The Last Firewall (7 page)

Looking up, she noticed that she was hiking through slums, a street sign indicating this was Sand Hill Road. The oversized buildings were boarded up, surrounded by heavily rusted chain link fences. Whatever prosperity had once visited this place, it was long gone.

On the north side of the road, smoke rose from one of the fenced-in compounds, and the smell of cooking drifted over. Cat crossed the street and peered through the chain-link. She could hear kids playing, but whoever was there was hidden. Squatters probably, living in the abandoned office complex. She guessed that Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers didn’t need that space anymore, whoever or whatever they once were.

She hiked on. Orange trees grew in the spaces between buildings. Hungrier than ever, she walked over to one, but the oranges were just tiny green globes, nowhere near ready.

Half a mile further, she came to a small white and yellow building, the hand-painted sign proclaiming the structure to be a bodega. A Mexican man disappeared inside. Cat studied the storefront. Food was inside there. Her stomach rumbled. She felt in her empty pockets again. A stenciled poster in the window advertised payment cards. If only . . .

She squatted under a tree at the edge of the parking lot. She carefully turned on her implant, squelching her ID and preventing the implant from automatically connecting to the net. She just observed the building.

At a level lower than consciousness her implant connected to local network nodes, filtered the encrypted traffic, correlated the data streams, slowed them down and built a visual representation, and then fed it to her neocortex. What Cat saw was a data stream she isolated down to the bodega from all the other network traffic. She separated out the low bandwidth stuff, and watched for a bigger burp of data, something with heavier encryption. Sure enough, a chunk of data flew over the wire. A minute later, the Mexican left the store, carrying a bag of groceries.

Cat turned the data over and over in her head, trying to understand it. She knew it had to be the man’s payment. She had no hope of decrypting the packet to see what was inside. Probably no one could, except maybe the monster AIs with tens of thousands of processors. She couldn’t decrypt it, but could she replay it? She’d need to purchase the same things in the same quantities as a previous customer, and reset the time signal so the store would accept the payment . . .

She thought she could do it; now she just needed some customers. She waited. The traffic was light and no one came. Her stomach grumbled. Then, all at once, two people approached on foot and another in a beat-up electric pickup. She stood and walked into the store in the middle of the pack. She pretended to browse while keeping an eye on the other customers. The owner stood behind the counter watching her, but she ignored him. One woman went to the back of the store, picking up beer and other groceries. A man poured himself coffee. The last customer, a woman, was near the front register. She picked up two $50 payment cards and presented them to the owner.

At the sight of the payment cards, Cat stopped, motionless, and focused on the transaction. The owner swiped the cards in the register. Data streamed white in Cat’s vision and she grabbed the digital packets as she synchronized the stream with the precise time of the transaction.

The woman left, and Cat went up to the register. She picked up two of the same payment cards, and handed them to the owner. He looked at her suspiciously. She didn’t say a thing, but concentrated on keeping the integrity of the data in her head. He swiped the cards, then nodded at the ID reader.

She focused on the net, tweaked the register to send out a request for payment, overrode the time signal, and replayed the encrypted packets. The register beeped an alarm.

“No es bueno. ¿Tienes dinero?” the storekeeper said, shaking his head.

“Try again,” Cat said, nodding toward the register, her hands sweating below the counter.

The storekeeper grumbled under his breath, and pressed a button on the register. The ID reader lit up again, and Cat tried a second time, keeping the time signal and data stream perfectly synchronized.

The register beeped a happy tone and the owner slid the cards to her. “Gracias. Buen día.” His gaze slid onto the next person in line.

Cat took the cards with shaking hands and forced herself to walk slowly outside. She continued away from the store, trembling and half crying. “I’m sorry, Mom,” she blurted out, when there was no one to hear her. She stumbled down the dirt road, clutching the payment cards in a tight fist. She’d promised her mother in the hospital, the day before she died, that’d she’d be good. She tried so hard in this world where nobody knew what to do, and still she strived to honor her mom. Yet in twenty-four hours, somehow, her entire life had become derailed. She’d killed three men and now she was robbing convenience stores. She fought the urge to vomit, her reptilian brain driving her to get further away from the store. She got a quarter mile down the road and then collapsed against the side of a building, sobbing.

She lay there in the dirt, curled up in a ball, feeling like her future was being torn away from her. She would have stayed there forever but her stomach growled painfully, again and again, a reminder that present needs trumped the future. The hunger pains brought a grim smile to her face. She would find food. That at least she could do. She picked herself up, put the hard-won payment cards in her jeans pocket, and walked down the road to find another store.

11

L
EON SWAYED WITH THE MOTION
of the subway on the way to meet Mike. He tried to review what he knew of the murders, but was too distracted by the protesters crowding the car, who were amped up, holding signs and banners with a palpable tension. A man in a business suit stood in front of Leon, gesturing off into space, but he too was one of them, and wearing a button that said, “Jobs are for people.”

Leon stared at the wall, trying to do nothing to attract their attention. He recalled President Smith’s words a few days earlier: “The anti-AI movement sees you and Mike as the inventors of AI, and therefore as the cause of their unemployment and every social problem from drug use to reckless behavior. To them, you are public enemies number one and two.”

When the train slowed at his stop, the demonstrators pushed hard toward the door and exited first. Leon slowly followed, nervous that they were getting off at the same station.

He climbed the stairs, emerging into an even bigger crowd at street level. A girl in a hooded sweatshirt bumped into him, nearly beaning him with her sign. An army veteran in uniform stomped by yelling. The stream of protesters from the train grew louder and unruly as they met others already on the street, joining their chants and shouting new ones.

It was six blocks to the Institute, and by the time Leon had walked three, the crowd had grown so dense that he could hardly move. He worked his way past a group of older women his mom’s age; could even have been her friends for all he knew.

