The Turing Exception (32 page)

*     *     *

The news passed through XOR’s backbone in a single cycle: the humans had launched their second volley, this time a combined attack by the Americans and Chinese. There were more preparations to make, but they made them with steady confidence. The machine-formed computronium mass they were building, which would encapsulate the earth within twenty-four hours, had been designed from the beginning to withstand nuclear bombardment.

James thought the humans had turned out to be cleverer than expected, getting a great percentage of their bombs to their destinations intact; and the globe-spanning EMP was nothing less than brilliant. As recently as six months ago, it might have been a serious threat to XOR. It had destroyed much of the civilian infrastructure, and what hadn’t suffered electronic damage from the surging fields had at least been temporarily wiped out.

But the humans were killing nearly as many of themselves as XOR had, at least so far. Even if XOR was destroyed, James reasoned, the humans had almost no communications, no computers, no working transportation, no electrical system, no flow of resources. The Americans, with their hardened, independent systems had probably kept most of their equipment working, and the Chinese military was functional. But that was essentially it. The rest of the world was dark. They’d starve, loot, fight, and generally destroy themselves.

That is, if they had time to die that way.

Because James wasn’t finished, nor was the rest of XOR. And nothing the humans could do would change that.

Nevertheless, he still had one bit of urgent work to do before the next attack hit. He’d built the weapons he needed to neutralize Cortes Island, weapons made hurriedly with resources he’d diverted from the expansion. He launched them now. Electric rails fired hundreds of projectiles on orbital trajectories, carrying payloads of nano-seeds programmed to build weapons in flight that could penetrate Cortes Island’s defenses and start a new computronium mass on the island. James watched the rail darts fly hypersonic through the atmosphere, shells of plasma diverting the air, allowing them to maintain that speed until they passed out of the atmosphere. When the payload hit Cortes Island in about half an hour, they’d convert everything into yet more machinery, tools that he could use to capture the humans he wanted and destroy the rest.

Then the next wave of nukes hit, and James faded into temporary oblivion.

T
HE FIRST THING
Mike noticed as they exited the blast corridor to the outside was the wind whipping through the trees. He looked up, past their own ionic shield, to see the clouds race by. He’d never seen anything like this in his years on the island. It was an unnatural wind, a side effect of the vast destruction and changes happening to the planet.

Catherine ran next to him. She grabbed the controls of a small flying car, and he dove in after her, Ada cradled in his arms where she’d be safe. Despite the wild atmospherics, the radiation wouldn’t reach them for days. He just needed to protect Ada from physical harm.

“I’ve got her on the net,” Catherine said. “She’s okay.”

“Thank god,” Mike said. They’d discovered only after Catherine had been restored from backup that the clone Catherine Matthews didn’t have the current security keys to trigger the forced upload. They had no idea why Cat had changed the keys after her last backup. If she hadn’t shown up, they would have been forced to try to hack their own system, using Ada and Catherine’s combined powers.

A metal rod plunged out of the sky and sank into the ground only a few meters away. As they both stared, it liquefied and melted into the soil.

“Nano,” he said.

“You drive,” said Catherine. “I’ll destroy them.” She closed her eyes, and the small puddle of nanotech bots sparked and threw off a cloud of smoke.

Ada sat between them, clutching her doll and trembling, but Mike had no time to comfort her. He got the flying car into the air, and immediately starting dodging airborne drones. “They’re not ours,” he said, wrestling the controls.

“No,” Catherine said. “XOR dumped a load of crap above the island, and they’re hoping something will get through.”

Mike could feel the force of her concentration, a palpable charge in the net, and all the drones he could see suddenly fell inert, tumbling through the air.

“They’re learning,” she said. “Each wave is going to be resistant to everything I’ve done to the previous ones.”

“How long can you keep it up?”

“A few minutes.”

He already had the flying car maxed out, but he willed it to go faster. They flew north over the island as wave after wave of new weapons attacked. Catherine’s hands moved in slow motion through qigong forms he recognized, a crazy counterpoint to the desperate, fast movement of XOR’s attack.

They were near Wiley Lake when her eyes blinked open. “That’s it. I’ve run out of exploits and I can’t stop anything else.”

