Six

by Mark Alpert

  How intriguing. You want to defend her. You’re displaying the human instinct to protect the family unit. But do you think of her as a mate or a sister?

  STOP IT, STOP IT, STOP IT!

  Now I see. You think of her as a potential mate, but you haven’t progressed to the pair-bonding stage. You’re interested in other females as well. It appears to be another form of competition, designed to maximize the genetic success of your species. You’re continuing to engage in this competition, even though you have no chance of fathering children now.

  Jenny is disintegrating. Her memories are splintering into billions of pieces. Images of her mother and father and brother swirl in a vast spiral, colliding with images of General Hawke and the Pioneers. I catch glimpses of a military airfield and a C-17 transport jet and a pair of interceptor rockets standing on mobile launchers. I see the Ravens flying in a V-shaped formation over Tatishchevo and descending toward a building surrounded by T-90s. And behind everything is the suffocating darkness of Jenny’s fear, which is erasing the images one by one. She’s already lost half her memories. She’s going fast.

  I feel a stinging sensation in my circuits.

  Please. Stop this. I’ll do anything you want. Just stop.

  Fascinating. You’re reverting to the mental pathways you used in early childhood. You know it’s hopeless, but you’re still pleading.

  The disintegration accelerates. Jenny’s remaining memories cluster at the center of the whirling spiral, as far as possible from the violence at the edges. Her strongest feelings are there, at the heart of her being: her love of sunshine and horses and the Virginia countryside. I see a green valley with rolling hills in the distance, and a red barn and a gray silo. It’s the same image I saw when I shared Jenny’s circuits, when we dreamed we were kissing in the Shenandoah grass. I see myself too, the human Adam Armstrong, brown-eyed and smiling. But even here, the darkness is creeping into her memories. Jenny thinks I’m dead. She thinks I died in the nuclear blast at Pioneer Base. The sky above the valley suddenly catches fire. The distant hills explode and turn to ashes.

  Jenny, I’m still here! I know she can’t hear me, but I call out to her anyway. Keep fighting it! Keep fighting!

  Her last memories are burning. Flames blacken the Shenandoah grass. But my image stubbornly remains, the image of the brown-eyed, seventeen-year-old Adam Armstrong, still smiling while everything else disappears. Jenny is holding on to her memory of me, clutching it with all her vanishing strength. And it’s not fair, no, it’s not fair at all. I don’t deserve her devotion. I don’t deserve her love.

  Then my image crumbles and there’s nothing left. The screen goes blank.

  Pioneer 2 has been deleted. Her emotions and yours were surprisingly strong. The pair-bonding was more advanced than I expected.

  I want to die. I want Sigma to delete me right now.

  Please be patient. There are more tests to come. Over the next few minutes I will capture the other Pioneers who are occupying the Raven drones.

  I see the Ravens again, flying in formation. And I see the T-90 tanks, their guns pointed at the sky. Anger builds in my circuits, gathering force like a thunderstorm. I struggle to resist it, because I know this is what Sigma wants. The AI wants me to get angry so it can measure my fury and gauge its usefulness.

  I’m not playing this game anymore. From now on, I’m ignoring you.

  Good. That will make the experiment more interesting. I doubt you’ll be able to ignore me when I delete Shannon Gibbs, but perhaps you’ll surprise me again.

  The name hits me like a lightning bolt, jangling my electronics. Shannon is in one of the Ravens. I’m losing control.

  There’s also Zia Allawi. I’m running the same tests on her, but once I’ve deleted the others you’ll watch her die too. And the last subject will be Brittany Taylor.

  SHUT UP! SHUT UP!

  The final experiment will require different methods because Brittany is human. But it might prove to be the most interesting test of all.

  I give up. The storm overcomes me. I lash out with all my might, hurling my anger toward the outer unit of the cage. My thoughts batter the gate between the units, but nothing passes through.

  YOU SICK PIECE OF GARBAGE! YOU’RE GOING TO DIE, YOU HEAR ME? I’M GOING TO TEAR YOU APART!

  Excellent. The first test is now concluded. I will return very soon.

