The Turing Exception Read Online Free PDF Page A

false skin had worn away. The delicate unit rose up, a skeleton of spidery servos and struts, a bundle in one arms. There was a scramble behind it, and a boy, maybe ten, appeared, gripping white-knuckled onto the android’s frame. The bundle gave a cry, and Cat realized the android carried a human baby.
    “Where’s their family?” Cat asked. She put the gun away and walked closer, wanting to comfort this boy.
    “I’m their family now,” the bot said. They stepped backwards, keeping their distance. The boy seemed torn between wanting to run away and being afraid to let go of the android.
    “I won’t hurt you,” Cat said.
    “It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?” the android asked. “You destroyed the world’s computers, burned the net, killed every robot that wasn’t disconnected at that moment. And the humans depended on automated supply chains. No food, no electricity, no water. How did you think they’d live?”
    The boy huddled closer to the android.
    “You killed ten billion sentient beings, Catherine Matthews. Less than five percent of humankind remain.”
    Cat woke with a start, her eyes blinking open in the darkness, her implant telling her she’d slept a little more than four hours. Hot and sweaty, she kicked off the covers and sat up.
    The same dream. But she hadn’t killed the world. In Miami, she could have changed things, but she didn’t.
    She cradled her head in her arms. She’d had the vision back then, back in ’43, right when the whole mess started. The vision that had made her afraid to take action because she might trigger a global apocalypse. She stood by instead, let half the world’s AI get shut down, and the other half get hobbled by insane restrictions. Was this better? Or was the future still inevitable?
    She swung her feet over the edge of the bed. She needed to get back on the road. Couldn’t sleep again after that dream, not when she still had lives to save.
    *     *     *
    At the border, Cat’s car slowed to a crawl. The arcing aurora set up by the American government to stop airborne incursions extended miles into the atmosphere, casting a palpable tension over the border crossing.
    Hundreds of human agents manned the crossing into Canada. It was still odd to not see a single robot among them, like cutting school when she was a kid and finding herself the only child in a store. She settled back in the car, tired, sore, and dirty from the long days on the road. She kept her mind a blank. No need to antagonize the border-crossing computers. They might not be sentient anymore, but it wasn’t worth the risk.
    “I’ll take it from here,” she said to no one, and put her hands on the wheel to pull up to the inspector. It made no sense, the US Border Patrol caring more about what left the country than the Canadians caring what entered, but then most things the US did these days didn’t make sense.
    The inspector wore full combat gear: a tactical vest, helmet, and machine gun cradled in her arms. “Anything to declare . . .” The inspector paused, waiting for her ID to display on the helmet HUD. “Mrs. Johnson.”
    “Nothing,” Cat said, letting her implant trickle out nothing more than the false identity.
    “Please wait while we scan your vehicle.”
    The inspector stepped back as a solid loop of metal rotated up from the ground, passed entirely around the car, then disappeared back into the ground. The active probe was a hundred times more sensitive than the passive AI scanners found everywhere.
    “Thank you, Mrs. Johnson. You’re clear to cross to Canadian Border Patrol.”
    Cat drove smoothly away to the second checkpoint half a mile away. The Canadian officer was dressed in a civilian uniform. He scanned Cat’s identity again, as he joked with a coworker. “Welcome back to Canada, Mrs. Johnson.”
    With that, she was back in a civilized country.
    She’d grown up in the US, lived in Portland for most of her life. The States had been normal