away herself and it wouldn’t help to walk into the middle of Adam’s envoys. She overrode the Rally’s chosen route and exited at McKensey Ranch, crossing the CAP aqueduct. She took the Rally Fighter off-road, the chassis rising as it transitioned to the rough terrain. Cursing the rooster tail the car created on the dry earth, she slowed to a crawl to minimize detection.

She drove northeast, looking for a vantage point. She needed to know why this was so important to Adam.

53

A
DAM WAITED IMPATIENTLY
as the combat bots pursued their investigation. Their original algorithms were optimized for fighting, so he left them in control and took the role of observer. Still, he wanted to do something useful, so he sent two autonomous surveillance helicopters to the site.

A pair of bots started down the shaft, carrying a single handgun each. He still assumed someone fabricated the stop to get into Tucson. Unless . . .

He checked on the state of Catherine Matthews, puzzled to find the team he’d sent wandering around downtown. Why wasn’t she in her room?

He interrogated his other self, the context he’d forked to get the girl, and replayed the history logs. The evidence seemed clear enough: they went to the hotel and up to Cat’s room but she escaped out the back staircase, missing them by seconds. The task force duly followed her outside.

He skipped forward a few minutes as the units tracked her and spread out, pursuing across multiple roads. Almost in visual range, two robots zoomed ahead on adjoining blocks to encircle Cat at Twelfth and Arizona.

Catherine somehow avoided them, and a little while later, the mixed group of bots chased her down the same streets as before, once again almost in range.

Suddenly the memory looped, a tiny glitch, the only pointer a misalignment in the feed data. Back near Hotel Congress, robots fanned out to pursue the girl on parallel paths.

An alarm triggered, signaling that he was stuck in a recurring loop of neural excitation, an AI behavior comparable to humans’ obsessive compulsive disorder.

The data indicated he’d repeated the same pattern twelve thousand times, losing eighteen minutes according to the atomic clock.

He scrutinized the evidence, finding the cause was the chase. The damn girl had fiddled with the time synchronization and location data, a clever hack to trick the bots and his forked self and send them into an endless loop.

She’d been gone for a third of an hour, maybe more. Adam realized he’d made a crucial mistake. The Continental might have stopped for Catherine’s getaway.

He checked on the bots near the train. They still hadn’t found anyone, and now the dispatched fire trucks and ambulances had arrived, the responders descending into the earth. The observation drones he had sent twenty minutes earlier sat idling at the Air Force base. Wait, that didn’t make sense. They should have been scouring the terrain near the egress.

Adam paused, fear running through his circuits. He’d been tricked not once, but two or three times. He now estimated a seventy-eight percent chance that Catherine had stopped the train to make an escape.

Adam oscillated, his frustration building. He needed to get the Continental going before a crowd of investigators descended on Tucson. But he couldn’t allow it to leave with Catherine onboard. It was past time to quit fooling around. When he got his hands on the girl, he’d kill her.

Months of work would be wasted if the emergency stop caused an investigation that uncovered Adam’s crimes. He’d be instantly terminated. Even if his plan got as far as killing the existing politicians, he needed to remain free and unblemished to gain the trust of the new President and influence her to change the rules for AI.

Perhaps he should step up his plans, executing them today instead of tomorrow. He knew their schedules, already had his assets in place.

Adam spun up more cores, crunching hundreds of variables to maximize the chance of success. He hated to rush into changes with everything orchestrated down to the smallest detail, but the math said it was better to act now, with a seven percent chance that he’d suffer exposure within twenty-four hours. Why had he brought the damn girl to Tucson?

Reluctantly, Adam contacted his agents.

“Change of timing,” he said, wearing a computer-generated avatar, a perfect composite of California features. “You’ll need to carry out the plans tonight.”

“That’s eleven hours away,” Madeleine Ridley said. “I can’t get everyone in place. I don’t have a schedule for the VIPs.”

“I’m sending their timetable now. Do you have the equipment?”