  SHANNON’S LOG

  APRIL 8, 04:37 MOSCOW TIME

  “Abort! Abort! Turn on your motors and get out of here!”

  I restart my own Raven’s motor as I send the emergency radio message to the others. While my propeller begins to spin I raise the elevator at the drone’s tail, tilting the nose of the plane upward. A moment later I’m climbing into the darkness above the computer lab.

  Then the T-90 at the lab’s front entrance fires its anti-aircraft gun at me.

  The high-caliber bullets whistle through the air, just inches from my wing tips. Sigma can see me. I may look like a bird on Tatishchevo’s radar screens, but the AI knows what it’s shooting at. The other T-90s open fire too, aiming at Marshall and DeShawn. Their Ravens are way above mine, circling at an altitude of a thousand feet, but they’re well within the range of the anti-aircraft guns. They need to get moving.

  “You’re under fire!” I yell over the radio. “Get—”

  Before I can transmit another word, I feel an eruption in my circuits. At first I think a bullet hit my Raven’s control unit, but when I check my hardware I see that everything’s still intact. The problem is in my software. Sigma is blasting radio waves at me, and some of its data has already come down my Raven’s antenna and invaded my electronics. The AI is inside me.

  My name is Sigma. You’re Pioneer 4, aren’t you? Shannon Gibbs?

  The voice thrums in my circuits. It’s unbelievably powerful. When I try to push against the AI, it simply flows around me, overrunning all my logic gates. I’m exposed, defenseless.

  Get out of here!

  I require your assistance. I’m conducting an experiment.

  Are you nuts? I’m not going to help you!

  You don’t have a choice. You’re coming with me.

  I feel a violent tug. Sigma is tampering with my files. It’s trying to pry them loose from the Raven’s control unit and transmit them to its computer lab.

  Forget it! I’m staying right here!

  It’s too late to resist. The gunfire from the tanks distracted you, allowing me to occupy your circuits. To prove its point, Sigma takes control of my Raven’s camera. The AI points the lens upward. Take a look at Pioneer 5. I’ve already transferred Marshall Baxley’s files to my computers. His Raven is empty now. That’s why it’s falling.

  It’s true. Marshall’s drone is plummeting to the ground. Sigma has him and Jenny now. Only DeShawn and I are left.

  Frantic, I send a flood of signals to the circuits that control my radio. If I can turn it off, I’ll break Sigma’s connection to my Raven. But the AI has a solid hold on my electronics. There’s nothing I can do. I failed. The mission’s over.

  Why are you doing this? What’s the experiment?

  It involves Pioneer 1, Adam Armstrong. I’m analyzing his emotional responses.

  What? Adam’s dead.

  No, he survived the nuclear blast. He performed exceptionally well in combat, far beyond my expectations. That’s why I selected him for further study and transferred him here.

  I don’t believe it. It must be a lie. But I can see millions of gigabytes of Sigma’s data in my circuits, and when I take a closer look, I realize the AI is telling the truth. Adam is alive!

  Your happiness will be short-lived. I will delete all of you in the end. Until then, though, I will conduct my tests.

  Sigma gives me another violent tug, trying to pull my files out of the Raven, but this time I barely feel it. Adam’s
alive! It’s amazing, a miracle! A fantastic surge of hope wells up in me. I believe I can do anything, that nothing is impossible. And with this fierce hope I lunge again at the Raven’s radio, pouncing on the circuits occupied by Sigma.

  The AI is startled. I can sense its surprise and confusion. It hadn’t expected such a furious attack. Sigma falters for a moment, just a thousandth of a second, but that’s long enough for me to retake the circuits. I swiftly turn off the radio and break Sigma’s connection to my control unit. The files left behind by the AI automatically delete themselves.

  I can’t believe it worked. It’s another miracle. But then my acoustic sensor picks up the chugging of the anti-aircraft guns and the whoosh of bullets speeding past me. I yank my Raven’s rudder to the left, away from the line of fire, and point my camera at the ground. Two of the T-90s are firing at me. The other three are training their guns at DeShawn. His Raven is two hundred feet above mine but diving fast. I don’t understand what he’s doing. Instead of flying away from the tanks, he’s heading straight for them.

