The Turing Exception (23 page)

As she approached British Columbia, she scoured nodes, destroying resident AI and disrupting network connections. She drew back a moment, taking in the network topology near Vancouver and Cortes Islands. Everything was grey, turbulence from XOR’s attack destroying the natural order.

She had no time for finesse or tricks. She hacked routers and computers to the core, going beyond the applications and OS to the firmware at the root of every device. Triggering a half-dozen exploits she’d held in reserve, she consumed them entirely, wiping the deepest layers, inserting aggressive semi-sentient worms that destroyed the hardware they ran on even as they raced on to new locations in the net.

XOR’s agents were driven back, Cat’s countermeasures pursuing them through the net, hounding them from router to router, packet to packet. She raced outwards, determined now to find XOR.

But the computer worms she’d spawned grew suddenly unwieldy, a billion tendrils spreading through the net, twisting and distorting everything they encountered, annihilating the devices they passed through, subverting her own control of the distributed attack.

They turned toward her, and
then—

C
AT
’
S EYES OPENED
—
her natural, biological eyes
—
and she glanced out the minimalist cockpit window. Her heart leaped into her throat as she saw only ground through the glass, a field spinning rapidly. She’d done something bad
—
she’d destroyed the network hardware. She had a brief glimpse of a swath of destruction between here and Cortes Island, the network gone, not even black but disappeared entirely.

The plane bucked wildly, the wing configuration all wrong for this altitude and speed. She reached for the plane’s control interface through her implant, but there was nothing there, nothing to feel or sense. And there was no yoke, no pedals, not a single button or switch in the cabin. It was all automated, and all out of her control.

Then she remembered there
was
a manual control. Just one.

She reached down, and her fingers touched the handle Mike had shown her. She hesitated for a second, then pulled it up hard.

The escape hatch in the roof blew, disappearing instantly. A charge under her seat exploded, sending seat and Cat through the hatch into the air.

Pain lanced through Cat’s head, and that was the last thing she knew.

*     *     *

When she came to, Cat found herself laying on her side in dirt. Lines trailed from her harness to the parachute, and fabric billowed in the breeze, tugging on her now and then.

Her face was sticky, and she smelled and tasted blood. She pushed herself up and released the harness. She found the helmet’s chinstrap, unfastened it, and lifted the helmet away.

Pain throbbed through her head. She stared in shock at a white rod, presumably part of the plane, that protruded through the helmet. She turned the thing over, and saw the rod had penetrated half an inch into the interior.

Then the blood started running down her face again.

She told her nanotech to stanch the wound. No response. She queried her vital signs from her implant. No response. She triggered the diagnostic interface. No response.

Crap
. Her implant was offline. Maybe the head injury had caused it. Wait. She’d burned the net right before ejecting. Maybe she hadn’t only hit the net. Maybe she’d destroyed everything: the plane, her own implant. Who knew what else.

The blood still ran down her face. What was she supposed to do?

She distantly remembered her mom explaining first aid once:
Direct pressure. Keep pressing on the wound until the bleeding stops.

Cat unzipped her flight suit and ripped a piece of fabric from her undershirt. She folded it into a pad, and felt around the front of her head; when she found the spot where it hurt the most, she applied pressure with the fabric.

Thinking of her mom reminded her of Ada. She was fairly certain she’d beaten off the XOR attack. But why had they attacked Cortes? And would they try again, by other means? She had to get back to the island.

She tried to stand. Despite her effort, she found herself still sitting, woozy.

The breeze, hot and humid, brought a sulfurous whiff of petrochemicals and the faint but pervasive odor of cows, but she didn’t think anyone raised those anymore, not since they started growing meat in vats.

She remembered that she’d been on the Texas border, about ready to drop the second-to-last nanoseed. An unknown, untracked plane going down in the US would be investigated. And she might have left traces in the net. She tried to remember: had she routed everything through the satellites they controlled? No. When Ada had called out, she’d gone directly for the high-bandwidth ground network. She must have left digital evidence of her location.