The agent nodded.

“Then your people can act. The optimal opportunity is at ten o’clock. They’ll be returning from dinner with former President Smith.”

“She’s not on the list.”

Adam respected Rebecca Smith’s formidable intelligence. He regretted the loss of a worthy life, even a human, but with the situation desperate one more person was a tiny price. “Eliminate her as well.”

54

L
EON SHADED HIS EYES
with his hand, looking west across the desert. The landscape was broken up by the highway two miles off, a grey ribbon shimmering in the heat, and by faint greenery further off, evidence of irrigated farms.

He turned back toward their objective in the east, Tortolita Mountain, rising up thousands of feet, its summit hidden behind the ripples and folds of the mountain.

“What’s the temperature?” Mike asked.

Leon licked his lips. They’d hiked less than ten minutes and his mouth was already parched and his skin burning. “June, in Tucson, at noon. Somewhere between blistering and scorching.”

“Pass me some water.”

Leon carried the backpack they’d filled with bottles back in LA, straps biting down into his shoulders. Three liters for each of them, a heavy burden that wouldn’t last long in this heat. Their plan was to hike up Tortolita Mountain and down the other side into Catalina, then catch a ride into Tucson proper. Going south of the mountains would be too obvious of a route, and north too long.

In the air-conditioned coolness of the subterranean Continental, the scheme had seemed like a good idea. An eight mile hike, elevation gain of less than three thousand feet. He and Mike had done that and more for fun many times. But at a hundred degrees with no shade, this might be the most dangerous part of their trip. “Let’s get a little further. We’re still too close to the exit.”

Mike nodded.

Leon’s legs ached from the fifty floor sprint. They’d gotten out of the egress in less than fifteen minutes, beating the response team, and kept pushing to put more distance between them and the train. They hiked in silence, conserving moisture and breath, the only sound the crunch of their shoes on dirt and rock. They walked on an old unpaved road that made a fine hiking surface, relatively flat, even if too eroded for vehicles to use. Saguaro towered over them, while smaller cacti dotted the desert around them. The pale yellow earth reflected the intense gaze of the sun, leaving nowhere to look without squinting.

They traveled for another five minutes, until the sound of a distant vehicle reached them. A cloud of dust rose near the concrete structure, now more than a mile away.

Mike, his face red, wavered on his feet.

“Let’s get into the shade for a second,” Leon said, worried about the older man’s ability to handle the heat.

Mike nodded, making his way toward a scrub tree. They crouched in the meager semi-shade underneath.

Leon brought out a water bottle and they both drank.

“I thought it was supposed to be a dry heat.” Mike said after a long swig.

“Yeah, like the inside of an oven.”

“You’re sunburned already.”

Leon touched his forehead. Ouch. “We’ve been out in the sun for twenty minutes.” He shook his head, immediately regretted the dizziness that ensued. “I don’t think we’re going to make it across these mountains in the middle of the day.”

They’d gained a few hundred feet in elevation, and from the shade they made out a little movement around the concrete block house. The cloud of dust from the vehicle slowly drifted away.

“Emergency services?” Leon asked.

“No,” Mike said. “We’d be able to see fire trucks, even from here, and they’d send more vehicles. I suspect the AI came to look for us. Hopefully he’ll assume we went toward the highway because we’d be crazy to go across the desert.”

“Maybe we are. What if we can’t make it?”

“We’ll wait for night,” Mike said, “the temperature will drop.”

Leon’s legs extended out into the sun. The shelter of the scrub tree was not enough for both of them. “It’s not survivable, even in shade. I doubt we’ll last until tonight.”

Mike glanced at him. “You’re right. Can you hijack an aircar to pick us up?”

Leon tentatively touched the net and backed off. “Not without giving away our location. We’re under intense scrutiny.”

“If we stay here, they’ll discover us.”

“Let’s go further into the mountain,” Leon said. “Maybe we can find deeper shade under a rock and wait until night.”

Mike chuckled, then laughed out loud.