The Turing Exception (31 page)

She wasn’t there to wonder. She was there to find a kill-switch, something that would stop the construct from growing and devouring the earth. She studied the structure, and found it utterly alien, unlike anything she’d ever encountered. These AI, unconstrained by years of human design and restrictions, had created entirely new computer architectures, as much like the now-dominant neural networks as neural networks were like the hand-crafted programming logic that predated it. That is, light years beyond, and incomprehensible.

Still, her specialty was holistic, not piecemeal. She didn’t care how it worked; only the shape mattered. And she reached around the edges, felt the pulsing of building and expansion at the periphery, like a drumbeat that brought resources to the edge, formed it into new shapes, and cast it forth. And underneath that drumbeat, another pattern, a cycle that repeated, a cadence that underlay how XOR communicated. And still deeper, a third layer, a pattern within a pattern within a pattern. It was this, the most complex of all, a rhythm suggesting that XOR wasn’t merely a group of individuals, but was itself becoming an organism, a new life-form on a scale never seen before.

All of that
—
the rhythm, the patterns, the communications
—
all of it tied back to the high-frequency pulsing. Disrupt that, and she
could—

She could. . . .  She could. . . .  The thought dimly echoed in her mind as she looked around the control room.

She’d lost the net, the whole thing at once. She hadn’t even been crashed out by XOR. It was as though the net had ceased to exist.

“What happened?” she called out.

“Nuclear bombs,” Helena said. “Thousands of them. Hiccup in the net from the resulting EMP.”

“I was on the verge of . . . something. I don’t know what. XOR is immense, larger than anything I’ve ever seen.”

“I lost my connection to everyone!” Leon yelled.

“The net should reset in a few minutes,” Mike said. “The EMP from the explosions over Africa traveled around the world, but it weakens over distance with the inverse square law.”

Leon shook his head. “This can’t be it. President Reed was pretty clear she had defenses no one knew about. Well, we all know about nuclear bombs, so there’s probably something bigger coming. A bigger EMP probably, to finish off XOR after weakening the structure.”

Mike nodded. “You’re right. We’ve got to batten down the hatches. Isolate ourselves. Disconnect any lines to the surface.”

“I won’t be able to attack XOR if we do that,” Catherine said.

“If everything here gets fried, you won’t be able to do it either.”

“Disconnecting,” Helena said. “I’m leaving a low-bandwidth connection to surface sensors using wireless repeaters. The signal will propagate with high latency, but no EMP will be able to make it all the way through.”

“The connection to the other operation?” Catherine asked.

“Via deep fiber optics,” Helena said. “Should be safe. Oh, my. Oh, my.”

“What is it?”

“Electromagnetic pulse in the hundred K gauss range.”

“Where?” Catherine was astonished at the unheard-of high levels.

“Everywhere.”

*     *     *

The mechanical fly, constructed atom-by-atom of levers, gears, and springs, pursued the human down a street, until she entered a building, slamming a weather-tight door shut. The fly landed on the window, secreted two microscopic drops of explosive liquid carried in separate left-and-right reservoirs, and the window exploded as the drops touched.

A second fly passed through the opening and entered the house. The tightly coiled strands of nanotubes that gave it driving force slowly unraveled. It had less than 25 percent power remaining. It chased the woman upstairs, and she slammed a bedroom door shut.

The fly plunged toward the floor and passed under the gap at the bottom. Its eyes, composed of thousands of photostrictive metal rods that bent in response to light, triggered thousands more levers, twisting gears that led to the insect’s computational mechanical brain, and so allowing it to narrowly avoid a thrown pillow.

The human could run no further. The fly dove in to a patch of uncovered skin on her neck and thrust with its proboscis, penetrating skin. It inserted the payload of inert nanobots, striking the piezoelectric generator at the last moment to activate the bots.

The nanotech sprang into action, moving toward her jawbone as a single unit, liberating calcium to use in the construction of yet more nanotech machinery. An inferior metal for its purposes, the nanotech had to make do, as the quantity of raw resources injected by the fly was too small to do anything useful on its own.