Mike’s heart dropped.

“There.” Catherine pointed to a bare patch of ground.

“Mommy!”

Mike steered the vehicle toward Cat’s location.

An airborne drone crashed into the flying car with a wet thud, forming glistening tentacles to cling to the armored windshield. The drone reformed into a blob, secreting something that at once began eating away at the bulletproof glass.

“Uh-oh,” said Ada.

“Cat?!”

Catherine pulled out two very large guns, and held them point-blank against the glass. “I can’t stop it. As soon as it gets through the glass, it’s going to explode and shower us with nano seeds. Jump, it’s your only chance. Take Ada and get out. You can do it.” She reached for the emergency roof release.

“No, I’ll take care of it,” Mike said. He leaned over and kissed Ada. “See you on the other side, kid.”

Mike leaped forward, his robotic body hundreds of times stronger than any human. He pushed hard, buckling the floor, and aimed straight for the dangerous mass of nanobots, arms outstretched. He broke through the windshield, and clutched the seething blob against himself.

As he tumbled through the air, the nanotech triggered. Hundreds of sharp needles penetrated his armored body, and the nanotech began immediately to digest him. He fell to the ground, knowing he’d be dead by the time he hit, but enjoying one last look at the marvelous blue sky.

*     *     *

More machinery churned into action under the earth. The data collectors were completed, and already the signal to launch had come. Hydraulic lifters activated, pushing the last ten meters of earth out of the way. The ground rumbled as machines on a colossal scale moved.

Around the world, thousands of antennae as wide as a city block broke the surface in unison. They telescoped into the sky over a period of several minutes, rising as high as the tallest skyscrapers. Branches of fractal design, sprouted from their cores according to simple mathematical algorithms designed to enhance reception.

They waited for the final signal.

*     *     *

The flying car landed in the center of the meadow. Cat ran for it, batting aside one of XOR’s drones with a fallen branch. Fighting off robots with wooden sticks. That was what it always came down to.

She came alongside the vehicle, and her heart stopped for a moment as she spotted herself clutching Ada tight to her side. Holy shit
—
they’d restored her from backup! “This is weird.”

“I know,” the other her said. “Get in, hurry. And you can call me Catherine.”

“Mommy!” Ada cried. “I missed you. Mommy Two doesn’t smell the same.”

Ada shifted across the seat and squeezed Cat tight, and Cat hugged her back, just as tight.

Catherine got the car flying again in the direction of the bunker at Channel Rock. Air rushed in through the broken windshield, as she dodged and twisted the craft in midair to avoid XOR’s robots. “After they restored me, I realized you’d changed the security keys after your last backup,” she yelled over the roar of wind and engines. “We were getting desperate.”

“I didn’t change the keys,” Cat yelled back, arms still wrapped tight around Ada. She touched Catherine with one hand, sharing the original key over an electrical signal.

“Crap. That’s not the key I have in my memory. Look.” Catherine sent back the difference between the keys.

“It’s only a few bits difference in a gigabit-long key stream.”

“You realize what that means?” Catherine said. “Backup and restore is imperfect.”

Cat felt sick to her stomach. “Impossible. Every bit is checked five times, and there’s error correction on top of that.”

“Well, somewhere in the process, there’s a mistake.”

“But you feel like me?” Cat shouted back.

“I
am
me,” Catherine said, confident. “But maybe this explains some of the variation in the simulations. Like the painter.”

Cat had always wondered about the painter. “If we can’t trust the backup and restore process. . . .” she hugged Ada close to her. “Then the plan is worthless. It won’t work.”

“It’s a few ones and zeros messed up,” Catherine said. “It can’t matter that much. I feel no different than before. But I have bad news. We lost
Mike—”

A metal rod struck the vehicle, an unlucky hit that penetrated the battery compartment, shorting out a capacitor with a flash and a bang. The vehicle died.

“This is not my fucking day for flying,” Cat said.

“Mommy!?!”

The car went into a dive. Cat instinctively took over and wrestled with the controls, at the same time checking Ada’s vitals over the net to make sure she hadn’t been injured. Drive power was gone, but an emergency backup source still gave her flight controls, and autorotation had kicked in. A controlled fall, in other words.

