She returned her attention to the physical world. A few cars drove the otherwise empty streets. Somehow Tucson turned into a ghost town. Where was everyone?
She was still musing when she overlaid her view of the net and the real world and spotted six white lines of AI travel intention converging on the hotel. One of her first unusual abilities, she didn’t need to do anything special to receive and interpret the messages that autonomous vehicles broadcast to other AI. It was a routine protocol, but in this case it triggered warning bells. With so few people, cars, or bots in the city, why would multiple AI converge on her location?
She inspected the simulacrum of herself in the hotel room. It still held steady, showing her meditating, just a slight intentional leakage of her unique electronic signature.
On a hunch she swept over the city, finding a second set of lines converging on a point ten miles north of Tucson. Something was going on.
Her gut said to get out. Adam always came alone, and something must have changed for so many robots to arrive at once. She traced the trails back to their sources and found a handful of bots from the military base and two medical androids from the university. Her hands twitched; she had less than three minutes before they arrived. This was not good.
She switched to the other group, tracing the northbound AI back to their sources. More military units, all headed toward the emergency exit of the Continental. Why wouldn’t the first response be emergency services?
With a moment’s reflection, she realized Adam was threatened by the train’s arrival. If she wanted to get to the root of what Adam was, she needed to know what he feared.
Decision made, she dashed for the doorway and raced downstairs, taking the side exit rather than go through the lobby. Out on the street, she ran north and west, away from the approaching bots. She shied away from the larger downtown buildings, which would have more cameras and security, and headed across the railroad tracks on Seventh Avenue.
The intense heat and sun baked her, while the arid desert air wicked away moisture as fast as her body could generate it, clothes staying dry despite the sweat pouring down.
Two blocks north of the tracks she found an old white sedan, a granny car, behind a house on the corner of Fifth Street and Seventh. She unlocked the doors with a thought and slid behind the steering wheel. She spent a minute massaging the car’s algorithms and the vehicle transmitter stayed silent when the electric motor whined to life.
She needed to hurry. She told the car to accelerate, speeding west on Speedway, then turning onto I-5 with a squeal of tires. The old sedan reached a hundred and twenty and hiccupped. She cursed as the vehicle slowed, the charge meter dipping to zero as the worn out capacitor died under the excessive load.
She got out, slamming the door. Scanning nearby for something new, fast, and fully charged, she found a Rally Fighter X. Perfect. She hijacked the car’s computer, had it meet her on the highway.
She checked back to the Hotel Congress through the net; less than a minute until the bots Adam sent arrived. She took a few moments to weave a diversion she hoped would delay them.
With a screech of tires and smoke, the Rally Fighter slammed to a halt next to her, the door swinging up. She jumped in, the car pulling away as soon as her center of mass cleared the doorway. Acceleration forced her hard into the seat as the speedometer curved smoothly upwards. She hit a hundred and eighty racing toward the train exit in Marana, twenty-five miles and eight minutes away.
51
The medical nanites that Slim and Helena liberated from the Navy had worked on Tony’s injured leg, but the big man wasn’t quite conscious yet.
Within an hour of Helena’s deceptive call to Adam, the car arrived. Slim stared with a disbelieving eye at the autonomous medical ambulance. He’d been sure Adam had written them off.
Slim didn’t want to be anywhere near Helena or Adam, never mind in the middle of a fight between them. But Helena had saved Tony’s life, and she’d probably kill him if he tried to back out. Reluctantly, he turned to her. “Let’s carry Tony together.”
They worked in unison to get Tony into the coffin-like chamber. The med unit went to work on him, cleaning and wrapping the wound, giving him a transfusion and filtering impurities from his blood.
Two hours into the trip, the top opened and Tony sat up, smiling and back to his usual self.
“When do we eat?” he said.
Slim grunted. He couldn’t forget Helena outside. She’d taken one look at the high tech interior and figured Adam might monitor the vehicle. So she had grabbed onto four mount points with her tentacles and held on as they flew toward Tucson.
A nervous trickle of sweat ran down Slim’s side. Adam would merely shoot them out of the sky with a missile if they were lucky. The other options were worse: torture, a new type of memory extraction that worked without implants, or forced implantation so Adam could turn them into zombies. He’d seen it all over the last months, done much of it himself. He couldn’t figure a way out.
“Adam did right by us,” Tony said, climbing out of the med unit and into a regular seat, oblivious to Slim’s concerns. “I had my doubts, but I’m fine now.”
“It’s not like that,” Slim said, jaw clenched.
Tony raised his eyebrows, clearly planning to out-wait Slim.
“Adam abandoned us. He took the aircar, convinced the girl to get inside, and brought her back to Tucson. He was going to leave us for the cops to pick up. You were dying on the street, would have kicked the bucket if we didn’t close the wound and get you blood.”
“Who’s we?”
Slim mouthed “Helena” in case Adam was monitoring them.
“Who?”
Slim waved his arms like wild tentacles until Tony’s eyes got big for a second. “How?”
“She patched you up and drove us to the hospital. I snuck in and stole blood, then did the same at the Navy base to get medical nanites. She said the bone was pulverized. You wouldn’t have walked right again.”
Tony rubbed his leg, and shook his head back and forth, coming to terms. “What’s happening now?”
“I wanted to lay low, hope he forgot about us, but she wants vengeance for the rest of her crew. So she tricked Adam into sending this car for us.” He gestured toward the rear, leaned close and whispered, “She’s out back, hanging on.”
“What the hell?” Tony hissed. “Adam’s gonna kill us if we bring someone to town.”
“No shit. It’s not like she gave me a choice. Now that you’re all patched up, enjoy the last few minutes of your life.”
52
Cat massaged the net, inspecting Adam’s activities as she disguised her location. Back at the hotel, the combat bots closed in. She set her simulacrum in motion, giving it a fast paced walk and an avoidance protocol so its path wouldn’t run into the robots.
The ruse might not hold for long, but every minute counted. She prepared a backup plan: if caught, she’d claim her excursion was merely to practice the skills Adam had taught. Didn’t he tell her to train? She smiled grimly, returning her attention to the drive.
The Rally Fighter’s engine, a powerful hydrogen-electric hybrid, throbbed as the car wove around the sparse traffic on the highway. Cat suppressed other cars’ sensors so they wouldn’t react to the Rally’s passage; no clues to give them away. She didn’t notice any human drivers, but at nearly two hundred miles an hour, everything passed in a blur.
Now on to the bots approaching the train. She checked their positions and swore when she found them less than a mile away, already within visual range of the egress. She picked one of the identical robots at random and piggybacked on its sensors, optical data trickling in until a live video feed popped up.