Louis felt a tinge of empathy.
How weird, he thought, for a robot.
“You will do it,” Alex said, and to make his point he aimed the remote at him, placing the red dot again on his chest, reminding him of the microchip that enslaved him.
“All right,” said Louis. “I’ll shoot this stupid fool.”
“Yes,” General Popov said. “He is a stupid fool.”
“He’s not the only one,” muttered Louis.
“Free the prisoner!” Popov shouted. The soldier opened the cage.
The skittish prisoner froze for a moment, wild eyed, scrawny and unshaven. He seemed to evaluate his options and surely none of them looked good.
“There is a small door – see it? – on the other side of this room,” Popov told the prisoner. “If you can get to it, you are a free man. Give it a try. It’s not so far. We won’t chase you. We will only watch. You have but one obstacle. And it’s not even human. Do you think you can outmaneuver a machine? You, the product of so many thousands of years of evolution, up against this – a beta test that didn’t exist one month ago?”
The prisoner eyed the door on the other side of the room. He looked at the warrior robot. He made a move like he was turning back toward his cage.
Then he immediately spun around and sprinted.
The prisoner ran across the length of the floor in a desperate scramble for freedom.
“Shoot him!” Popov demanded.
Louis quickly turned and faced the skinny, fleeing figure. He lifted his right arm. His vision gained a second layer displaying a scope. The scope locked in on the target and followed him across the room with pinpoint accuracy.
Arms still lifted, Louis did not initiate gunfire.
Instead, in a sudden redirection, he thrust his clawed hand into his own chest with all the might he could muster.
He punctured his own shell, closed his big fingers around a chunk of electronic components and pulled them out as if he were extracting his own beating heart.
Recalling the location of the red laser dot, Louis knew he had succeeded in gouging out the microchip that controlled him – and a heap of other metallic mass.
As the prisoner escaped out the door, Louis hurled the fistful of his robot guts into the protective glass protecting the Russian team of observers.
The heavy sheet of glass fell back on them.
Several of the scientists, led by Alex, pointed their remotes at Louis and tried to shut him off – to no effect.
“Shoot him down!” Popov yelled.
“With what?” said Alex. “The guns we just proved don’t work on him?”
Louis tested the running ability of his warrior costume and was pleased by his fast pace and enormous stride. He reached the edge of the hangar fully aware there was no door big enough to allow him to exit, so he made his own.
Louis plowed through the side of the building, creating a rain of debris, and stepped into the gray outdoors of Moscow.
Louis had no idea where he was going, but proceeded forward anyway. He figured it was a really long walk home. He didn’t know if he was equipped with a GPS system. He just knew he didn’t want to stay here anymore. He was done being a plaything for others.
Louis was tired of being manipulated – first by the US and now the Russians. He didn’t want to help rich Americans live longer. He didn’t want to help the Russians create a super army. He just wanted to be left alone. His years of quiet time in a cell with a simple life of books, meals, exercise and society’s general disinterest didn’t seem so bad now.
The sidewalks were too small, so he used the street as his pathway. There were cars and trucks in the street but they quickly swerved to one side – sometimes into things or each other – to avoid the metallic monstrosity glaring down at them. One car hit Louis straight on, but it didn’t hurt, it was just a nuisance. The driver, however, looked very hurt and screamed in pain or terror or both. Louis shoved the vehicle out of his way.
The immediate area was dense with various drab buildings of the same size, but up ahead Louis could see a cluster of modern high-rises and decided to make it his destination. This must be downtown Moscow, he told himself. Smashing some buildings would be fun. He remembered his childhood Godzilla fantasy, setting up the Playskool village, all the little toy houses and businesses and vehicles and little peg people, and then attacking them like the oversized monsters he watched on television. As a small child, the fantasy attack made him feel empowered. He systematically wrecked the Playskool town, roaring like a beast with uncontrolled fury.
Maybe there’s an Empire State Building I can climb, he mused.
People were spilling out of buildings to get a glimpse of him and then hurrying back in for shelter. Louis waved his thick robot arms and made a menacing growl. It was fun. He was truly enjoying himself.
He approached a stately building with pillars out front and people scrambling up its concrete steps to hide inside. There was some kind of colored Russian logo out front, and Louis figured it was a bank.
He stopped and considered entering the bank to perform the ultimate bank robbery. Who needed Charlie Chaplin when you could wear a Transformers costume? But he knew spending the money in his current state would be next to impossible. His appearance was just too obvious to blend anonymously into some community.
What he needed was a deserted island.
Louis heard a single, urgent, pulsing siren fill the air. Then, very quickly, one became two became four became a dozen.
White cars with blue stripes approached, bearing ‘Mockba’ on the side. The Moscow police.
They positioned their vehicles to block him and shot a spray of bullets, tiny pellets that did nothing. Louis kicked one of the police cars into a building with ease, shattering a glass storefront. When a police officer ventured too close, firing a bigger but equally ineffective gun, Louis picked him up and flung him with a flick of his wrist like a frisbee.
