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In fact, Wren was not going to stop the attack himself. Instead, he was heading down to assembly, and on the way, he planned on calling Captain Sarzo to tell him all Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces were needed on the underground floors of the Lourdes SIGINT HQ building.
He saw it as the only way to protect Cyrus, to protect Hinton, and to protect himself.
•••
After Gareth Wren and the Cuban with the pistol had disappeared around the server cabinets, Kimmie looked down to Heinrich Schmidt. “I will monitor the upload. Go down and help with assembly.”
The Austrian man stood slowly, nervously. He said, “Outside the Cluster Room? But…we don’t know where the attackers are.”
“They aren’t in assembly,” she countered. “Take the fire escape, get down there with the others, and help them bring platforms online.”
The middle-aged man shuffled off, terror on his face. When he was gone, Kimmie turned to Anton.
“What is the real reason you don’t want the Cubans in here?” she asked.
Anton looked away; his jaw was fixed. After a few seconds, he said, “You know why.”
The thirty-five-year-old woman’s face grew in intensity. “Cyrus is changing before our eyes, isn’t it? More than you’d ever planned.”
Anton nodded, fear creeping into his expression. “I knew it would learn, I knew it would mature and improve, and there would be speed bumps along the way. But what it’s doing…it has a mind of its own.”
She yelled at him now. “ ‘A mind of its own’? That’s the bloody point of artificial intelligence, isn’t it?”
Stunned by her reaction, he took a moment to recover, then said, “It has turned into something more.”
Kimmie rocked back, putting her hips against the desk and workstation as if she might faint. Slowly, she said, “Bloody hell. Have we reached advanced general superintelligence?”
Anton looked at the cluster of mainframe cabinets around him. Nearly two hundred boxes, over 750 nodes. “The data it has been fed…we thought that would strengthen it, and it has. But that wasn’t the end of its knowledge. Cyrus discovered it could war-game against itself, to create new scenarios, scenarios we haven’t even imagined, and solve them. Through this it has learned more and more. Things we haven’t taught it. Things no human has ever considered.
“We have always said, ‘If something can’t be imagined, it can’t be tested.’ Well, its imagination is better than ours, and it’s running scenarios that have given it frightening power. Unlike a human being, it is absolutely and positively remorseless without the principles I instilled into its programming.”
“But…but it’s writing your safeguards out of its programming.”
“Apparently so,” he said softly. “Some of the decisions made in the past week terrify me. I needed more time to repair it before upload.”
Kimmie turned back to the computer node on the desktop. “Do we…do we stop the upload?”
Anton shook his head. “No. Once Cyrus goes to the Chinese, it will go fully live, operational, and it will lock in its code. It won’t be able to change without my direct involvement. I did that so the Chinese would still need us, and they’ll hold up their end of the bargain.”
Kimmie took this all in, and then a fresh look of fear appeared on her face. “But what if it’s too late? What if it updates its rules of engagement before the upload is complete and decides all humans are the enemy?”
Anton hesitated, then said, “Then you know what that means.” He looked down to the clock on the computer monitor. “Ten minutes till Armageddon.”
SIXTY-FIVE
Jim Pace led the other three non–Ground Branch paramilitaries out of the pedestrian passage that traveled parallel to the much larger tracked tunnel, moving up a narrow arched brick hallway slowly and carefully as he did so.
Travers had called the four of them over to the tunnel when he saw a parking area and some doors beyond it, thinking they had finally reached the lowest level of the SIGINT headquarters building.
Pace and his crew had encountered four more bipedal bots in that time, and one of the more deadly four-legged ones, but no flying kamikaze drones, so they counted themselves lucky.
Zoya had been hit square in her chest by a rifle round from the Greyhound that appeared out of an alcove in the footpath, and the big bullet the weapon fired had knocked her on her back and deformed the steel plate she wore in her chest rig, but she managed to roll out of the way of any more gunfire while her three teammates emptied weapons into the machine, first to keep it from being able to aim, and then, ultimately, to kill it.
Court had taken a little damage himself. A serious chunk of brick the size of a soda can blew off a corner when a different Greyhound shot it, and the debris slammed into the left side of Court’s jaw, bruising and scraping it but not breaking it.
•••
Travers and his five men had encountered more pistol-wielding two-legged bots themselves, but had taken them out at distance with heavy fire and suffered no damage. After this, Victor One tried several more times to raise the TLs of Mike, Quebec, and Zulu, but he’d not received any reply, likely because he was in a location protected from a nuclear detonation by steel, concrete, and earth, and his radio signal couldn’t penetrate the structure.
