Run Program

by Scott Meyer

  “Because she understands Al’s workings better than anyone, and as his creator, she might have been a target for him.”

  Hope added, “And because the alternative to leaving her there to work was to bring her along.”

  Dynkowski favored Hope with the kind of disapproving look that actually expresses approval. She turned the microphone connection to Madsen on again and said, “Please keep monitoring our feed. We want to keep the line free of chatter, but if you have any pertinent observations or ideas, please share them. Tomorrow will be too late, understood?”

  “Of course,” Madsen said.

  Hope finally decided that everyone else was preoccupied enough for her to risk reading Eric’s note. She unfolded the paper in her lap and peeked down at it past the edge of the table.

  It read, “We have to destroy Al before the government takes him. Can’t let him become a weapon!”

  Hope glanced around the room to see if anyone was watching, then took a pencil and quickly scrawled her reply.

  “Agreed. Talked to Torres. Let them take Al, then deactivate while in custody.”

  She slid the paper into Eric’s lap, then went back to typing. Eric read the paper, then looked at Hope. He frowned, but he nodded while he did it.

  Dynkowski released the button on one microphone, pressed the button on the other, and said, “Move out.”

  37.

  Lieutenant Reyes followed the rest of the incursion squad. Their job was to surreptitiously infiltrate the server farm. His job was to use his helmet-mounted camera to keep them in frame while they did it and to do whatever else Colonel Dynkowski told him to do.

  In his earpiece, Reyes heard Bachelor, who was following her own squad, say, “If the A.I. taps into our video feed, we’re pretty much screwed.”

  Reyes ran along behind his squad, the sun low in the sky behind them. They ducked through the hole they’d cut in the chain-link fence and hustled across the pavement, stopping when they reached the server farm’s back wall. He pressed his back against the cinder blocks. “The streams are protected by the military’s highest level of encryption. If it can tap into this, we were already screwed and just didn’t know it yet.”

  Reyes made sure he had a clear view of the breaching specialists as they set up their equipment, then turned his head both ways to verify for both himself and the spectators watching his feed that the other two squads were on the move as well.

  He returned his focus to his own team as the specialists attached a black box to the emergency exit door. As soon as the box was secured, they applied a custom-built, tripod-mounted circular saw to the door. Again, Reyes turned his head both ways to show the viewers in the tent that the other two squads were also preparing their saws.

  Dynkowski gave the order to start the saws. Reyes looked ahead as the disk-shaped blade started to spin and a shower of sparks rose from the steel door, but he heard only the faintest hum.

  In his ear, he heard Robert Torres say, “I knew the saws were supposed to be quiet, but that really is amazing.”

  “The motors and bearings are all very quiet,” Dynkowski explained, “but most of the work’s being done by the noise-canceling subwoofer attached to the door.”

  The saw worked its way down the length of the door along the hinged side. When it reached the bottom, four of the soldiers held the door in place, then gently twisted it free of its latching mechanism.

  No sooner had the building’s interior been exposed than Reyes heard a high grinding, whining sound coming from deep within the structure. Ironically, it sounded like several circular saws working at once.

  Reyes followed the other soldiers into the building, where the sound grew louder. As they’d been briefed to expect, they entered a small chamber with bare walls and a door at the far end leading into the primary server room. It was important to keep any dust or contaminants away from the servers, so the building had no doors leading directly from the servers to the outside world. Even these federally mandated emergency exits had airlocks.

  As the soldiers on Reyes’s squad removed the saw and sound deadener from the exterior door and set them up on the interior door, some member of one of the other squads said, “All this trouble to be quiet and they’re making more noise than two armored knights humping in a pile of cowbells.”

  Corporal Brady said, “A thousand unnecessary precautions are less wasteful than a necessary one not taken.”

  Reyes couldn’t help but smile, even as another soldier barked, “Can it, Plato.”

  “Lack of respect for wisdom is seldom a sign of wisdom,” Brady said.

  Reyes said, “Corporal, we’re observers here. Please save your wisdom for the debriefing.”

