That was the end of their conversation. Zai folded her arms over her chest and tried to control her breathing. After a moment she realized the clicking noise aggravating her so much was her teeth grinding. She willed herself to stop it, but her internal silence let the sounds of her overweight selfish neighbor into her consciousness.
"Jerk," Zai snapped at him and reveled in the uncomfortable silence that followed. After a moment, she heard him get up and leave for a seat further back in the compartment. This made her feel a little better, but the problem of finding Devin in this great big universe still remained.
The train set into motion again, leaving Zai to contemplate her isolation. She was so absorbed in self-pity that she barely noticed her palm-computer chirping an instant message. She still could not go online, which required her sending signals out to the Web, but her computer could apparently receive incoming data.
Jodie's excited, spirit-lifting voice came through, "Zai, you won't believe what just happened! I just received an e-mail from a hacker named Traveller. He says he's with the Legion of Discord and our attempts to hack IWA assure him we're not with the law. He also says they installed a program on Devin Matthew's monocle computer that broadcasts its GPS coordinates.
"I plugged the 38.805 latitude and –77.047 longitude into mapit.com and it gave me the address for IWA Headquarters in Alexandria Virginia. That's just outside Washington DC Zai! Isn't that something? So if you get this message, be sure to get off at the next stop in Union Station. You can take the metro from there. Good luck Zai and go get him!"
Alone in a vast desert expanse, Alice could find nothing familiar in the abyssal landscape. No paths, signs, buildings, or other structures provided a user interface to the system of any kind. Looking down, she found the standard IWA agent avatar in place, a black jumpsuit, thick boots, mask, goggles, and a gray backpack storing a wide array of software utilities. It was ages since she last wore the avatar, and hoped she wasn't too out of practice with it.
She took a few steps forward, seeking a sense of navigation, and the landscape changed. The sandy dunes morphed into a red-lit room. Alice looked around it, feeling as if she should know its purpose. Then it came to her. The metal housing and types of monitors covering the different consoles were the giveaways. She was standing in a Navy ship's nuclear reactor control room.
She approached the nearest console, but the room transformed into a networking closet before she reached it. Her breath condensed around her face in the refrigerated air, and she shivered against the sudden chill. This new setting was a standard corporate networking room.
Walking forward another place materialized, a government building of some kind, which faded to a busy highway a few steps later, the cars frozen in place. A virtual garden replaced this, filled with fantasy animals and make-believe plants. She recognized it as a MMORPG. Another step and she was browsing a gallery of NASA telescope photos. It was like walking through the cosmos. Here were stars hatching at the edge of the universe, spinning pulsars, supernovas, and distant planets circling alien stars.
Alice was beginning to understand. These were three-dimensional representations of recorded places. She was walking through an archive of sorts. There was no point in continuing. She could wander for years. Millions of places were potentially stored on the system's hard drive.
She opened a system monitor window. As she expected, nothing. The AI was blocking her.
The computer she stood in was overrun with the AI inhabiting it. That was important. If the AI filled the flash drive to capacity, then there was no place she could go on the drive that wasn't part of it. These images she was walking through right now were also part of the AI, an archive of its experiences or intelligence gathering.
That meant she had to find a way to step outside of the system, become external to the AI. Connecting another network drive to this computer held two possible outcomes. In one, she would meet the AI on the empty space and engage it there. In the other, the AI would seize the empty drive space in the same manner it overtook the Internet.
She opened a window to a neighboring computer. She selected two flash drives from the diagrams, establishing a connection. Her surroundings changed.
The green rolling pastures were the default welcome setting in this operating system. She did not relocate here; something moved her. A small wooden bridge crossing a stream represented the link to the AI's drive. On the other side a twisting wall of pipes and wires pulsed in a rhythmic time, as if breathing. In the tangled, squirming mass thousands of eyes peered out at her. This was the AI.
"Hello," she said, and jumped when the mass flinched defensively.
It folded in on itself and a thin, black tendril slithered out toward her. Smaller branches split off from this to blossom into more eyes, each one eerily observing her. It slithered across the bridge to rear up in front of her. Alice gasped in surprise as it bloomed into a megaphone large enough to swallow her head, which hovered expectantly.
The language of mathematics was thought universal. Alice would now test that hypothesis.
Pulling up a calculator, she entered the first 20 numbers in the Fibbonacci set and sent it to the AI. It responded with a short burst of chirps and bleeping. She sent the number sequence again, and a different sound string came in response.
"Randomly encrypted communications," Alice muttered to herself, "impossible to break. Unless..." A devious smile crossed her face, "Unless I eliminate the encoding component."
She surveyed the tangled mass of the pulsing intelligence, speculating on the purpose of each squirming appendage. She pulled a sector-editing program up in a window and set it to manual scan and delete mode. The window for the program disappeared, becoming a rather wicked-looking laser in her hands.
She leveled the weapon at the mass, a red dot danced amid the wriggling confusion. She said, "Testing, one... two... three..."
Alice searched for activity as the hovering megaphone emitted another nonsensical string. It was difficult to discern anything from the chaotic mass, but activity at the megaphone tentacle's base drew her attention, a glass orb puzzle of lights, constantly shifting in complex arrangements.
"Random pattern," Alice noted aloud.
The megaphone chirped in reply, and a green pulse flashed from Alice's weapon, vaporizing the component and leaving a gaping tear in the virtual fabric. The megaphone shrieked and dropped dead. The AI billowed out, bristling with spikes and rendering a metallic texture. Tendrils weaved out around the wound's edges to quickly knit it closed, while a robotic appendage extended high into the air , a data-eraser taking shape at its end, focusing on the bridge between them.
Alice closed her eyes and bolted across the bridge, praying the large silver cannon did not fire while she was in the kill zone. She hit the ground on the other side, and a flash burst high overhead. Falling into a roll, she looked over her shoulder in time to see the bridge vanish into a cloud of glowing cinders. The grassy fields across the stream disappeared, as the neighboring flash drive was disconnected. Alice slapped the log off button on her belt, but nothing happened.
She was now trapped on the flash drive with a very angry AI.
"It's killing her!" Devin shouted at Chien, and strained against the guard's grip.
"Her pulse is elevated," Chien brought up Alice's vitals on the SDC's LCD. "190 beats per minute. Her heart will explode." He reached for the emergency release lever that would dump Alice from the SDC and thought better of it, "I've seen these symptoms before, military applications for cyber attacks."
"You mean like law enforcement incapacitating criminals with seizures," Devin said.