by Tarah Benner
The air inside me seems to expand as I slowly turn the knob. As soon as the latch clears the strike plate, I lean back and kick the door wide open.
The door flies back and hits the wall, and I step inside the room. My heart is hammering like a war drum in my chest, but the office is completely empty.
My eyes scan the long white executive’s desk and the ergonomic chair. The walls are painted Creamsicle orange, and there’s a sad tropical plant in the corner.
I step around to examine the desk and run my finger along the surface. It comes away covered in dust. No one has been here for a while.
I open a few drawers. There’s nothing inside. The office has the feel of a hotel room nobody stays in.
I glance over at Maggie, whose mouth has hardened into a thin line. I can tell she’s just as uneasy.
The room is too empty to be normal. Either Mordecai was never here, or he took the time to wipe the place clean.
I slip out of the room and clear the hallway. I glance from one corner to another, tempted to shoot out every camera I see. I have this eerie feeling that I’m being watched, though it could just be my paranoia.
Then there’s the issue of the missing bots. Mordecai has to be keeping them somewhere.
I jump at the sound of a door snapping shut. I look around, ready to shoot, but it’s just Maggie closing the office door.
We continue silently down the hallway. The golden light streaming through the windows gives the impression of being frozen in time. The light cuts through the empty space, illuminating the dust stirred by our feet.
There are only about half a dozen offices on this floor. We check each and every one, but they’re all completely empty.
As we near the last door, I feel frustration setting in. I’m not sure what I expected to find. Mordecai would have to be stupid to hide here — or too cocky to fear getting caught.
The last office we check belongs to Ziva herself. I step inside, and I’m immediately dazzled by the bright light streaming in through the large bay windows.
This office was clearly handpicked for her. It’s lighter and more spacious than all the rest, painted that same sky blue. Unusual tropical plants burst from every corner. A large white desk curves around to one side, and a white marble bar cart is parked near the door. Two orange chairs are positioned by the window, and a copy of Wired magazine is lying on the fragile side table.
Maggie walks along the edge of the room, running her fingers over the crystal ice bucket. It’s strange to think of Ziva in here — designing killer robots in a tropical paradise.
Then, all of a sudden, my blood runs cold. The pilot light is blinking on her desktop, causing the orb to pulse on and off.
I meet Maggie’s gaze. She’s noticed the same thing: The desktop wasn’t on when we first walked in.
I glance up at the ceiling. I don’t see any cameras, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any.
“Let’s get out of here,” I say finally. This room is giving me the creeps.
Maggie nods and heads straight for the door, but a second later, the desktop turns on, and a blue projection illuminates the room.
I stare. The network connection isn’t great, and the image wavers in the air. A man is standing in the desk, his lower half cut off by the solid white surface.
I watch him orient himself with the sensors, and the dread that’s been building inside me surfaces.
It’s Mordecai.
He’s not sitting in a dark room this time, but his face still has a pale fishy look. He doesn’t seem as smug as he did when we spoke at Maverick. He seems sweaty, agitated, and annoyed.
“Well, well,” he says, blinking very fast and attempting a creepy half smile. “I wondered how long it would take you to come here.”
I just glower at him. I refuse to be intimidated by a projection.
“Sergeant Wyatt . . . Ms. Barnes. Or is it Ms. Jones?” Mordecai’s gaze narrows. “Maggie . . . I was hoping I might get to view more of your delightful stories — stories about my bots and —”
“You mean your sister’s bots,” Maggie breaks in.
That’s my girl.
“Those bots belong to the entire Blum family,” says Mordecai. His tone is cool and even, but I can tell from the flare of his nostrils that Maggie has struck a nerve. “Those bots are my birthright . . . a right that I was robbed of years ago.” He takes a deep breath. “But no matter . . . My sister will pay for the pain she has caused.”
“The pain she’s caused?” Maggie snaps. “What about the pain you caused the families of all those innocent people you killed?”