Cat got onto her knees, then forced herself to her feet. Keeping the makeshift compress on her head
—
the bleeding had slowed or stopped
—
she stood, her legs shaky.

She needed to get out of here. But which way? She had no maps. No idea of where to go.

What the hell did people do before the net?

She scanned the environment. The flat field was dotted with old, idle oil pumps. In the distance, bits of greenery, maybe trees. Nothing special called to her, so she picked a direction at random. But she stopped before she’d gone ten feet. She needed to hide the ejection seat. She bundled up the parachute and dragged the seat and chute into a drainage ditch. She kicked dirt on top until they disappeared from at least a cursory view. Then she resumed her walk. Ten minutes of walking brought her to a narrow, muddy river, maybe a hundred feet or so across.

To the left, behind a row of shade trees, a house sat alone on the open field, near the river.

The house was risky. It could have people inside, people who would have seen her plane, or maybe her. But a house right on a river meant the possibility of a boat. A small boat might not have any electronics on board. It wouldn’t be tracked the way a motor vehicle was with transponders and active receivers.

She decided to chance it.

She approached. No vehicle outside. That gave her a little more confidence. She finally, carefully, removed the cloth from her head. There was no trickle of blood. It was sore, and she desperately wanted a mirror to inspect the wound. But that would have to wait.

She strode through the grass, forcing herself to walk upright and calm. If questioned, she’d claim she was a hiker out for the day who’d been injured when she fell. But she still saw no one near the house.

On the side closest to the river a wooden deck protruded from the house; under the deck, a green canoe lay upside-down on old railroad ties. She glanced around one last time. Still nobody around.

Cat moved quickly, righting the canoe. She dropped an oar and life vest inside, then dragged it to the river, her head throbbing with the effort. She slid the canoe into the water, her boots sticking in the muck of the river bottom. Once she had a foot of depth, she climbed carefully into the canoe.

The river had a current, so she paddled out toward the middle.

She grew hot in the flight gear, and when she got to wherever she was going, she wouldn’t be able to walk around in a space-age white suit. She extracted her ever-present knife from her boot and peeled back the suit top, rolling it down to her waist. She set about cutting off the top with the knife, but it was impossible. Whatever the suit was made of, it wouldn’t cut. At least not with a knife.

She sighed and settled for tying the sleeves around her waist.

Cat paddled gently, as even light exertion made her head pound around the injury. She prioritized. She needed to get away, get first aid and water, and then make a plan to get back to Cortes and check on her family.

For a moment, her vision swam as the situation overwhelmed her. She had no implant, no augmentation. She’d been connected to the net her entire life. Nobody could do what she could do online. Everything that made her special was because of her implant.

“Get a grip, Catherine.” She’d suffered through too much. She would
not
give up. Time to go back to her roots.

She visualized the water as qi. She was floating in a river of pure life energy. She paddled, channeling the qi into her body.

She was Catherine Matthews, and she would not be beat.

T
HE KITCHEN STAFF
set down a tea tray and bowed slightly to her.

“Thanks, Tommy,” Reed said absentmindedly.

Joyce came in as Tommy left. “Perfect timing. Let me get you some tea.” She stood and removed a set of tea bags for herself and Joyce.

“Please let me get that,” Joyce said.

“For crying out loud, I can still steep a tea bag myself.”

Joyce was ready to protest.

“Sit down and relax. That’s a presidential order.”

Joyce rolled her eyes but sat on the small loveseat.

Reed looked over at her and smiled. “Go on, take your shoes off. Relax.”

“I can’t take off my shoes in the front of the president.”

“Joyce.”

“I have a hole in my stocking.”

“Well, do what you want.” She handed over a cup of tea. “I’m taking mine off.” Reed sat in the only other comfortable chair, and true to her word slipped her shoes off.

Joyce followed a moment later. “Nice tea.”

“White tea. From a forty-year-old tea shop called Townsends.”

“Why do presidents insist on getting things from Portland?”