Louis hated all cops, no matter what country. He was an equal-opportunity cop smasher.
He continued his steady advancement down the street, stomping through confused intersections. The surroundings became nicer – cathedrals, gardens, fountains and various statues of people of apparent importance. So much to destroy. This was an excellent set up for venting his pent-up rage. He was King Kong and Godzilla rolled into one. This could be the most fun I’ve ever had.
Then the military helicopters came. No surprise there. The first one fired a rocket at him that bounced off his head and he laughed it off. The second missile, however, scored a bull’s-eye into the gaping hole in his chest that he himself had created. There was an internal explosion and Louis felt some of his physical coordination turn sloppy as more inner components became damaged. The helicopters would not leave him alone, swarming above his head like mosquitoes. He fired ammunition from his right arm at a chopper that got too close and reduced it to a fiery heap on the sidewalk. Surely the Russian tanks were not far behind. He was willing to fight them all, but this oversized madness quickly grew tiresome. One image in particular dampened his enthusiasm for destruction. On the sidewalk, a frightened mother quickly led two small boys away from the war zone. The youngsters were crying. One of them had a broken, bleeding arm, perhaps struck by some shrapnel.
At that moment, Louis realized he just wanted one thing: to follow through with the original fate he was handed in prison when they discovered his cancer. He didn’t want to be somebody’s robot. He didn’t want to be a thinking hard drive probed and passed around like a trophy or keepsake.
He just wanted to be done with it all.
And he couldn’t trust the Russian military to do the job.
As the noisy thumping of helicopters grew around him and additional police sirens squealed in the distance, Louis knew it was time to truly leave this planet for whatever waited – or didn’t – on the ot
her side.
Stepping through the litter of abandoned cars in the middle of the street, he approached a big blue-and-green gas station. It offered several fueling pumps under a broad canopy, labeled with a garbled brand name composed of letters and symbols Louis couldn’t possibly pronounce. A large fueling truck sat idle nearby, its driver no doubt in flight on foot, maybe already blocks away, which was a wise, lifesaving act.
Louis stood before the long, silver truck propped on numerous pairs of wheels. He made a fist and punched a hole in its side. A steady stream of gasoline immediately began streaming out.
One more strength test, Louis thought to himself. Let’s try out this barbell.
In his wide, clutching hands, Louis gripped beneath the truck…and lifted it off the ground.
He didn’t feel the strain but could sense he was taxing the physical strength of his robotic armor. With a mighty push, he held the gasoline truck over his head with powerful, stiff arms.
The gasoline rained down on him. He tipped his metallic face upward to catch its steady flow like a welcome shower.
Gasoline spilled all over his head and upper body, entering every crevice, soaking into his internal connections, coating his surface. He stood in the same position for a long moment as the truck emptied its contents, placing him in a huge puddle of fuel. When the flow reduced to a trickle, and then just some final drops, Louis tossed the truck away, letting it crash loudly on a row of parked cars, crushing the vehicles with a burst of shattered windows.
Soaked in gasoline, Louis turned and looked back at his path of destruction and felt pretty damn good. It was much more fulfilling than the Playskool village of his youth. Helicopters continued to hound him, crowding the sky, and it was time to give them an explosive finale.
Louis looked down at his left arm. He aimed it at himself and activated the flamethrower.
The inferno consumed him.
Although covered in flames, Louis felt no pain. He did not want his digitized brain to survive. He did not want to think about anything ever again. He did not want to awaken in some other stupid trap. As Louis burned brightly, he feared his mental faculties might survive with a stubborn resilience and he should do something about it.
He reached up with his burning arms, clutched his burning head and pushed inward, maximum strength. He crushed his own skull with all his might.
His vision turned black. He lost all balance. He sensed he was falling, toppling to the ground. He landed hard, still burning.
Louis experienced the death throes of his digitized consciousness. As the mangled black box melted, it hurled a sputtering backlog of memories at him, sights and sounds that had been buried in his subconscious but rarely – if ever – returned to the surface.
Louis flashed backed to his prison cell. Alone and filled with hate, kicking the walls.
Then, in a weird twist of time and space, memories opened up from other periods of his life: exhilarating bank robberies, followed by his anger-filled teenage years and even glimpses from his early childhood. Louis returned to a grassy schoolyard where the other children teased him, hit him, even spat on him, and the teachers did nothing to stop it. He re-experienced the wallops of a belt from a raging, drunken father.
Louis fell further back into memories he never knew he had. He re-experienced the confinement of bars, but these were not prison bars, they were sketched from wood. He revisited the inside of his baby crib, his silky blanket, and a single stuffed bear toy, the brown one with the three black dots: eye, eye and nose. Bobo! Then Louis plummeted into the very deepest recesses of his brain, a memory of total darkness and loud noises followed by flashes of light, chaos, fear, more light, more chaos, voices, and an emergence into a bright room of people and the sound of his own cries and the sensation of being handled, rotated, shoved toward faces that looked very much like young versions of his parents.
I’m being born!
