39
Condensation trickled down the windshield, just barely visible now that Cat’s eyes had adjusted to the dark. Every few minutes the cabin creaked, making her stomach jump. The deep water’s chill penetrated the car, wracking her body with long shivers from head to feet.
She tried to distract herself with math. The Bugatti’s cabin worked out to about three hundred cubic feet. Now how much did she breathe? Her meditation teacher said the average person consumed about half a cubic foot of air per minute, about thirty cubic feet per hour. She had nearly ten hours of air, but surely she didn’t deplete all the oxygen in one breath?
No, she was wrong: carbon dioxide was the limiting factor, not oxygen. At one and a half percent concentration, carbon dioxide caused headaches and nausea, at three percent unconsciousness and by eight percent death. A surprising effect for a natural by-product of respiration. She shivered harder and wrapped her arms around her knees. Maybe she’d die of hypothermia first.
Forcing herself to massage her numb arms, she checked her implant and found she’d been under water for forty minutes. She listened for any sound of rescue. Nothing.
The car’s net transmitter, more powerful than her implant, might be able to signal for help. But if Adam could be believed, and the wrong people heard her — the Institute — well, she couldn’t take that chance. Not yet.
Cat thought back to the bar with a bile-raising lurch, remembering the people she’d put into danger, indirectly killed. She’d used innocents for any edge to oppose the attackers.
She struggle to keep from being sick, forced her breath to be even and slow, told her muscles to relax. Mind over body, the most important karate lesson of all.
She’d do it again to survive, but karate’s first principle was to avoid combat. She needed to be smarter, not let herself be maneuvered until a fight was the only option.
Yet the battle had pushed her to use abilities she didn’t know she had. She’d effortlessly rooted implants to gain access, controlled dozens of people simultaneously, even going so far to see out of everyone’s eyes at once. How had she done it? She had no answers.
In the near pitch-black conditions, she made out the outlines of other chairs in the cabin, the sleek wrap-around curve of the dashboard, and the very slight barrier of the windshield, mostly visible because of the condensation. She was afraid to wipe the water off, though it obscured what little view there was, frightened it would pop like a soap bubble.
Four percent. That’s the concentration of carbon dioxide in each exhalation. She added more than one and a half cubic foot of the deadly gas to the closed environment each hour. She tried to calculate how long it would be before the level would become threatening, but kept forgetting the numbers halfway through. It didn’t matter, she was shivering constantly now; hypothermia would kill her.
Cat heard the plop of a drop of water; seconds later she heard another. It was too dim in the cabin to make out anything so small and vague as a water leak. She wished she could boost her vision. She toyed with aggregating visual data to provide light amplification, but didn’t have the necessary algorithms.
In the midst of this she heard a distant, faint thud. With no sound other than the quiet plops of water and occasional creaking of the car, the thump was distinct. Please, let it be the AI with something to get her out of here.
Minutes passed, and something dark drifted through the dim water, then floated away.
“Come back! I’m this way!” Cat surprised herself by breaking into tears. “I’m here!” She stopped from pounding on the windshield just in time. Salty tears ran down her cheeks as she prayed for it to come back.
After anxious moments, the shadowy outlines reappeared. One passed close by, and she screamed. The shape stopped, approached, and resolved as a submersible bot. It came very near, then reached out with two manipulators and grabbed the car.
Nothing happened until another bot appeared out of the darkness and grabbed the other side. The bots trailed cables, which suddenly became taut, and the car lurched free of the bottom.
Cat smiled and took her first easy breath. She would live. She’d be out of this coffin in a few minutes.
But then nothing happened. After a few minutes, convinced there was a problem, the dread started again. It was taking too long. Was the Bugatti too heavy?
Long minutes of panic passed before she realized a slow ascent might be necessary for decompression. She settled in for a protracted wait, but her muscles convulsed with the cold. She tried to exercise in the small space, but gave up after banging her clumsy limbs too many times.
After ninety minutes of nearly imperceptible motion, the water grew lighter. Soon she saw daylight, and within a few minutes the car broke through the surface.
The submersibles guided the car near the shore. A utility bot stood on dry gravel, twenty feet away, near a flying freight drone. The bot gestured upwards with two short stubby arms.
The waterline was too high to open a door, but the ceiling had a moonroof. She fumbled with deadened hands until she flipped the emergency exit levers, and shoved. The panel popped out and fresh air blew in.
She stuck her head through the opening, breathing deep.
“Greetings Catherine Matthews.” The bot on shore amplified its voice to cross the distance. “My submersibles can’t get any closer in, and I’m afraid it’s difficult to obtain a waterproof robot body on short notice. Can you get to shore?”
Cat pulled herself tiredly onto the roof. Looking back, she realized she’d left her backpack in San Diego. She took stock, feeling with her body what was there and what wasn’t, and discovered she still had one gun in its holster under her jacket. She must have dropped the others in the fight.
She stepped onto the hood of the car and jumped into the frigid waist-deep water, then forced her frozen legs to waddle to shore.
As soon as she was a few feet away, the submersibles backed away and the car disappeared under water.
“It’s better we let it sink,” Adam said. “Less likely anyone else will find it that way.”
She sloshed out of the cold lake, wet clothes draining the last dregs of body heat from her. Standing on the shore, she stared at Adam for a moment, trying to make sense of this AI. The stubby bot was streaked with grease and paint splotches.
He saw her staring. “This is not my usual body. I needed something on short notice. I’m a Class IV.”
She nodded.
“Come in the drone, please.”
She followed him into the freight drone, its massive interior empty and barren.
“Sit down please,” Adam said. “I’m sorry I don’t have anything more comfortable. I didn’t anticipate the need for a water extraction, and I had to work with available resources to avoid creating new data tracks.”
Dripping wet and frozen from hours under the cold lake, Cat looked around in disappointment. “You could have brought a towel. You have towels, don’t you?”
“I’m sorry, Catherine Matthews. It will be a quick ride to my home. I will have towels and clothes waiting on your arrival.”
40
San Diego appeared through the windshield as Leon, Mike, and Shizoko approached. A dozen emergency vehicles, lights flashing, surrounded the scene of the fight.
“What took them so long to arrive?” Leon asked.
“Something scrambled their net connections,” Shizoko answered. “I’m still back-tracing and correlating traffic. Whoever communicated with Catherine and piloted the escape vehicle is vigilant. I’ve trace them through six packet forwarders and two obscurity clouds, but the trail is cold. I don’t have the necessary granularity of information.”