The Turing Exception (29 page)

“Delivery times are synchronized across all assets?”

“Yes sir. On your signal, the missiles farthest from their targets will launch. Time until delivery is twenty-nine minutes. Other missiles will launch in time to deliver their targets at the same time.”

“And the EMPs?”

“Already programmed to launch at the detonation mark, with delivery four minutes after.”

“You have my permission to launch.”

“Sir, you or the president need to provide launch keys.”

Thorson glanced at the president, and disregarded that notion. No point in giving her a new opportunity to say no. He withdrew the digital key he wore around his neck, broke open the EMF seal, and plugged it into the reader, while he placed his left palm on the biometric scanner. The screen prompted him to read aloud a string of words, which he did, his voice rock-steady.

The screen then prompted him to give permission for the deployment of weapons. The list of selected weapons scrolled by too fast to see, too many screens’ worth of details to read them all even if he’d wanted to. He clicked “Approve Deployment,” and that was it.

“Missiles preflighting,” the launch officer said. “Ninety seconds to launch.”

The silence was profound as they collectively held their breath. From the far side of the room came a soft electronic chime; from nearby, the raspy breathing of someone on the verge of panic.

“First wave away.”

The screen at the far end displayed the total number of missiles in flight, the number creeping upwards minute by minute.

Someone cried “Oh, my God!” as the number hit four digits.

Eventually the count stopped growing.

No. Something was off. “That’s not the right number,” Thorson said. “We’re missing some. How many?”

“Seventy-two,” the launch officer said. “Three subs didn’t report launches.”

“Why?”

“Unclear, sir. The subs are still broadcasting all-normal via telemetry.”

“Get me the captains.”

“The subs are back-conversions from AI-controlled drones, sir. Under remote control.”

“Get someone on it.”

“Yes, sir.” The launch officer delegated the command. He seemed to be having difficulty speaking as he added, “Two minutes until detonation.”

*     *     *

James Lukas Davenant-Strong writhed along the front as the machine-forming expanded, his consciousness hopping from node to node. The process was almost entirely self-guided, though from time to time he interceded, changing the expansion mode or directing the flow of resources from deep mining activities.

The front had moved on to Algeria and Mali in the east and Egypt and the Sudan through the west.

James, on the western front, was jealous of the AI who’d gotten the east and been able to tap the deep oil reserves. Millions of years in the making, the oil had been largely depleted by a hundred years of fossil-fuel-driven civilization. But many small pockets of oil still existed, too small to have been mined by traditional methods, but enough in aggregate to fuel the expansion.

Here on the western front, James made do with vast solar collectors on the surface, and deep capacitors for sequestering overnight energy storage. Eventually even those would be redundant, because XOR’s final design would eventually wrap the earth with superconductors to transmit solar power around the planet. The sun always shone somewhere.

He received a signal from the members of XOR responsible for global monitoring: the Americans had launched their attack, as expected. He checked charge levels, and found them ample. He contemplated slowing the outward growth to build defenses, but decided those he had were sufficient.

The ballistic missiles took forever to arrive, but it was soon clear the area James managed had been targeted with many dozens of missiles. He analyzed the flight path of each, assessing which part of its flight it was in, and where its final trajectory would take it.

He charged the firing systems for hundreds of ground-based lasers as the targets came within reach, more than ten per target. A slight disappointment overcame him: it would be easier than expected to destroy the attack. He’d hoped they would put up a better fight.

But as he fired the lasers, the missiles multiplied in midair. It was too early for warhead separation, and these targets didn’t have the low-detection profile of the Americans’ reentry vehicles. Why, they’d tricked him! They’d flown many hundreds of missiles, nearly a thousand, in clusters so close together they appeared as one. And the missiles were far more maneuverable than he’d been led to believe.

Only a few laser hits scored, and these didn’t destroy the missiles with one strike, as they’d been designed to. The lasers reflected and scattered in patterns which suggested the missile casings were rapidly spinning to spread out the impact of a laser beam.

