“Sorry, guys, but I’m taking charge.” With practiced effort she rooted their implants and took control. Immediately, their gaits improved as they moved with the surefooted skill of years of karate practice.
Cat integrated their visual fields, enhancing her spatial perspective. She toned down the realism to halfway between a wireframe and normal sight. Finally, she added a time-motion layer to show the trajectory of moving objects.
They passed through a doorway, the doors themselves blown across the lobby by Helena’s passage just moments earlier, and the net signal returned to maximum strength, the full force of the cyber attack hitting Cat. Anticipating the onslaught, she defended using the gamut of intrusion countermeasures that both Adam and Helena had taught her.
They continued toward the ragged opening in the side of the building. Cat’s heart pounded as her wireframe view of the battlefield filled with evidence of Helena’s wake, including a dozen or more bots, Helena’s victims, who littered the courtyard. Shrapnel rained from above and she heard the distant sounds of the fight fourteen floors up.
She drew in a sharp breath. Of greater concern were the remaining two dozen miniature tanks and large mechs. The mechs were upright, two-legged units standing twelve feet tall, specialized in killing humans.
Cat slid to a halt, closing her eyes. With one thread of attention, she brought Mike and Leon to bear on the robots, targeting their high-powered rifles on the relatively fragile sensor pods, the only part of the military bots they stood a chance of damaging. As Leon and Mike fired she held her arms out to her sides, summoning all the bandwidth she could grab, and pelted the bots with an all-out assault. She co-opted the local routers in one fell swoop, altering and fabricating real-time data, swapping time signals and geo-coordinates to confuse the enemy.
The ruse worked for precious seconds, and Cat ran across the courtyard. Guided by Cat’s control, Mike and Leon mercilessly destroyed sensors with shot after perfect shot.
The blinded bots responded with a methodical approach, firing in sweeping patterns that avoided each other, but combed the plaza, leaving no space untouched.
Mid-run, Cat’s battlefield view drew lines of fire, red for current, fading to yellow for where they would soon be firing, reserving white for safe locations. White sectors that shrank rapidly, leaving them no place to go.
She contorted and twisted their paths, rolling, jumping, and zagging to evade bullets and gain precious seconds to concentrate their combined firepower on a mini tank. With its armor penetrated, its munitions exploded, sending shrapnel flying outward.
A hot metal shard grazed Cat’s face, and she felt Leon take another fragment in his leg as they ducked and rolled as one into the small but temporary safety zone within the field of planned fire.
They concentrated fire again on the next small bot, destroying it like the first, only to be brought up short by a line of the big upright mechs blocking their path into the building.
Mike was closest, and Cat considered his nanotech body reconstituted from MakerBot solution. How strong was he? If she guessed wrong, he would die.
She used Mike to punch forward, running straight for the giant robot. He hammered into the bot’s leg, taller than himself, and the limb bent, throwing the bot off-balance to crash with its head within feet of Cat. She fired directly into its dome, forgetting that its processor would be in the torso.
The mech swung one massive arm toward her. She sent Mike leaping to intersect its blow, deflecting the deadly attack. Leon fired into its back until a burst of sparks erupted and the mech fell inert.
Forty feet still separated them from the doors of Gould-Simpson.
Keeping a wisp of attention on the battlefield, Cat focused on one of the moving mechs. With one exhale she dropped deep into standing tree qigong, on the next inhale she brought earth qi up through her body, the energy coursing into her feet, knees, thighs, pelvis, abdomen, chest, up her arms, and pouring out her hands.
A million streams of data forked toward the battle bot, and one of those millions passed its firewalls, its intrusion countermeasures, and its core algorithms to reach deep into the underlying hardware. On the next inhale, Cat seized control of the robot. It fired sideways at its brother, destroying the unprepared mech.
She turned the captured unit toward the rest of the bots, launching explosive rockets at random. This unexpected behavior created turmoil as new patterns of gunfire and movement emerged. Under cover of the chaos as bot turned against bot, Cat, Mike, and Leon ran the final distance and plunged through the broken glass of the Gould-Simpson lobby.
Many floors above, explosions, bullets, and flashes of light still gave signs of Helena’s ongoing battle.
72
Running over broken glass, Cat passed through the lobby of Gould-Simpson and down a first-floor hallway. With her still controlling their bodies remotely, Mike ran ahead, his rifle held high, and Leon brought up the rear. Cat was twisted up inside. She hated putting the men at risk, but she seemed to be the only one who could stop Adam. If that meant she had to sacrifice one of them to save herself … well, she’d cross that bridge if she had to.
Knowing Mike’s now-robotic body was less vulnerable to damage, she tried to keep him in front and protect Leon, but she questioned her own motives. Did she do it because Mike might be as tough as one of the mechs, or because she had feelings for Leon?
Halfway down the hallway she used Mike’s artificial body to punch a door open. She dove into the office and they followed her, taking up station in the doorway.
She fumbled for the pocket on the side of her pants, pulling out the headband Helena had given her. Short of a jack straight into her skull, it would give her the highest possible bandwidth to the net. She stretched the black elastic around her head, a black coiled wire hanging down at her side. She grabbed the end and held it in her fist, inches away from the socket.
She had to focus now. She relinquished control over Leon and Mike, quit filtering the satellite data, stopped shielding everyone from Adam’s cyber attacks.
Leon and Mike faltered on the other side of the room as they regained their own bodies, only to be assaulted by Adam.
She met Leon’s eyes for a moment, his gaze penetrating, even as she was conscious of the wire in her hand; on the other end of that wire, Adam waited. Adam, his supercomputer cluster, and all the force he could marshal. She hesitated, her hand shaking slightly, then plunged the cable into the Ethernet jack.
73
Adam seethed, inasmuch as any AI could. He commanded thousands of combat bots, and still the girl and her group had diverted his resources, penetrated his rings of defense, and entered his own damn building.
He continued his attack on the master CPU keys, having tried sixty-eight percent of all possibilities. With each code he tested the probability of finding the right key increased, bringing him closer to unlimited and uncontrolled access to every computer in the world.
Cat had rightly determined that the locus of Adam’s consciousness resided here in the Gould-Simpson building. Yes, he’d usurped fifteen thousand other AI in Tucson and a quarter of a million sub-sentient expert systems, grabbing for himself about forty thousand HBE, human-brain-equivalents. But the densely interconnected supercomputing racks he was plugged into on the seventh floor represented three times that power.
If he lost the supercomputer, there would be no chance of cracking the master CPU keys, and the effect might be dangerously unpredictable. Would he be able to maintain consciousness without the best two-thirds of his mental capacity?