“Lesson over.” Adam stood and left.
She looked down, saw a dried pool of vomit at her feet. Every movement was agony, the pain worse than any physical fight she’d ever been in. She tried to move, but her muscles locked up and she almost fell.
She settled for leaning against the wall instead. The clock showed half the afternoon had passed. The fight seemed distant now. What had happened? Had she been about to beat Adam?
She forced herself up, ignoring the protests of muscles that held her in place for hours, and staggered back to her room.
48
“Make the train stop,” Mike whispered. Their plan hinged on getting the three-thousand-miles-an-hour Continental to halt under the Tucson emergency exit.
“I’m trying.” Leon focused, still attempting to trigger the stop.
“It’s not working,” Mike said. “We’re traveling forty miles per minute. We’ll be in New York soon.”
Another passenger glanced at them.
“Be quiet,” Leon said through a clenched jaw, “you’re distracting me.” He grappled with the train’s software architecture, afraid of alerting the AI driver. Five minutes later, Leon gave up and leaned back against his seat.
Mike’s head hung. “I thought you’d be able to stop us.”
“The subsystem is wrapped in all kinds of security and a Class II AI is driving.”
“Kuso!” Mike said. “Now what?”
“We ride to New York and try again in two hours.”
“We’ll bounce back and forth all day unless you have a specific plan.”
Leon shook his head. “I’m out of ideas. You?”
“Can you fool the sensors with an imaginary obstruction?”
“No, I tried.” They had picked a car full of humans to avoid bots with super-sensitive hearing, but a guy across the cabin kept watching them.
Mike leaned closer. “You can open the doors at the top of the egress?”
Leon checked. “Yes, but what good does that do if I can’t make us stop?”
“Hire a remote telebot,” Mike whispered. “Something dumb, no onboard AI. Unlock the ground level door, send the bot down the stairs, and throw it on the tracks.”
“Are you crazy?” Leon hissed. The same passenger stared at them again. He continued in a softer voice. “You know what would happen if this train hit a robot going forty miles a minute?”
“The avoidance sensors will detect the obstacle and stop.”
“Jesus. You’re betting everyone’s lives.”
“You have a better idea?”
They failed to think of any alternatives, so before they reached New York Leon hired a automated construction bot and delivery truck in Phoenix, using his implant to hide behind layers of other servers to disguise his identity. He juggled routing tables and encryption keys, realizing he’d never had been able to do this without Shizoko’s enhancements.
In Manhattan, the ticketing AI asked them why they were buying return tickets so soon.
“I forgot my lucky rabbit’s foot in LA,” Mike said with a straight face.
The agent smiled and nodded. “Ah, yes, superstitions. Humans are cute.”
“Dude, that was the lamest excuse,” Leon said later.
“Confirmation bias works with AI, too,” Mike said, smiling.
On the ride west Leon researched their maximum deceleration. He needed to time the telebot’s arrival to trigger a three gravity stop, causing the train to end up under Tucson. Early, they’d be too far from the station to make a quick getaway. Late, they’d lose consciousness from the high G forces, or worse, hit the robot at speed, killing people.
Leon used his implant to force open the steel doors of the concrete egress bunker and sent a long series of instructions to the waiting robot, knowing he’d lose connectivity once it started down the fifty flights descending into the earth.
The tension built until the bot popped back online using the tunnel’s built-in net as it rolled to a stop outside the first set of airlock doors. Leon checked the train’s position and speed one last time, then triggered the next steps.
The robot punched through the outer airlock, triggering a rush of air into the chamber. Once the pressure equalized, it entered the vestibule and drilled into the next door. The hole was minuscule compared to the volume of the tunnel, but Leon distantly noted alarms sounding.
The bot crossed the second airlock onto a walkway that paralleled the maglev. Leon waited for the correct moment, then nudged the machine over the edge, where it fell lengthwise across the tracks, as much as he could have hoped for.
The real world returned with a jolt as Leon found himself pressed hard into his chair, many times his normal weight. His armrests had automatically risen up to push his arms in, which lay across his chest like sacks of wet sand. He tried to budge them but couldn’t. His headrest folded around his head, holding him perpendicular to the direction of deceleration.
“Nice work,” Mike sent over the net.
“Thanks,” Leon sent back.
“How long do we have to put up with this?”
“Another thirty seconds.”
At two hundred miles per hour the train switched from maglev braking to friction brakes. A tremendous moan shook the car until, with a final screech, they halted. All was still.
Mentally prepared to move, Mike and Leon grappled with seat belts and struggled out of their chairs. Leon’s legs were jelly after the stress of rapid deceleration. They made their way to the door, stamping their feet to increase circulation. They were out before any of the shocked passengers had risen from their seats.
Leon passed through the wrecked airlock and craned his neck up at the unpainted square concrete chamber with metal stairs twisting up out of view. A momentary pang of despair at the task ahead tugged at him, but he continued. No choice but to go up. He started with Mike right behind him.
He climbed rapidly, his feet slapping against the metal steps and echoing off the bare walls. When he got to the twelfth landing he stopped. “Mike?” he called out.
“Coming.” Mike’s head appeared in the gap between the stairs, a flight below. “How much farther?”
“Thirty-eight.”
“Good grief. I’ll need a medical bot at the top.” Mike caught up, sweaty and breathing hard.
“You’ll make it.”
Mike nodded. “Yes, but next time I’m not going along with your crazy ideas.”
“This was your idea!” Leon followed after Mike as he passed by.
“Never mind.”
Fifteen tense minutes later they emerged from the last set of stairs and collapsed onto a concrete floor. Leon’s legs burned from the fifty-flight sprint.
“We have to keep going,” Mike said after half a minute. “We can’t get caught here. It’s too obvious. They’ll be sending emergency workers or worse.”
They forced themselves to their feet and opened the metal doors. Hot wind assaulted them, like the world’s largest open-air furnace. The sun was at its peak, a scorching ball of fire in the sky. The dirt road in front of the bunker was still clear.
Ignoring the path, they walked off into the desert between a pair of saguaro cacti.
49
Adam didn’t know what to do with Catherine. She would have won their sparring exercise had he not halted the program. A girl who could defeat a bot after a day of lessons was too dangerous for further training.
Of course Adam had thousands of bots at his disposal and could overwhelm her with numbers, but her cyberspace abilities were more fluid and nuanced than any human or AI he’d met.