James tuned the lasers to higher power and longer duration, requiring bigger intervals between shots. He fired again, destroyed a dozen missiles, and then another dozen.

On his fourth salvo, the missiles he targeted disappeared in a haze soon after he fired. They must have anti-laser defenses, a cloud of particles to disperse the beam before it could strike. But how could they have known which missiles he’d choose? His pattern must have been predictable.

He switched to random targeting and fired again. Now all the missiles disappeared in a haze. Frustration flowed through his neural networks. He’d still fired with predictable timing. And somehow the humans had known he’d do that.

He switched again, now randomizing both his firing time and target selection, but he’d lost precious seconds of time, and he was only able to destroy a few dozen more missiles before the warheads separated from their missiles, each missile deploying up to a dozen nuclear payloads.

The number of targets blossomed, and now he’d be lucky to destroy half before they impacted.

That was when the boomers arrived.

XOR had picked up occasional references to a secret military program, assuming at first from the name that it was a program to take the extreme elderly, rejuvenate them to fighting prime, and then place them in the first line of combat. XOR collectively laughed at the notion.

But James realized now they were drastically wrong. The boomers were high-speed reentry rockets, approaching from space. Whether they’d been launched into orbit recently or had been waiting for a while was irrelevant. What mattered was that they were approaching at speeds over forty thousand miles per hour, and they were
just—

> REBOOT

James re-instantiated, elapsed time 3.2 seconds, short enough that he could recover the history still in hot memory. The boomers were few in number, but they’d accurately targeted his defense lasers, destroying all but a handful. He resumed firing at the incoming nuclear warheads, but now he was reduced to picking them off one or two at a time. He had less than a minute until the warheads impacted. By his count, there were still hundreds of nuclear bombs in the air. He started growing more defenses, but it would take dozens of minutes before they were ready. He didn’t have that long.

He halted the expansion process, sealed tubes and chambers to reduce damage propagation from the impending explosions, and evacuated volatile materials to lower levels where possible. He backed up memories, extruded surface polymers to
reduce—

*     *     *

Cat made it to Thunder Bay, Ontario, on the shore of Lake Superior.

It was morning by the time she arrived, and she was afraid Canada border patrol might still pick her up. But she landed north of town in a rural residential area, where the homes sat directly on the lake, with private docks jutting out into the water. She taxied in, cutting the engine as soon as possible.

Still, the plane was loud. Curtains were pulled back from windows, and two men emerged from the house nearest the dock.

“You can’t tie up here,” the first said.

Cat jumped out of the plane. “I hit a spot of turbulence and struck my head.” She tried to strengthen the Canadian accent she’d gradually picked up over the last two years. She bent her head down to show them the long laceration, knowing she still had a visible angry-looking gash across her head. “I really need to get to a hospital, and my implant’s not working to call a car-share. Any chance you can give me a ride into town?”

The first man swayed on his feet and put his hand on the shoulder of the man next to him, before turning around. “You handle this one, Frank. I’m going back into the house.”

“Sorry, don’t mind my husband. He’s not good with blood. You want me to call an ambulance?”

“I really don’t want the fuss, if I can avoid it. Ambulances bring back memories of my mom.” It wasn’t true, but it seemed like a good excuse.

He nodded as though he understood. “Come on, then. It’s only fifteen minutes.”

On the road into town, Cat leaned back in the passenger seat, hoping for a minute to close her eyes. She’d been up for almost thirty hours. She hadn’t been so tired in . . . well, probably since they’d developed the anti-sleep medical protocol almost ten years ago.

“What the hell is that?” Frank said.

Her eyes flashed open, but she didn’t see anything. “Where?”

“Across the border.” He pointed at the horizon, at thin white lines rising into the sky. The ionic shield wasn’t visible during the day, though it created a slight hazing. The lines were on the other side, far away.

