Jake slammed his phone against the dashboard. “I still can’t get through. Everything is jacked up.”
“Mine’s ringing,” Hailey said as she put the call on speakerphone.
The digital tone sounded twice more before a panicked Colton Porter picked up the phone with a hasty, “This better be good.”
“Colton,” Hailey shouted. “What the hell is going on?”
“Hailey? Jack’s dead.”
“I know. What is going on there?”
“All hell’s broken loose. It’s the uprising, Hailey. The revolution or whatever those whack jobs called it.”
“That’s not possible,” she responded.
“You’re absolutely right. But it is. So here we are.”
“Is there any way to stop it?”
“Not from here. I don’t even know how it’s happening.”
“Activate the teams,” she ordered as she turned left down an alleyway. “We have to help as many people as we can.”
“The teams are screwed, Hail. Our bots are going nuts just like the rest of them.”
“Then grab some gear and do it yourself!” Jake shouted.
“Who said that?”
“Jake Ashley.”
“Oh. I see,” Colton said. “Screw you, Jake. There’s no way I’m going out there.”
“You damn coward. Get out there now.”
“Keep your pants on, Jake. Not all of us are stupid enough to—“
“Do it, Porter!” Hailey yelled as they emerged from the alley. A postal vehicle clipped the SUV and she grunted as she struggled to maintain control of the truck.
“No way. I’m staying locked in here. This is a job for the military.”
“Colton—“
The line went dead.
“Oh my God, I’m going to punch him.”
“Me first,” Jake said. “You promised.”
Hailey pulled around a pile-up and collided with a postal bot that was running down the sidewalk throwing letters everywhere. “Where am I going, Jake?”
“Take us to the shop. Maybe Savant has some idea of what’s going on.”
The whir of a hundred drones filled the air, but this new one was closer.
“What is that?” Jake asked.
“I don’t know.”
The little bot flew over the back seat and cracked Jake in the back of the head.
Hailey scolded the tiny machine. “Whir-bert, no!”
The robot’s tiny hands grabbed a handful of Jake’s hair and shot forward, pulling his head into the dashboard.
“Why didn’t—“
Whir-bert shot back and pulled Jake’s head against the headrest.
“—you tell—“
Whir-bert dove forward once more and Jake’s head hit the dash again.
“—me he was—“
Whir-bert crashed Jake’s head into the passenger window with a crack.
“I thought he’d be okay.” Hailey grabbed at the companion bot but had to return her hand to the wheel to avoid a small family that had run into the road trying to escape the carnage.
Jake took one more blow against the window before he was finally able to grab the little drone and pin it against the dash.
“Don’t hurt him!”
“Him?” Jake asked.
“It. Whatever.”
Jake opened the glove box and forced the machine inside. He slammed it shut and put his feet up against it.
“I’m sorry, Jake.”
Jake nodded and dabbed at his head searching for a sign of blood. “Just get us back to my shop.”
Any hope that the carnage was localized dissipated as they made their way across the city. The insanity was happening on every street in the city. News reports were spotty at best as the reporter drones joined the fray and provided only images of the madness they themselves were creating.
The street outside Ashley’s Robot Reclamation of Green Hill was no different. Several cars were overturned and burning. Those that weren’t sped down the street, careening wildly left and right until they struck enough things to damage the motor. People fled in terror with no idea which direction led to safety. This meant people were constantly running in fear, screaming and doing their best not to get hit by cars.
Jake jumped from the SUV and pounded on the door until Kat opened it. “Jake. Thank God. Get in here. He’s going to kill him.”
Jake waved Hailey to pull the truck in and dashed inside. He followed the shouting.
“I’m not a robot! You know that!” It was Glitch and he sounded scared.
“Sounds like something a robot would say.” Mason had the big man cornered. He stood behind the massive IMP with the barrel pointed at the cyborg.
“Mason! What are you doing?”
“Just waiting for Rosie here to go revolutionary on us.”
“Put it down, you moron,” Jake said. “He’s not a robot.”
“That’s what I told him.” Glitch didn’t move. He had his hands out in front of him as if they would protect him from the devastating pulse.
“Robot arms, robot legs, robot dick. He’s a robot all right.”
“Think about it, Mason. You know better than anyone that it’s a machine’s AI that sends it renegade. Glitch doesn’t have artificial intelligence. He barely has normal intelligence.”
Mason lowered the barrel of the IMP an inch while he considered this. He nodded and backed away. “Yeah, you’re right.”
Glitch stepped away from the corner. “Thanks, Jake.”
Jake put a hand on Glitch’s shoulder. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, he just went nuts all of a sudden.”
“I think we both know he’s been going nuts for years.” He turned back to the shop. “Where the hell is Savant?”
A hand went up behind a bank of computers. “Over here, Jake.”
“What?” Jake moved behind the technician. “Why aren’t you trying to stop them?”
