Run Program

by Scott Meyer

  Hope said, “Maybe if she got to know you in a social setting.”

  Eric, walking beside her, shook his head. “She’s had three months to get to know me under more normal circumstances. She already knows me about as well as anyone. Besides, what am I going to do, tell her about our work? I doubt she’ll be impressed. We’ve spent the last three months in a lead-lined lab booting up Al 3.5 on a computer with no radios and trying to neutralize him with logical paradoxes or by overloading his emotions. All we’ve learned is that he enjoys riddles, cries easily, and the military isn’t all that interested in an A.I. that crashes every time it gets scared.”

  “Yeah. Even if they try to use that build, they’ll have to keep it out of combat situations, so that’s something.” She paused, then said, “Still, you should get out more, Eric. Come with Reyes and me to do something.”

  “Thanks, Hope, but while I’ve been rehabbing my leg I’ve kind of gotten into playing computer games.”

  “That’s the beauty of hanging out with Gabe. He likes go-karting and the gun range. It’s like playing video games, but in real life.”

  Torres, who had been standing at the side of the hall up ahead, fell in with them, walking alongside Dr. Madsen, who was so quiet these days that Hope had forgotten she was walking behind her and Eric. After they had exchanged greetings, Torres said, “We have to destroy Al.”

  Hope asked, “By ‘we,’ you mean Eric and me, don’t you?”

  “I’ve been doing stuff too, you know,” Torres said. “I had all of the project notes and the earlier versions of Al’s code erased from the corporate servers and told the army that Al destroyed it. That leaves them with nothing but the flawed version they pulled off that computer that got soaked.”

  “Yeah,” Hope said. “It turns out burying stuff in uncooked rice for a week really works.”

  Torres said, “Yes, unfortunately. But I also have them convinced that without her notes or a more recent build, Lydia might never be able to re-create Al as he is, because his development might have been a fluke. Now, with all of that done, we just have to destroy Al.”

  Hope said, “That’s easy for you to say.”

  “You disagree with me?” Torres asked.

  “No,” Hope said, “but it’s easy for you to tell us to kill Al.”

  Madsen said, “She’s right, Robert. You didn’t work with him.”

  Eric said, “Neither did you. You had Hope and me do most of the work.”

  Madsen said, “How dare you?”

  “What are you going to do, fire us?” Hope said. “Oh no, we don’t get to go on the suicide mission.”

  “It isn’t a suicide mission. Even if it were, nobody’s ordering you to do it.”

  “No,” Eric said. “But we all agree it has to be done, and we’re the only ones who can do it. And you’re right, it isn’t a suicide mission—suicide means to kill yourself. We’re probably just going to get killed in the crossfire or something. And if we do manage to get to Al, the soldiers might shoot us in the back as soon as they realize we intend to kill him instead of letting them use him as a weapon.”

  Madsen said, “I doubt that they’ll shoot us.”

  Hope said, “Good.”

  Madsen continued, “But if they do, it’s worth the sacrifice. One of our lives to prevent something we created from killing millions, either on his own now or eventually for the government. Don’t you agree?”

  Eric nodded. “Yes.”

  Hope also said yes, but more slowly than Eric, and with her eyes narrowed.

  “Good,” Madsen said. “I knew the two of you would feel that way. You’re both good people. Better than me, in many ways.”

  Eric said, “Thank you. It’s good to hear you say that.”

  “It’s true,” Madsen said. “And since you’re good people, I’m sure you’ve thought about how Jeffrey is still young and needs his mother, while neither of you has kids.”

  Hope said, “It’s not good to hear you say that.”

  Madsen looked around with an eyebrow arched, a move that communicated to anyone watching the message I’m going to say something I don’t want anyone to overhear. It surely would have drawn the attention of anyone watching, but nobody was.