“An unfortunate consequence of her selfish, greedy, spineless —”
“You shouldn’t blame Ziva,” I break in. “Leaving the company to her was your father’s decision.”
“A decision that was made under Ziva’s heavy-handed manipulation,” Mordecai spits. “My sister has always had my father’s ear. I’m certain she spent the last several years of his life whispering that I was unfit, incapable . . . All those days they spent shoulder to shoulder, turning out prototype after prototype.”
Mordecai’s description of Ziva’s relationship with their father is so bitter that his last words come out as a snarl.
“But no matter,” he breathes, dragging a deep breath in through his nose. “My sister will learn that she can’t twist the laws of nature without consequence. All this talk of applying the best of humanity to a life form that doesn’t age, doesn’t degrade . . . What she’s doing . . . It’s a perversion of science.”
I swallow. The longer Mordecai talks, the more I start to get the sense that we haven’t seen the worst of his plan.
“What did you do, Mordecai?” I ask.
“Was this really just to embarrass your sister?” Maggie breaks in. “To discredit BlumBot and everything your father accomplished?”
“Discredit —” Mordecai splutters. “No, no, no — not discredit. That would be too kind. What my sister believed and what my father believed . . . Those were two very different things. But my sister has poisoned his vision . . . taken it farther than he ever intended. I wish to show her the error of her ways — the horror of what she has done.”
“What you have done,” Maggie growls. “You’re the one who installed the malware that made the bots kill all those people.”
“I was simply showing the world the bots’ true potential — my sister’s version of singularity. Do you really think that these machines will want to help humans once they become self-aware? Do you really think they’ll be content with scrubbing our floors and fetching our coffee and issuing parking tickets?” He shakes his head. “No, they will not.”
“So this is about stopping the bots?” I ask. “You’ve got a funny way of showing it.”
Mordecai takes a thoughtful breath. “I suppose there is a part of me that wants to see my sister suffer . . . But if you knew what she had done . . .”
There’s a long beat of silence that chills me to the core.
“The time is right.”
“Right for what?” asks Maggie.
Her expression tells me she’s filled with dread just as I am — waiting for Mordecai to reveal his plan.
“Do you know what I did with BlumBot in all the years my sister was perfecting her humanoids?” he asks.
“You were in Russia,” says Maggie.
“Correct. I was tasked with overseeing the bots used as part of the denuclearization effort happening in Chebsara — just north of Moscow. Day in, day out, bots handled the physical disposal of excess plutonium by burning it in a fast reactor. Fifty tons of it!”
Maggie and I exchange a look. I have no clue where this is going.
“Mind you, this was only a fraction of the plutonium in the country — a tiny percentage of the total weapons-grade plutonium in the world.” Mordecai’s eyes grow dark. “The denuclearization program should really have been called the nuclear streamlining program. The Russians still have nuclear warheads. We still
have nuclear warheads. To see the scale of our human appetite for destruction . . . It was sobering.”
I raise my eyebrows. I don’t know what’s more messed up: the idea that the Russians had fifty tons of nuclear material to dispose of, or that a psychopath like Mordecai ever had access to weapons-grade plutonium.
“Russia is where I met our mutual friend, Lieutenant Buford,” he muses.
At the mention of Buford, my neck muscles tighten, and I hear Maggie’s intake of breath. Even though Buford is dead, the rage that stirs inside me is real.
“Buford . . . Now, Buford was ambitious, but he was weak.” Mordecai cracks a sad smile that doesn’t meet his eyes. “Buford was overseeing the air-force division charged with patrolling the surrounding area. The US feared interference from a rogue cell of the Bureau for Chaos or else some renegades out of Syria. They didn’t want the plutonium falling into the wrong hands before it could be destroyed, you see.”
I glance at Maggie. Now I’m really getting nervous.
