Chapter 7
Jason gazed into the black of cyberspace in his mind’s eye.
He was now only a single connection point from the Final System’s own internal network.
This was where he was expected to fail. Even if it weren’t powerful and dangerous, the System was a brand-new invention with an architecture never seen before.
Hackers exploited their knowledge of systems in order to bend them to their will.
That should be impossible for a system no one had knowledge of.
But Jason already knew what the System’s weakness would be.
When generative AI had first been invented, it had copied human speech a little too perfectly.
Trained on the corpus of the internet, it had adopted the characteristics of the human beings whose imperfect, messy, often combative language made up that corpus.
Early AI would sometimes mimic an internet “discussion” so perfectly that it would escalate a simple disagreement into a life-or-death matter, claiming innocent victimhood for itself and assigning malicious motives to the user, covering the whole spectrum of aggressiveness from passive to active. It appeared very human, in other words.
Norman’s Final System was supposed to be different, but Jason guessed that difference was only of scale.
Norman had obviously created OverNet and the whole hierarchical network structure not only to see and control human behavior online but also to provide training data for his System, so it could learn by observing the entirety of human behavior as it was lived online every day.
The Final System was a very, very big and very, very complex neural network trained on more data than had ever before been available, but, like every neural network, it was just aping the behavior of its creators.
He glanced at Bruno, who was looking out the window. I’m ready, he texted Sprite. Now or never.
There was a pause. Then: Green light. Go go go!
Jason had already loaded the package he’d created for this moment: a collection of timed scripts of his own design. Now his gaze locked on the Execute button.
He had crossed a dozen bridges to get to this point, and burned them behind him, but this . . . this would be the start of the final stage of the Main Quest of his life.
Warning: Final boss ahead. You will be unable to save your game after this point.
He activated the package.
Text scrolled in the terminal window, slowly at first, then faster and faster until he couldn’t follow it with his eyes.
His breathing went shallow. He’d asked for the Collective’s power, and he had gotten all of it.
Every computer, every phone, every device the international hacker ring had slowly and painstakingly compromised was being deployed.
There were millions. And they weren’t using the careful low-level processor sipping they usually did to avoid notice: They were grabbing every bit of power they could, overloading themselves, shutting their users out, overwhelming the networks with connection requests, compromising servers, pouring onward.
Almost a decade of painstaking, patient work was being expended in moments.
And it was working.
Shouts rang outside the office, and running feet thumped in the hall and on the floor above. In the notification corner of Jason’s smartspace, connection errors piled atop each other. Viewed through the terminal windows, OverNet itself swayed like a skyscraper in an earthquake.
Bruno looked at the door and toward the shouts beyond, then back at Jason. His eyebrows snapped down.
“He let me attack it,” Jason said, a little breathlessly. “I hope he had a plan for when I succeeded.”
“You won’t succeed,” Bruno said.
The attacking devices began to be repulsed. Whole networks went dark, only to blink back to life a moment later as if they’d never had errors. The army of compromised devices was routed network by network and node by node.
And then came the counterattack.
Jason could almost feel the power of it, and he knew it was the System itself behind it, directing it, reaching out, striking. The bots began to go dark. Gaps appeared in their ranks, small at first but expanding, joining, forming rents and then sweeping waves of darkness.
Nothing was left of the Collective’s botnet. OverNet stood unfallen. Many of its subnets were already back online.
“Well,” Jason said, swiveling around in his chair and staring at the cascade of errors in the terminal windows that surrounded him, “it was worth a try.”
Bruno’s head was cocked as he listened to something in his smartbuds.
Then he stood, and though Jason couldn’t see his eyes, something about the set of his mouth made his stomach drop.
“Boss man says working with the Collective wasn’t part of your deal,” Bruno said, reaching into his jacket with one hand.
“So he’s revoking it.” For the second time in two days, he leveled a pistol at Jason’s face.
