35
Leon packed netspace with research on Catherine Matthews and street camera video feeds from the bar in San Diego until the walls of the cabin disappeared. Shizoko helped by adding visualizations of the massive fluctuations in the net.
“Five minutes until we arrive,” Shizoko said over the roar of wide-open engines.
“You’re sure Catherine is not on their side?” Mike asked.
“The timing doesn’t match,” Shizoko said. “Her public data feed reveals a perfectly ordinary life for ten years. While she’s recently done peculiar things with the net, they’re different than the disturbances surrounding the chain of murders. Nothing, until the attack in the park, would suggest she was anything but normal.”
“And this group,” Leon said, pointing at the video, “following and attacking her, puts them on opposite sides.”
“We can’t be sure that makes her the good guy,” Mike said. “Maybe they’re undercover.”
“No,” Shizoko said. “Their reputation scores suggest they’re hired mercenaries, and they mounted an assault on the bar without calling for police backup. “
“Undercover cops use faked IDs with bad reps,” Mike said. “Look, we’re trying to rescue this girl without knowing enough about her.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Leon said. “She’s being attacked. Why wouldn’t we help her?”
“You think she’s cute and you want to play the hero.” Mike shook his head. “You’ll keep playing with the data until it tells you what you want.”
Leon felt himself flush with embarrassment and anger. She was pretty and smart, and nothing would be better than riding to her rescue. But that didn’t change the facts: she was literally surrounded. He decided to ignore Mike. “Shizoko, what will you be able to do against the mercenaries? You’re not a military bot.”
“I’m armed, but I also hired private security to meet us. I tried to notify the police, but another AI, a big one, is blocking me.”
“Another Class IV?” Leon asked.
“No, it’s bigger. After this encounter, I’ll analyze the network traffic to determine point of origin.”
Leon and Mike stared at each other. There shouldn’t be any AI more powerful than a Class IV.
They banked hard into a steep dive. Directly ahead of them, the Gaslamp Quarter, and in the sky, four other aircars converging on the same location.
“Are those security?” Leon said.
“Yes.” In the back of the cabin, Shizoko replaced his lower pair of arms with robotic rifles he retrieved from a cabinet. “I have traditional handguns here, but I recommend you remain in the aircar, where you will be protected.”
“You’ve fought before?” Leon asked.
“No, but I have training programs.”
“Aren’t you afraid of being killed?”
Shizoko laughed. “No. Did you think my consciousness was here? Less than a hundredth of my processing power is in this body. The rest remains in my computing center in Austin.”
“Why fight when you could let the security bots handle it?”
“Like all AI, I crave immersive experiences. It’s not every day I can join such a battle.” Shizoko exercised the articulated rifles. “Stay in the car.”
They made a final sharp turn, reverse thrusters throwing up dust and debris. The door sprang open as they jolted down and Shizoko dashed out, his treads churning as he flew into the street and toward the bar.
36
Still huddled in a ball behind the bar, Cat contemplated the military bot’s ultimatum. Surrender, without any knowledge of what it wanted?
The sound of low whimpers and sobs came from the rubble. She’d endangered the people here by coming in, and worse, used them to save herself. All were hurt, and many dead. But she didn’t start this fight, and she wasn’t going to let their loss be in vain. And she sure as hell didn’t study karate for six years to give up at the first challenge. They might have started it, but she’d finish the fight.
Afraid of the robot’s cyberattacks, she still suppressed her regular vision and used the three dimensional wireframe she had generated from multiple viewpoints. Better than normal eyesight, the wireframe let her see through walls.
How could she defeat this combat bot? Karate was pointless, normal bullets useless, and her one rocket easily disabled. She recited the twenty principles under her breath.
Wazawai wa getai ni shozu. Accidents come from inattention.
Karate no shugyo wa issho de aru. You will never stop learning karate.
Katsu kangae wa motsu na makenu kangae wa hitsuyo. Do not think you must win. Instead, think that you do not have to lose. This was potentially a good one for the situation at hand.
Karate wa, gi no taske. One who practices karate must follow the way of justice. Well, duh.
Kokoro wa hanatan koto wo yosu. Be ready to free your mind…
Maybe the problem was that she wasn’t stretching far enough. She found a few hundred people in the nearby net, scared from the gunfire. Other AI too, mostly curious because they knew little fear. She reached into their implants, every one. They might not consciously know how, but their hardware could route data, even the humans.
Using them all, she pulled and twisted and massaged a huge stream of connections, ten, a hundred, a thousand.
“What are you doing, Catherine Matthews? You’re manipulating the net.” The robot crunched debris under treads, drawing closer.
Cat continued rerouting protocols, forcing astronomical amounts of data in and out of people’s interfaces. Not used to moving this many bits, they were screaming, their brain patterns becoming irregular, pain leaking back through the connections. Quickly, before the whole thing collapsed, she sent the streams toward the military bot, a high bandwidth assault.
“You cannot believe,” the robot called, “that you can penetrate my military hardware with bulk data?”
The robot pulled itself through the doorway, glass crunching under its tentacles, metal twisting and screeching.
She pulled more feeds, encrypted them on the fly, forwarding the bytes to the bot. She didn’t need to kill the AI, just swamp its processors. Assessing each feed’s legitimacy would cause enough contention to starve sensors and render the robot blind.
The world slowed down at she went deeper. She cycled feeds, connecting and disconnecting hundreds of times each second. She pushed the data toward the robot, until finally she got what she wanted: the packet response time started to drop off. Connection denied responses went from three millisecond delays to four milliseconds, eight, and finally twenty.
“What you’re doing won’t work,” the robot said, but now Cat believed this to be bluster. It was working.
Tables and chairs scraped the floor as they were pushed out of the way nearby.
Cat leaped to her feet, turned her vision back on, and came face to face with the robot, both guns raised. She fired point blank, emptying the guns into the sensor pods, blinding the bot.
The tentacles lashed out, but lethargically, as the robot’s overloaded processors struggled to get enough cycle time to operate its body.
Cat, her reflexes maxed, ran around the bot, leaping over bodies and tables and onto the hood of the Honda.
The thin man watched her.
She raised one gun, no rounds left, but he didn’t know that.
He lowered his gun and backed away.
She probed for other attackers. Nothing in the immediate block, but she tasted the hard iron of more military bots in the net, approaching fast from all directions. Air traffic data showed a circle of aircars closing in less than a minute.