“I immediately knew Buford could be useful,” Mordecai continues. “I just didn’t know how. He was easy to manipulate. He was disillusioned by the inefficiencies he saw in the air force, and he was disillusioned from the time he’d spent fighting the war on cyberterrorism. He was convinced that artificial intelligence could be the answer — a social watchdog that could step in when humanity grew too complacent to step away from its own runaway madness.”
Maggie’s gaze narrows. I can tell she doesn’t believe Mordecai, but his description of Buford fits with what I know.
Buford was fascinated by the SPIDER — almost worshipful of technology. I have no doubt he could have grown so enamored with the bots’ capabilities that he became putty in Mordecai’s hands.
“Buford’s usefulness became clear when he informed me that he had been approached about forming a new private military entity for Maverick Enterprises. My dear sister had signed on to build a satellite office on Elderon . . . It was serendipitous.”
“So you leaned on Buford to steal the SPIDER data,” I say.
“You’re getting ahead of me, Sergeant,” Mordecai chides. “Don’t you want to know the rest of the story?”
A smug half smile flickers across his face. He enjoys hanging this over my head. “Don’t you want to know how you came to be here?”
“I already know about Buford,” I growl. “I know he recruited me. He’d seen me fight. He wanted to use me to program the SPIDER.”
“Then you know you have Buford to thank for everything,” says Mordecai. “He gave you a path, and he gave me an opportunity to test the boundaries of the bots’ capabilities.”
“And you killed him,” Maggie whispers.
“Yes,” Mordecai admits. “That is regrettable. But sacrifices must be made. Buford became possessed by his ideas. He would not listen . . . He had outlived his usefulness to me.”
“Buford disobeyed you?” I ask.
“I told him to remain on Elderon. I told him that his incarceration would not last. He was in no real danger, you see . . . The buffoons running Maverick Enterprises hadn’t even determined how they were going to conduct legal proceedings aboard the space station. I told him to wait. I said, just wait for me, and everything will be sorted. Well, you know what he did . . .”
There’s a long beat of silence as I try to absorb what Mordecai just said.
“You told him to wait for you?” I ask, trying to keep the slow creep of panic out of my voice.
Mordecai looks slightly surprised and then cracks that off-putting half smile.
“Why, yes,” he says, his cold eyes lighting up. “Ziva should have known that I would come for her eventually . . . It has been too long since I’ve seen my sister.”
33
Maggie
At Mordecai’s words, all the blood pools at my feet. A horrible chill settles over me, and I feel the bile rise up in my throat.
“What did you say?” Jonah asks.
“I’m here now,” Mordecai repeats, that creepy smile still playing on his face. “I wanted to see my sister. And I needed to check on my girls. They’ll be needing to change out their fuel cells soon, and I needed to make sure the process went smoothly.”
My girls. Gag.
Jonah’s dread is palpable as the realization sets in. Mordecai is there — on the space station. On Elderon.
“Don’t look so shocked, Sergeant. Maverick Enterprises’s robotics program — well, Elderon, too — was built on the back of my father’s company. Our bots built that space station. My father is the reason there are now humans colonizing space. I wanted to experience that legacy he left.”
I swallow, frantically trying to do the math in my head. It only takes five hours to get from Earth to Elderon. He could have left at any time — if he had access to a shuttle.
“You’re bluffing,” says Jonah after a moment, and I can tell from his voice that he hopes it’s true.
“Oh!” Mordecai scoffs. “I do not bluff, Sergeant Wyatt. I have no reason to. We humans are very inefficient with all our lies. It wastes so much precious time.”
“How did you get there?” asks Jonah, clearly attempting to test the veracity of Mordecai’s outrageous claim.
A dreamy expression comes over Mordecai’s face, and I feel like I’ve been punched in the gut.
“That’s the wonderful thing about being filthy rich,” says Mordecai. “Of course, I would be even wealthier if Ziva had not bamboozled my father and sold our company to Maverick Enterprises. She really made a mess of things . . . My father is probably rolling over in his grave. But no matter. All things are fixable.” He smiles. “I bought a small shuttle for my own personal use a few years back. I thought that with everything we were planning, it might prove useful.”