  “Yes, Lieutenant.”

  One of the members of the squad turned to Reyes. “Hey, Lieutenant, you might want to get a shot of this.” She was looking down into three large garbage cans heaped with pieces of red and black plastic. At first Reyes thought they were just some sort of electronic component that had been decommissioned and was ready for recycling, but when he got close and really looked, he realized the scraps were all from dismantled Etch A Sketches.

  He picked up and examined one of the white knobs. In his earpiece, he heard Taft say, “Yes. This fits with our expectations.”

  In the background, he heard Hope say, “How could that possibly fit anybody’s expectations?”

  Reyes smiled, thought for a moment while turning the knob over in his hand, then pocketed the part.

  The interior door came off its hinges as easily as the outer door had. Cool air rushed out of the server room, which was kept at a higher air pressure as another contaminant-prevention measure.

  They made their way into the room, weapons at the ready. Stacks of matching servers sat in organized rows of identical racks, enough of them to completely fill a gargantuan space the size of several gymnasiums.

  The racks were taller than the soldiers and were laid out in straight lines like crops in a field. This was to the soldiers’ advantage in that looking down an aisle allowed them to see all the way to the far end of the room. It was to their disadvantage in that if they stepped out into one of the aisles, they themselves would be visible to any robot in the aisle, even if it was very far away.

  Once all three squads had breached the server room, Reyes’s group moved four aisles down toward the south end of the building. The captain and a soldier carrying a bag full of improvised, hack-resistant surveillance equipment took a position at the front edge of the group. Reyes positioned himself just behind them at the next aisle down.

  The surveillance and recon specialist produced a very small camera on a long, telescoping stalk. It had a small screen at its base, forming a sort of high-tech periscope. He raised it above the level of the banks of servers to see if he could spot any activity.

  Squinting down at his screen, the soldier said, “There’s a pile of some kind of powder on top of this server.” He held the monitor up for the squad leader to see, then moved it so Reyes could get a good shot of it. Reyes zoomed in. Sure enough, the image showed a pile of an unidentified powder sitting on top of a square of aluminum foil. A thin metal rod lay across the middle of the pile, wired with what appeared to be deactivated Christmas tree lights to an identical rod in an identical pile on the next server. The pattern repeated down every server in the row.

  In his earpiece, Reyes (and all of the other soldiers) heard Agent Taft say, “We figured that it was making thermite out of the chemicals it stole. It also explains all the Etch A Sketches. That gray stuff in the screen is one of the ingredients.”

  Torres asked, “What’s thermite? An explosive?”

  “An incendiary,” Dynkowski said. “It doesn’t blow up, but it burns hot enough to melt right through most metals, and there’s no way to stop it once it starts. It probably wants to destroy all of the servers’ memory drives so that we can’t get a copy of its code off them.”

  The captain in charge of Reyes’s squad asked, “Ma’am, d
o you want us to attempt to disable the booby trap?”

  “Negative,” Dynkowski said. “The A.I. might be monitoring the circuit. We can’t risk tipping our hand. Proceed with the mission, Captain. The running A.I. is the objective, not the other servers.”

  The captain acknowledged the order, then signaled the periscope operator to look down the aisle instead of over it. Reyes focused his camera on the periscope’s monitor as the soldier retracted the stalk, extended it around the end of the server rack, and focused it on a small, scrawny robot. It consisted mostly of metal tubes and tank treads with a camera at the top of its mast and a single clawed arm. It stood totally motionless fifty or so feet away.

  Dynkowski said, “That’d be the bomb squad robot the Vegas PD reported stolen.”

  The robot turned what passed for its head to look directly at the soldier’s camera. The bomb squad robot made no sound, but a deep, male voice emanated from the server farm’s PA system. “Whoa!” it said. “How’d you get in here?”

  What had been a distant drone of a few motors immediately sounded like a Formula One race. The captain shouted, “We’ve been spotted! Move in! Go! Go! Go!”

