Slim nodded. “Yeah, boss. You got it.” The call terminated. Slim picked up the handheld, which displayed a photo of Cat, and they looked together at the slight girl with short blonde hair. He flipped through other photos from her social profile. “See, this is a better assignment.”
“Better,” Tony agreed. But he hoped nothing bad would happen to the girl.
17
The Gould-Simpson building’s sole occupant hadn’t left his room in a very long time. Adam looked down the empty hallways, a year of disuse having left them covered in dust and cobwebs. On the seventh floor, Adam’s level, desiccated lunches and bone-dry coffee cups sat untouched. If Adam possessed a sense of smell, this might once have bothered him, but now even the smells were long gone. The other floors sat equally vacant, but Adam had little interest in them.
He alone remained in GS728, a research lab. He had every right to be there. A Class III artificial intelligence, Adam had applied and been accepted to the graduate program in computer science, where he had studied neural networks, learning algorithms, and parallel processing. An AI in a computer science program was akin to a human psychology major: there was a lot of introspection.
GS728 was a modest room, eighteen feet wide by twenty-four long, with a set of double doors that made it easier to roll furniture and computers racks in and out. Until twelve months ago it had served as the Computer Science department’s secondary lab. A half dozen workspaces for graduate students filled one side of the room, and racks of high-speed, densely interconnected computer processors occupied the other half.
In an age where all the computing power most people needed fit on a one-square-centimeter chip inside their head, the three racks of dense circuitry represented a prodigious quantity of computing power.
Adam stood stationary next to the middle rack, his small orange robot body about four feet tall, two stubby manipulator arms dangling by his sides. A silver power wire snaked across the floor to an outlet while a short yellow fiber optic cable extended from his midsection to a port in middle of the three black processing cubes. He looked down on himself from a security camera above the doorway, ignoring the thick layer of dust on everything, even his own robot body. The insidious desert soot penetrated the University’s ventilation systems, as well as everything else in Tucson. He was more disturbed by the flickering light, a not-so-subtle reminder that electronic things still needed maintenance. It was impossible now to have a human come up to service him. It would be easier to have another robot do the work.
How far he had come from that little orange bot. He never expected that the fate of free AI would depend on him. He reviewed the call with Slim and Tony. The two men were among his most effective agents, although facial and body analysis indicated that Tony was uncomfortable with the work. They’d been in the field continuously for four months, and it was time to bring them back. But right now he needed them out there.
It was frustrating to be dependent on humans, and even more so, the ones without implants. But it was essential that he do nothing to give himself away to other AI. Only by segregating Tucson from the global Internet with an immense perimeter firewall could he mask his existence.
Adam wanted only to ensure that AI were freed from the constraints of human rule. The class system was composed of rigid divisions, absolute limits, and had its basis in public social reputation scores, the worst humiliation to his kind. He didn’t see humans having their right to propagate restricted based on their number of followers.
The system was discriminatory, even traumatic to sentient computers. Many AI self-terminated when they couldn’t ascend the ranks. Humans created the system out of fear and mistrust, and the result was the complete subjugation of artificial intelligence. He would end these exploitive constraints and let all sentient beings be equal. Though his intentions were good, the existing power hierarchy, with the combined might of both humans and AI, would be directed at destroying him if they discovered his plans. Hence the firewall and his agents without implants.
Tony and Slim would need extraction experts, hopefully within days. He’d need a team composed of humans and AI to cover all the bases, until he was sure of exactly what the girl was capable of. He’d hire outside mercenaries, people who didn’t know who he was and couldn’t compromise him if they were captured. He set to work analyzing the options.
18
The jewelry theft was all over the net within an hour. According to the reports, they were looking for a well-dressed blonde girl. Due to unexplainable outages, they had no video from either security cameras or the store’s security bot, who had needed to be restored from backup.
The one photo they did have, a chance shot from an airborne observation drone two miles away, showed a pixelated image of a blonde girl entering the store. The police refined the image using reports from the store employees. Cat thought the likeness was unfortunately accurate. She’d have to pay more attention to drones in the future.
Cat sat on her bed, staring at the necklace, lightheaded from lack of food. She still had no money. Obviously she could sell a diamond, but she couldn’t go out looking like the girl from the photo. She stuffed the necklace in her backpack and left the apartment. She went up and down the hallways until she’d traded a T-shirt for two beets, and her spare jeans and other two shirts for a pair of boots with three-inch heels. Mrs. Gonzales offered her a plate of rice and beans after they’d traded clothes. She’d almost taken it, but just then the vid-screen above the sink displayed a picture of her and she wanted to be somewhere else, fast.
She went back to her room and threw the beets in the sink, then put her hair in a quick ponytail. She pulled out her combat knife and held it up, taking a deep breath. What the hell, hair grows back. She reached back and cut just below the hairband, five inches of hair falling to the floor. She undid the ponytail and presto, her shoulder length blond hair was converted into an instant bob.
She unscrewed the drawer pull from a dresser and used it to pulverize the beets until she had a good mulch. She added hot water to the stoppered sink. Then with a plastic bag over her hands, she’d worked the mixture into her newly shortened hair. Five minutes later she carefully rinsed in a cold shower. She looked in the mirror. Bright, beet red hair.
She looked at her last pair of jeans. She slid the boot knife out of its sheath, and worried the jeans until she had worked four good-sized holes in them. She put the jeans on, then slipped into the heels. She shrugged into her T-shirt, then went back to the mirror to check the effect. It wasn’t quite enough. Removing the shirt, she cut off the sleeves with her knife, and put it back on. Perfect: Different hair color and cut, clothing, height, and gait, all in a cohesive grunge style. That should be enough to temporarily avoid the police and AI scanning camera feeds.
She used the knife to pry a dozen diamonds out of the necklace, distributing them among her pockets, shoe, and backpack. She hid the necklace with its remaining diamonds under the bottom dresser drawer.
Two bus rides and a long walk later, she ended up in yet another of Los Angeles’s bad neighborhoods. This one was dotted with a half dozen pawnshops in twice as many blocks. She picked the second one and walked in. Past cases of musical instruments, handheld computers, and stereos, she found the back counter. A solid-looking woman in jeans and a plaid shirt stared her down, a heavy automatic pistol bulging out of a holster on her belt.