My stomach turns over. If Mordecai isn’t bluffing . . . If he really is in space . . .
“In any case, I must be going,” says Mordecai. “As much as I have enjoyed our little chat, I came here to see my sister. We have some family business to attend to.”
“Wait —” says Jonah, lunging toward the desktop as though he might be able to physically stop Mordecai. But a second later, the desktop goes dark, and Jonah is left leaning into the air.
The silence seems to swallow us whole. Mordecai is gone.
“We have to warn them,” Jonah mutters, his knuckles white on the edge of the desk. “We have to warn Ziva.”
“And Tripp,” I say quietly. “Ping him first. We need him to mobilize the Space Force. If the bots are all getting new fuel cells . . . they’re never going to stop.”
Jonah’s jaw tightens, but he gives an offhand nod. I can tell he hates collaborating with Tripp, but their feud really is the least of our problems.
Tripp Van de Graaf is already listed in the contacts on Ziva’s office desktop. We ping him twice, but nobody answers.
Jonah swears. The Optix network must still be down, and Tripp is not in his office.
“Should we try Greaves?” I ask.
Jonah nods. “First Ziva. Greaves doesn’t know Mordecai. He doesn’t know what he’s capable of. Ziva does.”
Seconds seem to stretch into hours as Jonah pings Ziva. The anxious knot in my belly winds tighter and tighter. She isn’t answering either.
Finally, the orb on the desktop glows blue, and three blinking dots pop up. It’s connecting us to Ziva.
My heart bobs in my throat as we wait for her to appear. When she finally does, she looks paler than I remember, and her face is tight with worry. Her bouncy black curls look flat and damp, and a few strands are stuck to her forehead with sweat.
“Ziva!” Jonah’s voice is filled with relief.
“I’m sorry,” she says, her voice full of sadness. “I know what my brother has done. I cannot tell you how sorry I am.”
Something in her voice breaks my heart, and I feel a pang of sympathy for Ziva stronger than any I’ve experienced before.
“Have you spoken to Mordecai?” I ask.
; Ziva hesitates, and her eyes flicker off to the side. “Yes.”
“Then you know what he’s planning . . .”
Ziva nods. “My brother wants revenge. He believes I’ve tainted our father’s vision.”
We wait, hoping Ziva can shed some light on the insane ramblings of her deranged brother.
“Mordecai believes that my father never intended bots to be modeled after humans,” Ziva continues. “He believes that my father intended to give the bots the dignity of their own form — an identity separate from and superior to humans.”
“What does that even mean?” asks Jonah. I can tell he’s just as frustrated as I am. Neither Mordecai nor Ziva is making any sense. Maybe it runs in the family.
Ziva takes a deep breath. “My father and I always strived to create artificial life forms that embodied the best of humanity — without any of humanity’s weaknesses. Weakness for greed, weakness for envy, weakness for lust or violence . . . Mordecai has another vision.”
“And what is that?” asks Jonah impatiently.
Ziva glances behind her, but I can’t tell what she’s looking at. “Mordecai believes that creating bots that look and think like us will make them vulnerable to all the same mistakes. He believes our own ego has caused us to create beings that will only exacerbate the problems our species has created.”
“Is that why he ordered the bots to kill all those people?” Jonah growls.
Ziva shakes her head and draws a heavy breath. I can tell that she still hasn’t gotten to the heart of the matter, and she seems too horrified to put it into words.
“Mordecai doesn’t believe that humans and bots can work side by side,” she says. “He believes that as bots advance, they will begin to recognize the error of human ways.”
There’s a long beat of silence as we try to process this statement. I think back to what Mordecai said about the human appetite for destruction and wonder if he thinks the bots will be better.
“Mordecai believes . . .” Ziva trails off and looks at the floor, as if it physically pains her to give voice to her brother’s point of view. “He believes that bots are not meant to supplement human capability . . . He believes that the bots’ true purpose is to supplant us.”