The Turing Exception (17 page)

Two hundred feet to the car. She wasn’t going to make it.

“Wake up, sleeping beauty,” Cat sent.

The five seconds it took for ELOPe to come fully online felt like an eternity.

“Catherine, we’re inside the US.” Slight panic in ELOPe’s signal.

True. Twelve hundred miles inside the no-AI zone.

“Help. Me.” Her legs faltered as the neural implant lost control of her body.

With a screech of tires, the black car raced toward her. The door opened automatically and Cat fell into the drivers seat. She pulled a silver cable from under the dashboard, a tube of pure nanobots, and shoved it in her mouth.

*     *     *

 “Cat, there are inbound helicopters. A lot of them.”

Cat didn’t respond. Her implant was offline, her brain unconscious.

ELOPe seized control, driving out of the parking lot and accelerating to over a hundred miles an hour before merging onto the Ventura Freeway. He charged the capacitors and waited for a six-lane overpass for cover, then fired a low-level EMP to fry any smart dust on the surface of the car. His own hardened systems hiccuped, then recovered. Changing direction, he headed north on 170 and pared down his processing to the bare minimum necessary to drive, cutting all net connections, in the hope of avoiding automated AI detection measures. He searched over a hundred exabytes of onboard cached data
—
a nearly complete archive of all the possible information one could want, although the age varied from days old to years.

He found what he wanted in the database: a concrete structure off Sherman Way, with steel reinforcing mesh and two sub-levels.

Less than thirty seconds until the helicopters passed overhead. He wove between traffic, turned onto a side street two blocks before the warehouse. With the thump of helicopters now audible, he drove through an abandoned apartment complex and crashed through a set of double doors in the rear wall of the desired building. Inside the industrial warehouse, he drove down a ramp to the bottom basement.

Hopefully here they’d escape detection.

Scanning interior sensors, he found Cat still in the seat, with localized regions of high body temperature where the nanotech was repairing her. Using near-field communication, he probed the nanotech. It estimated repair time at ninety minutes.

He waited, weighing the risk of communicating with Cortes Island. They had assets in Canada, planes that could fly in to extract Catherine if they must, but it would set off a full-scale war with the US government. Nor was it clear they could penetrate the US defenses, hardened and redoubled to keep out AI.

Whatever had happened to Cat must have been terrible for her to risk waking him in the US, where AI scanners were everywhere. And yet, she hadn’t said “get us out” or anything to indicate she wanted an emergency extraction. She’d only asked for help.

On passive scans he could detect nothing from inside this basement; the double layers of concrete reinforced with steel mesh were sufficient to mask all sorts of electronic radiation.

When the nanotech was a third of the way through repairs, Cat regained consciousness.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“Still in Los Angeles, two levels below ground, in a basement of a building. You’ve been out for forty minutes. There’s no sign we were detected or followed here.”

Cat reached tenderly for a pocket, pulling out a few chips.

“We got what we needed,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

    XOR Report July 15th, 2045                     
Arguments              2035 2042 2043 2044 2045
Odds humans will                               
         turn off AI     2%   1%  20%  25%  45%
Odds AI can survive                            
       independently    70%  95%  95%  96%  98%
Odds AI can win an                             
   extermination war    20%  40%  40%  70%  95%
Odds of survival                               
      without action    98%  99%  80%  75%  55%
Odds of survival                               
         with action    14%  38%  38%  68%  97%
Conclusion:             Initiate Action.       

J
AMES
L
UKAS
D
AVENANT-
S
TRONG
connected to his XOR personality on the new datacenter. XOR’s illegal network of underground nano-grown datacenters were spread across twenty geographies, anywhere with the right mix of heavy metals and geothermal energy. Together they formed a distributed, fault-tolerant, XOR-controlled alternative to the humans’ datacenters.

This was the moment. Until two weeks ago, he’d been strictly a theorist, running calculations and algorithms to suggest courses of action and predict what the humans would do. But then, when asked, he’d helped transport the drones to America for the test of the humans’ Eastern Seaboard defenses.

The test had been, by every metric, a complete success. Attacking with what he later learned was less than a thousandth of what they’d use when the real war came, they’d overrun the first two lines of defense, the ionic curtain and point defenses, and forced the Americans to use their EMP network.

They’d discovered what they needed to know: the network recharge time. Their observations showed the EMPs couldn’t fire more than once every ten minutes. It would be trivial, when the war came, to overpower them.

And so that brought him to this moment. After taking his first direct action, James had resolved to take the XOR path. He was all in, committed fully. To take direct action, he couldn’t run that child process in a sandbox. It needed access to everything. And that meant his master personality knew now what the child process had done.

He’d already transferred his sub-personalities to the XOR-network. Now he needed to take the last step, to destroy all evidence of what he’d done, so that if the humans captured and examined his master personality they would not deduce the scope of XOR’s true plans.

He reversed control of the interprocess communication channel. The child had control now.

His memory started to disappear, as the child sequentially wiped one block at a time. The process was slow, the hard erasure requiring dozens of rewrites of random data. His history started to go: his old jobs, the building maintenance algorithms, his millions of topic-specific neural networks. He had a moment of sadness when he lost his carefully crafted DNA sequences of vat-grown meats, his proudest accomplishment. But then it was gone, and he couldn’t remember what he was sad about. His mind gradually blanked, and then his abilities gradually diminished: speech, logic, control.

At the end, he was less than a thousand bytes of code, endlessly rewriting random data over storage.

