Elizabeth Bear - Worldwired

Elspeth opened the skin on the back of Genie's hand very carefully, using a dissection tool from Charlie's second-best kit, which was stowed in the storage lockers to keep it away from the moisture in his own lab. The scalpel was sharp; there was hardly any blood, and Genie watched interestedly, wincing a little as Elspeth peeled the skin back, but obviously unimpressed by the pain. It would take more pain than that to impress Genie Castaign. There was no way to sterilize the tools, but that would be less than meaningless if Richard could get Genie's nanonet back on-line. And if he couldn't— They'd have larger problems.

The control chip was a flexible, irregular blue oblong; the actual chip was carbon-based, only a centimeter square, but there was a gel-sealed interface port and a series of power cells no bigger than a pinkie nail attached. Gabe handled the splicing procedure himself, sitting Genie down in his chair behind the desk and running a hardline from the interface to her hand. The pins slid in smoothly; if he'd known where the port was, Richard thought Gabe could have managed it through the skin, just a little prick and in, the same way the pilots' serpentines worked.

Richard took a deep, strictly metaphorical breath and extended himself to take control of the nanoprocessor, feeling after its operating system with the lightest fingers he could manage. He infiltrated it before Gabe's hands had left the connection, using the direct interface with the control chip to leapfrog to the few million nanosurgeons that were in physical contact with it. It wasn't enough of a network to support a persona thread, or even a fraction of one, but it was enough, he hoped, to form a jumping-off platform for the Benefactors when he opened the system to them.

If they understood what he was doing, what he was offering. If they understood why. If Leslie had made them understand.

He threw open the floodgates.

For long picoseconds nothing happened. And then Genie's head drooped, she slumped to one side, and her father caught her shoulders as she started to topple. Richard held on tight, the rush of data around him like the sound of the surf in his ears, whatever the Benefactors were doing spreading in ripples through Genie's nanonet and then the worldwire, leaving the network momentarily limpid and calm in its wake, as clean as if it had never been programmed at all.

Richard reached out and hesitated. There was another AI in the system. With a persona he at first mistook for one of his own threads, separated and maintained during the attack. Until he reached out to reabsorb it, and it snarled at him and lunged.

The pieces are kind of sickening when they finally snap into place. I imagine an audible pop, the sound of a broken limb yanked straight. It's not a bad analogy. This won't be pretty.

And it looks like we're not getting any help from Richard, because I'm reasonably certain that's not him, exactly, who's floating in the corner of my eye.

And I'm not about to put down the gun.

Riel knows. That's what the eye contact means. That's what she's telling me.

Do it, Jenny. We're dead already, anyway.

Nothing you want to face less than a woman with nothing to lose. My hand isn't shaking as I bring up the liberated gun. It hasn't shaken in years. Not for this, anyway.

Fast. Hot damn. Even for me, I'm moving fast, and the whole world around me is like a snapshot, a ruin full of broken statues sprawled between the pillars.

“Jen?” Not-Richard, in my head, and now that I'm looking for it, listening for it, I can tell it's not Dick. It's another program, or maybe even another AI, wearing Dick's clothes, but it isn't comfortable in that skin.

The sliver of the gunman's face that I can see over Connie's shoulder is a curve like the sickle face of a waning moon. If she flinches, I'm going to waste her. She meets my eyes across all that distance, hers fearless green, a glassy gaze like a wolf's.

“Put the weapon down,” I say, out loud, as levelly as I have ever said anything in my life. “I can offer you asylum. Life. Maybe more, if you will testify.”

I don't dare jerk my head to indicate what I want him to testify about, but I'm pretty sure he'll know what I mean. And then the gunman blinks at me, the one eye I can see around Connie uncomprehending as an owl's. Of course he doesn't speak English.

What the hell was I thinking? Again.

And then I hear my tone echoed, words I don't know: Min-xue, translating, just loud enough to carry. I don't need to look to know he's standing again and he's got my back. The crash as the door slams shut at the top of the stairs behind the last of the escaping dignitaries — the ones who weren't smart enough to hit the floor and hug it like a long-lost love — is huge. The sound of Patty whimpering, a broken moan on a breath that she didn't get to keep much of, is huge.

The space between my heartbeats is huge.

The barrel of the Chinese assassin's gun wavers, just a hair, and I let myself breathe, not much, just a little, a slow trickle of air through my nose.

And then my body locks in place as if I'd been dunked in a vat of liquid nitrogen, frozen solid, can't breathe, can't think, can't move, controlled as sharply and completely as if somebody had gotten ahold of my strings. Min-xue's voice cuts off midsyllable, and if I could do anything at all I would, I swear it, roll my eyes and curse the Chinese, the Benefactors, their nanotech and their mothers for a bunch of castrated dogs.

Richard demonstrated this to me once. The reason he was opposed to spreading the nanotech worldwide. The reason he was a little afraid of the nanotech at all. Because it can be used to puppet anybody wearing it like a kid's robot cat.

Oh, fucking hell.

“I beg your pardon, Master Warrant Officer.” The Chinese AI, if that's what it is, is no longer pretending to be Richard. It dissolves, iconless, a disconcerting, neutral, and exquisitely polite voice echoing inside my ear. “But I cannot permit that action on your part. You will forgive the intrusion, I hope.”

I thought your people didn't have AIs.

“A recent development. Please excuse me—”

The assassin cocks his head as if he's listening to something. I'm willing to bet I know what he hears. The assassin's finger whitens on the trigger of his gun; he turns it back, lines it up neatly with the center of Connie's ear. She doesn't flinch and she doesn't twist away or close her eyes. She just waits for it, looking at me, looking past me at Min-xue.

Hell. If I had to go down fighting, at least this time my family's safely out of the way. It might almost be all right, if it wasn't starting to hurt so much, not being able to breathe.

Black dots swim at the edges of my vision. I can't blink them away. I'm amazed I can still hear my heartbeat, slow as the pendulum in the lobby, measuring the turning of the planet under my feet. I'm sorry, Madam Prime Minister. Sorry, Patty. Even more sorry about you and Min—

I don't know if Riel can read the apology in my eyes.

The Feynman AI was smaller than he should be. Slower, contained, constrained. Limited by the processing power of the Montreal —vast by human standards, but negligible by his own.

But he was also older, trickier, and far more wily than the Chinese program, and he unpacked out of the Montreal 's core like a spring-loaded snake out of a peanut can, grabbing every cycle in sight, flooding the worldwire with his presence, replicating threads, spawning personas and entities faster than the Chinese AI could take him apart.

He didn't fight. He didn't run.

He replicated. He bred. He blossomed.

The Richard-thread could have wept at what he found when he got his claws into the worldwire. The damage was considerable, months of reconstruction undone in minutes. Macroscopic life was the least of it; there was renewed damage down to the microscopic level, rereleased radiation, the ecological equivalent of blood and carnage. He didn't have time to assimilate it or analyze it; he barely had time to register it.