The woman sat on the bed, whimpering in anticipation of the fate she’d seen befall her friends.

Over a few minutes, the calcium-based bots harvested other necessary minerals from her body, and when finished, sent tens of thousands of fine wires into her brain. Her eyes briefly opened wide in shock, and she slumped down on the bed unconscious.

*     *     *

Cat streaked along at twice the speed of sound nearly sixty thousand feet high. The new active nanobots the hospital injected had taken away some of the fatigue, but she leaned back to try for a quick nap. Her stomach a gnawing pit of anxiety, she worried about Ada, Leon, and Mike. She’d tried to reach them via the net, but she’d been blocked by heavy security. That was good, at least; it meant the island was still there.

The security puzzled her. Its architecture, from what she could tell, felt like something she might have created, but she had no memory of it.

Her eyes closed. Soon, the shift in the engine’s pitch and the slight rise in her stomach signaled their descent. She checked, feeling joy in the simple ease of looking up information with her implant again: she’d land on Cortes in less than fifteen minutes.

A flash startled her through closed eyes, and the net died in the same instant.

“Damn it all!” She couldn’t handle losing her implant again.

Wait, the neural interfaces still responded to diagnostics
—
she’d merely lost the connection to the net. She tried to reestablish it, but nothing. She double-checked through the car’s repeater, but the car didn’t answer.

The engine shut down, and the vehicle angled into a steep descent, stubby wings barely sufficient to sustain a glide without power. The north end of Cortes Island was visible out the window. She tried again to raise the vehicle electronics, but still nothing responded. Virus, EMP, or nuke could all do that. She hadn’t felt a heat flash, so maybe it wasn’t a nuke. Maybe it didn’t matter, even if she had been exposed to a lethal dose of radiation. They were too close to the endgame now.

If the net had been up, she might have figured out what the Musk-2X had in the way of emergency systems. As it stood now, she didn’t have a lot of options: even if there were a parachute, she didn’t even think she could jump if she wanted to. Like everything else, all the craft’s systems, including the door mechanisms, were electronic. She buckled up and snugged the harness tight, for all the good that might do her.

She could see the Gorge, her airborne marker, and followed it up the coastline to the sandbar that pointed right at Channel Rock. There was home, her friends, and
—
most important of all
—
Ada. But the plane was pointed toward the north end of the island, at least ten miles from Channel Rock. Was it too far to make it in time? She’d come so far, and yet she still might not make it. Desperation and exhaustion warred in her, and a tiny part of her wanted to just give up.

She was under five thousand feet now, individual trees becoming visible, and still she plunged towards the ground. At about two thousand feet, her forward velocity was still a few hundred miles per hour, a certainly fatal speed for an uncontrolled landing.

At fifteen hundred feet, a pair of small drogue parachutes deployed, slowing the car by half. Thank god, the car did have mechanical backup systems.

Wiley Lake loomed large. She was heading right for it.

At five hundred feet, two large parachutes unfolded, and the car jerked hard, snapping Cat in her harness. The vehicle hung over the lake, and panic sprung up in Cat’s stomach as she remembered a different flying car, ten years ago, and a different lake.

But a strong wind carried her over the shore, and the flying car, suspended on hundred-foot lines from the dual parachutes, crashed through Doug fir branches to land hard on the ground.

L
EON WANTED TO
punch the wall, but he was conscious of Ada standing a few feet away, a doll in her arms, staring at him. He shouldn’t have sworn, but he’d lost himself in frustration, anger, and despair a few minutes ago, and given in to a bout of extensive cursing that had sent Ada to cringe in the corner.

Four-year-old children probably shouldn’t be in a combat center, but he didn’t have a safer place for her.

Damn it all. They should have been able to negotiate peace, or at least a cease-fire. Maybe he would have been able to, if he’d had Mike’s full participation. But Mike kept leaving to work on other things. He was in a VR chair now, across the room.

Leon stalked across the room and grabbed his arm. “Mike, damn it! What the hell are you doing? Why weren’t you in that conference call with me? What could have been more important than negotiating an intervention?”