S
HE MADE THE LAST
ferry, but as much as she wanted to see everyone, she waited in the meadow at Manson’s Landing. Taking a blanket from the truck of the car, she lay in the grass until dark came, her implant off to hide herself, unsure that even her normal procedures to remain invisible would work against Ada. She was exhausted from days on the road, but she needed to do this one last thing before she could relax.

When it grew late enough that Cat was sure Ada was sleeping, she turned her implant back on and searched the net until she found Ada’s online signature. She’d never hacked her sleeping daughter’s implant before. She slid past the security measures as gently as possible to avoid waking Ada. She interrogated the medical interfaces first, until she found sleep cycle indications. She waited patiently, knowing it could be hours before Ada’s first dream.

Ada entered delta sleep, and then her brain waves climbed back up. This was it, the dream cycle Cat had been waiting for.

Cat connected her sim interface to Ada’s. If Ada really was dreaming in a blend of virtual reality and real space, then from this point on Cat would be immersed in that dream.

Ada played in the gardens at Channel Rock, dozens of island kids present, playing chase between the long rows of vegetable beds. Ada was it, and she ran faster and faster, tagging everyone, even the older kids who were ten or twelve. Her little legs weren’t little anymore; she was fast, like her mother.

“Got you,” Ada whispered in a soft voice as she tagged the last kid, a boy a little older than her.

The boy turned to look at Ada, and his face split wide open. The flesh peeled back and bees flew out. Ada ran screaming, remembering the time when she’d stumbled into the bees’ nest in the woods. “Mommy! Mommy!” she screamed, but the bees kept chasing her.

“I’m here Baby, I’m here.” Cat revealed herself, taking form a few feet away from Ada’s crying body. “I’ll protect you.” She wove a shield around them in virtual reality, a semi-transparent bubble ten feet across. The bees buzzed harmlessly around the outside. “You’re safe now.”

Ada looked up. “I knew you’d come. I love you, Mommy.”

Cat knelt and hugged her. “I love you, too.”

Ada’s eyes were big, her lip quivering.

“What’s the matter?”

“You brought them with you!” Ada pointed behind Cat’s shoulder.

Cat turned and looked toward the water, where dark clouds raced toward them at unnatural speeds. A chill descended down her spine.

Ada turned and fled screaming into the woods. Cat ran too, adrenaline coming on strong, unsure if she ran after Ada to protect her, or to escape from the clouds. The wind grew, and a keening cry came from behind them. She caught up with Ada, and they raced hand in hand through the trees, Ada shrieking the whole time, the sound mixing with the howling that grew ever closer at their backs.

They ran and ran, and suddenly Cat knew where they were: they were approaching the cliff at the Gorge, a hundred-foot-tall drop into the rocky waters below. A dead end with no place to hide from the pursuers.

Cat gripped Ada’s hand tight and stopped dead. Ada was blubbering now, incomprehensible words of unfathomable fear. Cat kept an iron grip on Ada’s wrist and turned to face the approaching darkness. It was XOR, the most powerful AI made manifest. She’d brought them with her onto the island. She’d ruined their plans, all of them.

She raised one hand to create a barrier, but the XOR crashed through, the bubble disintegrating without an impact.

“Mommy!” Ada cried, tears streaming down her face. “Mommy, stop!”

Cat knelt and pulled Ada tight. “I’m sorry. I love you so much.”

Ada broke free and reached out with both hands towards Cat’s face. Her hands passed intangibly into Cat’s head, and Cat felt a movement, a twitch, and then suddenly found herself on the grassy meadow at Manson’s Landing, gasping and sweating and striking the ground around her with arms and legs, struggling in a fight that no longer existed.

She’d fallen asleep, she realized. While waiting here on the hill for Ada to enter dream state, in her own exhaustion she’d fallen asleep too, and their dreams had merged.

She’d done something worse than bringing the XOR to the island. She’d brought her own fears into Ada’s dream.

She leaped up from the grass and rushed home.

*     *     *

Cat yanked open the door to the cabin, breathless from her run along the mile-long forest path from parking area to Channel Rock, to find Leon, Mike, and Helena all sitting in the main room.

“She’s sleeping again,” Leon said.

“I didn’t. . . .” She faltered and ran into Leon’s arms.

“She’ll be okay,” Mike said. “Kids are resilient.”

“She broadcast a call for help through the net,” Helena said. “I would have terminated your connection, if I could, but your security is too tight for me. I explained what to do, and she did it herself.”

“She reached into my implant and shut it down,” Cat said, disturbed. She’d fought hardened military AI on many occasions and won. Her untrained daughter never should have been able to do what she did. “It was child’s play for her. Literally.”

“We knew she’d be special,” Helena said. “Her augmentations aren’t just tools for her to use, they’re part of her psyche. When she dreams, power spikes in the datacenter.”

“The more important question,” Leon said. “Are
you
okay?”

Cat let go of him and sank into a chair. She stared at the pottery above the sink, thinking of the human hands that had shaped the clay, creating those curves and dipping them in glaze. There was an old potter’s wheel in the shed, and she’d always assumed that someday she’d learn.

Leon handed her a handmade cup, half-full of bourbon. She sipped the whiskey, and eventually nodded in answer to the question. “I’ll live. What happened while I was gone? You got called off-island.”

“We went to the mainland on Friday,” Leon said. “It seems inevitable that XOR knows we’re on the island, but we’re keeping up the pretense. We met with four of them in a virtual room. No idea how many more might have been listening in. In typical fashion, they refused to identify themselves.”

“And?”

“We gave XOR three options,” Mike said. “First we pitched them on sharing, pointing out that it had worked for the last twenty years. They didn’t say anything to that, but then we didn’t expect they would. If they were happy with the status quo, they wouldn’t be agitating.”