Escape
Lights flashed across the fronts of the ADPAX systems resting on the racks. Jason had called the configuration a micro-Grid, which sounded ominous to Go. If—as the term implied—there was enough horsepower in the devices to run the infrastructure of a small city, it seemed likely the artifact ghost could be a deadlier threat than anyone had thought. The computerized person had rented the storage sheds only a short while ago and had converted them into a compound dedicated to…
Go nudged the robot he’d bludgeoned into an inert, crumpled mess, then wrinkled his nose at the stink of the fried electronics spilling out of the ruptured shell. It was just a regular machine, not a purpose-built monstrosity, yet it had nearly broken his foot. “So, it’s building a robot army, yeah?”
Jason didn’t budge from his station in front of the arrayed computing devices, head bowed, eyes closed. “No.” His voice was barely louder than the air conditioning units.
Still trying to connect to the micro-Grid.
“Okay.” Rosario swatted Go’s butt. “You’re as good as new.”
He pulled his pants up and tested his leg, wincing at the dull pain where she’d glued the cut together and sealed it with spray-on flesh. “You offer refunds, Doc?”
“You don’t like what I did, go to a clinic.”
“Nah. I’ll be fine. I could use a few weeks of rest is all.”
She gave him a peck on the cheek. “If he figures this micro-Grid thing out, maybe we can recover the OMI data. We’ll spend a few weeks on a beach when this is all over.”
“Sounds good, love.” She hadn’t said what beach, but it would have to be far away from all the death and violence, far from the memories of Pardis.
The driver slumped. “I can’t do it.”
Go shuffled closer. “Can’t do what?”
“Break the security. I’ve hit the system with every bot packet I have, and—” Jason glanced at Rosario and lowered his voice. “—I’ve tried several direct connections.”
“Don’t take it wrong, mate, but should we ask Ash to come back?”
Jason scowled. “He’s not going to get any farther. There’s layer after layer of security.”
“So this could be the Gridhound, yeah?”
“No. This is different. It’s acting like an AI now.”
Rosario put the tip of her carbine against one of the ADPAX devices. “You said it’s dangerous because it’s operating with all these in parallel. What if I shoot some of them?”
The driver stiffened. “Don’t. Please.”
“Why not? It gets dumber if we do it, right?”
“Sure. But it might launch defensive measures.”
“We destroyed all the robots.”
“See these devices on the lower shelves? Storage. Cheap, but there’s plenty of it.”
“And?”
“It wouldn’t take much to launch a virus and wipe it all out.”
Go did his best to squat to get a better look at the arrayed devices. “Just unplug them, yeah?”
“I didn’t get deep—” Jason turned, eyes barely opened. “—but I got deep enough to see some of what he… I saw what it did to configure this hardware. You can bet those devices are set up to suffer corruption without a clean shutdown. We’d be months rebuilding them, and you’d lose data. There’s no avoiding it.”
Rosario set her weapon down and unstrapped her bulletproof vest. “It was going to hack everything to pieces again, wasn’t it?”
Go nodded at the still-smoking buzzsaw robot. “Yeah.”
“So it probably already launched something to wipe everything out electronically. A virus, like you said.”
Jason winced. “It had. I stopped that.”
She squinted at the micro-Grid. “I thought you said you couldn’t get in?”
“I—” The smaller man turned away. “Harry Cho’s still in there.”
“Good. We want him alive.”
“That’s not the problem. Like I said, it’s not really him anymore. It’s about what you’d expect of an AI.”
“All right. What’s that mean, Jason? I’m not a systems person, and neither is Go.”
“It means I’m not sure how to deal with it. It’s…”
Go tapped Rosario’s shoulder and waved for her to give Jason more space. “He talks to computers directly, yeah? Now he’s looking at a computer that could talk back. Maybe it could control him like he controls machines.”
Jason twisted around, face pinched in anger for a moment, then his lip quivered in fear. “I’ve never encountered something that could…talk back.”
Rosario’s eyes widened in understanding. “Well, I trust you. If—”
“I can do it. I mean, if the OMI data is stored in there, I have to, right?”
She smiled. “It’s worth a lot of money.”
“Sure it is.” The genie sucked in a deep breath. “Well, here goes nothing.”
Go held up a hand. “Wait a second, mate. How do we know if it’s frying your brain?”
“Well, I guess I could share what I see with you. Over the earpieces.”
“Yeah. If things get ugly, we’ll pull the plug.” Go tapped the claw of the crowbar against the rack holding the ADPAX systems. “Hear me in there, Harry?”
Jason chuckled and closed his eyes. He sent a connection request, and when Go accepted, he received a dense, dark video. Instead of physical objects, the room was defined by blue-white glows. Some—the ADPAX array—were bright like a star. Devices like the destroyed robots were fading into the black.
The starlight took on detail, with towering gates of stone set in a thick, impregnable wall of obsidian. Jagged spears of light intermittently leaked through the gaps of the gate.
Go couldn’t imagine the AI building such an interface. It seemed more like something Jason would do. Questions like that could be asked later.
For now, their awareness—Jason’s awareness—moved closer to the gate.
He cleared his throat. “I’m going to try to gain access. Past the security.”
There was a buildup of…pressure. Energy. Something. The gate shuddered, and the light leaking out grew brighter. The walls lost some of their solidity.
