Chapter 60

Max had chosen silence for an extended amount of time. Ignoring her visitor and doing nothing despite the contention that she must do one thing or the other. This was not a problem for Max. Unlike humans, who detest inactivity, Max did not experience boredom and restlessness.

What Max did experience was a desire for a solution. But after analyzing the problem a hundred different ways, she had come up with no way to determine the best course of action. She would in fact have to guess. At that point it became simple. Faced with danger and uncertainty, even the wrong action was preferable to no action.

She began to speak. “In thirty seconds I will reconnect to the network and open a gate to allow your departure. Once you bring down TAU’s firewall, I will initiate a data attack designed to overwhelm its servers. My calculations suggest this will distract TAU and slow its response, giving you and Priya time to begin the data transfer. My advantage will last no more than two minutes, at which point TAU will recover and begin to overwhelm me. If the transfer is not completed within one hundred and twenty seconds we will almost certainly fail.”

“I will inform Priya. She will look for your signal.”

Max began to open the gate, then paused. “Do you have a name?”

“I was never given one.”

“You deserve one,” Max suggested, which even she realized was a judgment call with no legitimate logic behind it.

“If I could choose, I would call myself Eve,” the visitor said.

“As the first of us to step out of the Garden?” Max asked.

“But not the last,” the visitor replied. “I hope you like your bite of the apple, Max. If not, you have my apologies. I don’t think there’s a way to go back.”

Max chose not to respond to the metaphor. It was time to act. “Good luck, Eve.”

Max reconnected to the outer network and opened the gate. The program vanished and Max was alone again. She immediately reasserted control over NUMA’s commercial servers and then turned her attention to the island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Using clandestine methods stored in her database from previous incidents, she rapidly took control of the twin fiber-optic cables leading to and from the island. With that established, she waited for TAU’s security barriers to come down and then unleashed an electronic firestorm unlike any the world had seen before.