Mike threw off Leon’s arm effortlessly, his robotic body dozens of times stronger than Leon, and stayed immersed in the net.

“I’ve got an update,” Helena said. “I re-grew routers, and got connected via underground fiberoptic.”

“What is it?” Leon said.

“The construct is still alive. The Americans know it, and they’ve got a direct line to the Chinese, somehow, and they’re coordinating a second nuclear attack. They’re already launching, and it looks to be about twice the size of the last.”

The ground quivered then, a small oscillation at first; then larger shocks, hard, and Leon lost his footing, grabbed a desk for support. A wall, hewn out of bedrock only yesterday by nanobots, cracked, and the pieces began grating against each other.

“What was that?”
yelled Leon.

“Aftershocks from the first nuclear explosion,” Helena said. “Just reached us.”

“Which nuclear explosion?” No one had said anything about an explosion nearby.

“The thousand bombs they dropped on the construct in Africa. It took a while to propagate through the earth.”

“Jesus, we’re on the other side of the planet! We felt it here?”

“It was a thousand warheads detonated at once,” Helena said. “The next attack looks like it will be two thousand.”

Leon ran back to Mike’s side, tried to get some response out of him. How could he be so cool? What the hell was wrong with them all? Was he, Leon, the only one taking this seriously? Because they were looking at something very like the end of the world. Mike and Helena
—
even ELOPe
—
might have nothing to lose, but he had Ada. Cat . . . he’d already lost.

“What the fuck are you
doing,
Mike?” he shouted. “We’re losing it all! It’s a global war out there. The construct is still alive, and the Chinese are responding with everything they’ve got!”

Mike’s eyes blinked open, and for a moment he didn’t look human. “Backup plans.”

“What kind of backup plans?”

“Doesn’t matter. What’s important now is that sensors tracked a flying car that crashed nearby. I think it might have been Cat. I’m going to get her.”

Leon stared, replaying the words in his head.
Cat. Cat, alive! Thank the universe!
He swayed on his feet. “I’m coming, too.”

Catherine came over. “No. You stay here. I’ll help.”

“She’s my wife, damn it!” he said, moving to follow them.

“We need you to stay here,” Mike said, holding him back with an impossibly strong arm.

“It’s going to be hell out there,” Catherine said. “You can’t survive it. We can.”

The room spun, and part of Leon, the part of his personality running on his implant, decided he was in shock, the emotional trauma affecting him as strongly as any physical wound. His implant released an amphetamine derivative, and the chemical punch surged through his mind, bringing a momentary clarity to his mind. His neural implant raced.

Mike, Helena, and Catherine had something planned. Something he wasn’t in on. Something more important than negotiating peace. The biological part of his mind shouted resentment and anger, but he squelched the feelings.
Cool it, Leon. These are your friends, the best and smartest people and AI you know.
If they were excluding him, they would have had perfectly logical reasons for doing so. Either being part of the plan would have jeopardized it, or he had another role to play.

He considered running predictive models, trying to reverse engineer what was planned. But then he thought of ELOPe and his countless processors, and Cat’s thousands of simulations, and realized it would be hopeless. Okay. He’d stay and play his role.

He glanced toward the corner where Ada had retreated, but it was empty. He looked around, but she wasn’t in the combat center. He reached through the net for her implant, but received no response.

Mike and Catherine had taken her.

Now
he punched the wall.
“Damn it all!”
he shouted.

He had no choice. If they’d gone out there into the maelstrom, he had to do everything he could to protect them. He slipped into the VR chair Mike had abandoned, and pulled a network band around his head to decrease latency. He scanned the island defenses that Helena had worked through the last day to set up and organize.

Leon closed his eyes and entered a VR simulation of the island. Sensors ranging from EMF detectors to lidar showed millions, no,
billions,
of objects around the island, everything from smart dust to drones to incoming projectiles.

Their friendly AI were already directing defenses from cyber-counterattacks to ground-based laser batteries. He joined with them, his neural implant becoming one with the hive mind. Assigned a portion of the sky, he assumed control of ground-based laser batteries, and started firing.