Chapter 47


Knil knew many ways to change the world. Flying over the tracks, he had a brief conversation with a famous consumer activist, who promptly contacted hundreds of law enforcement agencies. He warned them the Resistance had tried to implant plasmids in Knil and his guards. Damon and Rick were already infected, and they had to be quarantined at once.
  Now Rick would have to prove his loyalty to an organization that despised traitors. One bribed UN inspector had become a billionaire, but still expected to be vaporized at any moment.
  Within a minute, dozens of roadblocks had been activated. The police had learned to avoid the once-popular car chases. Traffic could be diverted and stopped with signals and movable barriers. Laser sheets passed through moving vehicles, a series of frozen moments no passenger would remember.
  Several more advanced methods remained off-limits. A low energy phased-neutron beam crossed the Kubrick Expressway to a hidden receiver on the other side. Five thousand vehicles crossed the beam every hour in both directions. A large delivery truck degraded the signal for a third of a second. The truck was sold in many versions, none of which were supposed to be armored. It exited the expressway to avoid an underpass checkpoint, and headed for the transurban colonies of Sidetrack Canyon.
  Within a minute of each other, four nondescript vans entered Riverside and San Diego Counties. Guided by the same alien instinct, they approached the truck on parallel routes. The largest van crested a hillside and broke through a forest of chaparral scrub oaks, branches snapping against tinted glass. Part of the vehicle unfolded in the shade.

  "Locking harnesses," Damon shouted. "Relax your muscles." Rick felt the acceleration in his teeth. They were pulled tight against their seats, which rotated to face forward. Dozens of items stowed away, as a sheet of armor unrolled against the walls. Everything looked improvised, but fit perfectly.
  The Horizon had arrived. Too much progress had finally created a terminal paradox: one part of civilization had become incomprehensible to another.
  Looking outside, Rick realized how badly he had underestimated Anonymous. Did she control the UN, the Back Room, or him? He wondered if she came from Earth at all.
  The truck's cameras reconstructed a 3D shape approaching at almost a third of the speed of sound. Its head floated in the center of the screen, a gold-brown marble oval, rope legs brushing the road like a roadrunner cartoon. More complicated than a dead human, hotter than an engine. Its optics were evenly distributed over its surface. On top was a disk with a spiral groove. Not a shell, but a proboscis.
  Whenever Rick saw unexpected signs of progress, he was awed by the possibilities in nature. Last year, wheeled bots had helped him move to a new apartment, effortlessly rearranging and recombining themselves.
  Movie battles were much more spectacular, but the reality was more original. New words were required to describe what was about to happen. It was an honor to be here.
  The chase was three seconds old, long enough to send an SOS and activate all weapons. Rick saw a tree they had passed in a different lifetime, forever receding. He was separated from the future by a thin sliver of knowledge. Otherwise everything was fine.
  The attacker was decelerating. "Impact!" Damon shouted. They trembled, and momentarily felt lighter as the truck shook forward. A ribbon stretched back to the robot, now burning in two places. It swung to the roadside in a cloud of dust, dragged on rotor legs. Oncoming cars swerved automatically. The truck had released a megavolt charge on contact.
  The robot kneeled on the road, reeling in its tether. Sparks flew, with titanium and carbon emission bands. New tools unfolded on top, including a cone-shaped sonic gun with the power of a hand grenade. Like the truck's improvised defenses, it looked clumsy, a first draft.
  The truck had become a temporary node of influence. The robot might be attempting to infiltrate the Resistance, steal or alter data, or delete evidence of an earlier infiltration. Millipol would use this attack to further discredit the Starters.
  Approximately human-sized, this was a "Peacekeeper", a hypothetical weapon that could defeat an army. It embodied many of the worst threats on RedList: whips that could slice through buildings, magnetic field lines that controlled distant objects, the power to rearrange matter by borrowing atoms as needed. It was made of NAD-5, the universal molecule, also known as carbon plasma. Shaped like tiny asterisks, they could rearrange themselves into thinking grids, motors, tiny drills. Each element only did a few simple things. With the right software (which would take centuries to evolve), they could rule the world.
  Rick had been under the impression NAD-5 hadn't been invented yet. For a typical machine, it would be easier to hit a meteor in space than to cross a room and pick up a glass of water. The main application of NAD-4 was as a type of paint. It was also woven as a flexible layer in engines and Lucidspace chairs.
  The tentacle should have split into many fibers, but it seemed to be strengthening, and was slowing the truck. In its highly organized and perfectly circumscribed mind, the robot was reliving thousands of earlier, simulated chases.
  The battle was ten seconds old. The Resistance was now broadcasting the attack worldwide. Each new viewer felt a moment of panic.
  Rick stepped outside himself. Releasing his safety harness, he stood up, and slammed his fist against a locker. "Open up," he said with just enough panic to trigger the emergency routines.