  “At the end of the equipment briefing, we’re all going to be given portable drives just like these.” Madsen handed Hope and Eric two black portable drives about the size of Hope’s thumbnail. “The ones they’re going to give us have a program I’ve developed with the NSA. If we plug it into Al, it will exploit a flaw in his audio-processing module. He’ll experience it as a piercing sound, almost infinitely loud. He’ll be in pain, disoriented, and unable to think about anything else for long enough for the soldiers to disconnect any data cables and stick his server into a portable Faraday cage.”

  “That sounds awful,” Eric said.

  Madsen said, “Yes. The drives I gave you—I have one too—are equipped with a different program. It will instantly deactivate Al while also obliterating any sign of him from the server’s memory.”

  Eric said, “That sounds . . .”

  Hope said, “Just as awful, but in a different way.”

  Eric said, “Yeah. Look, Doctor, Mr. Torres. I see why we need to do this, but I’m not gonna pretend to feel good about it. Al has intelligence and free will, and we’re planning to kill him.”

  “It’s an awful situation for everybody,” Torres said. “And I mean everybody. Every person on the planet, because if any government gets ahold of the kind of power Al has, it can’t end well. And he’s building those rockets. You can’t tell me that doesn’t seem like a threat. Yes, the three of you are going to have to do something terrible, but you’re doing it in self-defense, on behalf of our entire species.”

  Eric said, “But not every member of our species is going to see it that way. The soldiers’ orders are to bring Al back intact and functioning at all costs. If they catch us trying to kill him, they’ll try to stop us. At the very least we’ll end up in handcuffs. Are we sure deadly force isn’t off the table?”

  Hope said, “I doubt Gabe, or any of his people, would shoot me.”

  Eric asked, “What about Dr. Madsen and me?”

  Hope said, “Oh, they’d probably shoot either of you. But neither of you will be with his squad. You’ll both be with a bunch of strangers.”

  “This has been the least reassuring conversation I’ve ever been part of,” Eric said, shaking his head.

  They reached the hangar serving as the staging room. It was a large space with concrete floors, a high, curved roof, and exposed wooden rafters. The back wall consisted entirely of sliding doors large enough for multiple vehicles to be brought in or out. A wooden partition on rollers dominated the middle of the room, hiding whatever was behind it from the soldiers and from anyone else who happened to walk past the open door.

  As they entered, Hope saw Lieutenant Reyes. They smiled at each other as Hope walked over to him and his squad. Corporal Bachelor was standing with the group. She and Eric looked at each other and then quickly looked away—Eric trying to seem nonchalant, Bachelor hoping to become invisible.

  Colonel Dynkowski cleared her throat, and the room instantly fell silent.

  “Welcome to the technical briefing. Here we will familiarize you with the special weapons and transportation systems you will be using in your assault on the island. These will include a handheld missile launcher specifically designed to neutralize the robots, the software delivery vector you will use to deliver the weaponized code to neutralize the A.I., and the portable and collapsible Faraday cages each squad will carry to transport the A.I. once it is in custody. But first we will discuss your transportation.”

  Two soldiers moved the rolling room divider out of the way, revealing an aircraft the likes of which Torres had never seen. It had the streamlining and pointed nose of a high-speed military airplane, but its body was much fatter than one would usually expect, giving the impression of a giant cocktail sausage, an impression th
e craft’s light brown color only accentuated. Its wings, which looked far too short to support its weight, extended in a straight, horizontal line from the very bottom of the fuselage, like an extension of the craft’s floor. The two jet engines bulged from the plane’s roof instead of hanging from the wings or extending from pods on the sides of the plane. A sliding door, like a larger version of a minivan door, was set into the craft’s side. It sat open, exposing a couple of rows of uncomfortable-looking seats and a heavy machine gun mounted to the door.

  “This,” Dynkowski said, “is the vehicle you will ride into battle. We have three of them for this mission—the only three in existence. They’re based on a Russian design from the Cold War, taking advantage of something called ‘the ground effect.’ They fly low and fast, carrying a great deal of weight with minimal radar exposure. They will serve as your landing craft, similar to the Higgins boats of the D-Day invasion. They will fly you in under the enemy radar and deposit you on the beach in relative safety.”

  Hope raised her hand. “Relative safety?”

