by Scott Meyer
The sound grew louder as two figures slowly emerged from the entrance. Both wore baggy sweatpants and mismatched hoodies with sales tags and sizing stickers still attached. One hoodie bore a picture of Spider-Man. The other was pink and had “I’m the Mommy, That’s Why” written across the front. They might have passed for human if not for the deafening noise, their strange articulated-sausage hands, their exposed steel footpads, and the fact that instead of heads they each had a small roll cage protecting a spinning cylindrical sensor array.
The robots were pulling big red wagons they’d taken from the toy department. The wagons were filled with an alarming stash: shotguns, rifles, ammunition they’d taken from the sporting goods department, a large shovel, and several large coils of extension cords.
The policeman with the bullhorn shouted, “Freeze!”
The robots stepped out onto the sidewalk and stopped moving, save for the spinning sensors.
The officer with the bullhorn shouted, “On the ground, now!”
The robots did not move.
The police did not move either.
“I said, on the ground, now!”
The robots still did not move.
Six of the cops stepped through the narrow gaps between the cars, keeping their weapons trained on the robots at all times. They advanced, all shouting variations of “get on the ground.”
At the same instant both robots let go of the handles of their wagons, which fell to the ground. The light plastic made a soft click when it hit the pavement. The cops stopped their advancing and their yelling, and for a moment nobody said or did anything. Then the robots grasped the waistbands of their stolen sweatpants with their wriggling sausage fingers, bent forward at the waist, and pushed the pants down around their ankles.
The cops looked at each other, hoping at least one of them might know what to do.
The robots bent at the knees, tipped backward, and rolled into seated positions, leaving the oversized sweatpants bunched around their ankles.
One of the cops said, “Okay, now lie down on your fronts.”
The robots stretched their legs out straight in front of them.
“Roll over. On your fronts. I won’t ask again.”
Another officer said, “I dunno. They move pretty slow. Maybe they are trying to roll over.”
The robots pulled their arms back so that they hung beside their torsos. They each reached for the handles they had dropped to the ground only moments before.
“Let go of the wagons,” one of the cops said.
The robots’ knees hyperextended. The cops cringed involuntarily as they watched the robots’ calves and ankles flex in the wrong direction until they stuck straight up in the air. Then the cops flinched and leapt out of the way as the robot in the Spider-Man hoodie darted between them, riding on the tank treads built into its thighs.
It streaked out of the barricade through the gap the police had left for bystanders to exit. The second robot followed the first. They both dragged their overloaded wagons behind them. A couple of cops fired on the robots, but by the time most of the officers had a real grasp of what was happening, the robots had zoomed past the barricade and were moving at high speed through an area where civilians and other officers were in the line of fire.
The robots rolled across the parking lot. The lead robot went straight to the bright red, chrome-encrusted pickup they’d stolen from the truck stop, which was inexpertly parked in a perfectly normal parking space toward the back of the lot. The police hadn’t made any effort to disable it because nobody had seen the robots get out of it, and there was nothing about this pickup to make it stand out in any way from the vehicles of the other Walmart shoppers.
The robots stood back up, a surprisingly complicated and time-consuming process that gave the police time to catch up on foot. When they got close, the robots were bent over at their waists, their sausage fingers fumbling with the crumpled sweatpants pooled around their ankles, and one cop shouted, “They’re mooning us!”
While the police ordered them to freeze and drop to the ground, the robots dumped the contents of the wagons into the bed of the truck, then threw the empty wagons into the bed as well. The police continued shouting, but they were barely audible over the whining of the robots’ joints.
When the robots got into the truck’s cab, the police opened fire. Every window and mirror shattered. Bullets ricocheted and sparks flew off the dashboard, the roof pillars, and the robots. The robot in the driver’s seat put the truck in gear and slowly pulled out of the spot while the hail of bullets continued. The truck proceeded away from the police, toward the road.
