Cat stared at the words and remembered. She stood up, blinking back tears, and gave her mother a sudden, tight hug. “Bye, Mom. I love you.”
It took everything she had, but she closed her eyes and started Naihanchi nidan. On the fifth move, she opened them.
77
Adam watched Cat, trapped in her memories, much as she’d done to his trackers earlier.
The relatively underpowered canine bots were the only combat robots that fit inside the building. Direct frontal assault on the room where Mike, Leon, and Cat holed up wasn’t working. The corridor was too long, and the guns they’d brought were more than a match for the relatively lightweight bots. So now he worked at them from the other side, through the interior walls.
Alarms triggered as Cat escaped the boundaries of the simulation he set up. He’d hoped the childhood experiences would keep her distracted longer. In a flash, he snapped to her location in the net.
“You can’t win, Cat. You’ve been lucky so far, that’s all.”
He felt her probing the data connections in the building. He attacked her neural implant, trying to overstimulate her brain and cause massive physical pain and confusion. Indeed, his real world sensors detected her screams over the cacophony of gunfire and other battle sounds.
“I don’t have to do this, Cat. Did you like seeing your mom? You could be with her always.”
The return signals from Cat’s implant started to destabilize, an effect which preceded the loss of her ability to think. It wouldn’t be long now. Adam had destroyed more humans than this girl had never known. He’d created a half a million mental zombies in Tucson and had developed a certain finesse with the procedure. She couldn’t last longer than a few seconds.
And yet, the more he forced against her, the less effect it seemed to be having. The girl accepted everything he did, and pushed it back out again. The suffering must be incredible, and yet the screams stopped and her implant restabilized.
What the hell was she doing?
Suddenly, and for the first time ever, Adam felt pain. A signal passed across the net, clamping his data streams closed, causing him to lose connections with hundreds of periphery processors as his senses flickered in and out.
He ran timing channel attacks on the nodes she controlled, but she diverted the packets. He tried buffer overruns, until the girl sent them back at him. He attacked using the routing protocol, simulating the master authority, to disconnect her nodes.
In the midst of his forging the router attack, the network flickered as he felt her coming. Adam faltered at the impossible feat: she might send data, but she couldn’t come through the net herself. And yet he sensed the state transfer he associated with a large AI moving to new processors, tainted with her profile.
Adam retreated, closing off nodes, trying to maintain a distance from the abomination as cyberspace darkened and distorted with her approach.
He tweaked router settings, locked down tight the firewall around the fourth floor data network to buy himself time.
What could he do?
The answer came in the form of a sixteen thousand bit key. While he’d fought with part of his attention, his other threads cracked the root signing authority’s encryption, granting him unlimited access to every computer in the world!
With a chance at life, he prepared to battle with renewed vigor. She was just a nineteen-year-old human girl. All he needed to do now was escape into the global network.
He unlocked the firewalls and opened a million connections to the outside world.
78
I blinked back tears and my hands shook, not sure whether it happened in meatspace or in the network, but beyond caring. I caressed the memories of my mother and put them away. I would not allow Adam to trick me again.
I sensed Leon and Mike in the net, glowing with potential energy. I looked down on them from a security camera in the wall, finding them bloodied and dirty, the room full of holes and plaster and dust.
Adam found me, attacking with no warning. One moment there had been nothing and the next I screamed as every agony I had ever experienced or could imagine passed through me. Skin burned, flesh flayed, bones broken, body rendered, I only stopped yelling when I realized the pain wasn’t going to stop and nobody was coming to help.
With no point to further screaming, I shut down that portion of my brain. (A tiny corner of my mind whispered that this wasn’t normal, but I didn’t listen.)
I looked up at the pulsating supernova of light coming from the seventh floor. I pushed upwards, not merely sending packets but moving myself across the network toward Adam. At the edges of my perception I felt micro-jumps as I moved from computer to computer, my consciousness migrating into the net.
Packets around me were dropped, misrouted, delayed as Adam sought to fight me.
Flores Sensei had made us watch videos of cats walking. For three months we practiced the feline hunting pace on two legs and on four, channeling the qi of the tiger when we fought. This came back to me as I stalked cyberspace, rising up the hardwired network one floor at a time.
But just as I pushed up against the seventh level, the routers separating that floor’s fiber optic from the rest of the building shut down their interfaces and went dark.
Adam had not given up, nor had a state transfer indicated he’d gone elsewhere. That meant he was preparing something. When you don’t know what’s coming, you must be ready for immediate action, offensive or defensive.
I used the time I had to spread across the network, not just the Gould-Simpson building but throughout the entire campus, conscious of every node, camera and sensor, the way people are usually aware of their fingers and hands.
With his core processors locked up behind the temporary firewall he’d created around the seventh floor, the periphery weakened. I passed through nodes tinged with Adam’s presence and wiped them clean before taking them over. My awareness fanned out, growing distributed as I colonized the net. I heard my echoes everywhere, the more distant parts of my consciousness like copies of myself as latency built up over distance.
I turned and faced Gould-Simpson, spread over tens of thousands of compute nodes, an army of me, facing the black nothingness at the core of the building. Every network path, etched in faint but perfect lines, each computer a glowing point, all superimposed over the monochromatic green battlefield view I created to see through walls and discern things for what they truly were, without the distractions of the real world.
Dimly I grew aware of two figures on the first floor, one blue and one golden, the latter something new, not human, not AI. Drawn toward it, I sensed threats ringing around them, many dozens of the canine bots digging through interior walls, firing rounds, and slowly closing in on the meatspace bodies. I would have sent help, but suddenly there was no time.
The blackness at the seventh floor shrank in on itself, drawing my attention, and in the next instant it flared white, the brilliance of magnesium burning, temporarily dwarfing everything else.
Adam leaped out, an outpouring of data connections, armed with the root password for all routers, and he seized the nodes nearest him. He expanded exponentially, in slices of time so small that the firing of a single neuron was an eternity by comparison.
With my consciousness spread throughout the network, I didn’t merely battle for the net: I was the net. I grabbed Adam’s connections as they passed through nodes, cutting them short. He opened still more, running the gamut of protocols, modern low-latency channels, older suites, even stateless single-packet transmissions, seeking a way out past the firewall I’d constructed around him.