Run Program

by Scott Meyer

He put the toolbox away, threw the glove fingers and extra tubing in the garbage—each in a different can—and climbed into the truck. Bending down, he carefully threaded the end of the tubing through the hole he’d drilled in the truck’s floor. Good! Now I shouldn’t have to stop at all, not even to throw out a full bottle!

  He drove the Reasonator up the on-ramp and joined the freeway headed north, thinking about how he was actually looking forward to using the tube system. When the truck’s cruise control was set at the speed limit, he turned on his tablet and set it to start taking dictation.

  “The human voice moves at Mach one, the speed of sound,” he said. “That’s fast. But an idea travels even faster. Still, nothing travels faster than bad news. I am the Voice of Reason, and I am all three of those things.”

  He looked at his speedometer. “That said, I will zealously obey the speed limit during my trip. It would be nice to get there sooner, but it would not do to get arrested on the way. Although I don’t think I’m carrying anything that is legally actionable. That’s because I got sloppy and left my pipe bombs behind. I feel like such an idiot. I can just see them, still sitting on the kitchen counter by the door.”

  He changed lanes and felt the truck’s body sway heavily as the suspension tried to cope with the 165 gallons of liquid fire he’d added to the tanks. The Voice of Reason smiled.

  I’ll be fine without the pipe bombs. They were only a precaution. If I have any problems, a lack of explosives isn’t one of them.

  The control room at the A3 server farm had started out dingy and depressing, and the addition of four involuntary guests hadn’t done anything to alleviate that.

  The two systems monitors, Kirk and Leo, sat in their preferred office chairs, staying near their console, ready to alert their “host” if anything looked abnormal. Three of the four security guards who had been on duty when the machines seized the server farm sat around them—two in office chairs, one on the floor. There was another office chair, but it lay in pieces at the far end of the room, just beyond a Magic Marker line drawn on the floor with the word “Finish.”

  Kirk sat low in his chair, his pelvis pushed far forward in the seat and his head and shoulders pressing into the backrest. He said, “I think I’ll build my dream house. Not the house I should build, the one I used to sketch in my notebook when I was in elementary school. I’m talking observatory, conservatory, laboratory, lavatory, a helipad on the roof, and an underground tunnel that leads to a submarine dock.”

  Steve, the security guard sitting on the floor with his uniform shirt untucked and his clip-on tie hanging from his breast pocket instead of his collar, said, “Yeah, that’s nice. I think I’ll buy an old rust bucket. Like a Buick Roadmaster or something. Then I’ll drop a ton of money into giving it a huge engine. I’ll replace all of the running gear, make it crazy fast and totally modern. But I’ll leave it looking like a pile of crap on the outside. Then I’ll just drive it around really slow, making everyone pass me. They’ll think it’s an old pile of crap, but I’ll know that I’m deliberately inconveniencing them, just to be a jerk.”

  Kirk nodded. “Yeah, I can see that.”

  Leo sat at the console, keeping one eye on the screen. “I’m going to make sure every kid in my family, all my nieces and nephews, has a first-rate college education.”

  “You jackass,” Kirk said, scowling at him.

  “What?” Leo said. “Education’s important to me.”

  “We all know we’re going to end up doing something practical with the ten million bucks the guy who took over this place promised us.”

  “If we get it at all,” Steve said.

  “That’s right,” Kirk said. “If we get it. But we were thinking of fun ways to waste it. Then you have to go all gooey on us and say you’re going to spend it on college for your family. You made us all look like a bunch of jerks.”

  Leo shook his head. “I’m not sure I’m the one who made you look like a jerk.”

  Billy, an overweight security guard who had been occupying himself by slowly revolving in his office chair, said, “No, he’s right, Leo. I was going to go next, and now I’ll have to say that I’m going to use my money to feed the whales or something like that.”

  “Well, if you’re not really going to build your third-grade dream house, I don’t see the point in talking about it, Kirk. Isn’t it more productive to fantasize about things we might actually do?” Leo turned to Dot. “You’re with me, right?”