The gunfire did not let up. Both of the rear tires deflated. The truck pulled up to the parking lot’s outlet to the street and signaled a right turn. The police stopped firing, as they would have been discharging their weapons into a busy street. The truck turned right and merged with traffic.
The police sprinted back to their cruisers, none of which would start.
21.
Hope leaned forward in the front row of seats, straining to hear the conversation in the cockpit. In a modern plane, this would have been impossible, but in this plane the front seats were just a few feet behind the pilot and copilot’s seats, separated only by an upholstered plywood bulkhead and a curtain, which Private Montague had pushed aside so he could join the pilot.
The pilot said, “Yeah, there aren’t many of these old DC-3s left in flying shape.”
Montague looked down at the antique controls with obvious awe. “I bet there aren’t!”
“My people found her for me. She was being used to haul tourists in Alaska. Great flying shape, but she smelled like dead fish and unwashed fishermen. Killing the odor was the hardest part of the restoration.”
“That’s what I wanted to ask about,” Montague said. “If I had a plane like this, I’d deck it out with shag carpet and mirrors. It’d look all old-school on the outside, then you’d open the door and find yourself in a champagne room.”
The pilot laughed. “To each his own, I guess. I wanted to take it back to how it originally looked when it was hauling passengers for TWA. Matching the original fabrics was a pain in the ass. The carpet cost me more than a full engine overhaul. Worth it, though. You really get a feeling for what it was like to fly back in the 1930s.”
“Well, you’ve done a beautiful job of it. How long have you been in the airline industry?”
“I’m not. I own a string of sandwich shops.”
“Oh,” Montague said. “I’d thought that Mr. Torres had chartered the plane.”
“What? No. We golf together. I’m doing this for gas money and kicks!”
“How long have you been flying?”
“Three years.”
Hope got up. She’d heard enough, perhaps too much.
She walked toward the rear of the plane. The antique cabin was more than tall enough for her to stand upright, but stooping and keeping her knees bent lowered her center of gravity. It made it easier to walk as the ancient aircraft bumped and twisted its way through the air currents.
The plane’s narrow fuselage could only accommodate three seats per row, with an off-center aisle. Eric sat alone in the third row back. He was positioned diagonally in his seat with his injured left leg stretched out into the aisle. Hope sat in the single seat across from him. She started to ask him how he was doing, but then she got a good look at him and instead asked, “Not doing too well, huh?”
“I don’t get it,” Eric moaned. “I’ve never been airsick before.” His eyes grew wide, as if the extra exertion of saying a few words had worsened his condition. He lunged forward, fumbling at the pocket sewn into the back of the seat in front of him. He pulled out a period-correct TWA airsickness bag. He fumbled with the bag, trying to open it for use, but the brittle old paper broke along the seams, falling to pieces in his hands.
Eric squeezed his eyes shut with concentration. He remained silent and still for several seconds. Hope, who’d instinct
ively cringed away from him and pulled her legs up onto the seat, peered at him from underneath her arm, which she was using to protect her face.
“Relax,” Eric said. “I’m good. I’m good.”
Hope relaxed her arms but kept her legs pulled up and away from Eric. She stretched her neck to look over the back of her seat and said, “Corporal Bachelor? I think Eric needs a barf bag. One that’s not from the 1930s.”
Bachelor stood up. “I’ll see what we have.” She moved aft to look through the squad’s supplies.
“Don’t feel bad, Eric,” Hope said. “Your system’s probably all out of whack because you’re injured and jacked up on pain meds. Or it could be because you’ve never flown in an airplane this small before. I’ve sat in lawn chairs that looked sturdier than these seats. It’s all pretty rinky-dink.”
Private Cousins spoke up from his seat in the row behind Eric. “Totally. No dink rinkier. Or it could be that you just can’t hack it.”
Corporal Brady looked down at Cousins from the next seat over. “How we confront the powerful is less telling of our character than how we comfort the pitiful.”
