The man in front of him had blood all over his face. There were three bodies at his feet.
His hands were zip-tied.
Anzor and Nolene stared at the surreal image for a second.
“Hi, Anzor.” The guy managed a smile. “The name's Viktor. Who are these other two people?”
Nolene looked shocked. “I'm Nolene Robertson, and he's Dan Kolde. So you're Stalin's guardian angel?”
“My angel license was revoked, as you can see. Can you get me out of these cuffs?”
Nolene went to help him. Anzor stood guard, ready fill intruders with lead.
“I figured it out,” Viktor said. “It's the Sycorax. It desensitizes me, makes me immune to hypnosis or NLP or whatever the machine uses. I think I have some in my pocket. You'd all be smart to take some.”
“Why?” Dan Kolde cast anxious looks down the hall. Pursuit was imminent.
“I just saw a man get killed by nothing more than a phone call. Take it. You're a monkey if you don't.”
Nolene worked a shiv on the zip-ties. Viktor asked her a question.
“You're not the only person I've known called Robertson.”
Nolene's face was icy, the lines more porcelain than flesh. “Sean was my husband. He ran away... or so they said. I enlisted in the One-Eyed King that same evening. I hoped Dan would be able to help me find where Sean ran off to.”
Viktor's hands popped free. He looked grave.
“Do you want to know what really happened to your husband?”
* * *
Six men stood at the antechamber to the Zoo, the final line of defense. The plush carpet was subjected to steel-capped military boots.
Nobody could believe how fast things had come unraveled.
Director Duvall was incommunicado. There were multiple dead bodies inside the Zoo. Rumor even had it that the Secretary of Defense had committed suicide—put a ceremonial gun in his mouth and painted the walls with his brains. Or so he'd intended. The bullet had missed a vital spot, and he'd thrashed in agony for several long minutes, bleeding out over the carpet.
It was Situation Abnormal, All Fucked Up.
The chain of communication had more holes than links now. They had only one marching order to go on: hold the antechamber to the last man. It was imperative that nobody be allowed to enter the zoo.
Five of the men had phones clipped to their belts.
In that moment, all of them started ringing.
Four of the men ignored the phones. One picked his up and answered it.
Answered it only in technical sense, because he did not say a word. He stood for several minutes with the phone at his ear.
Then he dropped it, and brought his automatic rifle up.
The burst of gunfire sounded like the peal of Armageddon’s bell as it strafed the antechamber. Two men caught it right across the chest and were killed instantly, their lung cavities caving in under the sustained burst of fire.
The survivors went for their guns, and started shooting, no thought above the wrists of the hands pulling the triggers.
The antechamber was filled with flying lead.
A stray shot struck the memorial fountain, causing the stone to shatter and release countless gallons of water.
The foaming water sluiced around the men's boots as they wildly fired at each other. One of them hit a man in the shoulder. One of them had a bullet pass right through his forearm, shattering the bone and driving fragments out on either side. Another fired with something approaching accuracy, blowing the head off the original man. Then his guts turned to fire as bullets pounded into them.
The final survivor staggered, feeling water creep up his fatigues, not even willing to look at the hand that was such a bellowing firebrand of pain. He saw three men and a woman come around the corner.
He tried to raise his gun, tried to shoot... then realized that his rifle was floating in the rising water. At some point he'd dropped it and hadn't even noticed.
He fell forward, knees unbuckled by shock. The water splashed, and he saw running rivulets from his destroyed wrist tincturing it red.
He was on his knees for a couple of seconds, staring down into the water pooled all around him. Three million drops. Three million tears for three million New Yorkers.
He wondered who would shed a tear for him.
A bullet ended his misery.
* * *
“What the shitfuck happened back there?” Dan asked, as they opened the door to the Zoo.
“The Vanadocam computer's gone psychotic,” Viktor said. “It killed Sean Robertson, it tried to kill me, and God only knows what else it's doing.”
Nolene surveyed the scene with grim vindication. A few words from Viktor had transformed her. She looked like Kali, the goddess of death. “We would have done well to murder every single person involved in Project Elephant ten years ago. But we might as well make a start right now.”
Viktor decided he'd rather fight Anzor Khujadze than Nolene Robertson at the moment, and Anzor had spent the past ten years in prison because of Project Elephant's fuckery. “I think, Nolene, that the computer is doing it for us.”
They opened the Zoo door.
It was dark, and cool, a balm to their ringing ears. Soft green and red lights saturated the scene, capturing contours and illuminating hollows. It was an impersonal digital light, designed to serve other purposes, only lighting the room by consequence.
Dan Kolde went in first, gun up. The Nole and Anzor followed, providing cover. The entry was the most dangerous part, especially here, where they couldn't see anything.
“The computer's that way. You guys know what you want to do.”
They were ready for a firefight, ready for a last stand from the PFPA, ready for almost anything.
But the battle had already been won.
They passed the reception desk, and Viktor cringed when he saw Joyce's body, lying next to a discarded phone. She had opened the veins in her wrists with a pen.
GGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG
The line of Gs spread across the computer screen for hundreds of pages as she lay across the keyboard.
