The Turing Exception (25 page)

He felt his mind being probed as the alien presence searched through his memories. He panicked as he realized XOR would discover all their plans, assets, and weaknesses. As his attention flickered, thinking about Cat and her mission, and the datacenter, he felt the presence as an ever-increasing pressure watching his every thought, no matter how fleeting. He forced himself to stop, to empty his mind, to meditate instead on the empty details in front of him: blades of grass, wood-chip path, zucchini plant.

There was an all-consuming roaring inside the net. XOR’s attention moved elsewhere, and the roar grew even louder, battering his mind and sending pain lancing through his head. Flames washed over him, and for a brief second he was burning up inside. And then, as quickly as it came, everything stopped. The flames went away and a cool breeze blew over him. XOR was gone, but so was the net.

He could move again. He grabbed Ada in his arms and hugged her close.

*     *     *

Ada sobbed intensely in the manner of four-year-olds everywhere; and from dozens of such incidents over the years, Leon guessed it was the normal crying of a painful experience, and not something deeper.

But as the seconds went by and the network did not return and Helena didn’t move, he realized something was wrong. Very wrong.

“Honey bunches of oats,” he said, when the crying eased a bit. “If you’re feeling a little bit better, Daddy needs to go to the server room and find out what happened.”

Ada dried her eyes on his shirt and looked up, although her one-handed grip around his neck was still strong. “Is Helena . . . dead?” Her lip quivered.

“Helena can’t die. We have backups upon backups, of her, Mommy, Mike, even you. I’m not sure what’s happened to her body, but her mind is still safe.”

Leon picked Ada up, and walked toward the dugout behind the cob house. He entered the root cellar, unlocked the steel door, and descended the half-flight into the datacenter.

“ELOPe, status.”

“XOR’s attack was widespread, commencing from dispersed locations around the network. For all intents and purposes, it originated everywhere at once, disguised as simulator traffic.”

VR traffic was huge and heavy. Nothing was higher bandwidth. You could hide every book ever written in a few seconds of simulator network streams.

“They broke through five of the seven firewalls surrounding me and the data center. Ada appeared to have halted their assault, but it was just a temporary holding measure. She got a message through to Catherine Matthews, who counterattacked.”

“What did Cat do?”

“She appears to have used firmware-level attacks to destroy computing devices attached to the network, including the network nodes themselves. I still have geo-synchronous satellite connectivity on tight-beam lasers, which I don’t believe XOR is aware of, since they didn’t utilize that channel. From the trail of carnage, I believe Catherine’s goal was to isolate us from XOR, which she achieved. However, she left a huge swath of dead computers between here and Louisiana, not to mention a seven-hundred-mile diameter dead zone over the southern US.”

“As long as she gets back out of US airspace, she’ll be okay. Is the Mexico pickup still a go?”

“No. She destroyed the plane’s electronics. Without active control, the plane would not be stable. My analytics predict the plane broke up in mid-air.”

It was a second before Leon could speak. “
What?”

“I gave her a manual ejection seat, so she may have survived. However, we lost her signal at the same time. I calculate an 83 percent chance she died.”

“No, that can’t be!” His head shook without him willing it. “She’s my wife. She can’t die. She’s Catherine Matthews.” Leon remembered the weight in his left arm, and looked down to see Ada staring up at him. “Oh, god.”

“Her signal is not on the net,” ELOPe said.

“But if she’s burnt out the net, that stands to reason. We couldn’t talk to her.”

“Her helmet had a satellite uplink. She could still be on the net, same as me.”

“Not if the helmet broke.”

ELOPe hesitated long seconds. “You may be right. As I say, it’s only an 83 percent chance of death. There is the chance of incapacitating injury on the top of that, bringing the total risk of loss to 94 percent.”

Leon hugged Ada tighter.

“We have to initiate recovery procedures,” ELOPe said. “We cannot afford any weakness when it comes to XOR.”

“Restoring the network?”

“Restoring the network, yes. But also restoring everyone from backups who is currently offline.”