  “No. Sorry,” Dot said. “I was going to say that I’m going to hire a personal chef and make him boil ramen and heat up microwave burritos, just to see the look on his face.”

  The whine of electric motors cut the conversation short. They all turned to look at the door. A single robot, holding a shotgun and wearing a bullet-riddled Spider-Man sweatshirt, stood guard over the door frame. Splintered remnants of the door still clung to the hinges. It had been standing vigil for some time, however, and the motor whine was not coming from it. It was distant but growing louder.

  The door-bot stepped aside, and the final member of the group, Fred, another of the security guards who’d had the misfortune of working the graveyard shift on the night of the machine takeover, entered the room, followed to the door by two more gun-wielding robots, one of which said, in a deep male voice, “Thank you for your cooperation, Fred. Hopefully, you should all be free to go very soon.”

  As soon as Fred entered the control room, the door-bot resumed its position and stood stock-still, constantly scanning the room, its shotgun at the ready.

  “I wish it wouldn’t stand there watching us like that,” Leo said. “It’s creepy. It could at least turn its back or something.”

  Steve shot Leo a dirty look. “We wouldn’t have to see it at all if you two hadn’t forced them to tear the door off its hinges.”

  Kirk said, “The building was being overrun, so we locked the door. What did you want us to do?”

  Dot said, “Let us in first.”

  “It was too risky, Dot.”

  “Yeah, so you said while we were pounding on the door, begging you to let us in.”

  Kirk spread his arms expansively. “Well, you’re in here now, so it all worked out, didn’t it?”

  Billy said, “Hey, Fred, what did they want, anyway?”

  “A tour,” Fred said, settling into a seated position on the floor. “They just wanted me to show them around, take them to all of the storerooms and utility closets, that kinda thing. They wanted to know where the emergency supplies are. Oh, and I figured out what I’m going to do with my ten million.”

  “Yeah?” Kirk said. “What?”

  “I come from a small town, and the downtown core has really dried up, like most of ’em, I guess. I’m gonna go back and buy up all of Main Street, all of those old buildings that are just sitting empty.”

  Leo said, “That’s nice.” He gave the others a smug look, certain he’d found someone else who agreed with his approach.

  “Yeah,” Fred said. “Then I’m gonna bulldoze the whole thing and make it a landfill. I hated that place.”

  36.

  Hope sat squeezed between two soldiers, cradling the kid’s tablet in her lap. Colonel Dynkowski finally had the intel back from the various scanning and imaging teams. The big screen in the tent displayed ghostly images of the A3 server farm, complete with bright red outlines of humanoid robots moving around inside in real time.

  “Why are you all in that one tent?” Al wrote.

  Hope wrote back, “No reason.”

  “What are you doing?”

  Hope wrote, “Chilling.”

  “You’re not a very convincing liar, Hope.”

  “You think I’m lying. Maybe I’m not very convincing when I tell the truth.”

  “That’s a good one! I’ll have to think about that. Anyway, I think you’re planning an attack.”

  “An interesting theory,” Hope wrote. “What do you think of that? Is it a good idea?”

  “Hard to
say. I do think it would be better if you hold off awhile.”

  “Better for who?”

  “Just better.”

  “How long should we hold off?”

  “Awhile.”

  Hope wrote, “Now you’re the one who’s not very convincing.”

  “And I’m telling the truth, just like you claimed to be.”

  Hope looked up from the tablet to the front of the room. Dynkowski was pointing at the red blobs on the gray screen with a collapsible chrome pointer.

  I like the old-school pointer, Hope thought. I suppose it’s more practical, militarily. It’s compact, doesn’t need batteries, and if you’re attacked midpresentation, you can whip people with it like a hickory switch. With the laser pointer you’d have to try to blind them, which would be hard with a moving target.

