The Turing Exception (4 page)

“Watch yourself,” she called to it.

Inside, the old chrome diner reminded her of so many other roadside restaurants. With a nod to the waitress, she settled into an empty booth, the bag next to her, and glanced at the menu. Meat was inexpensive again, the vat-grown stuff cheaper than anything else you could buy, and genetically engineered for extra nutrients. She ordered a burger, fries, and coffee, too tired to contemplate anything more complicated.

Using her implant to hack into the cameras outside, she watched as an old woman approached the diner a few minutes later. Cat glanced up in time to see her walk through the door. The woman looked around, her eyes adjusting to the light inside, before settling on Cat. She walked over and slid into the booth.

“Are you Catherine?” the old woman asked.

Cat nodded.

The woman pulled out an ancient EMF bag, the silver lining heavily crinkled. A momentary panic pulsed through Cat: the failing package might leak signals. She hoped the car would have warned her.

To compound matters, the woman chose to slide the bag across the table at the precise moment the waitress came back with coffee. But the waitress didn’t say a word, and gave no sign of suspicion.

Cat drew the bag closer, peering through the reflective material. Inside were hundreds of tiny wafers, a centimeter on a side, thin as a fingernail. Cat slid the EMF bag into her leather satchel.

“There’s one more,” the woman said. She pulled at a cord around her neck, revealing a flat metal case stamped with the old US Army logo. “My son, from the war.” She laid it on the table, pushing it across to Cat.

Cat put her hand out to take it, but the woman didn’t let go. She stared into Cat’s eyes.

“May God go with you,” she said.

The old woman’s faith surprised Cat. The digital wafers containing personality uploads were proof of the lack of any soul. Start executing the personality upload on a computer, or instantiate it, as the computer guys like Mike said, and you instantly had a copy of that person’s mind running, impossible to differentiate from their biological origin. Instantiate them twice, and you ended up with two identical people. Tens of millions of uploads occupied cyberspace, enjoying life free from the confines of their dead or decrepit bodies.

Strange or not, she slid the identity case into her satchel. By the time she looked up, the woman was already walking toward the door.

The food came and Catherine ate, mindlessly.

When she finished and the waitress brought a tablet for payment, there was another metal case left on the table. Word must be spreading that someone was smuggling uploads and AI out of the country. Cat slid that one into the leather bag too, then made her way outside.

The bag weighed heavy on her shoulder. Had she made the right decision in Miami? It had seemed like the best course, but look at the path of the world since then. AI and personality uploads outlawed. The US and China regressing.

She’d turned into a modern-day underground railroad. Each life she got across the border, AI or human upload, was atonement for the decision she made. But it wouldn’t bring back the millions who’d lost their lives or were stuck in digital limbo.

She stuffed the new packages in the shielded safe box, then climbed into the car. On the road, the car drove as she drifted off, thinking of the two thousand chips she carried, now outlawed in the United States of America. She was their last hope, their last chance to live again. Maybe she couldn’t make the world right, but she could save these people.

*     *     *

Cat opened the door to the motel room and glanced back to where the car sat quiescent. Bone-tired, she still checked the mesh network for any indication of surveillance or signs of danger. She hacked routers, cameras, and servers with practiced ease. She spotted no problems, although the net had changed so much in the last two years that she sometimes failed to recognize the protocols and doubted her power to control smart mechanisms. Suddenly unsure of her abilities, chest constricted, she focused on the motel sign. It blinked off and she breathed deep in relief. She turned the sign back on and slammed the door.

Stupid and delirious with exhaustion, she needed sleep. The car would watch for her. She’d only slept deeply once in the past seven days, and her nano was broadcasting sleep-toxin warnings.

Her head hit the pillow.

Cat walked along the side of a dry stream, round river rocks embedded in tan dirt, brown as far as the eye could see. A few stunted trees survived on a rise to the west, and a spot of black on the horizon grew as she drew closer. The hulk resolved itself as a rusted-out truck canted down the slope of the wash. Her heart leaped in hope of supplies, although it was more likely the truck had been stripped of anything useful long ago. Now it could be the spot of an ambush.

