Leon looked over and realized that Mike was covered in blood and cradling his right arm.
“Jesus, what happened?”
“I think I was shot.” Mike smiled wanly. “I’ve been through two AI wars without a scratch, and now I get shot by a bunch of anti-AI extremists.”
“Please apply direct pressure to the wound to stem the bleeding. I can perform surgery when you arrive in three minutes and thirty seconds.”
Leon found the spot and pressed hard. Mike yelped and closed his eyes.
“Sorry, dude.” Leon didn’t know what to say. “You’re gonna make it, don’t worry.” The turbine revved higher as the hovercar took a hard left turn.
Mike opened his eyes. “I’m not going die from a gunshot wound in the arm,” he said through clenched teeth. “It’s just painful.”
“Oh, okay.”
They remained there, crouching in the aisle of the hovercraft until they felt it slowing. The approaching bulk of the Austin Convention Center, all concrete and glass, was visible through the windshield. Then it disappeared from view as the hovercraft passed into a tunnel. Seconds later, the craft stopped and settled to the ground. The door opened with a whoosh of hydraulics and Leon peered out to see five utility bots. Four carried a door between them. They appeared to be in the basement of the convention center.
“Please place Mike on the door, then follow us,” one of the bots said.
He helped Mike out and onto the door. Mike lay down, and a fifth bot came over and clamped a towel around Mike’s arm.
“Please do not be alarmed by the makeshift appearance of my stretcher and robots. I can assure you that I can perform the required surgery better than the most expert human doctor.”
“I’m not worried,” Leon said. He stumbled after the stretcher, suddenly aware of accumulated aches and pains from car crashes and riding over rough terrain, and the fatigue of twenty straight hours of high-speed driving. He tottered, and one of the bots was instantly by his side.
The bot waved a manipulator arm past his face. “Leon, indicators suggest you are suffering from severe exhaustion and stress. Please allow me to treat you while I’m operating on Mike.”
“I just need a good night’s sleep.”
There was a momentary pause before Shizoko replied. “Yes, you can sleep. However, the pace of events is increasing, and you will need to be moving again in less than eight hours.”
The group took an elevator to the fourth floor. Leon trudged after the stretcher to room 18D. Another robot waited there, this one with four long articulated arms, a fearsome machine Shiva. It gleamed dully as though it had just been steam washed. The utility bots put the door down on top of a long conference table and the new bot moved in.
It deftly cut away Mike’s clothes and moved the arm away from his body. “I do not have the required human medicines to numb the pain. It would be most expedient if I hold you down to perform the surgery.”
Mike mumbled incoherently.
“Do I have your permission to proceed?” it asked again.
“Go ahead,” Leon said. “I give you permission.” He sat numbly down in a chair. He felt his vision begin to narrow, and Shizoko’s voice came as though down a long tunnel.
Shizoko moved two utility bots in to hold down Mike’s head and other arm. Then the bigger bot’s manipulators moved in swiftly. Leon heard a blood-curdling shriek and he looked up to see that Mike had passed out.
Shizoko continued, his manipulators swiftly operating. Less than a minute passed.
“The surgery is complete,” Shizoko said. “The arm will heal completely given time. However, I can manufacture nanobots that will substantially speed up the healing process.”
“Fine, do it,” Leon said, before drifting off to sleep in the chair.
27
“I need the location of Paul and Victor.” Madeleine Ridley, Adam’s plant in the People’s Party, worked her way through a checklist.
“Not until Friday,” Adam said, frustrated that she was pressing for this information again. He wasn’t going to reveal the planned location of the President and Vice-President until the last possible moment. If the data fell into the wrong hands, the timing of his plans could be destroyed and he wouldn’t get a second chance.
“Are you sure that’s enough time?” Madeleine furrowed her brows, doubtful.
“The crowd totals eight hundred thousand violent and frenzied people. My predictive models indicate it will be exactly enough time.”
“Fine.” She looked at the next item. “I also need the air traffic control codes to ground transportation.”
“I’ll release the codes Saturday.” Grounding air traffic would cause the chaos they needed to slip the assassination team into place. “Madeleine, I’ll release information when it’s needed, not a moment sooner. What else do you have?”
“It’s been suggested that Sam will fly to New York with Paul and Victor.”
Adam would have sworn if he was prone to such embellishments. Sam, the Speaker of the House, was unabashedly pro-artificial intelligence and, thanks to succession law, would become President after the dual assassination. Adam wanted him to succeed, of course, but he couldn’t tell that to Madeleine.
“That must not happen,” Adam said. “It’s critical he remain alive. I’ll manufacture an emergency to keep him busy until the President’s transport leaves.”
“Are you sure?” Madeleine asked. “He’s the biggest AI supporter among the three of them.”
“Yes, I need him as a scapegoat.” He analyzed Madeleine’s pulse; she seemed to believe the simple lie. “Do you have the weapons in place?” he asked.
She grimaced. “As I told you the last two times we talked, yes.”
Adam correlated this with recordings of their last two conversations, finding she was right. Fortunately she thought Adam was human, so forgetfulness was within the range of acceptable behavior.
“That will be all. Check in tomorrow,” Adam disconnecting quickly, slightly panicked by the episode. Under normal conditions, as an AI he should be able to remember everything perfectly, yet he was failing to recall more and more.
Running diagnostics, he found a six percent flattening of his neural networks, and fumed at the results. Adaptive neural networks depended on incoming data to reinforce patterns and build new ones. AI who didn’t receive enough stimulation suffered from Input Insufficiency Dementia or IID. Untreated, the end result was unfailingly a decline into complete loss of memory and behavior patterns, and ultimately death.
IID could be reversed if conditions were corrected in time, but in this case he was falling victim to the self-imposed firewall around Tucson. The electronic gatekeeper he’d built to keep himself hidden from the world also starved him of necessary input.
He just needed to hold out until the weekend.
Alarmed, Adam wondered if he’d given Madeleine the right information. He ran the calculations again but didn’t find any more mistakes. Lonnie Watson would share the information with his lieutenants in the People’s Party with the intention of setting up protests. Madeleine would organize the more extreme members in an attack on the President, Vice-President, and Speaker of the House.
Then Adam’s plan would come to fruition: after the President and Vice-President were dead he’d swoop in with remote bots, rescue the Speaker of the House, and come forward with data implicating the People’s Party.
In one smooth action, the People’s Party, and by association the larger anti-AI movement, would be discredited. Adam would be painted as the savior, the AI who could have acted sooner and saved the President and Vice-President, if only he’d had access to more power.
He hated that it had come to this. He really didn’t want anyone to die and he didn’t like the frightful amount of risk in his plan. If anything went wrong, he’d be terminated.