He attacked me as he moved; spoofing data, masquerading as my binaries, and resending datagrams, my own bytes and his, and everything else digital too, until such a storm of packets flurried about it seemed the entire universe had decomposed down to its constituent electronic bits and would never be put together again.
79
Somehow, despite the ringing in his ears, Leon heard or maybe felt the scrambling on the other side of the sheetrock behind him. He launched himself away and spun, pointing the muzzle of his rifle at the wall.
Metal paws tore through, a robotic canine head peeking into the room, machine gun muzzles where its mouth should have been.
“Oh, hell,” Leon called.
Leon and Mike fired in unison, hitting the robot, then scattered rounds at the adjacent office.
The hidden bots shot back, firing through the flimsy plaster. Leon dove for the ground, but Mike stood and returned fire, gun on full auto.
When the gunfire stopped, Mike’s gun was smoking amid a cloud of dust. Leon lifted his head to peer into the now massive hole in the wall. Four bots splayed across the floor of the next office.
“How did you not get hit?” Leon yelled.
Mike shrugged. “Dunno, but I’m out of ammo.”
“Me, too.”
More scratching at the other wall sent them to crouch protectively over Cat’s sprawled body.
“Is she doing anything?” Mike asked.
“I don’t know. I think I got a reaction from her before, but the net was too painful for me to stay in long.”
The tearing at the barrier intensified; the dogs would be through in seconds. Leon would protect Cat with his body. His death might buy her time to complete her mission.
Mike stood and pushed his sleeves back.
Leon glanced sideways and his mouth dropped open: Mike’s clothes were full of bullet holes.
The wall gave way, and canine bots poured in.
Mike punched the first one, sending a fist into its armored face with an echoing metal-on-metal smack. A second dog entered and Mike grabbed it by the neck, throwing it into the air one-handed to fly into a support beam. The robot’s spine cracked in half, sparks shooting everywhere.
Leon reeled, unable to believe his eyes. No one but a robot should be able to do what Mike was doing. He’d seen, or thought he’d seen, Mike do impossible things as they’d crossed the courtyard, but in the haze of gunfire and flying metal shards he’d been too terrified to think. What had happened to Mike?
Mike prepared to face the next big dog but the bots suddenly crashed to the ground in unison, completely inert. A canine unit draped halfway into the hole in the wall. More lay in the adjoining office.
They waited a few seconds but nothing stirred, other than the quiet settling of debris. Leon left his useless gun on the floor and looked out the door. He saw more inert bots in the hallway.
“How did you manhandle those robots?” Leon asked.
“I have no idea,” Mike said, standing tall. “Something is different since we passed out in the desert. That’s amazing,” he said, pointing to the bots he’d killed by hand, “but I can’t tell you what a relief it is that my knees don’t hurt anymore.”
“Shizoko’s nanotech must be responsible.” Leon mused for a second. “What matters is whether she beat Adam. I don’t hear a thing going on, but she’s still out.”
“Let’s try the net.”
They each found they could connect again.
“I’m calling Rebecca to warn her about the possible assassination,” Mike said. “Call the Institute, mobilize everyone. Get the FBI down here.”
Leon nodded. After days of being unable to use the network for fear of discovery, and now standing in the ruined office amid dead bots and sparking electrical wires, the ordinariness of the call was surreal.
After a quick explanation, he hung up and looked back down at Cat. She still hadn’t moved. Something was wrong; she should have been out of the net by now.
Leon fell to his knees next to her. He pinged Cat, but she didn’t respond. He tried and failed to connect directly to her implant. He shouted her name and searched again.
The faintest sense of Cat permeated everything in the net. He called once more, online and off. He used his Institute access to instantiate a priority search, filtering out across all nodes, replicating at each junction, branching a thousand times, going deeper, wider. The query went out, nothing returned. He drew his hand back, hesitated, then slapped her face. No reaction. “Help me, Mike!”
Mike sank down next to him. He concentrated, and Leon was surprised that he could see wispy threads emanating from Mike. A moment later, Mike shook his head. “She’s not there.”
Leon remembered how he’d woken in the clubhouse, with Cat’s hands on him, praying or meditating over him. He sat like she had, laying one hand on Cat’s forehead and one on her abdomen. He closed his eyes, took slow breaths. He called Cat back to him.
80
I flitted about for a while, checking nodes to make sure no trace of Adam existed. When I had checked every processor, router, and mesh node inside Tucson, I peeled open Adam’s firewall and looked outside.
My mind reeled at the impossibly rich vista, refusing to synchronize for a moment, until my perspective slowly slid into place. I found Phoenix to the north. Not only the city, but every building, computer node and router, every person with an implant, each a twinkling pixel that together built an image. I somehow grasped the grosser points, the outline of the urban boundary, highways, city blocks, even as I held the inner details too: buildings, people, the hardwired connections. Woven through all, the intent of the AI, colored borders indicating where the robots were going, who they would interact with, their level of certainty. And something new, too: fainter lines surrounding the humans, who radiated intention as well, like the AI, but at a resolution I’d never been able to interpret before.
I pulled back to the larger geoscape: Los Angeles to the west, and Washington, DC way out on the Eastern Seaboard, glittering brightly with data movement, a thousand, million, billion processors. Across the sea, more cities and the fibers connecting them.
The twisted topography took time to interpret. Bandwidth, not geographical distance, dictated location, and brightness represented computational power, not physical size. New York resided right next to LA, massive backbones bridging the two once-great media cities, while data centers burned with supernova intensity even at this scale.
At a still larger ratio, certain spots — the Bay Area, Germany, Japan — exerted an influence over the datascape as a whole, like supermassive stars creating gravity wells, around which the lesser cities orbited.
Bedazzled, seeing cyberspace in its raw form, I forgot why I was there, to look for evidence of Adam. Some moments passed as I flew through the world, touching everything, looking for any scent of Adam’s qi, the taint of his presence.
I found fragments of his communications with his agents, found the agents, hundreds of them. I recovered his earlier messages, broke open the encrypted packets, and fed them, along with current geo-coordinates, to the police, security, or military — anyone in the right place-time to apprehend Adam’s agents.
The AI slowly altered their plans in response, their space-time-action-probability functions changing color and writhing as the new data I supplied reached them, altering their intentions and destinations. It took long seconds, but I waited until the officials had the data, until I knew for certain that the criminals would be apprehended. Space-time intention twisted and turned until they centered on Adam’s confederates.