She looked around, shading her eyes with one hand in the glare of the sun, and forced herself to check the net. The data connection flickered but held, the screech of distorted data packets bombarding her neural implant. She weathered the attack and counter-probed, but the net brought no useful information. Disgusted with herself for old mistakes, she disconnected. How could she have done such a thing to the net?

She slid the gun out, the anti-bot weapon heavy even in her two-handed grip. She approached the truck, karate forms coming habitually, minimizing her profile, lightening her step.

“Come out,” she called, her voice cracking. When had she last spoken to someone? “I know you’re there.”

She waited, then went to holster the gun, when a scrape against rock gave away movement. She brought the gun back to ready, and circled to the side. “I heard you. Might as well come out peacefully.”

“We’re coming.” A metallic head, sun glinting off the bare metal dome, rose on the other side of the truck, above the wheel well. “Please don’t hurt us.”

The old android had probably worn clothes once, might even have worked in a store with human customers, but now even its false skin had worn away. The delicate unit rose up, a skeleton of spidery servos and struts, a bundle in one arms. There was a scramble behind it, and a boy, maybe ten, appeared, gripping white-knuckled onto the android’s frame. The bundle gave a cry, and Cat realized the android carried a human baby.

“Where’s their family?” Cat asked. She put the gun away and walked closer, wanting to comfort this boy.

“I’m their family now,” the bot said. They stepped backwards, keeping their distance. The boy seemed torn between wanting to run away and being afraid to let go of the android.

“I won’t hurt you,” Cat said.

“It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?” the android asked. “You destroyed the world’s computers, burned the net, killed every robot that wasn’t disconnected at that moment. And the humans depended on automated supply chains. No food, no electricity, no water. How did you think they’d live?”

The boy huddled closer to the android.

“You killed ten billion sentient beings, Catherine Matthews. Less than five percent of humankind remain.”

Cat woke with a start, her eyes blinking open in the darkness, her implant telling her she’d slept a little more than four hours. Hot and sweaty, she kicked off the covers and sat up.

The same dream. But she hadn’t killed the world. In Miami, she could have changed things, but she didn’t.

She cradled her head in her arms. She’d had the vision back then, back in ’43, right when the whole mess started. The vision that had made her afraid to take action because she might trigger a global apocalypse. She stood by instead, let half the world’s AI get shut down, and the other half get hobbled by insane restrictions. Was this better? Or was the future still inevitable?

She swung her feet over the edge of the bed. She needed to get back on the road. Couldn’t sleep again after that dream, not when she still had lives to save.

*     *     *

At the border, Cat’s car slowed to a crawl. The arcing aurora set up by the American government to stop airborne incursions extended miles into the atmosphere, casting a palpable tension over the border crossing.

Hundreds of human agents manned the crossing into Canada. It was still odd to not see a single robot among them, like cutting school when she was a kid and finding herself the only child in a store. She settled back in the car, tired, sore, and dirty from the long days on the road. She kept her mind a blank. No need to antagonize the border-crossing computers. They might not be sentient anymore, but it wasn’t worth the risk.

“I’ll take it from here,” she said to no one, and put her hands on the wheel to pull up to the inspector. It made no sense, the US Border Patrol caring more about what left the country than the Canadians caring what entered, but then most things the US did these days didn’t make sense.

The inspector wore full combat gear: a tactical vest, helmet, and machine gun cradled in her arms. “Anything to declare . . .” The inspector paused, waiting for her ID to display on the helmet HUD. “Mrs. Johnson.”

“Nothing,” Cat said, letting her implant trickle out nothing more than the false identity.

“Please wait while we scan your vehicle.”

The inspector stepped back as a solid loop of metal rotated up from the ground, passed entirely around the car, then disappeared back into the ground. The active probe was a hundred times more sensitive than the passive AI scanners found everywhere.

“Thank you, Mrs. Johnson. You’re clear to cross to Canadian Border Patrol.”