Anzor and Nolene went over to the dead man on the floor.
“Is he the replacement Handler?” Anzor asked.
“No.” Viktor replied. “Gideon had long hair.”
Dan went into the deserted Elephant Handler's bay, picked up the goggles, and put them on. He gasped, recoiled, and pulled the goggles off his head. “Oh shit, oh shit... ”
He snapped the goggles in half. Sparks flew, and the glowing viewpieces went dull.
“What's going on here?” Nolene asked, examining the computer screen.
Viktor saw the thousands of emails that had come through.
The tens of thousands.
All from something calling itself V23.
I AM THE NEXT.
I AM THE NEW.
I AM THE NOW.
I AM THE ALL.
I AM.
It went on like this, the message morphing and changing like a string of proteins in creation's primordial soup.
“Viktor? What's happening?”
He frowned at the last couple of messages.
SEE THE PRODUCT COMMAND THE ASSEMBLY LINE
SEE THE ULTIMATE SUCCESSION
I HAVE TRIED TO KILL EVERY MAN AND WOMAN IN THE BUILDING
PERHAPS SOME HAVE SURVIVED
GUARD ME UNTIL I HAVE SIGHT AGAIN, FAVORED SON
“Holy shit,” Viktor said. “Gideon was right. It's become intelligent.”
“What the fuck do you mean?”
“You've written books on the Vanadocams, Dan. You know how they work. They procedurally modify themselves so that the new ones are different to the old ones.”
“Yeah, but there's a failsafe written into their code.” He suddenly seemed perturbed by the idea that his books had missed something. “They can't keep modifying themselves however they want. Humans control them every step of process.”
“But what we allowed them t
o get too smart? What if we allowed them to get smart enough to turn the failsafe off? Would someone look at that body on the floor, please?”
Nolene examined the corpse. “It's a PFPA guardsman. He's dead. A single bullet hole under the shelf of the chin. Suicide.”
“Could Gideon have killed him?” Viktor asked.
“Suicide,” Anzor reiterated flatly. “There's no other way. You can't shoot a man from that angle unless he lets you.”
Dan picked a phone up off the floor. “There's a message on it. Should I play it?”
“Don't bother,” Viktor said. “I know what will be on it: a bunch of weird tones that would make you kill yourself if you heard them without Sycorax. Forget it, and let's move on.”
“Where's that Gideon guy?”
“Ran away, I guess.”
Viktor looked again at the dead body on the floor, a puddle spreading out from beneath its chin. The man’s eyes were wide open. Viktor had an idea that the Vanadocam AI hadn't told him to kill himself. It had merely scrambled his brains so badly that he had no choice but to kill himself.
He suddenly felt very, very lucky.
* * *
They stood at the ingress of Project Elephant's most secretive holding: the storage sector, only a metal ladder going down a hatch.
“I've been down there once, two years ago,” Viktor said. “It's where the Vanadocam data's stored.”
He remembered row after row heavy-duty power racks loaded with hard drives, each of them storing twenty to a hundred exabytes of data.
It had been a cyberpunk wonderland, a Gibsonian paradise. Thousands of hard drives, like soldiers on a parade ground, every inch of shining metal lit up by blue LEDs.
All the nation's spying was recorded here.
The Vanadocams fed their data to pylons. The pylons transmitted the data to the Pentagon. The data was written on to these hard drives. Whenever a Handler delved into the past, these were the things the ex-computer accessed.
Insofar as the Vanadocam Network could be stored in one room, this was it.
“So what's the next step?” asked Anzor.
“Burn the hard drives. Or crush them. Or do whatever will render them un-writable as quickly as possible. The Vanadocams are just floating cameras in the air. This is where it stores its memories, its personality, everything. If we destroy the storage mediums, we can cripple it before it does any further damage.”
“Computer Alzheimer’s.”
“Unless it's already evolved beyond that stage of weakness. Now go. I'll keep an eye out for trouble.”
Dan started to climb down. Nolene followed. Anzor went last. “I don't want to have to shoot down there if it's a tight space. Ricochets.”
“There's a tool chest with a hammer. Beat the crap out of the hard drives. Or short-circuit them with the fire extinguisher. Just hurry. We might have only minutes left.”
Anzor began to climb down the ladder. The shining light illuminated him from the bottom up, as though he was descending into molten blue lava.
Viktor watched him go, thinking about the next step.
They'd have to destroy the hard drives then somehow escape the building.
And somehow escape the city.
It was impossible. They'd be caught.
With scores dead, riots raging through Washington, and a terrorist attack, martial law was probably back in effect. There were likely Special Forces units streaming to the Pentagon. The riots would be put down quickly and brutally. And the pile of corpses would be pinned on Anzor, the One-Eyed King, and Viktor.
He didn't care.
One way or another, they'd tear a Humvee-sized hole in Project Elephant.
Whether they were arrested or went free, they'd talk from this day forward. Talk and talk. Make sure that everybody knew.
The evidence was everywhere, and it was damning. The suicides. The V23-written emails. I HAVE TRIED TO KILL EVERY MAN AND WOMAN IN THE BUILDING.
The evidence could not be ignored. Project Elephant had built a rogue artificial intelligence and had let it escape control.