Many of them were obviously from out of town, carrying backpacks and sleeping bags. He shook his head in frustration. This was bigger than a local protest, and it wasn’t going to go away overnight if people were coming from outside the city.

Amid the chanting and press of the crowd, he hopped up on the bumper of a car and looked toward the Institute. A line of police, human and robotic, surrounded the building.

Leon jumped down and brought up a live video stream on his implant from bloggers covering the rally. He watched this superimposed over part of his vision as he cut across a small side street, heading to the next corner. The Institute shared a city block with another university building housing International Studies. A common courtyard, hidden from the street, connected the two.

On the next block, the crowds were sparser, but there was a steady influx of new supporters. The video stream in the corner of his vision showed protesters pushing up against the police. In the video, he could see Institute security behind the glass front of the building. The two thin lines of defense seemed insufficient against the rapidly growing crowd.

Leon had serious doubts that he should head into work. He pinged Mike for a location check but didn’t get a response. He tried the local network nodes, but they were sluggish, under assault from the crowd. Even the live video stream was degrading now. He paused for a moment and decided it was crazy to go further. He would go home and try Mike from there. He turned around, then suddenly halted, fighting the urge to run or hide as he confronted hundreds of people streaming toward him. Would these people recognize him? Rebecca seemed to think so. He couldn’t walk face-forward through this crowd. If just one person spotted him, they’d all attack.

Leon reluctantly changed his mind and decided to keep going to the Institute. It seemed the less risky option. He worked his way forward, keeping his face in the same direction as everyone else. At least the photo they were sharing of him online was a three-year-old social media shot. He looked different now, he hoped. He finally reached the International Studies building and made his way to the entrance. Security was doubled, and police stood ready to back them up.

He showed his ID and let them scan his neural implant, then the guard checked his bag. “It’s not going to take long before this crowd figures out there’s a pass through.” He handed the bag back. “You might not want to spend all the day in there.”

Leon nodded and hurried through the building toward the enclosed courtyard. He crossed the plaza, a simple concrete pad with a few trees in planters. He could still hear the chanting of the crowd outside.

He came up to the rear door, mentally provided his ID, and passed into the quiet interior of the Institute. At least here, near the back of the building, he could hardly hear the protests.

Two security guards and a police officer waited by the door. They repeated the ID scan and bag check.

“You know, it’s your name they’re chanting out there,” one guard said.

“Yeah, I know.” Leon sighed. What inspired people to such madness?

“You go can in, but they’re expecting the crowds to grow, and they’ll find the back door eventually.”

He nodded, grabbed his bag, and took the stairs at a run, bursting into the main office. The central space held less than a quarter of the people he’d usually find there. They were all clustered in the middle of the room.

He was met with stony silence instead of the usually friendly greetings. Not a single bubble “Hello” floated into his vision.

After a few seconds, a researcher approached from the herd. Leon remembered he was from the Education department. He quickly pulled up an info sheet from net space. His name was Miles.

“What are you going to do about this?” Miles demanded.

Leon looked at them all and thought for a moment. He liked technical problems, not people problems. “Go home, everyone. Go through the International Studies building now before the crowds build up. Go out two or three at a time. Don’t come back here until the protests are over.”

“But my work!” one woman protested. “I’m negotiating AI citizenship in Brazil for the upcoming election.”

“I’m not saying don’t work.” Leon said. He forced himself to smile, to project a sense of calm he didn’t feel. “Work from home, the way corporations do it. I know we all like coming in here where the bandwidth is high and we can chat with each other. But that’s not how most information workers do it. It’s just for a few days until this, whatever it is, blows over.”

There were grumbles, but people started to collect their belongings.

A blue robot named Sawyer wheeled up. “Do you recommend that we go home as well?”

He was joined by another bot named Sharp. “I don’t have a home. I live here at the Institute.”

Leon’s stomach dropped at the thought of all the bots and AI in the building. “Don’t go out. It’s not safe.” He thought about going to the window to look out, and then realized that would be a mistake. Someone outside might spot him. “Look, is Mike here?”

“In his office,” Sawyer said.

“OK. I need to talk to him. You two investigate some other options. You’re probably safe here if we keep the building locked down, but you might want to see about getting a helicopter to land on the roof and take all the AI out.”

Leon thought about the small data center in the basement that housed about a hundred AI employees. “Sawyer, anyone who is virtual should move to another data center.”

“They’re trying,” the bot said, “but we’re under a denial of service attack. Bandwidth in and out is limited.”

“Shit. Do what you can. I need to talk to Mike.” He headed for their shared office and yanked the door open. He stopped on the threshold and called back, “Have the helicopter bring a portable mass storage device and make a backup of all resident AI.”

He turned back to the room, letting the door close behind him. Mike was deep in concentration. His status was set to On Call. Leon sent a priority note to let him know he was there.

Mike held up one finger, and Leon sat down to wait. Within seconds Mike stood up. “I eked out a low bandwidth call with Rebecca. She says the People’s Party have been whipped into a frenzy by their leadership, and the protests are expected to continue.”

“How could this get out of hand so quickly?” Leon asked. “A month ago this wasn’t on anyone’s radar.”

Mike slowly shook his head, clearly bewildered. “I don’t know.” He stared helplessly at the wall. “Rebecca says we’re in danger. That we should avoid going outside if we can help it.”

“No shit. What about Sonja and the Enforcement Team?”

Mike paced to the interior window, looking over the main work room, now nearly cleared out. “I know Sonja went to San Diego with the team. Obviously they were investigating the murder. But who was she going to see? What clue tipped her off? I have no idea. Her case files are so heavily wrapped in encryption that none of the resident AIs think there is a hope of cracking them. She obviously feared the case being compromised.”