The Turing Exception (27 page)

The road stretched on, and finally she came to the new shore of Lake Michigan at the mobile dock that moved east each year. Boats stretched off in all directions, and then she found what she wanted: a line of float planes at one end. It was mid-afternoon, and the docks were moderately busy. She spent twenty minutes wandering around and getting a feel for things.

Cat left, grabbed dinner and a few essential tools in town, and came back after dark.

She parked the motorcycle and dismounted. She patted it twice. “Thanks for the ride.” She left the keys in the ignition and the helmet hanging from the seat hook for whoever might come along.

She followed the docks to the float plane section. A chain-link fence topped with razor wire appeared to be the limits of security. You can only do so much on a dock.

On the next dock over, she untied a small sailboat, straightened the rudder, gave it a hard push, and jumped on board. She walked the deck to the other end, and when it reached the next dock, jumped off. She grabbed a line and tied the boat up. No point in letting it drift away.

She searched for the oldest planes, ones with a minimum of electronics. She found a short line of Cessna Caravans of the right vintage, all painted with the same company logo. She’d flown them before, when she had an implant guiding her. Her knowledge was imperfect now, since much of the skills and memories resided on her implant, but she thought she still had enough to get into the air.

The hardest part was hot-wiring the plane. Of course, she didn’t have her implant to give her the easy answers. Her heart fell at the mess of wires under the dashboard. Crouched in the cockpit, flashlight in her mouth, she tried looking for patterns. When that didn’t work, she tried organizing the wires and tracing them back to their source. After fifteen minutes of fruitless work, tears started to come.

Without her implant, she was a nobody, incapable even of rescuing herself, let alone her baby, Ada. Was Ada okay? Had she hugged her before she left? She couldn’t remember now, couldn’t even pull up a crisp photographic memory of Ada in her implant. Instead, what came was a memory of Ada hugging her leg as she practiced karate, and of herself laughing as she tried to do the forms balanced on one leg.

She’d seen the way Ada looked up at her, the way Ada thought Cat was perfect. She’d said something about needing to practice, and Ada had said Mommy didn’t need to practice, Mommy was already a karate master.

She dried her eyes on a sleeve, and turned back to the wires. If Ada believed she was so perfect, then she’d try to live up to that, implant or not.

She grabbed a bunch of wires, wires that went somewhere behind the dashboard, trying to puzzle out which went to the key switch, and then she laughed. She might not be able to figure out the wires, but she still knew how to pick a lock.

Cat dropped the wires, and hunted through the backpack, digging through for tools she could use. She found a tiny screwdriver she’d use for torsion, and a thin metal strip she’d have to somehow use as the world’s crappiest pick. Fortunately the lock mechanism was low quality, the tolerances poor, and within two minutes she had the lock turned to the on position.

After stowing her bag in the copilot’s seat, Cat untied the plane and reentered the cockpit. She ran through the preflight checklist as best she could, but kept the avionics master switch off. That left her with no radio or navigation, but also no transponder signal or electronic emissions to betray her location. Fortunately these were labeled in the fuse box.

She started the engine and pulled away from the dock. She still had to refuel, and she needed to be quick now, because the noise of the engine would be obvious to anyone on the dock. Taxiing to the spot nearest the refueling hose, she killed the engine, leaped out onto the float, and wrapped the dock line quickly around the mooring cleat.

She retrieved the crowbar from her backpack and pried the lock off the refueling station. She turned on the pump, dragged the hose over to the plane, and started the flow of synthetic biofuel. Then she waited. Three hundred gallons involved a long wait. She stood nervously glancing around. If anyone came, would she run for it? Or take the plane? Once her implant would have calculated hundreds of possibilities, crunched the data, and given her the answer.

But she didn’t have to exercise either option. The gurgle in the line changed and she killed the fuel pump. Leaving it there on the dock, she untied, got back in the cockpit, and started the engine.

Pointing due north, she throttled up, skimming over the lake till the Caravan reached takeoff velocity and pulled itself up out of the water. As soon as the floats cleared the surface, she throttled back.