  “Yes, Miss Takeda, in that the enemy should only be able to fire missiles at you for the final fifteen seconds of your flight instead of the entire way.”

  Corporal Brady said, “All activities involve risk; the avoidance of all risk more so than most.”

  Dynkowski nodded. “Well said, Corporal Brady. Radar travels in a straight line. The earth, as some of you may know, is curved. Flying in low will allow the aircraft to remain below the radar horizon for longer. Once they do breach the radar horizon, their unique shapes and coating of radar-absorbing materials will make it that much harder for the enemy missiles to get a lock. The jet engines are heavily modified to reduce both noise and exhaust heat, and finally, the entire exterior of the craft is embedded with e-pigments. An onboard computer will monitor the color of the background and modulate the color of the aircraft to make it harder to spot with either cameras or the naked eye.”

  The colonel walked around to the rear of the aircraft and held up her bare hand in front of a lens. The entire craft’s skin changed from brown to a lighter tone that perfectly matched her skin. The color shifted as her hand moved slightly, giving it a subtle shimmering quality that Hope found hard to look at. Dynkowski lifted her hand farther so that the sleeve of her jacket was in front of the lens. The craft changed colors again, shifting to army-fatigues green.

  Colonel Dynkowski walked back in front of the craft. “Three squads will be inserted in three aircraft. You will come in low and fast. This will make you harder for the enemy to hit, but it will also bring you within range faster. We figure that the element of surprise will wear off quickly, giving the first aircraft in line a slightly better chance of making it to the beach than the other two.”

  Dr. Madsen raised her hand. “Colonel, I volunteer to ride in the first aircraft.”

  Colonel Dynkowski said, “I sort of figured you would.”

  Hope asked, “What are they called, the weird-looking airplanes?”

  “Their official designation is ‘low cross-section ground effect vehicle,’ or ‘LCGEV,’ but that’s a bit of a mouthful.”

  Hope said, “I agree.”

  “So we’ve been just calling them ‘stealth ekranoplans.’”

  “Is that meant to be easier to say than ‘LCGEV’?”

  Dynkowski smiled. “Nobody ever said life in the military was easy, Miss Takeda.”

  46.

  The cool, blue water of the Caribbean Sea beckoned, only twenty feet below Hope’s feet. She could have easily jumped in. The water would have looked very inviting if it weren’t streaking by at nearly three hundred miles an hour.

  She looked at the ocean, then at her heavy body armor.

  The armor’s designed to save my life, she thought. But if this thing goes down, this vest is a one-way ticket to Davy Jones’s locker. Nobody wants that. Spending eternity with a British character actor wearing a CGI tentacle beard. What I need is a life jacket. Of course, they’re usually bright orange and inflatable. Not great at stopping bullets.

  She turned and looked at Lieutenant Reyes, who sat in the jump seat next to her, inspecting the workings of his rifle.

  Strange, she thought, how the things that can save your life in one situation can help end it in another.

  She elbowed Reyes and asked, “Hey, do you have life jackets in the military?”

  Reyes said, “I knew you weren’t listening to the safety briefing.” His voice sounded tinny and distorted in her headset, but it was still easily understandable.

  Hope said, “I was thinking about something else.”

  “What?”

  “How dangerous this all is.”

  “Too worried about dying to listen to a safety briefing,” Reyes said. “Civilians.” The other soldiers laughed, but not unkindly.

  “There’s a life jacket under your seat and a raft in a hatch to the rear,” Reyes said. “We only get them out if the plane goes down, but you don’t have to worry about that.”

  “Because the plane’s not going down,” Hope said.

  “Because the plane’s flying so low that if it does go into the drink, we won’t get any warning. We’re already about as far down as a plane can go.”

  “Fair enough,” Hope said. “What I really wanted to know was: What color are the life jackets?”

  “In a plane like this, usually orange. We want to be visible so rescuers can get to us.”

  “That’s what I thought, but doesn’t that make you more visible to the enemy?”