Astounded, Louis absorbed himself in this deeply submersed memory unleashed from his consciousness. He became consumed by a spiritual awe. Then the light receded, all the images went away, and he returned to darkness, this time forever.
Chapter Eighteen
Alex sat at the long, mahogany table with eight other men and one woman representing intelligence and military agencies of the Kremlin, including the Foreign Intelligence Service and Federal Security Service. General Popov was joined by two solemn defense chiefs. Large Russian flags stood firmly in stands at the front of the room, and the heavy drapes were closed, only admitting a hint of outside light. Alex tried not to squirm in his white, upholstered chair. The aftermath of Ares’ destructive stroll was not pleasant and required more cover up than the country’s ugliest fashion model. But Alex quickly focused on the positive – and the long term.
“Ares was the first in a new generation of Russian warriors,” he said in a measured tone. “He will not be the last. We will rebuild. We have the knowledge and expertise. We can now perform our own digitization of human consciousness. We can construct our own shells to host the digitized mind. There is nothing the Americans can do that we cannot duplicate and improve upon.”
His words were met with silence.
To fill the silence, Alex continued talking. “We are already ahead of them. The integration of a digitized mind and military forces isn’t even on their radar. They are taking baby steps while we—”
“We can’t be so sure,” spoke up Boris Spakov. Spakov was a thin-lipped, frowning official from Foreign Intelligence Services and a former KGB man. “We have new intelligence that gives us reason to be concerned. There may be more happening in America than meets the eye.”
Alex looked at him. “In all my years with that team, I never heard a word—”
“Don’t expect to know everything, comrade,” Spakov said. “Please listen to what I have to say. All of you. Our US surveillance team has reported a meeting between Giamatti and the president of the United States that took place at the White House on Thursday afternoon.”
“They are friends. They have been friends for a long time, going back to the president’s days in Congress,” said Alex.
“This was official business,” Spakov said. “While we do not know the nature of their meeting, we do know it was highly classified and involved top members of their government.”
“We don’t know what they talked about?”
“No,” said Spakov. “But we’re determined to find out. One possibility is that they, too, are pursuing a marriage of this technology with their country’s military capabilities.”
Alex found the conclusion slightly paranoid but chose not to voice this opinion.
Tomas, a broad-shouldered man with dark hair and rimless spectacles, and the head of the Russian Federal Security Service, spoke next. “We intend to find out. For every plan by the United States, we must have a counter plan.”
“Our intelligence team in the United States is stepping up its surveillance of key individuals and we hope to learn more,” said Spakov. “While the White House is a very difficult target, we feel we have a good chance with Mr. Giamatti and members of his inner circle.”
“We still have a very important asset belonging to Mr. Giamatti,” Tomas said. “A human shell. I believe it could come in handy.”
“Tom Nolan,” Alex said. He sat up straight in his chair. “Yes. We have the Tom Nolan replica. It is in our possession.”
Tomas said, “I’d like to put it to use.”
“I’m sorry?” Alex said.
“You know Mr. Giamatti,” Tomas said. “You know the players on his team. You could infiltrate them again.”
Alex looked at the faces around the table in disbelief. “But surely by now they know I was a spy. They would never accept me. I would be captured and thrown in their jails.”
“No,” Spakov said. “Not as yourself. As Mr. Nolan. We know he is staying at the mansion. We wi
ll conduct an exchange, one Tom Nolan for another, without their knowledge. We will have the ultimate insider.”
“You want me to go back…as Tom Nolan?” said Alex.
“Yes,” Tomas said. “You are going to experience this new technology from the inside. You will be the first brain transfer on Russian soil.”
Alex said nothing, stunned.
“You don’t have to agree,” Tomas said, “because this is an order coming from our president. Your agreement has already been secured.”
Alex looked down at the table. He nodded with compliance.
“What’s the matter?” asked Spakov. “Don’t you have confidence in your own expertise? You helped create it. Now you will live it.”
Several others around the table murmured in agreement.
“I will do it for my country,” Alex said.
“Of course you will,” said Tomas. He pushed a photo across the table to Alex. Alex took it and looked into the eyes of a gaunt, familiar face.
Tomas stated, “You will return to the United States. You will meet with our top spy in America, Sergei Vladin. Together you will be invincible.”
Alex nodded in recognition. Sergei was a legend, a brilliant Russian spy with a long record of significant international influence and interference. He was known as ‘The Stick’, because of his very tall, thin frame. He had a scar down his left cheek that dated back to the Cold War. His accomplishments included the manipulation of political elections around the world.
“It will be an honor,” said Alex. The words came out automatically, robotic, without deliberation. He knew it was what they expected to hear.
Chapter Nineteen
Tom Nolan paced the small, elegant guest room in Giamatti’s mansion, growing stir crazy from multiple days of captivity. This was a polite, unavoidable and mutually understood confinement, perhaps, and super comfortable, but it was like being locked up in a penitentiary all the same. He wanted his life sorted out. He ached to be reunited with Emily and Sofi.
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