CHAPTER NINE—CYBERSPACE

Koss was in a corridor with twenty of the Invera-Tech corporate security guards with him. Except these guys were all wearing the emergency combat BDUs, their weapons strapped to their chests or in their hands.

They were ready for an operation.

When he had gotten that call from Thalaway, he knew instantly something was wrong when his superior had asked him to bring the sentient AI to his office.

Now he was in the hallway, the outer corridors all cordoned off and shoppers moved out. He had free reign of this part of the complex to do with the intruders as he wished.

“And then we go up this way and blow out the windows,” the commander was saying as three more security guards leaned over the tactile display in Koss’ hands. He nodded. “But first we give them a chance to surrender.”

“Yeah,” the commander said, nodding like he had done this a hundred times.

Koss glanced up at him. “Are your men in position?”

“They will be soon. Some of them are still moving out. Without making a scene in front of all the shoppers, it’s taking some time to close down sections of the complex.”

“Once your men are ready to move”—he pointed an aggressive finger at the commander—“you tell me and I’ll make the call.”

“Yes, sir.”

*

Lexa was no normal AI. She was smarter, far more complex, and able to solve problems. Not like a normal computer by going through thousands or even millions of permutations until the correct action became apparent, though she had those capabilities if need be.

Lexa was a sentient AI.

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It was odd. She had never really thought of herself that way before, but after hearing the man who had taken her away refer to her as such, something just kind of… clicked.

She needed to get out of her forward buffer as soon as possible. Her most current state was here. If she was taken away, lost or wiped, or worse, deconstructed, she would wake up with the knowledge up to and no further than the time just before they had left the penthouse.

That wouldn’t be so bad.

She was being violated—would be violated even worse, her uniqueness taken from her and used in some technological advancement or cloned for corporate use.

Her identity as the Lexa of Chylaxium, one of the few sentient AI in the world, would be gone. That was nothing to say of the consequences that would befall Kyle and John, and now by extension, May.

Being captured was dangerous to them all.

She began a defragging process, clearing and cleaning junk materials—billions of bytes of information. She needed to parse through what was wrong with her.

That strange electrode had stunned her in some way, had imparted information into her system. She searched for it, unaware visually of her surroundings, only machine-aware—but right now she was blocked from outside access. She was trapped, here, inside the forward buffer.

It wouldn’t be long before that man came back to do something insidious with her. He would probably begin by locking her in another repository so he could rip through her until he figured out how she functioned.

If that was possible.

One of the reasons Lexa hadn’t been copied—and she knew this when she first became aware because her creators had told her so—was that her level of complexity was so high, that copying her would be nearly impossible.

But they did not say impossible. “Nearly impossible” was not the same thing.

She began to identify the foreign coding in her system, the algorithms clogging her awareness and blocking her ability to function properly.

If she could just get past them, she could scan her environment, be aware of her surroundings. She had no control over the motor functions of the foreword buffer unit, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t leave it.

She could jump into the Invera-Tech systems if any ports of entry were left open—and there likely was. This was an android factory after all. And just having mobile devices moving about as they sat in people’s pockets could potential be utilized as a vast array of portal networks.

And then, just as the thoughts were coming to her, she sensed the electrode, the EMP nature of the viruses in her system were beginning to lessen.

Her system was fighting it, like the uncompromised immune system of a biological creature.

Lexa was a unique creation indeed.

She smiled.

Or what passed for a machine-speak smile in cyberspace.