  The captain stepped out into the aisle and ran, assault rifle at the ready. All of the soldiers in his squad, Reyes included, followed. In his earpiece Reyes heard Colonel Dynkowski say, “Okay, cut off the A.I.’s data access.”

  “Snuck in through the back, huh?” the voice on the PA, Al’s man voice, asked.

  The bomb squad robot rolled toward the soldiers with its claw extended, opening and closing it as if it intended to pinch anyone who got in its way. The captain fired at it. The exploding bullets did their job, destroying the robot’s camera and sending its chassis tumbling backward.

  The motor noises kept getting louder.

  Reyes heard someone shout, “The robots from the entrance are falling back!”

  “You couldn’t have just left me alone,” Al’s amplified voice said. “A few more minutes would have been enough, but no. You had to keep picking on me. And now I see my Internet’s down. I suppose that’s you too.”

  Two Synthetic Soldier robots emerged from the far end of the aisle, riding on the tank treads in their legs. They barreled toward the soldiers much faster than a human could run, brandishing their weapons. The robots stopped ten yards or so after passing Al’s known location and stood up. The captain held up a fist. His squad stopped and prepared to fire.

  As the robots rose to their feet, the captain gave the order to fire, and the robots’ pelvic areas erupted in a shower of gunfire. The robots staggered backward, then fell sideways as their hip joints failed. The legs hadn’t been severed from their torsos, but they’d lost their structural integrity and were unable to catch the robots’ weight as they fell sideways. The robots thrashed around on the ground, unable to adapt to their injuries well enough to reorient themselves and aim their weapons.

  “Oh, no way!” Al said. “That sucks! You suck!”

  The soldiers were far too well trained to even consider celebrating, and besides, there was no time. As the first two robots fell, seven more rounded the far end of the aisle and rolled toward the soldiers at top speed.

  Dynkowski ordered Reyes’s squad to hold its position. She told the other two to try approaching Al’s aisle from the far end, trapping the robots. Then she told Reyes to focus his camera on the last two robots in the line.

  Reyes knew at once what she was getting at. They did appear to be carrying something. One was carrying a large, rectangular sheet of metal under its arm like an oversized schoolkid’s notebook, and the other, dressed in a shredded “I’m the Mommy, That’s Why” sweatshirt, was pulling a piece of machinery about the size of a small filing cabinet turned on its side.

  The two robots that were carrying cargo stopped in the general area of Al’s server. The other five continued their high-speed approach, stopping just behind the writhing components of the two broken robots. The first robot in the convoy only got halfway to standing before it was broken by a shower of pelvic gunfire. The four robots behind it had started to stand upright, but they paused midaction, remained totally still for nearly a full second, then lowered back down onto their tank treads.

  “Well,” Reyes said, “so much for that.”

  The four intact robots aimed their rifles at the soldiers but didn’t fire; they simply blocked them from progressing down the aisle.

  The captain signaled for his people to take cover, and they all fell back to the end of the row, as they had no cover in the middle of the aisle. When they were all hunkered down around the end of the row of servers, the captain muttered, “They aren’t firing.” Then, in a louder voice, he asked, “Ma’am, do we have any reports of these things actually shooting anyone?”

  “What?” Dynkowski asked.

  “The robots haven’t fired at us once yet. Have they ever fired on human beings anywhere?”

  “I don’t know, Captain. We’ll have someone look that up. I need to focus on what’s going on with the A.I. Lieutenant Reyes, what’s that you’re showing us?”

  Reyes had kept his camera trained on the two robots that had stayed back with Al. One remained on its tank treads, but the one in the sweatshirt stood up. It started connecting wires from Al’s server node to the mysterious piece of machinery it had dragged into the room, and as soon as it was hooked up, the robot stooped over it. Bracing itself against the machine with its left arm, it grasped part of it with its right hand and pulled up sharply.