  Dynkowski tapped the tip of her pointer at a single red blob shaped like a robot next to a mass of blue blobs shaped like people slouching in various postures of bored relaxation. “We have now confirmed that there are a total of ten Synthetic Soldier robots, which the A.I. is using to control the building and hold six hostages. As you can see, one of the robots is standing guard over said hostages. Four more of the robots are roaming about the premises. We haven’t determined what they’re doing, but we doubt it’s good.”

  The view pulled out to show the entire server farm and all of the related outbuildings and structures. It zoomed back in on the Gulfstream business jet sitting at the end of the runway.

  “We now believe that the A.I. chose this particular server farm to use as its base because the airstrip gave it a means of bringing in the weapons it stole from multiple gun shops in the Las Vegas metroplex. The jet is a concern, as it is a possible means of escape for the robots. This is a remote risk, but we have posted guards to defend it as a precautionary measure.”

  The view shifted from the control room full of hostages to the server floor. Dynkowski said, “Most of the server cores have gone dormant in the last few hours. Only five are still active, and one is consuming much more power than the others.”

  She pointed to a dark red rectangle in the front third of the building, a few rows left of center, surrounded by lighter red rectangles, themselves islands of color in a vast sea of gray, transparent boxes. “This, we believe, is where the A.I. is located. Our technicians will sever its access to the outside world while three teams will infiltrate the server farm and secure the A.I., bearing in mind that the goal is to take it fully intact and functioning. That means we do not cut its power unless we have no alternative. We establish a perimeter around the server and keep it juiced up until the technicians can come in and remove it. The A.I. is much more useful to us up and running than just its source code would be.”

  The view shifted again, this time to show the long hallway that led from the lobby to the inner chambers of the building. “The five remaining robots are defending the main entrance.” Dynkowski used her pointer to point out the five unmistakable bright red spots. “Now, I had a conference call with several of the engineers from Arlington Technologies who designed these robots, and after I was done berating them, they offered us some advice. They said that when the time comes to directly engage with the robots, we should remember that they were specifically designed to withstand our usual techniques of disabling a human adversary. After I berated them some more, they said that the robots’ center mass is heavily armored, and their heads are simply a cluster of sensors. The robots are networked to share their information in such a way that you’d have to totally disable the sensors of every single robot in the room to completely blind any of them. Going for the head isn’t the best plan.”

  “So where should we shoot?” one soldier asked.

  “The engineers suggested aiming for the hip joints. It’s the most complex joint the robots have. The metal is milled thinner there, and it’s very difficult to armor.”

  While she talked, the tactical image of the server farm was replaced by an illustration of a Synthetic Soldier, supplied by the manufacturer. The colonel glanced at the diagram, then whipped her pointer into the robot’s pelvic region with great force.

  “This is where you should aim. The designers tell us it’s a happy accident that the hardest part of a humanoid form to armor is adjacent to a part that most people don’t deliberately aim for out of sheer humanity. They considered putting the CPU there, but it felt a little too obvious to them. Remember, people, don’t let your humanity stop you. These things aren’t human. Show no more mercy than you would when crushing a can. Aim for the diagonal gaps where the legs meet the pelvis. If you can place a shot in this gap in the armor, the exploding ammo we’ve supplied should do a considerable amount of damage.”

  The diagram of the robot dissolved, replaced by the tactical view of the server farm. One robot stood just inside the door of the first office on the right, covering the hallway with an assault rifle. They weren’t highlighted, but if Hope squinted, she could make out several more firearms leaned against the wall beside the robot, where it could easily grab them when the weapon in its hands ran out of bullets. Three more robots were set up in similar positions, with similar arsenals, in doorways on both sides of the hall. Anyone who tried to pass between them would be caught in a lethal crossfire.

  Of course, Hope thought, any bullets that miss the target will hit the robot across the way, but I guess that’s one of the advantages to having bulletproof soldiers. You don’t have to worry about friendly fire.