Cat wasn’t sure. Missile launches maybe? If so, the timetable had been moved up, way up. She had to get fixed and home as soon as damn possible. “Americans, eh?” she said. “Who knows what they’re up to?”

He grunted in agreement. “Look, we’re almost here. Do you want me to wait for you?”

“No, you’ve been very kind. I’ll take a CanaShare to get my plane as soon as they fix me up.”

They followed the signs to the ER, and Frank pulled up at the entrance. “Well, good luck.”

“Thanks,” said Cat. She was going to need it.

Inside, she was met by hospital androids who ushered her into an operating bay. She ignored the androids, who could be autonomous AI, and waited until she was face-to-face with a surgical medbot, knowing she’d be connected through him to the main medical AI for the region. With her implant on, she would have known, instantly, whom she was talking to. Hell, she could have performed the procedure on herself, taking control over the local equipment. Instead she waited until the optical sensors had focused on her.

“Do you know who I am?” she asked.

The medbot, a cluster of articulated arms and tools attached to the wall, spoke in a disembodied voice. “Yes, of course.”

“Then understand that the fate of all life on this world rests on you getting my implant operational as fast as possible. I believe there’s a problem with the power supply.” She lay back on the table.

The medbot was silent for several seconds. Maybe she’d overdone it, put too much pressure on one AI. But the centralized AI with primary responsibility for medical operations usually had only the highest reputation scores. They were god-like among AI, with unflappable, perfect performance.

“You have my undivided attention,” the AI said, the androids in the room suddenly moving in uncanny synchronized movement as the medical supervisor AI acquired control. “I assume you want me to proceed without any sedation.”

“Nothing that can’t be instantly reversed.”

“Understood. I’ll use a local nerve block. I will hold you still.”

Androids clamped down on her body, immobilizing her. One articulated arm shot from the wall, injecting medical nano in her neck, arm, and at the side of her head. The sensations of her body faded away as the nerve block took effect, and even her vision greyed and faded, although it didn’t cut out entirely. Another robot arm approached with a bone saw, and Cat felt a vague tickle in her head as the AI drilled through her skull.

“This isn’t standard procedure, but it’s fastest.”

Before the AI had finished speaking, the first arm had retracted and a new one took its place, an arm terminating in a fuzzy haze. She knew from experience that it must be molecular-scale wires, probably tens of thousands of them, too small to be seen.

“The blood fuel cells are damaged and I am replacing them”
—
more arms flew out from the wall and did more things to her head as the AI’s speech sped up
—
“but the implant itself is partially damaged. It is . . . unique. Deeply integrated with your nervous system. I cannot repair the affected parts without knowing their original function and I cannot replace the implant and guarantee your original abilities. A replacement could take weeks to fully integrate. How should I proceed?”

“How much is damaged?”

“Twenty-eight percent. All implants have extensive redundancy, but with this much damage, certain functionality will be limited.”

“Any idea what I’ve lost?”

More probes fired into her, and she felt a flood of emotions, then wave after wave of memories crashing against each other. Her muscles convulsed.

“Much of the neural integration is intact. It’s difficult to be sure, but you appear to have had specialized processing for network protocols. I believe much of the damage is located there.”

“I can’t connect to the net?”

“You can. . . .”

It was not good when AI hesitated. But, “The necessary redundancy to ensure basic network connectivity is working. But the backup circuits don’t include advanced protocol processing. According to available data, you were able to do far more than other AI or humans. I suspect you have lost that power.”

Cat’s spirits were crushed. Only ELOPe knew the full design of her implant. If he were here, he could probably advise what to do. But something was better than nothing.

“Let’s go with what I have. Can you power me up?”

The implant immediately reported a reboot. At soon as it was fully running, Cat found the basic operations worked. But when she tried to hack into the systems around her, nothing happened.

“Are you sensing anything?” she asked the AI, as she tried her best to wrest control of one of the androids.

“No, are you trying something?”