  The artfully lit locker held six weapons. The heaviest item belonged in a physics lab. A fluorine canister, a mirror attachment that weighed almost nothing, and no other moving parts.
  The tentacle blocked a rear firing port, tiny hooks pitting the window filter. The other port showed the rolling road, the sun a lemon disk in a drained sky. Janet grabbed the gun and spun it around. She pulled herself over the floor, leaning back while aiming the laser over her head. The barrel floated in the firing port. She cursed steadily while discharging the laser, which barked and stuttered like a rifle. Each light pulse was as long as the earth, and strong enough to drill through one millimeter of robot armor. Beams scintillated from its shell, already pouring red smoke from a mortar Damon had launched earlier. The barrel began to glow orange, and Rick could feel the heat.
  He unfolded an M-111 point-and-kill micro-rifle that would fit in an attaché case, and replaced the laser in the firing port. The M-111 hummed like a ray gun, transmitting fifty bullets per second. The projectiles split while accelerating, making even more noise. They seemed to arrive after the impact. Sometimes real life seemed fictional. Cracks evolved on the robot's layered shell.
  As the seconds slid by, Rick forgot he was part of a simulation. Strapped securely in their chairs, they were actually operating the laser through a roof periscope, the rifle through a turret underneath.
  The Resistance response would cause more fear than the attack itself. Every second, at least five components failed, including an electric drive motor and the mortar, but redundant backup systems replaced them.
  Now the robot was only meters away, stabilized by spinning tentacles. No one had designed or assembled it. Different humans might have briefly understood each component, as was the case with most software.
  If it managed to drill through their armor, it could inject fifty kilos of surgical microns and one gram of drugs in five seconds. He, Damon, and the others would be rapidly converted into someone's obedient tools, believing whatever their new owners required. They would have become too dangerous to live.
  After another second, Rick rejected the notion. He could see no reason for this attack. A strange system had spun out of control, and it was taking him with it.
  He sensed an awareness almost as alien as Anonymous. In humans, even the simplest thoughts required millions of irrelevant facts, as dominant brain modules triggered and suppressed a network of ever simpler action chains and subroutines, a process not easily distinguishable from anarchy. The strength of all the connections was known as personality. Unlike humans, the robot's modules were perfectly balanced, ready to respond to any situation without delay. It would never get tired or confused. The robot didn't need to be aware.
  "Swerving," Damon drew out the second syllable, as he loaded an AK-2247 minigun with a spiral clip. He looked no different than usual. The truck entered the berm, the robot stumbling as it passed a tree on the other side, the tentacle stretching and fraying before snapping. It slipped into the oncoming lane at fifty kilometers per hour, sideswiped a truck, and vanished in the dry bushes on the other side.
  A wall of white smoke swept across both lanes and through the trees, arriving everywhere like instant oblivion. The truck had deployed half a ton of micron repellent powder. Copied from Anonymous's escape plane, the technology was five days old. Cars braked and collided when their radars failed, and the live broadcast ended abruptly. In the last second before the whiteout, the robot had started to change.
  Trapped inside his game interface, Rick believed he floated over the floor. Surrounded by white light, he remembered shouting.
  The noise returned, and he was back in his chair, grabbing the armrests, unable to hold on. He wanted to say "brace for impact". There was no time to think, but the crash seemed to last forever. This was his ninth major accident, each one less predictable than the last.
  As the truck broke through the underbrush, he felt he was at least making progress, if only because he was still alive. The restraints relaxed and let go, as white objects bloomed throughout the cabin. Here came the recoil. He swam into a foam airbag that could be as soft as a cloud or tougher than steel, and felt a choking pressure.
  When he recovered, he found himself lying on his side in a steady draft, uncomfortable but unharmed. The truck was resting upright on its frame, the cabin splattered with white. Belatedly, he closed his armored facemask. Because of what was about to happen, he would soon forget this moment.
  Damon never lost consciousness. He knew the robot was on the other side of the road, more dangerous in pieces than whole. Its pattern was immortal. The radar couldn't penetrate the fog, and his weapons wouldn't fire without a target.
  Eventually it would win, of course. He couldn't stop evolution. Genetically, humans were no more advanced than plankton. The immune system operated on the honor system, and was designed to eventually fail. The slightest injury caused permanent damage, even if it felt like new strength. Damon focused on the battle for its own sake, not the outcome.
  His face hardened. "Get up! Move forward!" He shouted, herding the crew to the front compartment. He kicked out the windshield, and all they saw was white light. Rick watched the others fade away as warm air flooded the cabin. He thought he smelled strange flowers through his armor. Through the sound-killing fog came a distant crash.
  A fan came on, reluctantly clearing the interior. Damon sprayed everyone with silver strings that quickly became invisible, and their radios worked again.
  "We'll stay connected if we walk in single file! We'll use signal balance to plot a course!" he shouted. "Let's go!" He lowered Pike over the edge.