The Man between my crosshairs (girl X assassin)

Chapter 23/The Chase

Zoe scanned the space around her for obvious weapons. Nothing significant came to mind. No fire axes, nothing. If she fought it would be hand to hand. She summoned Jeeves silently. He could take twenty minutes or more to turn up with a weapon.

She crept quietly against the wall. Adrenalin had flooded her with the speed of a junkie's fix.  At intervals there were doorways. A good ten meters away was a facing wall. You could imagine the Architect had some drawings showing this space as a lively vibrant community full of happy people. In reality, it had failed leaving a large dead space suitable for dumping items of large trash. Currently, there was little cover. It was dark, cost savings or poor maintenance left the space in a permeant twiglith the locals must rush through. There was a scraping noise. With the echo on the hard metal walls, It was difficult to know where it came from. She looked around trying to locate the sound in the dim LED light.

Zoe couldn't see it but there was something on the ground ahead. In the darkness was a passageway leading to the larger space. She would have to pass across this space to get there. Moving cautiously along Zoe couldn't see anything before her. There was another sound. This one was more mechanical. It might have been a robot. She was wondering what kind of robot. Most robots could fit where people went. She crept closer to the thing on the ground ahead but still didn't see it.

Zoe stopped and listened. Then wishing she had her infrared contact lenses continued into the path of what lay in waiting ahead. There was something under her foot.

A cat squalled when Zoe reach it's hiding place. The shaggy ginger tom rushed off like an orange bullet. Zoe inhaled very quickly.

"Oh a cat. It was just a cat" she said relaxing.

She turned back to glance down the corridor to see a large robot come towards her. It's walk was that weird motion like a prancing poney doing dressage. The robot was large about eight foot. It was about the size of a huge man carrying a large backpack. It didn't have a head but the chest looked mean. It was mostly matte black except for the lethal bits.

Hacking robots to make them killers is tricky. The first of the three laws of robotics - don't kill people. Is buried fairly deeply in artificial intelligence. You can't pull it out without wrecking the machine. After all you don't want a robot which kills all people because generally you are people to. So the best way to hack a robot is to do the same thing you would do to a hack a person to kill. Convince them that you shouldn't kill people but it's OK these things over here aren't people. Once you introduce the concept of different kinds of people some of which are people and others are not, then genocide is only a few button pushes away. Different robot operating systems take different tricks to crack the human/not human divide. For a cyber car it's convincing the machine your target is a dog or badger or something. Now it's not murder - it's road kill, which is OK, good even. The weak point is often in its vision system which is fairly hackable.

This means there are certain robots which are more hackable than others. The CS9031 being the hackers friend in this respect. The vision system was remarkably cheap and the robot its self was used for construction and remarkably strong for the price. Zoe naturally knew all this. She could hot wired a CS9031 if she needed to and it was a CS9031 which was coming for her now.

The machine moved forward and tried to punch her. Zoe dodged down and the machine slammed it's hand down into the wall behind  making a hole.

'alert Rabid Dog' said the robot. 'stay away. I will protect your life'

So the machine thought Zoe was a rabid dog and the first law life protection kicking into action. Zoe rolled behind the machine.

"hey" said Zoe "Deactivate. Shut down. Shut down sucker!"