Cat drove smoothly away to the second checkpoint half a mile away. The Canadian officer was dressed in a civilian uniform. He scanned Cat’s identity again, as he joked with a coworker. “Welcome back to Canada, Mrs. Johnson.”

With that, she was back in a civilized country.

She’d grown up in the US, lived in Portland for most of her life. The States had been normal back then, progressive even, leading the world in artificial intelligence, robotics, and technology.

But two years ago, in Miami, terrible things happened with nanotech. It turned out that “grey goo”, the nightmare scenario where microscopic nanobots replicated endlessly, was possible. Who knew how far it might have spread? Was it a terrorist act, or an accident? Two years later, no one knew.

Some argued the death toll was minimal compared to the alternative, that South Florida had already been mostly abandoned by 2043 after two meters of sea rise. But still, Miami was gone, just a slush of grey goo destroyed by two nuclear bombs.

That was the opening salvo of what turned into a global witch hunt to find the responsible parties. Only AI possessed the purely intellectual ability to engineer nanobots, so from the start they assumed the South Florida Terrorist Attack, or SFTA, as it came to be called, was an AI attack on humans. The US forced a global shutdown of all AI to forestall any other attacks.

But eventually the rest of the world
—
everyone except the US and China
—
turned their AI back on. Because without AI, there was no commerce, no transportation, no supplies. No computing, no information, and no communications. Civilization was utterly dependent on AI.

Only the US and China were crazy enough to keep the AI shut off, sacrificing millions of their citizens to cold, accidents, illness, and hunger before they were able to rebuild their societies without AI.

Two years later, the US and China were still AI-free zones. Merely possessing computational power in excess of a quarter of a human-brain-equivalent was a crime punishable by imprisonment within their borders. The land was saturated with low-power computing dust to monitor for violations.

The US exercised its might and invoked ancient copyright laws to ensure no AI or digitized human personality from inside its borders could be instantiated outside. At a time when AI numbered in tens of millions, and the number of human uploads now equaled the AI, that was a whole lot of people in limbo. The US wouldn’t instantiate them, and it wouldn’t allow anyone else to either, condemning them to long-term storage as the months and years went by.

Cat was furious in the face of such insanity. How could the US, a country that regarded itself as the paragon of freedom and individual rights, have fallen so far as to claim a human who uploaded was no longer a legitimate person?

Cat drove north toward Vancouver and caught the ferry to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. Anticipation built during the two-hour ferry ride, the worry of the days past starting to drain away in the sea air at the forward railing. She’d made the trip many dozens of times, but never tired of it.

She stopped in Nanaimo and drove into a car wash. The spray came down over the car, followed by suds and brushes. Suddenly the conveyer belt stopped, the brushes pulled back, and the water stopped sheeting down the windows. Cat got out, made her way toward a small door, opened it and stepped into a clear plastic vestibule.

“Welcome back, Cat,” said an attendant dressed in overalls with the carwash logo. “Got any new friends?”

“Some. Look, he’s covered in smart dust, I felt it at the border. I’ve got it on me, too. I don’t know if they’re onto me in particular, or if they’re giving everyone this treatment.”

“Dust is cheap. Cheaper than dirt, maybe. We’ll clean it up.” He paused, one hand over a touch panel. “EMP ready?”

She nodded.

There was a flash of ozone inside the chamber, then a grey cloud blew in through a vent, surrounding her. More nano, but it was their own tech. The little warriors would seek out foreign riders on her body and destroy them. She turned and watched through the clear panel as the car received a bigger electro-magnetic pulse, or EMP, followed by liquid nanotech poured over the top. She waited as every nanometer of their respective bodies was mapped, covered, inspected, and cleared.

“Breathe, Cat, breathe. They can’t check your lungs otherwise.”

She reluctantly took a deep breath. A little cloud of nanobots rose off her face and rode the breath inside, looking for any tech that had infiltrated her.

“You’re clear now,” the attendant said. “You know their tech is standing still since SFTA, while ours is still advancing. How can they hope to stay relevant?”