Now came the tricky part. She kept the plane ten feet above the water, its headlights glinting off the black waves. She’d have to fly this way all the way to Canada. She glanced down at the compass from time to time, but mostly focused on maintaining her low altitude: at a hundred and sixty knots, even a minor downdraft could send her crashing into the water unless she responded almost instantly.

From Milwaukee, an hour and a half brought her to the Hiawatha National Forest, a narrow bridge of land less than fifty miles wide that separated Lake Michigan from Lake Superior. The unpopulated forest would mean few observers.

The dark waters of Lake Superior came into view. Here, less than a hundred miles from the border, the great ionizing shield put up by the Americans was visible, a man-made aurora spreading across the horizon.

Cat ripped her eyes from the mesmerizing sight and focused on the water in front of the plane. The shield surrounding the US was created by generators spaced twenty miles apart on land. But here at Lake Superior was a gap of almost a hundred miles between generators. The aurora was still present in front of her, but considerably reduced. She hoped that in the very center, at only a few feet above ground, the effect would be low enough that she could fly through without frying the plane’s electrical systems.

The aurora dominated the view now, casting changing hues within the cockpit. She still focused only on the reflection of her lights off the water. The plane’s indicators fluctuated in wider and wider oscillations as she approached the ionizing shield. The light surrounded her, and a tingling passed through her body. The lights on the plane brightened. Afraid they might burn out, she looked for the switch to kill them. Her fingers brushed the metal toggle, and a shock passed through her.

> NEURAL IMPLANT INITIALIZING

Cat yelped in surprise. Her implant was working! She pinged it, but it was still booting.

Suddenly the night grew dark again. She was on the other side of the ionic shield, in Canadian territory, or almost there at least. And then the signal from her implant faded.
What the hell?

The power supply of her implant, microscopic blood fuel cells, must be faulty. She could have burned them out during her defense against XOR. She’d been striving to reach the ground transmitters directly, which must have been well beyond the normal range, even with her extra antennae.

Oh god, she was going to be okay. Her implant was okay. She just needed power.

A
MACHINE, THE SIZE
of a single grain of sand, constructed on atomic scales, encompassed every aspect of a pico-factory. Instructions coded as DNA weighed less than a thousandth of a gram and contained two hundred gigabytes of data.

This particular machine, one object of approximately eight billion grains of sand in a cubic meter, of one trillion cubic meters of sand in Chad, started into motion. Fractal arms extended in all directions, scraped nearby sand, and fed the factory, building structures tailored to use silicon dioxide. Dozens of minutes passed, and then there were nine nearly identical copies. Less than a thousandth of the carefully scripted DNA instructions were utilized, but all were passed on.

A sphere of pico-machinery grew outward, its rate of expansion growing shorter as surface equipment increased in size and scale. Soon tiny shovels, visible to the human eye, funneled sand inward, where specialized nodes processing incoming silicon turned it into the desired components before pumping the finished product back out via a network of channels and ducts.

Solar panels blossomed above, molecule-perfect, operating at optimal conversion rates to power the ever-growing process. The edge, always chaotic, churned at ever-increasing rates, kid-sized shovels gradually being replaced by industrial-scale conveyer belts to feed the fabricators building large-scale devices.

Meanwhile, at the center, no longer needed for expansion, a darkly iridescent patch of computronium dilated: a solid, unchanging surface, stillness at its core.

Away from the core, the machinery was covered with pulsating veins, some black, some clear, transporting raw materials and bacteria-sized devices to where they were needed at speeds of a hundred miles per hour.

New veins burst outward, the perimeter increasingly ragged, as specialized transport systems reached out and down, finding the most desirable elements. Pustules at the perimeter bulged under pressure, then exploded, showering nano-seeds thousands of meters outward, creating new zones of infection that in turn expanded outward and merged with the core, speeding the spread.

The rate of expansion was up to a thousand meters per hour when the pustules changed form, became focused cannon firing powered slugs out twenty thousand meters. Now the computronium grew at twenty kilometers per hour; the veinous transport system crisscrossing the mass was composed of three-foot diameter pipes moving elements at a quarter the speed of sound.