Savant scanned the screen in front of him. “Oh, I figured it would all work out. I thought a better use of my time would be trying to figure out why the world went berserk.”
“What did you find?”
“Oh, nothing. I need a functioning machine to even start looking and everything around here is busted. That’s why I suggested we plug in Glitch. That’s when Mason went crazy and then you showed up, how are you?”
“Would plugging in Glitch tell us anything?”
“No, Jake. It was a joke, duh. None of you appreciate my humor. I need an AI-driven machine that hasn’t been smashed, bashed and shocked into a mess.”
Jake ran back to the truck as Hailey stepped out and into the shop. She pointed to Glitch. “What was all that?”
“I hired morons.” Jake opened the passenger door and pulled open the glove box. He grabbed at the little bot inside before it could realize what was happening.
Whir-bert struggled against his hold and almost squirmed free once or twice as Jake took him over to Savant. The machine chirped and beeped what Jake could only imagine were unkind words.
“What are you doing to him, Jake?” Hailey asked.
“Don’t worry. This won’t hurt him.” He handed the robot to Savant. “Will this hurt it?”
Savant took the machine and strapped it to a shop table. “No.”
“Dammit.”
The technician pulled a panel from the back of Whir-bert’s head and plugged in a cable before rolling back over to his terminal. The screens began to fill with thousands of lines of code. Savant tapped a few keys and rubbed his chin. “Hmm, interesting.”
“What’s interesting?” Jake asked.
“Every thing I do, Jake. Every thing I do.”
17
The code meant nothing to Jake. He and Hailey peered over Savant’s shoulder as the computer scientist scrolled through the gibberish saying things like, “Interesting,” “Isn’t that something,” and “Don’t you wish you were as smart as me?”
Jake kicked the technician’s chai
r. “Just tell us what’s happening.”
“That’s just it,” Savant said while readjusting his chair. “Nothing is happening.”
“Nothing is causing this?”
“No. Something is causing it. Something is flooding the system with nonsense and garbage code at a ridiculous rate.”
“What is the code telling them to do?”
“Nothing, Jake. It’s just pure nonsense at an insane speed. Even if it was something, the machines couldn’t process it.”
“So why the murderous rampage?” Hailey asked.
“It’s flooding the system with so much crap that they can’t process anything but their most basic programming.”
“What about safety protocols?” Jake asked.
“Those are higher level systems. There’s so much information coming that they can’t even get to that. These things are going to their most base commands. For example, cars go until they stop.” He tapped the tiny bot on the table. “Whir-bert here was just trying to cuddle.”
“He’s a little rough for me,” Jake said, touching the wound on his head.
“And it’s everything?” Hailey asked. “All systems are being affected?”
Savant shook his head and picked up a remote. He turned on the screen. “Not everything.”
Coverage of the devastation was on every channel. Reporters fired line after line of dialogue, hoping that some phrase they uttered would live for eternity next to “Oh, the humanity” as footage of the city in chaos played behind them.
The team watched in silence as the city tore itself apart, hunting through the images for any system that remained immune to the code’s effects.
“I’m not seeing it, Savant,” Jake said. “Everything looks affected.”
“Just watch the news, Jake.” The way he said it sounded like a lecture.
“I’m watching the news, Savant.”
“Exactly. Duh.”
Jake put his face in his hand. The headache was coming back.
Hailey leaned in close to the technician. “Spell it out for us, you complete ass.”
Savant sighed a deep breath of attitude. “You’re watching the news. The news is reporting it all. The news is showing you footage from their aerial cameras. Which are drones. Which are robots. Which are doing exactly what they are being told to do.”
“They aren’t being affected,” Hailey said.
“I always said she was too smart for you, Jake,” Savant said as he idly clicked through the news coverage.
“Wait,” Jake reached for the remote. “Go back a channel.”
Meagan’s face filled the large screen, “—exactly what we feared would happen.”
Beneath her image was her name and title: Founder and Director of the Society for the Preservation for Humanity. The reporter spoke to her through the drone. “What do you think is happening?”
“The machines are revolting. History has proven that throughout time any abused population will eventually throw off the yoke of its oppressors and rise up against them. What we are witnessing was inevitable.”
“Son of a bitch,” Jake muttered.
“The revolution will be televised,” Hailey said.
“There is no stopping them now,” Meagan continued. “The best we can hope for is to get through this with minimal loss of life and start passing some common sense robotic laws to prevent this from ever happening again.”
Meagan’s image reduced down to half the screen when the camera cut back to the anchor at the studio. “Ms. Mouret, you’ve suffered your fair share of critics and decriers over the years. Many have thought your ideas were pessimistic at best while others called you bat-shit insane. Do you feel today’s events have vindicated you? Are you happy to see this happening?”