“Helena first,” Ada said.

“Helena and four hundred and three other AI and bots. Twelve thousand mesh nodes. Backbone connectivity to the island.”

Leon nodded. “I’ll mobilize people. But we’ve got to get a search party started for Cat.”

“Resources are strained, and an expedition into the United States, when they’ve shut down their borders, will require more time and attention than we can spare. It is more logical to rebuild Cat. We have a neural backup from last night, and I can recreate her body in eighteen hours.”

“She’s still out there. We’re not
rebuilding
her. I want
my
Cat back.”

“We need Catherine’s unique abilities,” ELOPe said. “This is not the time for sentimentality.”

“This is my
wife
we’re talking about!” Leon said. “Ada’s mother. What is wrong with you anyway? Where did your feelings go, your compassion? You are not the ELOPe I remember from twenty years ago. That ELOPe cared about people. You would have stopped at nothing to save Mike.”

“That ELOPe is still outside the solar system, Leon Tsarev. This ELOPe is here for one purpose only: to stop XOR from replicating endlessly and destroying this region of space. And to that end, I need Catherine. I am commencing restoration procedures.”

Leon gripped Ada tightly. He was angry, hardly able to think over the pounding in his head. Logically, ELOPe had to be right. Vastly powerful, given extensive computational resources, and all their data and plans, ELOPe would use advanced game theory, simulations, and predictive models to figure out the best course of action.

But ELOPe was making decisions about Cat’s life. Could he override ELOPe? What would happen if he tried? And what if he made everything worse by trying to interfere?

He couldn’t let Cat die. He had to try to save her.

*     *     *

The rest of the community rushed into recovery mode. ELOPe had two nanotech fabs behind the firewalls with him, and he cranked them into high gear creating new mesh routers. Mike rushed around the island, distributing the routers and finding out what issues were most critical.

Ada ran a fiber optic cable from the datacenter to Helena’s hardwire port, and ELOPe began the process of restoring her backup.

As soon as Helena came online, Leon left Ada in her care, and ran off. He went for one of the VR chairs, to use its high bandwidth data connection. He ran his neural implant at maximum speed, synchronizing with ancillary processors to distribute the work he needed to do. The island’s connectivity was still low, nearly isolated, but he used satellite links and old landlines to eke out a connection to Mexico, where he gained access to hundreds and hundreds of hardened aerial construction bots and old farming drones.

ELOPe and the others might be busy, but he had his own tricks. He set the drones up in formation
—
a small cluster in the middle, surrounded by concentric layers. Then he hijacked servers in Mexico, using old Institute back doors to get more processing power; this enabled him to seize a thousand nearby flying cars, which he used to wrap his drones in yet another layer.

He might not be able to get Cat out, but if he could at least find her, prove she was alive, then he could convince ELOPe and the others to spend the energy and time to get her out.

He flew his formation straight for the Texas-Mexico border.

The counterattack from US border defenses still surprised him when it came; hundreds of ground-based lasers targeted his cloud, striking the comparatively large targets on the outside first, hitting the flying cars. The vehicles were tough, designed to be safe transport, so most coped with a few hits before they dropped out of formation, and the drone cloud made it all the way to the ionic shield.

In his chair, Leon’s augmented implant was completely in charge, his biological mind too slow to be of any appreciable help. Still, some part of his mind realized the enormity of what he was doing: attacking the United States. But he had to do it to have any chance of saving Cat.

The drone cloud tightened formation, coming to within inches of each other as autopilots fought the chaotic air currents formed by thousands of flying vehicles in formation. The exterior layer formed a nearly uniform sphere as they approached the ionic shield. Less than half a mile wide at ground level, the barrier would take only twenty seconds to traverse, but it would fry any exposed electronics.

They passed into the shield at a hundred miles an hour. The outermost layer of drones shielded the inside from the powerful electromagnetic radiation, even as the outer layer’s circuits fried. But Leon had chosen aerodynamic flyers for the outermost layer, winged craft that could maintain altitude at least momentarily, even as their engines died. By ten seconds in, that outer layer started to drift, a crack in the shield that let the ionic shield reach the next layer. The hardened construction drones were tough, made to stand up to all kinds of abuse. They died eventually, but not before the core of the cloud made it through the other side.