Ten hours later, the country of Chad officially ceased to exist in its original form. It had become a single, spreading mass of computronium, its moving perimeter visible to the naked eye from orbit. Expansion, including a dozen new methods of propagation, moved outwards at two hundred miles per hour.

L
EON WOKE,
muscles cramped from where he lay curled up next to Ada in her little bed. She hadn’t been able to fall asleep on her own. He let her sleep a few more hours, while he caught up on current events.

During the long night, ELOPe, Helena, and the rest of the team had dropped all pretenses of being a rural island. The fabricators had built more fabricators, which built still more. Everything on the island capable of replication was building something, anything that could potentially be of use: churning out smart dust, compute nodes, solar panels, mesh network routers, and weapons.

A tactical coordination center had been grown into the bedrock deep in the hillside behind the house, reachable by a tunnel through layers of sandstone and limestone. Antennae had been grown everywhere, and during the night thousands of drones had distributed mesh nodes throughout the region, restoring the island’s connectivity to the global network.

Helena directed the island’s physical defenses, everything from the electric railguns and ground-based lasers to destroy incoming attacks to coordinating the fleet of vessels they’d bought, stolen, or grown in the preceding weeks and stationed around the Georgia Strait and even as distant as the far side of Vancouver Island.

When Ada woke, he shoved nutrient bars into her hands, then brought her and Bear, her favorite stuffed animal, to the coordination center.

In the midst of dozens of people and bots rushing to and fro, Leon argued with Mike and Helena and a half-dozen other AI about whether to keep Ada on the island or to try to sneak away with her, removing her from the picture entirely.

“She has the ability to stop XOR,” Mike said.

Helena agreed. “Imperfectly, but with practice, she could improve.”

“My daughter is not going to be a weapon!” Leon stared at Mike and Helena, challenging them to say more.

“We may not have
a—”
Mike stopped and looked past him.

All conversation surrounding them paused.

Catherine stood in the doorway, dressed in her trademark black clothes, a brand-new handheld laser pistol strapped to her thigh. “Come on, people. Have you never seen a clone before? Get back to work.”

She walked over to Leon and Mike, and put one hand on Leon’s arm.

“I know this can’t be easy for you.”

Before Leon could say anything, Ada came running through the door. “Mommy Two!” She grabbed Cat’s other hand and looked up at her. “I’m still waiting for Mommy One, but I’ll love you, too.”

“Thanks, Baby.” Catherine knelt and hugged Ada. “I love you.”

A wave of involuntary revulsion washed over Leon, turning his blood to ice. This wasn’t Cat,
his
Cat. It
was—

Ada leaned in close and smelled Catherine’s hair. “You smell funny. Like a fab toy.”

“Her tissues are new,” Helena said. “Give her a few days.”

Leon stared at her. “You’re . . .”

Catherine sighed and stood. “Leon, it’s me, Cat. I’m me. I’m restored from backup, that’s all.”

He tried to control his feelings. “ELOPe, which . . . I mean, did
you—?”

“She’s restored from backup, Leon,” ELOPe said through the net.

Leon probed her neural implant’s diagnostic interfaces, seeking the information he wanted.

“What are you doing?” Catherine asked, obviously aware.

He found it. “Your run time is thirty-three years. You aren’t Cat’s backup. You’re a simulation that’s been running hot for the last six weeks. You’re four years older than your chronological age.”

He turned and faced a screen. “ELOPe, why?”

ELOPe paused more than ten seconds before replying, an eternity for an AI. “I chose a version of Catherine that has the best combination of knowledge and experience for our situation. I did what was necessary to maximize our chances of success.”

Catherine touched his shoulder, and he flinched.

“It’s still me, Leon. You can’t imagine how much I’ve missed you these last years.”

Leon backed away. “I know it’s you . . . but it’s
not.
You’ve lived four years without me. Not in the real world, but in a simulation. How can I believe that you’re still, well,
normal,
for lack of a better word. How can I trust you?”