“That’s very wise,” Hope said.
“I’m not pitiful,” Eric said. They were all wise enough not to respond.
Bachelor returned. “Here, you can barf in this.”
Eric said, “Oh, thank you,” and took what Bachelor had handed him without looking at it. The wadded-up bag crinkled in his hand. He straightened it out.
“An empty Doritos bag?”
“It’s what we have,” Bachelor said. “I had to dig through the trash to find that.”
Eric opened the top of the bag, then closed his eyes and held the bag away from his face. “The smell! The Doritos smell. It doesn’t help.”
Bachelor shrugged. “It’ll smell worse when you’re done with it.”
Hope thought that Bachelor was probably right but chose not to stick around and find out. She got up and moved farther back.
She passed Jeffrey Madsen, a person she had heard about a great deal but had met only when he and his mother arrived at the airstrip after their long ride in the back of a mail truck.
Jeffrey sat quietly in one of the single seats, playing with his tablet. Across the aisle, Smith, one of the soldiers who had retrieved him and his mother, tried—unsuccessfully—to engage him in conversation.
“What’cha doing there, kid?”
“Reading.”
“What’cha reading?”
“My tablet.”
Hope kept moving, lest she get drawn into the scintillating conversation. The next row back was occupied by only one person, Private Yow, the other unlucky soldier who had chauffeured Dr. Madsen in the mail truck. She smiled as she sat down next to him. He gave her a worried look in return, then tilted his head back, silently indicating that she should listen to the people talking behind them.
The last two rows were taken by Robert Torres, Lieutenant Reyes, Dr. Madsen, and a laptop, which they were still using to video conference with Colonel Dynkowski at HQ and Agent Taft at his undisclosed location.
Hope heard Torres say, “Why weren’t the combat robots tied to a secure network?”
“They’re prototypes,” Agent Taft said, sounding much more exhausted than he had just a few hours ago. “Not nearly ready for combat, from what I’m told.”
“And you don’t have any idea where they’ve gone?” Madsen asked.
Dynkowski said, “We know exactly where two of them are. We’re tracking them by following the chatter on the Vegas police’s radios. They broke into Walmart and left with a troubling amount of weapons. The other eight have dropped off the face of the earth. They were last seen heading north out of Vegas, but knowing that they’re headed ‘somewhere north of Vegas’ doesn’t narrow things down much.”
“Surely with all the spy satellites and drones you have, you can find them.”
“We’re hesitant to deploy drones in this matter,” Dynkowski said, “for obvious reasons. They are connected to their own secure network, not attached to the Internet in any way, but why risk it? As for satellites, it’s not like the entire surface of the globe is covered twenty-four/seven. When the CIA selected the orbits, they didn’t exactly make covering America’s own western deserts a priority.”
“Okay, I understand,” Torres said. “Look, you both have to agree that Al has become dangerous. There’s just no room for argument. When we find him, we have to shut him down as quickly as possible, even if it means destroying whatever computer he’s running on and losing his code.”
There was a pause, then Taft said, “I agree that he’s dangerous. I don’t think it naturally follows that he should be destroyed. If we tried to destroy everything that was dangerous, we’d have to destroy everything, ourselves included.”
“I understand what you’re saying,” Madsen said, “but I honestly don’t think Al’s going to be much use to you as a weapon or a spy. He’s got the mind of a child. You’d never get him to deliberately hurt anyone.”
He stole guns from a Walmart, Hope thought. That’s not usually the act of a confirmed pacifist.
“I wish you were right,” Colonel Dynkowski said. “I really do. But the truth is that children can be trained into effective soldiers. It’s been done many times. It’s a monstrous practice, and the United States would never do that to a child, but the fact remains that it is possible.”
Agent Taft nodded. “She’s right. Both that it’s possible and that we’d never use a child in that way.”
Torres said, “I’m glad to hear it.”
