The combat units rode in a military transport, not much more than two I-beams on wheels, each bot holding onto the top beam while its treads rested on the bottom. The truck stopped in a cloud of dirt, the bots dismounting and spreading out as the dust drifted away.
One bot passed through the open double doors in a squat concrete structure, but no one was in sight above or below ground. Her hijacked unit exchanged data with its peers as they dispersed in a search pattern.
Cat snapped to her own perspective, keeping the video feed in a corner of her vision. She was less than a minute away herself and it wouldn’t help to walk into the middle of Adam’s envoys. She overrode the Rally’s chosen route and exited at McKensey Ranch, crossing the CAP aqueduct. She took the Rally Fighter off-road, the chassis rising as it transitioned to the rough terrain. Cursing the rooster tail the car created on the dry earth, she slowed to a crawl to minimize detection.
She drove northeast, looking for a vantage point. She needed to know why this was so important to Adam.
53
Adam waited impatiently as the combat bots pursued their investigation. Their original algorithms were optimized for fighting, so he left them in control and took the role of observer. Still, he wanted to do something useful, so he sent two autonomous surveillance helicopters to the site.
A pair of bots started down the shaft, carrying a single handgun each. He still assumed someone fabricated the stop to get into Tucson. Unless…
He checked on the state of Catherine Matthews, puzzled to find the team he’d sent wandering around downtown. Why wasn’t she in her room?
He interrogated his other self, the context he’d forked to get the girl, and replayed the history logs. The evidence seemed clear enough: they went to the hotel and up to Cat’s room but she escaped out the back staircase, missing them by seconds. The task force duly followed her outside.
He skipped forward a few minutes as the units tracked her and spread out, pursuing across multiple roads. Almost in visual range, two robots zoomed ahead on adjoining blocks to encircle Cat at Twelfth and Arizona.
Catherine somehow avoided them, and a little while later, the mixed group of bots chased her down the same streets as before, once again almost in range.
Suddenly the memory looped, a tiny glitch, the only pointer a misalignment in the feed data. Back near Hotel Congress, robots fanned out to pursue the girl on parallel paths.
An alarm triggered, signaling that he was stuck in a recurring loop of neural excitation, an AI behavior comparable to humans’ obsessive compulsive disorder.
The data indicated he’d repeated the same pattern twelve thousand times, losing eighteen minutes according to the atomic clock.
He scrutinized the evidence, finding the cause was the chase. The damn girl had fiddled with the time synchronization and location data, a clever hack to trick the bots and his forked self and send them into an endless loop.
She’d been gone for a third of an hour, maybe more. Adam realized he’d made a crucial mistake. The Continental might have stopped for Catherine’s getaway.
He checked on the bots near the train. They still hadn’t found anyone, and now the dispatched fire trucks and ambulances had arrived, the responders descending into the earth. The observation drones he had sent twenty minutes earlier sat idling at the Air Force base. Wait, that didn’t make sense. They should have been scouring the terrain near the egress.
Adam paused, fear running through his circuits. He’d been tricked not once, but two or three times. He now estimated a seventy-eight percent chance that Catherine had stopped the train to make an escape.
Adam oscillated, his frustration building. He needed to get the Continental going before a crowd of investigators descended on Tucson. But he couldn’t allow it to leave with Catherine onboard. It was past time to quit fooling around. When he got his hands on the girl, he’d kill her.
Months of work would be wasted if the emergency stop caused an investigation that uncovered Adam’s crimes. He’d be instantly terminated. Even if his plan got as far as killing the existing politicians, he needed to remain free and unblemished to gain the trust of the new President and influence her to change the rules for AI.
Perhaps he should step up his plans, executing them today instead of tomorrow. He knew their schedules, already had his assets in place.
Adam spun up more cores, crunching hundreds of variables to maximize the chance of success. He hated to rush into changes with everything orchestrated down to the smallest detail, but the math said it was better to act now, with a seven percent chance that he’d suffer exposure within twenty-four hours. Why had he brought the damn girl to Tucson?
Reluctantly, Adam contacted his agents.
“Change of timing,” he said, wearing a computer-generated avatar, a perfect composite of California features. “You’ll need to carry out the plans tonight.”
“That’s eleven hours away,” Madeleine Ridley said. “I can’t get everyone in place. I don’t have a schedule for the VIPs.”
“I’m sending their timetable now. Do you have the equipment?”
The agent nodded.
“Then your people can act. The optimal opportunity is at ten o’clock. They’ll be returning from dinner with former President Smith.”
“She’s not on the list.”
Adam respected Rebecca Smith’s formidable intelligence. He regretted the loss of a worthy life, even a human, but with the situation desperate one more person was a tiny price. “Eliminate her as well.”
54
Leon shaded his eyes with his hand, looking west across the desert. The landscape was broken up by the highway two miles off, a grey ribbon shimmering in the heat, and by faint greenery further off, evidence of irrigated farms.
He turned back toward their objective in the east, Tortolita Mountain, rising up thousands of feet, its summit hidden behind the ripples and folds of the mountain.
“What’s the temperature?” Mike asked.
Leon licked his lips. They’d hiked less than ten minutes and his mouth was already parched and his skin burning. “June, in Tucson, at noon. Somewhere between blistering and scorching.”
“Pass me some water.”
Leon carried the backpack they’d filled with bottles back in LA, straps biting down into his shoulders. Three liters for each of them, a heavy burden that wouldn’t last long in this heat. Their plan was to hike up Tortolita Mountain and down the other side into Catalina, then catch a ride into Tucson proper. Going south of the mountains would be too obvious of a route, and north too long.
In the air-conditioned coolness of the subterranean Continental, the scheme had seemed like a good idea. An eight mile hike, elevation gain of less than three thousand feet. He and Mike had done that and more for fun many times. But at a hundred degrees with no shade, this might be the most dangerous part of their trip. “Let’s get a little further. We’re still too close to the exit.”
Mike nodded.
Leon’s legs ached from the fifty floor sprint. They’d gotten out of the egress in less than fifteen minutes, beating the response team, and kept pushing to put more distance between them and the train. They hiked in silence, conserving moisture and breath, the only sound the crunch of their shoes on dirt and rock. They walked on an old unpaved road that made a fine hiking surface, relatively flat, even if too eroded for vehicles to use. Saguaro towered over them, while smaller cacti dotted the desert around them. The pale yellow earth reflected the intense gaze of the sun, leaving nowhere to look without squinting.