The Last Firewall Read Online Free PDF Page A

according to the results. Funny, she’d never known that.
    At first, neural implants had only been allowed in adults in the States. But within a year of their invention, as the benefits became evident, parents who could afford it rushed overseas to have the procedure done on their kids. Thus augmented, the privileged few massively outperformed their peers in school. Legislatures hastened to change the laws after public outcry. Now most implantations were done at fourteen, the legal minimum.
    But Catherine had suffered from seizures as a baby. Within a year, they were frequent and severe, endangering her life. No treatments seemed to help.
    After a doctor contacted her parents about an experimental procedure, the family immediately boarded a plane for Portland, Oregon. Though no one had even heard of neural implants back then, just a few days later Cat received a full-brain wraparound, the first and perhaps only of its kind. Its primary purpose was to detect and dampen seizure activity. But by the time she was four, Catherine had learned to use the implant’s wireless to get online.
    She’d had an imaginary friend then, ELOPe, who claimed he’d given her the implant. Then when she was eight there was the AI war, followed by YONI, the Year of No Internet. When the net finally came back, the first thing Cat did was look for ELOPe, but he was gone.
    Cat believed she was the only person to receive an implant at such a young age, but as nearly all pre-YONI records were gone, there was no way to know for sure.
    Deep in these thoughts, Catherine arrived at her favorite part of the park, a meadow surrounded by old Douglas fir. A scream and thud jolted her out of her reverie.
    A group stood in the shadows at the opposite edge of the meadow. The high pitched screech made her think of a child, but the sound was too warbly. Laughter drifted across the field, a man’s laughter. Cat looked around, suddenly scared. Aside from her and the group, the park was empty. Another screech pierced her, setting all her nerves jangling, then it cut off sharply. In the silence, the quickening pulse of her blood sounded loud in her ears. She hesitated less than a second, then took off at a run for the group. As she got closer, she spotted the same small bot she’d met two days earlier, surrounded by four men. Two held the struggling robot, while one pressed a long knife under its remaining optical sensor. The little bot pulled, the whine of its servos audible, but the men were stronger. One slender arm twisted at a wrong angle. Off to the side, the green wagon lay overturned, a jumble of electronics spilling out.
    “Damn job-stealing robots.”
    “Cut his eye out, the little fucker.”
    The robot tried again to pull away with its one good arm.
    Cat felt her blood boil and all of her outrage surface. At Sarah, at her mom’s death, at this hopeless world with no jobs. There were people who made the best of things, good people like Maggie and her mother, and even herself. And then there were the other people. People who lived to torture and destroy. Well, not tonight.
    She reached for the net to call the police, but it was jammed. She peered through netspace: the local nodes were tinged grey, overloaded somehow. The men must be using an illegal jammer.
    The bot let out another shriek as the fourth man rotated its bent arm. The metal gave way and the arm dangled useless.
    Cat knew she could take these men. Though she’d never fought outside the dojo, this is what she had prepared for. She ran silently across the grass, her footsteps light. She came up behind the fourth man, who was egging the others on, a tall guy with a red sweatshirt. She grabbed his arm and twisted sideways, a move from Nihaichi Sandan , then followed with a leg movement to throw him off balance. She turned and pushed and Red Sweatshirt was down, thudding against the grass, his head bouncing off the ground.
    The second assailant turned to Cat. She had time to see he was in his