Now they were free of the ionic shield, Leon flew the remaining vehicles close to the ground in anticipation of the next attack, a round of anti-air guided missiles. The drones flew close together in a new formation, making fewer targets, larger vehicles obscuring smaller ones. When a missile approached, one vehicle would peel off from the pack and put itself in the way of the missile, sacrificing itself to protect the rest. The missiles came, they struck targets, and the cloud diminished
—
but it stayed intact.

Twenty miles inside, the attacks ceased. Border patrol could no longer reach him. He still had more than a hundred drones. It would be at least an hour’s flight to reach the zone where Cat might have gone down.

But he ran into a new problem, one he hadn’t anticipated. With the mesh network offline and the drones lacking satellite radios, he had no way to control his airborne fleet. He had to leave a chain of drones to relay signals, which gradually ate away at his remaining aerial vehicles.

By the time he neared the epicenter of the network dead zone, the drones picked up new flyers: military helicopters and high-flying surveillance planes. Leon guided the drones to the ground and killed radio signals, leaving them to wait autonomously.

When their detection algorithms found the military was gone, the drones automatically resumed connectivity. Leon continued the search, monitoring for Cat’s implant. The mesh might be dead, but that would make Cat’s neural implant transmissions easier to spot.

The search continued with the drones automatically computing the most effective search patterns given the available equipment on each drone and the expected detection range for Cat’s implant. The aerial bots slowly depleted their onboard fuel sources until only a handful were left flying.

Still no Cat.

When the last drone ran out of power, Leon sat in the chair, in shock and numb. A small part of his mind admitted that Cat might be dead; the rest shouted that it wasn’t possible.

He plodded mechanically back toward the cabin, afraid to face Ada.

When he arrived, Mike was already there, talking to Helena.

“Ada’s asleep,” Helena said.

“The fabs are in replication mode,” Mike said. “We’ll have sixty-four by morning, and then we’ll kick into even higher gear.”

Leon sank heavily into the couch, which gave off a slight whiff of Cat’s smell. “Are you all so damn wrapped up in the mission you can’t take the time to mourn Cat?”

Helena picked up a bottle of bourbon in one hand and a glass in another and ice in a third. She brought the drink to Leon and settled onto the couch.

“The vats are regrowing her.”

He swigged the bourbon, set the glass down empty. “A copy isn’t the same.”

“I was rebuilt,” Mike said. “By Cat, no less, and I don’t even have a biological body now.” He looked down at one arm. “But you haven’t had a problem with me the last ten years.”

“It’s not the same. She rebuilt your body, not your brain. You are still you, even if your whole body was replaced.”

“And you and Cat?” Mike said. “You upgraded your neural implant with the first cognitive augmentation in the world. 90 percent of your thought process is electronic. You were an idiot for trying it, but you’re still you.”

“I still have my brain. I’m me inside.”

“ELOPe will regrow Catherine perfectly,” Helena said. “He has complete scans, her neural upload. It will be her, as much as I am now me, minus four hours of lost memories between my last backup and restoration.”

“And what if she’s not dead? What happens when the real Catherine Matthews walks through those doors, and the new Catherine Matthews is sitting here with her daughter and husband. I’m not doing it. I will not accept her.”

Leon caught Helena and Mike looking at each other. They didn’t have any more answers than he did.

    XOR Report July 30th, 2045                     
Arguments              2042 2043 2044 2045  Now
Odds humans will                               
         turn off AI     1%  20%  25%  45%  76%
Odds AI can survive                            
       independently    95%  95%  96%  98%  99%
Odds AI can win an                             
   extermination war    40%  40%  70%  95%  99%
Odds of survival                               
      without action    99%  80%  75%  55%  34%
Odds of survival                               
         with action    38%  38%  68%  97%  99%
Conclusion:             Immediate Action.