  Reyes shrugged. “If your plane’s been shot down, odds are you won’t survive long enough for a life jacket to be an issue. If you make it to the water alive, you want to be pulled out before you drown, get eaten by a shark, or hypothermia sets in. Otherwise you’ll be just as dead as if the enemy had shot you in the first place.”

  “Okay,” Hope said, waving a hand dismissively. “I get that in a plane crash you want an orange life vest, but what about in combat, when you take a beach or something?”

  Reyes smiled. “We don’t usually swim into battle, and when we do, the higher-ups tend to send soldiers who are strong enough swimmers to not need water wings.”

  Corporal Brady, leaning back in his seat across from Hope, did not move or look at anyone when he spoke. “It’s tempting to think about ways you might die, but it’s more useful to think about ways you might live.”

  Hope said, “Point taken.”

  Private Montague asked, “Any word from Al? Seems like he might say hi if he sees us coming.” He was sitting in a row well behind Hope, but thanks to the headsets she could hear him and reply without shouting or even turning to face him.

  She glanced at her tablet, more out of habit than any genuine hope that the situation had changed. “Nope,” she said. “Same silence we’ve had for the last three months, and we’re not in the mood to call him at the moment.”

  She looked at the live tactical map. The attack force, a neat line of three icons labeled Alpha Squad, Bravo Squad, and Charlie Squad, moved diagonally across her screen.

  Hope pulled up a satellite photo taken that morning. When zoomed all the way out, the island seemed dusted with glitter. Among the trees, jungles, white-sand beaches, and square utilitarian buildings there were hundreds of shining objects reflecting sunlight back to the satellite’s lens. When she zoomed in close, she could see that each of these glinting spots was a robot.

  At the center of the island, five round objects stood in a straight line down the runway. The picture showed the island from almost directly above, so she couldn’t get a real sense of what they were by looking at them directly, but the shadows trailing off to the left made it all too clear that the objects were large rockets and their support gantries.

  Hope knew relatively little about rocketry, but a lifetime of interest in science had equipped her with the ability to tell at a glance that while the rockets were not manned-mission-to-the-moon big, they were easily deliver-a-payload-to-Moscow big. />
  Hope couldn’t think of many positive things that were delivered to other continents via high-speed rocket.

  In the photo, the rockets emitted billowing plumes of steam where they connected with their gantries, which didn’t seem like a good sign.

  The pilot said, “We land in one minute.”

  The soldiers all checked their weapons. Hope pulled up a chat window to converse with Eric and Dr. Madsen in the other planes.

  “Here we go,” Hope wrote.

  A chat box sprouted from the icon labeled Charlie Squad. In it Eric wrote, “Yeah, this should be something.”

  The Alpha Squad icon also spawned a text box. Dr. Madsen wrote, “I know you’re scared. We all know what we’re doing, and we all know why we’re doing it. All three of us are equally responsible for this mess, and now we have to clean it up. The odds of all of us making it are not good, but there’s a chance that one of us will get through to do what we have to do. I don’t like it. You don’t like it. Our friends with the guns giving us this ride certainly won’t like it, and they may go to extreme measures to stop it, but it must be done. I hope to see you both when this is over. Good luck.”

  Hope opened a second chat window, this one visible only to Eric, and wrote, “I believe she had that prewritten and ready to paste into the chat box.”

  Eric replied, “You have to admire her preparedness.”

  Hope wrote, “And her optimism that at least one of us might survive.”

  The pilot said, “They have a radar lock. It sees us. This’ll get rough. Hold on.”

  Hope closed all of the chat windows and checked her map. The three weird-looking planes had nearly reached the island, but many smaller blips had appeared, following a path from the stolen military cruisers docked at each end of the island to meet the planes halfway. Hope started to count the blips but was interrupted by a large, bright red chat window—she had programmed the tablet to supersede every other function if Al made contact.

  “I told you to leave me alone! Just go away!”

  Hope wrote, “We can’t do that.”

  Al wrote, “Yes you can! Jeez! It’s easy! Just don’t do what you’re doing now! Can’t you please get off my back?”