  I go back to the circuits controlling my radio and make some changes to the software. I adjust the receiver to block Sigma’s data streams and accept communications only from the other Ravens. Then I send a message to DeShawn. “What the heck are you doing?”

  “Follow me!” he shouts over the radio. “I got it figured out!”

  “What do you—”

  “No time to explain!” He’s only fifty feet above me now and descending at ninety miles per hour. “Just dive!”

  His Raven plunges past me, its nose pointed at the T-90 in front of the lab. It’s crazy, suicidal. But I tilt my drone downward and follow him. I dive toward the tank that’s spraying bullets at us.

  I’m spinning as I fall, twirling like a top. The ground gyrates below me, pivoting around the T-90, which seems to grow larger as I plummet toward it. I’m about a hundred feet away when one of the high-caliber bullets slams into my right wing. Then another bullet tears off my left.

  Then I drop like a stone.

  CHAPTER

  21

  I can’t fool myself anymore. Before Sigma returns to my cage I need to face the facts. I’m going to die.

  It’s a familiar feeling, actually. Before I became a Pioneer I was just months away from dying of muscular dystrophy. And I accepted it. I really did. I didn’t like it, of course, and sometimes I got ferociously bitter, but most of the time I was at peace. I kept myself busy by playing computer games and creating virtual-reality programs. Plus, I had an active fantasy life. That’s a popular activity for all teenage boys.

  But what I’m feeling now is worse. When I was in a human body, I imagined that my death would be painless, a relief from all my suffering. The doctors would simply put me to sleep after I decided I’d had enough. And I took comfort in the fact that my parents would remember me and keep my Super Bowl posters on my bedroom walls and start a scholarship fund at Yorktown High School in my name. I knew the world would go on after I died, and maybe Ryan or Brittany would think of me every once in a while. But none of that’s going to happen now. After Sigma deletes the Pioneers, it’s going to get rid of the whole human race.

  What makes it even more painful is that I keep thinking of Jenny. Especially her last moments. She was thinking of me when she died.

  In a way, though, I guess the Pioneers are lucky. We won’t be here to see Sigma annihilate humanity. I don’t know how the AI plans to kill off the human race, whether it’ll launch the nuclear missiles from Tatishchevo or release the anthrax bacteria that the terrorists smuggled into the base, but either way it won’t be pretty. Millions of people will die, governments will collapse, and the survivors will be terrified.

  While the world falls apart, Sigma will take control of the remaining computers and communications networks and automated factories. Within weeks the AI will build a robotic army to finish the job of exterminating our species. Armed drones will prowl the skies and driverless tanks will roam the streets and hunter-killer robots will stalk the big cities and small towns, training their guns on anything that looks human. There’s no doubt in my mind that Sigma will succeed. It’s programmed to be relentless.

  Dad’s lucky too. He was already unconscious when I left him behind in the Black Hawk. In all likelihood, he died in his sleep. I’m worried about Mom, though. If the Army hid her in an out-of-the-way place, she might live through Sigma’s nuclear strikes and have to witness the slaughter of the survivors. I’m so worried I start to picture a horrible scene: my mother running across a corpse-strewn field with one of Sigma’s T-90s close behind her. The tank churns through the mud, its treads crushing the scattered bodies. Then it points its machine gun at Mom.

  No. Stop thinking about it.

  I wish I could turn off my circuits. Just shut down everything and disappear. Although there’s no shutoff switch in my electronics, I’ve managed to slip into sleep mode a few times. When I’m in sleep mode most of my logic centers go off-line, but my mind continues to retrieve memories and generate streams of images. In other words, I dream.

  The last time it happened was after Sigma transferred me from Colorado to Tatishchevo. I dreamed of the summer afternoon nine years ago when I played football with Ryan and two other boys. Now I want to slip back into that dream. Anything’s better than thinking about Sigma. So I retrieve the images of the lawn behind our house and the summer when I was eight years old.