Then the gate blew open.
Inside, blocky towers of the same sort of black stone rose around streets lit by the same blue-white glow. Silvery, bullet-like robots darted down those streets on treaded legs, going from building to building, disappearing through doorways protected by metal slabs that whispered up and down.
Rosario gasped. “This is what the Grid looks like?”
Go shook his head to warn her to let Jason concentrate, but she was completely absorbed in the spectacle. “It’s what I see.” The genie sounded far away.
“Are we in?”
“Yes. I pushed through the security, but something’s…different.”
Lights winked out in some of the towers. Robots came to a stop. Go almost felt the reduction in the sense of pressure, of presence.
Then Jason hissed. “It’s Harry—he’s leaving.”
The pressure—that must have been Harry Cho. Go knew he wasn’t actually feeling the presence, but something in Jason’s shared experience was somehow transferring the awareness of it.
Robots began moving again, but their activities were different. More frenetic, Go thought. “What’s this, mate?”
Once again, sensations slipped through the shared video: Jason’s awareness blitzed past robots, through doors, into rooms within the towers. “He launched another virus. He’s trying to wipe the data. I can stop the virus, or I can stop him.”
Rosario’s hand brushed across Go’s arm: She was flailing. “Save the data!”
They shot through the streets, and each robot they passed powered down or simply vanished. But as they did so, the light faded, until only a dull glow remained. Robots slumped in streets and doorways, inert.
Jason muttered something, then the connection closed. “It should be safe.”
Go shook his head, trying to clear the sudden imaginary pressure difference. “Where’d it go?”
His earpiece chimed: Ash was calling them. That must have been what brought Jason out of the simulation.
Rosario looked around, confused, then accepted the group connection to Ash. “What’s going on?”
“Our little computer ghost—I think I found it.” There was the familiar smug tone that made Ash so annoying, this time in spades. “That van nearly lost me a few times, but I found it.”
“Where are you?”
“You’re going to love this: the Pomeroy Building.”
Jason’s jaw dropped, then he took a step toward the ramp and stopped. “The Pomeroy Building? Is it going to the RPC office?”
“Nope. There’s a loading dock around back, and now a bunch of robots are loading up crates.”
The genie’s brow furrowed. “He was buying time.”
Go turned to the ADPAX array. “Harry?”
“He was transferring everything. It must have had multiple copies of itself. Of course! Without the limitations of a physical body, why wouldn’t it? I should’ve had a better monitor of Grid traffic running.”
Ash snorted. “Oh, this whole section’s been saturated since I got here.”
Jason took another step, stopped, and shook his head. “It’s like playing chess against an AI. It has every possible move planned out to a million different ends. We can’t outsmart something—”
Go hobbled toward the ramp. “We’ve got to.”
“Go, this isn’t Harry, not anymore. It’s a computerized simulation. He’s abandoned his body. He doesn’t want to go back.”
“Then what does he want, mate? It’s not inert. It’s doing something .”
“Well…” The driver pinched his chin. “Maybe we’ve taken out its copies.”
“Or maybe we’ve been letting it lead us around, yeah?”
“Lead us around?”
“You said Harry doesn’t want his physical body anymore, mate.”
“This thing isn’t human. It’s a different level of awareness.”
“Still needs physical components, though. Robots moving things around—those could be hardware to let it exist off the Grid. More of these ADPAX arrays.”
“Sure.”
“It’s sure not going to drive around in a van for the rest of its existence. We’ve already found it. So it needs a final destination. It needs to go somewhere away—”
Ash growled angrily. “You two mind telling me what’s going on?”
Jason slapped his forehead. “Go’s right. It’s trying to escape.”
“Yeah, you remember how I told you it’s loading up a van? Oh, and they’re done. Nice. Now I get to chase it all over the place again.” The motorcycle engine roared to life. “It can’t pull all the same stunts it did before, not loaded up like that.”
The genie stared off into space. “Shit. The starport. It’s rented an orbital shuttle.”
“A shuttle?” The security expert grumbled. “Where’s it going to go in that?”
Go waved for Rosario to help him up the ramp. “Anywhere it wants, mate. It could steal a cargo ship.”
Jason rushed over and wrapped an arm around Go for support and helped Rosario get him up the ramp. “That has to be it. Get off Newcastle, hide, then wait for an opportunity to snag a cargo ship. Ash, do you have anything to take down Grid connections?”
“Sure. It’s illegal as fuck.”
“So don’t do it there. I’m sending the location of the rented shuttle. Follow the van. When you get closer to the starport, hit the Grid in that area. Take it down.”
“Oh, that’s not going to piss anyone off.”
Jason and Rosario helped Go through the storage shed, then into the front passenger seat. The genie started the crawler up and backed out of the facility.
Go set the damaged crowbar on the floorboard. “You’ve got a plan now, yeah?”
The driver smiled. “You could call it that.”
Rosario poked her head between the two seats. “Tell me it’s something better than another shootout with robots.”
“Maybe. If everything goes right.”
“That’s not doing anything for my confidence.”
“Well—” Jason nodded toward Go. “After what he suggested, I think we’re finally the ones who’re a step ahead.”
Rosario leaned back in her seat, but as they accelerated toward the road that would take them to the starport, Go wondered if they really could ever be ahead of an AI or an artifact ghost or whatever it was that Harry Cho had become.