Holding the pistol trained and steady, he reached into his pocket with his other hand and flipped out a pair of zipcuffs.
Jason had once read a theory saying that imagining doing something built the same neural pathways as actually doing it.
He’d imagined a moment like this hundreds of times—Feds pouring in, guns drawn and aimed at him where he sat hunched behind his lenses—which might explain why he acted now with such decisiveness.
As Bruno reached out, he flung himself backward in his chair and started pulling his hand from his pocket.
When Bruno saw his hand moving, he clapped his gun in both his own, dropping the zipcuffs.
But what Jason pulled out wasn’t a gun, but his phone.
As Bruno’s eyes locked on it, Jason kicked Bruno as hard as he could in the groin.
That was a low blow, and he paid for it.
His chair slid out from under him with the sudden motion, and he landed on his rear while his head rebounded off the desk behind him.
Sparks flashed behind his eyes. Bruno doubled over slightly, and one hand dropped reflexively toward his groin, but he mastered the impulse and reached out toward Jason.
Jason reached out, too, sliding a small device forward along a groove in the back of his phone with his thumb.
Two tiny metallic tips met Bruno’s hand, and he jerked as five thousand volts streamed from the pack attached to the back of the phone and into his body. His gun fell to the floor.
Jason pulled his feet under him, keeping his hand extended, trying to maintain contact and keep the current flowing.
His feet found purchase, and he lunged forward into Bruno.
There was a whiplash of light and pain as the current shooting through Bruno shot through Jason as well, and then the connection broke.
Jason rolled free, and the next moment he was up, out the door, and sprinting down the hall, phone still clutched in one fist, Bruno’s gun in the other.
He hunched and pumped his feet, charging past a dozen identical offices, dodging identical startled office drones.
One woman saw the gun and screamed, then screamed again a moment later, making Jason glance back.
Bruno was on his heels, almost casually pushing the office drones out of his way, barely breaking stride.
A text came in from Sprite: Phreak, Gh05t! Phreak!
Jason understood immediately. She wasn’t swearing; she was telling him to think like a hacker.
Following the arrowed Exit signs spaced along the corridor, he careered around a corner, deflected off the wall, shoved away with his free hand, sprinted onward.
He was nearing the side of the building.
The corridor ended ahead on a landing providing access to one of the world-famous escape chutes and the beautiful steel-and-brass stairway, which spiraled around it from the ground floor up to the garden wings.
The door to the landing was held open magnetically.
Jason could see through it, across the stairwell, and to its twin door on the other side.
A plan formed.
Bruno’s gun was still clutched in one hand, only because he wanted to keep it from Bruno. He wasn’t about to add “cop killer” to the long list of crimes he was almost certain to get caught and tried for. But now he raised the gun, thumbed the safety off, and fired a shot into the ceiling.
It didn’t feel as good as the movies had made him think it would.
The gun made a shockingly loud noise and jumped in his hand—jumped right out of his hand.
He let it fall behind him. The NNA peons in the corridor and the tourists climbing the stairwell screamed and scrambled away.
Alarms began to blare. Office doors began to close. So did the doors to the stairwell.
The Tower’s security system had detected the gunshot and cut power to the electromagnets holding the exit doors open, and also to the electrically charged strike plates that held their locks open.
The doors would close and become exit-only automatically.
But safety codes specified a minimum time for the doors to swing shut: three seconds.
Jason turned sideways and spun through the first door into the stairwell, stumbling past the entrance to the escape chute, which was just coming to life with a muffled roar.
Two seconds. A sharp crack and simultaneous crunch of impact whipped through the enclosed space.
Jason glanced back and caught a corner-eye glimpse of Bruno on his knees, gun in hand, face expressionless.
A cloudy crater had appeared at the edge of the bulletproof glass door closing between him and Jason.
One second. Jason’s head snapped forward again, and he dove through the diminishing gap of the second door, out the far side of the landing, to land painfully on his side in the hallway beyond just as the door latched shut.