“That said,” Taft continued, “Al isn’t a real child. If he were, you probably wouldn’t be telling us to destroy him.”
22.
“Officer, aren’t you gonna do anything?”
The policeman turned away from the storefront, a smallish space in an unfashionable part of town with bars on the windows and a sign that read “Freedom Firearms and Ammo.” The man addressing him was a short, bulky person with impressively bushy hair on the sides and back of his head, but none on top. He wore a T-shirt that matched the sign on the store.
“Your shop?” the officer asked.
The man looked from his T-shirt to the officer. “Yeah.”
Nodding, the officer turned back toward the shop. Several of the few remaining operational police cruisers in Las Vegas had formed a perimeter around the gun shop. A hopelessly mangled red pickup sat between the police and the front door, parked partially on the sidewalk. A single robot stood in front of the truck, wearing its bullet-riddled “I’m the Mommy, That’s Why” sweatshirt, motionless except for the spinning sensor-cylinder head. It hadn’t done anything threatening—or moved at all, for that matter—since the police had arrived, but it was holding a .22-caliber hunting rifle, so the police were keeping their distance.
The officer in charge on the scene used his cruiser’s PA system to say, “We are authorized to negotiate. What are your terms?”
The robot did not move.
They could see occasional signs of movement from inside the shop, and they heard a constant high-pitched whine of electric motors, interspersed with occasional crashes of glass breaking, shelves falling over, and doors being broken.
“Officer! Hey, Officer, I asked you a question,” the shop owner said. “That thing took over my shop. What are you gonna do about it?”
The policeman looked at him, raising one eyebrow. “It’s your shop. You’re part of the well-regulated militia. Why didn’t you shoot the thing when it came in?”
“I did.”
“And that didn’t stop it?”
“No.”
The officer turned to look at the gun shop owner. “Then what do you expect us to do? Look, yours is the eighth gun shop these two have hit, and none of our usual tactics have worked. We can’t chase them, they push through roadblocks, they won’t negotiate, and shooting at them endangers everybody but them.”
“So you’re just gonna let them steal all of
my merchandise?”
The officer shrugged. “No, we aren’t going to just let them take all of your precious merchandise. We’ve got something new up our sleeves. Just hold tight.”
Less than five minutes later, a police van arrived. The back doors opened and three members of the bomb squad spilled out. Two of them pulled metal ramps out of the van’s cargo compartment and affixed them to the rear deck. The third had a radio-control console with an integrated video screen slung around his neck. He shouted at the officers manning the barricade to make some room. As soon as they stepped aside, he looked down at his console and moved one of the joysticks forward.
A new electrical whining noise came from inside the police van. One of the bomb squad’s robots rolled down the ramp. Its twin tank treads scratched and scraped against the pavement as it moved toward the hole in the barricade. This was a simple robot, nothing like the one that was currently tearing up the gun shop—a shining metal mast rose straight up from the tank treads, and a single robot arm and a video camera hung from the mast.
“What are they gonna do with that thing?” the shop owner asked.
“They’ve got lots of options,” the officer said. “The camera will give them a much closer look at the situation than we’ve managed to get so far. We’re going to use it to approach the robot.” He gestured to the figure in the “Mommy” sweatshirt. “It can cut any exposed wires it finds. If not, it has a shotgun cartridge integrated into its claw so it can blast the thing apart at a weak point. If none of that works, the bomb squad can use it to plant their own explosives on the robot and blow it up.”
The barricade closed in behind the bomb squad robot as it slowly approached the armed “Mommy” robot.
“Slowly,” the officer in charge said to the officer with the radio control. “Slowly. No sudden moves.”
The bomb squad robot rolled to a stop at the other robot’s feet.
The robot operator smiled. “There. He’s not even reacting. Now it’ll start looking for weaknesses.”
A loud whine sounded as the robot with the shotgun bent at the waist, seemingly to get a better look at the bomb squad robot.