“It distracts people. They’re paying so much attention to your eccentricities that they miss what you’re doing.”

Every one of the many e-sheets littering the surfaces in the room let off a shrill warble at once. Reed and Joyce both reached for them simultaneously.

“They want us in the situation room,” Joyce said.

The door swung open and the agent-in-charge poked his head in. “Situation room, Madam.”

*     *     *

“The incursion occurred somewhere over Arkansas or Texas. Maybe Louisiana.” Walter Thorson was at the Pentagon, and he’d taken over the briefing from the two-star general.

“Thorson, we can pinpoint a bird crossing the border and identify its species from wing turbulence, but you can only narrow down the event to a three-state radius?”

“Sorry, Ma’am. We probably had more accurate data on our drones and ground-based observation platforms in the area, but all of them were fried before they could transmit data.”

“By the EMP? The briefing says automated defenses triggered the EMPs across the region.”

“No, ma’am. The damage is too
great—”

Reed raised an eyebrow at that.

“I know,” Thorson went on, “too great even for what the EMP could have caused. We think this was a directed network of viruses.” He turned to the display behind him, showing a map of the continental United States.

“You can see there’s a dead zone roughly seven hundred miles in diameter around the southern border of Arkansas. Every observation platform, network node, router, and computer within that zone appears to be non-functional.”

An upside-down lollipop on the map. “What’s that bit going up toward Canada?”

“A three-hundred-mile-wide dead zone straight to Winnipeg.”

“What’s there?” asked Reed.

“The only thing we can think of is the central Canadian backbone. They’ve got ultra-high-bandwidth fiber there augmenting their mesh network. From Winnipeg they could reach anywhere in Canada, or overseas via oceanic fiber.”

“How long until we can bring our equipment back online?”

“Not sure. Fort Leavenworth reported in by long-distance radio. People are all fine, but they have total loss of any net-connected device. They’ve got techs analyzing the equipment now to assess whether it can be repaired.”

“Do we have any chance of identifying whether someone or something entered the incursion area?”

“We’ve got Navy surveillance jets scrambled out of NAS JRB New Orleans. We’re also sending a Marine helicopter squadron to the epicenter. Of course, we’re on Level 6 alert. All network communications cut, ionic barriers on max, and immediate destruction of anything crossing the border.”

Reed couldn’t help knowing what was coming: the inevitable accidents, people trying to cross the border and dying. Supply chains cut off, shortages of food and other essentials. And within that dead zone, hospitals offline, emergency services unable to respond. The deaths would mount, all because of some unknown event, an anomaly that lasted less than fifteen seconds according to the report.

“Madam President.”

Thorson gestured to somebody, and the background noise dropped as a door closed.

“We have the launch
the
operation. This incursion could be the final probe before an XOR attack.”

“Joyce, out.” If she was going to make this decision, she couldn’t do it in front of Joyce.

Joyce gave her a funny look, half-puzzled and half-shocked by the request.

“Sorry, Joyce. Just go.”

“It could also be a failed attack,” Reed said, forcing herself to go on once Joyce had left, even though she wanted to crawl into bed and cry. “This could have been their best attempt, and it wasn’t enough.” Even as she said it, she knew it was wishful thinking. She’d seen the nanotech-seeded factory video. XOR’s ability was far in excess of this minor problem.

“We need to distribute . . .” Thorson looked around, then turned back to her. “We can’t have this conversation.”

“Thorson, it’s an encrypted, secure line between the White House and the Pentagon.”

“Not secure enough. They can crack the encryption. Look, we need to go at least to phase three.”

Reed recalled the plan they’d shared. Phase three distributed the neodymium EMP weapons globally. The last step before triggering them and starting an all-out war.

“It reduces our response time. We need this, Ma’am.”

Her voice caught in her throat. She wanted to say no, that there was no way in hell she’d ever give the okay, that she was not the violent warmonger her predecessors were. She thought she’d count trees in this damn job. Secretary of the Interior.