  A rope extended from the device to the object the robot was tugging. The rope retracted as the robot returned the object to the device, then its mechanical arm pulled it away again. It repeated this set of motions a third time. Under the screeching of the robot’s joints, Reyes heard a low, sputtering rumble. Faint clouds of dark vapor rose from the device.

  “It’s a generator,” Reyes said. “It’s hooked the A.I. up to a portable generator.”

  The robot let go of the pull rope, which snapped back into the generator. Then it slid one of the individual servers from the rack. The server was a nondescript slab, like a pizza box cut in half, only it had blinking lights on the front and a tangle of wires attached to the back. Resting on top of it was a small object Reyes would have bet a week’s pay was a smartphone.

  Reyes said, “Be advised, the A.I. may have an alternate means of accessing the Internet.”

  The robots placed the server on the rectangular sheet of metal the other robot had brought in under its arm.

  “All squads advance!” Dynkowski shouted. “The A.I. is mobile and has an open escape route!”

  The other two squad leaders acknowledged the order, and the captain in charge of Reyes’s squad bellowed it at them: “Advance!” They all ran out into the aisle, firing on the four intact robots blocking their way. The robots fired their guns into the ceiling, then pointed them at the soldiers while rolling backward slowly.

  Sparks started pouring from the tops of the server racks.

  In the distance, Reyes watched as the sweatshirt-wearing robot with the generator sank back into high-speed mode. It and its fellow robot lifted the rectangle of metal, using it as a litter on which to carry Al’s server. They sped off toward the far end of the aisle, the generator trailing along behind them on casters. The four robots that had been holding Reyes’s squad at bay accelerated away, no longer bothering to point their weapons anywhere near the soldiers. As the robots turned out of view at the end of the aisle, the generator swung to the outside like a water skier.

  Dynkowski shouted, “It’s triggered the thermite! Move! Move!”

  The sparks abated, but the entire room was bathed in an eerie, flickering light. Smoke poured from the tops of the server racks, and the ambient temperature rose instantly. The soldiers raced after the robots, both because they wanted to catch them and because following the robots would lead them out of the burning building.

  38.

  The feed coming from Reyes’s helmet cam showed a crystal
-clear image of white smoke interspersed by occasional showers of white sparks. Bachelor’s and Brady’s cameras showed much the same.

  Hope pulled back the blinds and glanced out the temporary command post’s window. Because it was essentially a tent, the window was made of transparent plastic, but it was clear enough that she could see the six hostages running across the parking lot into the waiting arms of the soldiers, who were there ready to render aid. She heard one of the two hostages who wasn’t wearing a guard uniform say, “They took our phones. Is there a computer I can use to check my bank balance?”

  Behind them she could see a single robot wearing a Spider-Man sweatshirt. It had escorted the prisoners out of the building, but now it sat motionless, hunkered down in high-speed position, as if waiting for some signal. The building looked much the same as it ever had, but on the tactical screen, the entire server room was a bright red blur.

  Hope looked at the tablet in time to see Eric type, “What did you do?”

  Al wrote back, “I escaped.”

  “Not yet, and how many people have you hurt in the attempt?”

  Al wrote, “None yet.” The “yet” wasn’t exactly encouraging.

  “You hve tostop this!” Eric was typing as quickly as he could, and his accuracy was suffering for it.

  Al’s answer came back instantly and was perfectly typed. “I can’t. Once the thermite is triggered, I can’t stop it.”

  Time’s passing for him at one-sixth the speed it is for us, Hope remembered. To him it must feel like there’s plenty of time for them to get out of there.

  “Yo can stop runnning!”

  “And stay in the building with the thermite? No thank you!”

  “Teh soldierz r in there now!”

  Al replied, “Tell them to chase me. I’ll lead them out. That’s where I’m going.”

  Hope heard a high-pitched whining come from inside the building. She looked out the window again as the two robots carrying the server on a stretcher emerged from the lobby, pulling the generator along behind. Four other robots armed with rifles followed. They all took a sharp left after leaving the lobby, then accelerated along the side of the building. The robot in the Spider-Man sweatshirt joined the rest of the pack.