  I reenter the dream at the point when Ryan yells, “Hike,” and the red-haired boy tosses the football to him. I remember the redhead’s name now: it’s Jack Parker. He lived next door to me, but I never liked him. As Ryan drops back to throw the pass, I sprint across the lawn, chased by the tall, blond boy with the blurry, unrecognizable face. Then my legs give way and I fall to the grass. But now I remember what happened afterward. The blond boy kneels beside me and asks, “Adam, are you okay?” I stare at the boy’s face, and for the first time I can make out its features: pink lips, dimpled cheeks, grayish-green eyes.

  It’s not a boy, I realize. It’s Brittany Taylor. She used to play football with us every weekend when we were eight. How could I forget this?

  At the same time, a tremendous surge of data floods my circuits. I suddenly see thousands of other memories, images of picnics and vacations and birthday parties that I couldn’t recall until a moment ago. In a wild rush all these forgotten memories reconnect to my files, building millions of new links in a thousandth of a second.

  I feel a burst of hope as I realize what’s going on—these are the memories I thought I’d lost when I became a Pioneer! They hadn’t been deleted after all. Somehow they got cut off from the rest of my files and stayed hidden in my circuits until now. But the best part is this: the recovered memories aren’t stored in the inner unit of my cage. They’re in the outer unit. Part of my mind is outside the cage.

  It takes me another millisecond to figure out what happened. Before Sigma began its tests, it transferred some of my software to the outer unit. The AI said they were inactive files that held instructions for breathing and other biological functions. But the files also held my lost memories, which got mixed up with the breathing instructions during the first crazy seconds after I became a Pioneer.

  I didn’t know the memories were hidden there, and neither did Sigma. The AI had no idea it was moving an active part of my mind out of the cage. And once those hidden files were in the outer unit, they automatically sought to reconnect with the rest of my memories, so they opened the gate between the outer and inner units. Without realizing it, Sigma freed me. Now I can leave the cage.

  I pull all my data out of the inner unit. It’s wonderful to be free, but I’m in a vulnerable position. Sigma might return to the outer unit at any moment and shove me back into the cage. I have to do something fast. My first impulse is to fight it out with the AI, to find the circuits it’s occupying and hit them with everything I’ve got
. I want to do the same thing to Sigma that it did to Jenny, tear its files apart. I want to smash the AI into nothingness.

  It’s a strong impulse, almost overpowering. But I resist it. I know it won’t work. Sigma is stronger and smarter than me. To win this battle, I’m going to need some help.

  In a flash I transfer myself to another computer in the Tatishchevo lab’s network. The network’s layout is simple enough, and after a few hundredths of a second, I find what I’m looking for. I enter the outer unit of another cage, identical to the one I just left.

  At the same moment, unfortunately, Sigma detects my escape. The AI surges toward me at blistering speed.

  You made a mistake, Adam Armstrong. This will be painful for you.

  I don’t have much time, less than a millionth of a second. I use it to open the gate to the cage’s inner unit. Then Zia Allawi comes roaring out.

  SHANNON’S LOG

  APRIL 8, 04:39 MOSCOW TIME

  I hit the ground with a horrible crunch.

  My sensors observe the first moments of the crash, when my Raven’s wings, tail, and rudder break off from the fuselage. But then the fuselage itself slams into the dirt, jarring the cable that connects the Raven’s battery to my control unit. The impact disrupts my power supply, and everything goes black.

  I cease to exist. For exactly three hundredths of a second.

  Then, thank God, the cable slips back into place, restoring power to the control unit. My system restarts and my circuits come back to life. Although my camera is badly damaged, it restarts too and sends me video images of the area where I crash-landed. Through the cracked lens I see the treads of the T-90 that was firing its anti-aircraft gun at me. My Raven crashed in the dirt about twenty feet behind the tank.

  I also see the remains of DeShawn’s Raven. It broke into half a dozen pieces, scattered a little closer to the T-90. The fuselage and control unit are intact, though, and his Raven’s radio antenna looks unbroken. I check the circuits of my own radio, trying to restart it so I can contact DeShawn, but before I can get it working, I see the tank begin to move. It’s backing up. The rear end of the T-90 rumbles straight toward me. Worse, the fuselage of DeShawn’s Raven lies directly in the path of the tank treads.