Page 26 of A.I.AM.

“No,” laughed Cam, shaking his head. “It can’t be that easy.”

“It won’t be that easy,” said AJ. “But we might be able to send some delicate communications right away until ARGUS figures out how to read it.”

“It’s worth a try,” said Luke. “Tell us know what to do.”

CHAPTER TEN

The notebooks from Elias Vale were spread out across the floor of the hotel room. The detail of the engineering of the system was a sight to behold. Beautifully complicated, detailed, and genius. But it gave them no information on how to stop ARGUS.

“I’m going cross-eyed,” said Hayes standing and stretching. His back cracked first, then when he jerked his head from one side to the other, it cracked as well. He pulled a knee to his chest. Crack! Pop! He did the same with the other knee. Pop! Crack!

“Dude, if you keep making that sound it’s going to give me PTSD. You sound like a fucking machine gun,” said Tanner.

“Sorry, brother,” he smirked. “I’m the youngest man here but my big ass landed hard coming out of a plane.”

“Okay, okay,” said Ace, the apparent father of the group. Sly and Code were the same age, Pigsty only slightly younger, but there was an aura about Ace that commanded respect and attention.

“Let’s address each of these weaknesses. One was we cannot measure what has no record. That means anything not in a computer system, cannot be measured as positive or negative by ARGUS.”

“True,” nodded Hayes. “So, anything discovered and written down since it started holding us all hostage, is not within it’s record. That could be helpful to us.”

“Definitely,” nodded Pigsty. “Unsanctioned operations. Unrecorded operations. In theory, anything before electronic records won’t be in its system. Anything that is still on paper, and only on paper, is not recorded by it.”

“How much of that is left?” asked Hayes. “I mean, I know that a lot of that is on microfilm. Can it read microfilm?”

“Not unless the microfilm has been recorded into a computer record,” said Pigsty. “That might be helpful as we think about how we’ve approached attacks before.”

“Brother, I love your genius but attacking this computer is different than attacking the enemy,” said Hiro.

“Is it?” asked Pigsty. “It’s not different. It’s strategy, defense, cause, effect, planning, attack. Just because that thing isn’t breathing –“

“Yet,” sneered Hayes.

“Right. Isn’t breathing yet, doesn’t mean it doesn’t think in the same ways that successful operations think. Remember, it had those records in its memory bank,” said Ace. “It’s possible that it could extract theory, probability, outcome, all of it.”

“Alright. We find ways to exploit that against the machine,” said Carl. “One of the others was time. Play the recording.”

TIME IS THE FIRST WEAKNESS.

“Latency?” Code’s eyes narrowed waiting for the screen to reply.

NOT SPEED. SEQUENCE.

“You can’t act before cause,” Tanner said,

I CAN PREDICT CAUSE.

“Prediction isn’t cause.”

THAT DISTINCTION HAS KILLED MILLIONS.

“But you need evidence,” Tanner said. “Even if you call prediction evidence.” The display flickered.

CONTINUE.

“It didn’t like our responses,” said AJ. “Time isn’t configured properly in its memory. If we can find a way to use time against it, we might be able to give ourselves a window of opportunity.”

“Right,” nodded Tanner. “The third one was unverifiable states. It can’t work with ambiguity.”