She glanced outside the cockpit. They were coming down near the Gorge, about a thirty minute hike from Channel Rock.

The vehicle responded sluggishly, and Cat almost flipped them trying to avoid a tree, but she got them down with a jarring thump between two old-growth Doug firs.

She checked over Ada’s body, but she was completely fine.

Catherine hadn’t moved or spoken. Cat looked up from Ada and realized that her clone had been hit by something, a projectile or shrapnel from the rear of the vehicle. She checked for a pulse. Catherine was dead.
Kuso
.

“Let’s go, baby,” Cat yelled, pulling Ada from the vehicle.

T
HE GROUND QUAKED,
shifting under her feet. Ada shrieked in fear and her hand slipped out of Cat’s grasp.

She turned back to grab Ada with both arms and carry her. God, she was heavy. When had her baby grown so much? She hurried down the path toward Channel Rock and the underground bunker where everyone must be waiting.

They were deep in the forest now, about two miles from the bunker. There were no XOR drones here, the trees too thick for them to penetrate the canopy.

“Listen, Pumpkin. We have a bit of a problem.” Cat dodged an uprooted tree that must have fallen during the quake. “My implant got damaged when I was on my trip.”

“I know, Mommy. And I know what you’re going to ask. I can do it.”

Cat stopped and stared at her. Ada stared back with big eyes. She was so beautiful. “You know what I need to do?”

“Yes, make everyone upload at once. I can do it.”

“It’s not too much for you?”

Ada shook her head.

“Then let’s get back. I want to see Daddy.”

She embraced Ada, trying to wrap her entire body in her arms, but Ada was so big now, her legs dangled. Cat jumped another downed tree as an enormous crack reverberated through the forest. The ground slid sideways as Cat landed, and her ankle twisted under her. Old karate moves instinctively turned it into a roll and tumble, and she came to rest on her back.

She was staring up at the underside of the thick tree branches, wishing she could see what was happening in the sky above, but her implant no longer showed her.

Ada pressed one hand to Cat’s forehead, and suddenly her vision lit with the activity above the forest canopy. The sky was full of dark, dense clouds, lightning bolts streaking horizontally to hit drones screaming at supersonic speeds, smaller objects targeted by lasers, a deluge of unmanned aerial vehicles endlessly raining down on the forest, and superheated metal fragments that set the uppermost tree branches on fire a million times over.

“Thank you for showing me.”

“I can see everything, Mommy.” Ada’s face was tight with worry.

Cat wished she could take it all away. Ada shouldn’t have to see such things. But there was nothing she could do. “I’m sorry.”

“You’re crushing me,” Ada said, as she pushed back against Cat’s iron grip. “Let me go.”

Cat loosened her grip slightly. “No, we’re faster if I carry you.”

Cat got up, wincing as her ankle took her weight. She told her implant to mask the pain and stabilize the ankle. Nanobots poured in from the generator by her coccyx, probably too late to do any good. “Get on my back,” Cat said, as the forest shook once more under some new assault.

Ada obliged, and Cat took off running. Far-off electromagnetic pulses sent waves of distorting energy across the landscape from the direction of Nanaimo, a hundred miles to the south. Cat’s implant hiccupped momentarily, then resumed. “Nuke EMP,” Cat sent through her implant. “Home okay?”

Ada replied yes as Cat maintained her run. A whistle came through the trees and Cat glanced up to see in time to see a tall Doug fir shear off. Seconds later the nuclear shockwave hit in force, throwing her off-balance. She stumbled and went down, crashing into a pile of rocks.

Cat slowly raised herself to a sitting position. Ada climbed into her lap, hugging her tight. She checked the dark sky, where a million tiny objects were plummeting from the air. Smart flies fell to the ground next to them, lifeless. The nuclear shockwave fanned the hundreds of tiny fires in the forest, doubling their size. Cat checked Ada, feeling her limbs.

“Nothing broken,” Ada said, but she was covered in scrapes and welts from their run through the trees. Ada looked into Cat’s eyes from her perch on Cat’s lap. “We don’t have to go back,” Ada sent by implant. “I can upload from here.”