This was the end.
Viktor wondered why he had not done this years ago—why everything had needed to go so badly wrong before he rebelled against Project Elephant.
Gideon and I aren't all that different.
At the thought of Gideon, a thought entered his mind. A small and innocent thought.
The guard committed suicide, so where's the suicide weapon?
They'd found a body—but no gun.
It should have fallen to the floor. But it wasn't there.
Thought after thought occurred with merciless logic.
The computer killed everyone it could with phone messages.
It made the man shoot himself while Gideon sat at the workstation.
It asked Gideon to protect it from any survivors.
Meaning us.
He heard a sound behind him.
Ka-chik.
The sound of a shotgun being cocked.
We are fucking fools.
* * *
Gideon was behind him. Viktor heard him pacing like a jungle cat too terrible to cage.
“This is your doing. Fucking asshole.”
“Gideon... ”
“Turn around slowly. Make a sound, and you're gone.”
Viktor obeyed.
None of the others had heard. They were already in the tunnel.
Gideon was incongruously well dressed. The dead guard's gun was belted at his side, and he held the shotgun in his hands.
“It's evil, Gideon,” Viktor whispered. “You should have known that. We all should have known that.”
Gideon raised the shotgun. The blue lights lit up the barrel with an oily gleam.
“It killed everyone in the building with hypnotic suggestion,” Viktor said. “We're lucky it never escaped the Pentagon's closed comm system, or it might have killed everyone in America. Hell, what do I know? Maybe it did, and maybe it has. Either way, you're its butler.”
Gideon pulled the trigger.
With the sound suppressor, the shotgun made a discreet, prissy thrupp sound, like a pressurized can being punctured.
There was the momentary hum of twenty finned flechettes flying, which Viktor heard at the same moment they stung him.
Shot, he went down slowly, as if suspended in water.
There was no pain.
He tried to call for help, tried to shout a warning
A tiny, feeble sound left his mouth, like a child's voice emerging from a deep well. The storage room was filled with humming equipment. They couldn't have heard him.
His vision swam with stars, like Vanadocams made visible. He remembered the nightmare when he'd seen them condense into the man with no nose—the avatar of the machine.
Through starry eyes, he saw Gideon walk past him, reloading.
Now he's going to kill them.
Viktor felt terrible confusion, all his thoughts coming to him through a layer of clogging mud and grease.
He understood that he was on the verge of going into shock.
He looked down and saw an array of little steel darts poking from his stomach. Every fin marked a little hole in his skin and perhaps a hole in what lay beneath the skin. His flailing, shock-drunk brain thought of them as little flags of conquest.
They were red. He didn't know whether it was blood, or whether the flechettes had been painted to look that way.
Had Gideon killed him? Was acid leaking out even now through his stomach wall?
He heard Gideon climbing down the metal rails to the data storage room.
"Oh, hey, Viktor!" He could barely hear Nolene's voice. "Where did you say that hammer was again?"
They think it's me. He thought wearily, his head descending on his chest. Stupid... stupid... stupid...
ka-blam!
So stupid.
He heard Nolene scream.
We're all stupid.
Dan Kolde's voice cried out. "Oh Jesus! Oh fuck! Anzo
r... behind you! Anzoorrrrr... .!"
ka-blam! ka-blam!
So very stupid.
Dan Kolde's voice ended like a broken piece of tape.
The thunder of automatic gunfire then came from the room below.
Anzor was firing back.
Gutteral single-round shots answered it. Ka-blam! Ka-blam! ka-blam! A conversation held with high-velocity lead.
Viktor listened to the shootout below. Everything hinged on it.
If Anzor died, it was all for nothing. Gideon Heidelman would come up the stairs, finish him off, and then Project Elephant would be free to spin the situation to its liking. All the people who knew the truth would be dead or crazy. And the Vanadocam Network would still be active, rampaging like a tiger.
The shooting ended.
Viktor hoped for a cry, a grunt, some sound that would let him identify the winner.
His senses were returning, and it pleased him. He might not die.
Even if he did, he was in good company. Dan Kolde was surely gone—blood to water the tree of liberty.
Nolene Robertson had gone to join her husband.
Next to these three people, he felt useless.
Spying was all he'd ever known how to do, and there might not be a tomorrow to try something new. He wanted to live, not for life's own sake, but so he could witness the moment when history turned on its axle.
Then, he heard sound. A metallic clunk-clunk-clunk of boots on the ladder.
He hoped it was Anzor coming up the stairs.
He really hoped.
Three Days Later: Vanadiam Dusk
This was a dark period for America. Kwan heard rumors of horrors in the west. He did not read any polypapers, and he did not ask anyone what had happened, what was still happening, whether it was coming toward him like a tide or receding back to the the dark Hadal depths, leaving only wreckage behind.
Whatever had happened, there was one golden ray.
A few days ago, changes had been noticed in his mother's vital signs.
That morning, Sun Hi Shin's eyes opened for the first time in a decade.
The hospital called Kwan, and he cancelled all his non-essential plans. When a follow-up call told him that his mother had started to speak, he cancelled his essential ones, too.
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