Page 32 of A.I.AM.

“We won’t let it,” said Claudette. “Even if it’s only one night a week, we’ll plan things like this. In the summer, we’ll plan campouts for the kids on the outer islands. Pops rebuilt most of those clubhouses that the boys built when they were little. We’ll introduce a whole new generation to them.”

“I love that idea,” smiled Marie. “Hey, tomorrow let’s all go with Grant and his team out to the old Well. He’s rebuilding it and has the main structure done. Let’s lend a hand with the decorating. If we stay focused, it will be open by the end of the week and we’ll be able to celebrate. Hopefully more than the grand re-opening.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Pigsty woke to noise in the living area of their suite in Texas. He opened the door and stared at Carl and Bron.

“What are you doing?” he asked rubbing his eyes.

“We need to whiteboard this shit out. We can’t use the computers or tablets, so let’s really dig into these weaknesses.”

“Coffee first,” nodded Pigsty. “Then we dig.”

The suite had been designed to make confinement look expensive. Pale oak walls, a sunken conversation pit, a kitchen no one used, and windows that displayed a live prairie feed even though the real glass had been plated over from outside. Code had tested the feed three times. It was live, but that did not mean it was true.

Bron erased the whiteboard with the side of his hand. The ink left a gray blotch over his skin.

“Start clean,” he said. “Not with what it told us. With what it cannot avoid.”

Carl sat at the end of the table, still carrying exhaustion in the tension around his eyes.

“It cannot avoid sequence.” He repeated the sentence exactly as it had been written on his notepad.

Code uncapped a marker and wrote one word in the center of the board: TIME.

“Sequence is not the same as duration,” he said. “ARGUS can run faster than we can, but speed doesn’t remove order. It sees, classifies, assigns confidence, predicts consequence, chooses intervention, verifies effect. Those steps may occur in microseconds, but they are still steps.”

“So, we get between them,” Ace said.

“With what?” AJ asked. “A faster machine?”

“No machines,” Hayes said. He had taken the chair nearest the suite door and angled it so he could see both hall and room. “The moment we build something faster, we build something visible and ARGUS can take it over.”

Pigsty pointed at the word on the board.

“Then time is useless. If it gets a million decisions while we get one, the gap belongs to it.” Tanner shook his head.

“Only if the decision remains the same while it’s deciding.” Code turned.

“Say more.”

“ARGUS acts on a measured state. The state becomes old the instant it’s measured. Usually that doesn’t matter because behavior continues. A person walking toward a door is probably still walking toward it a fraction later. Its momentum. A bank transfer initiated is probably still intended when the bank receives it. We’re talking less than micro-seconds. ARGUS survives on continuity between observation and action.” Hiro leaned forward, elbows on his knees.

“Then time is not delay. Time is a state change.” Bron drew a line beneath TIME.

“How much change?”

“Enough that its action addresses a world that no longer exists,” Tanner said.

Carl looked toward the false windows. Night grass bent beneath a wind they could not hear.

“That sounds like every ambush and it’s giving me a headache. You guys forget, I’m just an old Ranger. I’m not a genius.”

“It is every ambush,” Bron said. “Your enemy commits to the picture you gave him. Then you replace the picture. And don’t discount what you know, Carl. That’s why they brought you and me. We might see the obvious that isn’t so obvious to all of them.”

Ace rubbed his closed fist, remembering the garage door hovering above the bicycle.

“It sees through pictures. It records every item in a picture and tries to find a response for it. It’s not just gathering data from recorded things, it’s looking at pictures and recording data it assumes is correct from the picture.”