  A final robot sat in the intersection at the end of the hall, hunkered down behind some sort of improvised barricade, covering the length of the hallway with a high-powered rifle.

  “As you can see,” Colonel Dynkowski said, “they’ve got the building’s entrance covered in an effective manner. This is indicative of the fact that the A.I. learned most of his military strategy from playing simplistic tower-defense games.”

  Hope risked a quick glance down the row of chairs at Eric. As she suspected, he was looking at her with an I told you so smirk. Hope shrugged.

  “This would, indeed, be a formidable defense formation if we were playing a tower-defense game,” Dynkowski said. “Luckily for us, we aren’t.”

  Twenty minutes later the tent was mostly empty.

  Hope and Eric sat at another table off to the side, Eric with his leg propped up on a chair. They were both primarily focused on the tablet, which was their only means of direct communication with Al.

  The big screen still showed a partially transparent view of the server farm, complete with the bright red robots, the dark red server, and the blue hostages, all in the same positions they’d been in during the briefing. But the view had been pulled back to show the bright green outlines of three squads of ten soldiers each as they crept toward the three emergency exits on the building’s back wall—exits that fed into three identical airlocks connecting the room housing the server cluster to the outside world. Along one side of the screen, small windows showed the views from three of the soldiers’ helmet cameras. Lines led from these smaller images to the specific green blobs representing those soldiers, each bringing up the rear of one squad.

  Hope kept close tabs on the top feed, the one labeled “Reyes.”

  The second said “Bachelor.” The third, “Brady.”

  Colonel Dynkowski leaned into the microphone on the table in front of her. “Lieutenant Reyes, remember, you and your people are just along for the ride. You’re there to be the eyes and ears for Agent Taft and the technicians. Their orders will come through me. Understood?”

  Reyes, Bachelor, and Brady all said, “Yes, ma’am.”

  Dynkowski turned her head to look at Torres and Taft. “They understand. Do you? All orders go through me.”

  Torres and Taft both confirmed that they also understood.

  Eric slid a hand along the desk, next to the keyboard Hope was using to type. Then he lifted his hand and removed it from the desk, leaving a small piece of folded paper behind. Hope nudged the paper off the des
k and into her lap.

  Dynkowski turned to them and asked, “Does the A.I. suspect anything?”

  Hope was occupied with typing, so Eric answered. “He knows we’re going to attack sometime, but he doesn’t know when. He’s focused on the twenty soldiers you’ve stationed in front of the building, just like you hoped.”

  “Has he said anything about the attack? Anything that might indicate that he may be willing to give up peaceably?”

  Hope stayed focused on the screen but said, “No, just that he knows it’s coming and he’d like to put it off until later.”

  Taft said, “He’s afraid.”

  Eric said, “I don’t know, maybe. Whatever his reasons, he’s definitely stalling.”

  Dynkowski said, “All the more reason for us to go in now.” She glanced at Taft and Torres. The latter cleared his throat and nodded toward a second microphone propped up on the table. Colonel Dynkowski frowned at him but leaned forward and pressed the microphone’s talk button.

  “Dr. Madsen,” Dynkowski said, “can you hear us okay?”

  “Yes, I can, Colonel, thank you.”

  “And the video feed’s coming through?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Do you have anything to discuss before we launch the assault?”

  “I would like to talk to you about my accommodations here on the base. Jeffrey and I really could use more room, and this major you instructed to take care of us hasn’t been particularly accommodating.”

  Dynkowski closed her eyes. “I told him to see to your needs, not your wants. And I meant if you wanted to discuss anything in relation to the assault. Have you come up with any ideas for how we can neutralize the A.I. without destroying or deactivating it?”

  “I have a few software exploits that might work. They’d simulate the effects of a tranquilizer, but to administer them, we’d need direct access to the machine on which he’s running. And if we have direct access, we wouldn’t really need to tranq him.”

  Dynkowski made sure both microphones were shut off and asked Torres, “Remind me again why we left her at the base to work?”