Missiles continued to rain down from the sky without exploding. As the car lurched back and forth to avoid them, Lacia pushed the top half of her body out of the car window, hefting the spear-launcher. She pulled the trigger, and Arato heard a light whistling noise split the air.
“Lacia, don’t kill anyone!” he shouted. “Just get them to let us go.”
“Understood. I will switch tactics to force them to land,” she acknowledged. Just as she’d said so, Arato watched one of the helicopters descend vertically and come to a rest on top of a nearby building, its rotors spinning to a stop.
“In order to take control of machines that do not receive external signals, I am using harpoons containing artificial nerve units to access the system directly,” Lacia explained. “With these, I believe that even if the enemy deploys fully autonomous weapons as a countermeasure to my hacking, they will not represent a significant threat.”
Lacia’s hair danced in the headwind. Despite them being completely surrounded by a military unit, she already seemed to be more concerned with what might happen later down the road.
A sudden jerk from the car swung Arato’s body around with fierce centrifugal force, and he saw a tank through the windshield. The automatic car didn’t even slow down as it approached the armed vehicle and passed it by at high speed. It had apparently been no trouble at all for Lacia to shut the tank down.
“Arato, we should split up here,” Lacia said. “We will soon be approaching the area where the army soldiers are deployed.”
“Split up?” Arato asked. “How are we supposed to do that when we’re in a moving vehicle?”
“I need you to get out of the car,” Lacia said. “Please, just trust me.”
The car door opened on its own, and Arato did trust Lacia. It wouldn’t make sense for her to have argued so fiercely with Astraea on his behalf, only to immediately turn around and betray him. With those thoughts in his mind, Arato was able to fight down his fear and brace himself to jump from the speeding car. Telling himself that Lacia would never betray him, he let out a yell that sounded like a barely-contained scream, and threw himself from the car.
The car’s chassis wasn’t very high off the ground, so jumping off was more like simply rolling out onto the road. Just as Arato expected to feel the deadly grind of his body sliding at high speed across the asphalt, he felt something soft catch him, instead. After an instant of feeling himself sinking into something very comfortable, Arato heard the sound of metal sliding on asphalt, and his body started to float.
Arato held his body low, holding on desperately so as not to be thrown from whatever had caught him. Whatever it was, it slowed down with each moment that passed as the speeding car carrying Lacia left him far behind. Looking down, Arato saw that the thing carrying him was a large metal object, floating about fifty centimeters off the ground.
“Wait,” Arato asked himself, “is this Lacia’s device?” It certainly looked like Lacia’s black coffin, only about half as thick, and it was missing the seams from the shape-shifting mechanism. It was like riding a metallic flying carpet, and the device continued to decelerate until it came to a complete stop, floating stationary in the air with Arato still atop it.
Raising his eyes, Arato saw that five other metal plates were floating around him. It was immediately obvious to him who had sent the strange metal shapes, which were black enough to cut visibly through the darkness of the night.
〈I attempted to create some devices to aid in protecting you, Arato, though I’m afraid they’re nothing more than by-products from when I developed a dummy version of Black Monolith,〉 Lacia’s voice explained, projected from one of the simple devices. 〈They should be more effective at protecting you than my actual body.〉
The sound of distant gunshots was swallowed into the night sky. Far ahead on the street, Lacia’s car was under fire from the platoon of soldiers that had been deployed behind the tank. In moments, the car was riddled with bullet holes and burst into flames.
Without thinking about it, Arato stepped down off the floating plate and stood on his own feet. He figured that, if Lacia had thought far enough ahead to prepare the plates for him, she probably had the whole situation planned out down to the last detail. Still, he couldn’t help but stare in shock as the burning car left a flaming trail through the night.
He couldn’t fight down the feeling that something was very wrong. Lacia had told Astraea that she would prove that ultra high-performance AIs could be forced to shut down, even without orders from their owners. Based on that logic, it didn’t have to be Higgins that was shut down; Lacia herself could be shut down, and still prove her point.
〈I will provide guidance for your escape. I will be directing large-scale equipment over to you, so please break through the cordon at this point,〉 Lacia’s voice came from the speakers on one of the plates again, and a display on the back of the plate showed a map of the area.
Lacia was alright.
The six floating armored plates formed a hexagonal barrier around Arato, about a meter in length on each side, and without a single gap between them. In the seams between the plates, Arato could see faintly glowing metamaterial. The floating shields completely obscured Arato’s natural vision. Instead, the screen on each showed him the surroundings outside the barricade.
“She wants me to bust through a military blockade with this?” Arato wondered aloud. But then he steeled himself. “No, I’ve got to trust her.”
He walked forward, following the path indicated on the digital map. His floating wall of devices rotated around him, providing protection from every side. Arato could hear rattling sounds from outside of the barrier, like small rocks hitting an aluminum can. The sound steadily increased in intensity, like light rain building into an evening downpour. It was the sound of gunfire hitting his shields.
〈The plates currently have the defensive capabilities of an armored recon drone, something achievable with current human technology,〉 Lacia said. 〈But they should be more than sufficient in this case, considering the equipment of the squads that will be attacking you.〉