“If Shizoko didn’t see them coming, would you?” Mike said.
“I guess not.”
As they left the hotel Leon glanced back and forth, wondering who was watching.
“You’re attracting attention,” Mike said. “Think you’ll spot an armed drone coming at the speed of sound with your eyes?”
“Right.” He switched to monitoring the net.
“Any idea where Shizoko thought the other AI was?”
“No,” Leon said, “but it was less than two hours away. The aircar could do eight hundred miles in that time.”
“That’s a good chunk of the United States.”
Leon stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “Wait, he said we’d be there in less than two hours. He wasn’t planning to be back for thirty minutes. Give us another fifteen to get underway, and that only leaves an hour and a quarter for travel.”
“Five hundred miles.” Mike started walking again. “Let’s hole up somewhere private. You can use your fancy new implant to figure it out.”
They turned in at a sushi restaurant, the hostess leading them to an enclosed room where they took off their shoes and knelt on the tatami mat.
“You can do this,” Mike said. “Hide your tracks so we don’t end up like Shizoko.”
“Got it,” Leon said, pride surging at Mike’s trust. He smiled and closed his eyes.
Using onion routers to disguise their location, he retrieved their research, copying the massive archive to local storage, more data than he’d ever held in an implant before. He started automated analysis, then realized Shizoko would have tried all the standard algorithms. He sifted through the news and police reports by hand instead.
He found one case, a woman who died in her home of unknown causes. She’d been discovered by her boyfriend while her son was off on a camping trip. The boy had gone now to live with his father, a California Senator.
A Senator? That was interesting. He scanned the rest of the deaths on the lookout for relationships. The sister of a US Congressman turned up; a banker, brother-in-law to Madeleine Ridley, Lonnie’s number two.
Maybe…
“Hey,” Leon said, blinking at the unexpected sight of sushi. He grabbed salmon nigiri with chopsticks. “What do AI think of human families?”
Mike shrugged and took a sip of tea. “They are aware of them, obviously. Some clone themselves to raise offspring, of sorts.”
“Yeah, but not Shizoko. He’s a spontaneous, emergent artificial intelligence, no children.”
“Why?” Mike asked.
“More than a few of these deaths are relatives of people involved in politics. Other than the ties to Lonnie Watson, Shizoko hardly mentioned them. I’m not sure he was looking for family connections.”
Leon closed his eyes and spawned thousands of search queries, exploring social networks, birth records, tax forms, and photo tags. Flesh and blood relationships didn’t always show up. You might meet cousins every couple of years, and you aren’t linked to all of them online, but at a family gathering you tell stories you wouldn’t describe to outsiders. The familial bond spans distance and time with an intimacy lacking in other connections.
A little while later, Leon was shocked to find he had data on five million people loaded into his implant. He opened his eyes, took a sip of now-cold tea.
“Family relationships aren’t obvious,” he said. “I had to guess at connections based on secondary data.”
Mike nodded. “Go on.”
“Twenty-three percent of the fatalities were related to people in political office, well above the norm. But it’s crazier when you look at it the other way, starting with the politicians. Every key person associated with the People’s Party, from Lonnie Watson on down through the party organizers, has been related to one or more victims. Distantly perhaps, but the connection is still there.”
“What the hell?”
“They’re the pawns of whoever is behind the murders. The Party is AI-created.”
“I don’t understand.” Mike slammed the table. “The People’s Party is an anti-AI movement. They’re trying to take down the machines.”
“They think that’s their purpose, but if an AI is manipulating them, who knows?”
Mike nodded slowly. “You’re right. Are we any closer to understanding who’s responsible?”
“I’m not sure. Let me look further.”
“Be quick. We’ve been here a while.”
Leon dove back in. The rogue AI must have crunched tons of info and yet had gone undetected, even by Shizoko, one of the premier network traffic engineers in the world. Disguising that much data would require hundreds of hardwired connections. Also, Shizoko had been in a survival gear shop, which suggested someplace with a harsh climate.
He booted an artificial neural net seeded with his data and new conclusions, and adjusted the software’s settings. He grumbled out loud as he botched the model, a vast area of southern Arizona fading to a dull grey. What had he screwed up?
He tweaked the controls and repeated the process. Tucson grew darker, more faint, causing Leon to grit his teeth. Frustrated, he reset the sensitivity threshold, flaring the whole continent red, but still Tucson failed to behave normally.
What the—?
He jumped backwards, upsetting the table, setting plates rattling. He blinked, tried to remember where he was.
“You found the answer.” Mike spoke softly.
“Tucson isn’t there.”
“What?”
“Data comes in and goes out, but too normalized. I can’t explain exactly. Tucson doesn’t act like the rest of the world.”
“Did you ping the city?” Mike got a faraway stare.
Leon focused hard, stopping Mike before he could make the connection.
Mike’s eyes grew big. “What’d you do?”
“Sorry, if you connected, they’d backtrace to us.”
“I get that, but how did you stop me?”
“Uh, I don’t know.” Leon shrugged it off. “Look, the data fits. Tucson is within the time limit Shizoko stated, and he was in a survival gear store, which makes sense if we’re going to the desert.”
“We need to get in touch with Rebecca.”
“No!” Leon banged a fist down. “If we communicate now, the rogue will find us.”
“We can’t shut down a powerful AI ourselves. We barely made the trip to Austin on our own.”
Leon tapped his temple. “But we’re smarter now. We’re just as capable.”
Mike stared doubtfully.
“We’ll find Catherine. She’s special. Together we can take down the AI.”
“How did you conclude that Catherine’s not working for the machines?”
“Instinct.”
“You crunched terabytes of data to figure out where the AI is, and you decide she’s good based on instinct?”
“Well, I’m still human.”
Mike shook his head. “You’re obsessed.”
Leon flushed. “I’m going. Are you with me?”
Mike took a deep breath. “Yes, I’m always with you.”
“Thank you.” Leon smiled, grateful, and Mike grinned back. “Now how do we get to Tucson? We are not driving again.”
Mike stared off into space. “I have an idea: the Continental.”
The super-sonic subterranean maglev was an early gift from AI-kind to humans, running in a partial vacuum at a peak of three thousand miles an hour.
“The train only stops in LA and NY,” Leon said. “And besides, we’ll be listed on the passenger manifest.”
“There are emergency exits.” Mike pushed a link over in netspace. “And with your new implant, can you hack the manifest?”
Leon glanced at the shared news article, accompanied by a photograph of a small concrete building peeking out of a cactus covered landscape.