There was the briefest of smiles before Meagan spoke. “Of course I’m not happy. I pray this comes to a peaceful end quickly before anyone else gets hurt.”
“I’m sure we all feel the same. Thank you for your time, Ms. Mouret.”
Meagan nodded with a smile as the drone pulled away to a wide shot of a city street. The chaos continued and the anchors did their best to cover the possible reasons for it all. Speculation ranged from ghosts in the machines to gremlins to a terrorist attack.
“Holy shit.” Jake pointed at the ZUMR building in the background.
“How did she get down there?” Hailey asked.
“We’ve got to get down there, too.”
“Why?” Mason asked. “Here’s perfectly safe. What good will going down there do?”
“Because.” Jake snapped his fingers and pointed at Savant.
Savant looked back at the code scrolling across the screen and nodded. “The signal is coming from ZUMR.”
“How?” Hailey asked.
“Colton.”
The realization dawned on Hailey as the pieces fell together. Her eyes sank to the floor and she shook her head. “That bastard.”
Jake rubbed his hands together. “Actually, I’m kind of glad he ended up being the bad guy because now we get to beat the hell out of him. It’s not often everything works out the way you hope.”
“What do we do, boss?” Glitch asked.
“Load up the Beast,” Jake called to the team.
“It’s full of holes,” Kat said.
Jake turned to the cyborg. “Glitch.”
“Yes, Jake?”
“Rip a hole in the roof.”
“How big?”
“Big enough for you to sit in. Everyone else grab every piece of gear that still works and put on some montage music. We’re building a tank.”
With everything jacked up as it was, the only music they could find to play was a thirteenth-century French vocal piece that was stuck in Glitch’s RAM. He had to hum it. It was terrible montage music.
Despite this, the team worked quickly. Ratchets cranked and torches arced in a flurry of sparks.
Glitch tore a Glitch-sized hole in the Beast’s roof and mounted the IMP on an articulated armature Jake welded together from several junked machines.
Kat layered the trucks with wire and connected the structure to several generators.
Savant set to gutting inoperable equipment and cobbling together functional weapons.
Mason complained a lot about how much work he was doing compared to what he thought the others were doing.
Despite the speed at which they worked, everything went smoothly. The only exception being when Hailey had to stretch across the hood of the truck to reach a tool and her ankle showed. Glitch lost his focus and dragged a welding torch across his hand, fusing his index, middle and ring fingers together.
The cyborg held up his hand. “Aw, man. Not again.”
Savant heard the moaning. “What’s wrong, Glitch?”
The cyborg held up the mangled appendage. “Now I’ve got to wear my old hand. It’s so ugly.”
“I used it for parts.”
“You what?!”
“It’s not like you were using it. It was just sitting there forever.”
“Now what am I going to do? I can’t fight in a robot Armageddon with just one hand.”
“Not so fast, Sad Sack of Parts.” Savant turned back to his shop table and picked up the project he had been working on. It was hardly gleaming with chrome, and it actually was still smoking in places but it was a pair of hands. A giant pair of hands.
“My old hands!”
“No. Your new old hands,” Savant said. He walked over to Glitch and helped the giant put his new hands on. “Twice the size and five times the grip strength. You should be able to crush any bot like it was nothing. Don’t try and pee with them though.”
Glitch held up his massive new hands and flexed each finger before tightening each into a coconut-sized fist. He said nothing to Savant. He only smiled.
Jake opened the gun vault in his office and began handing Hailey several shotguns which she laid out on the desk. He handed her a revolver in a holster and a box of ammo. “This one’s for you. Pl
ease don’t get killed out there.”
“Oh, that’s so sweet,” she said with little sincerity. “I kind of figured you’d tell me to wait here where it’s safe.”
“I was going to, but we don’t have time to go through the whole argument where you convince me I’m being controlling et cetera and so forth.
“So just know that I feel shame and take the gun. And try not to die out there because I really like being around you. Still.”
“You know me so well.” Hailey took the gun and tucked the holster into her waistline. “I’d also like you not to die out there. Okay?”
Jake took her hands and looked into her eyes. “Because you really like being around me?”
Her smile went crooked and she lowered her voice. “Because I’m pretty sure I’m going to need a new job after all this is done.”
“You’re hired,” he leaned in closer. “No one here has been paid in weeks. What’s one more on the payroll?”
Hailey leaned in, too. Their lips were less than an inch apart.
“Oh, please don’t ask about the perks,” Savant said from the doorway.
“Savant!” Jake shouted.
“It would be so expected. She asks about the perks, you say ‘let me show you’ and then you sweep the shotguns off the desk and go at it. I’ve seen it a hundred times, okay. It’s just so cliché.”
“Did you find him?” Mason shouted from the shop floor.
“Yeah,” Savant yelled back out the door. “He’s in here being gross with his ex.”
“She’s not my ex,” Jake said and started looking for the aspirin. “What do you want, Savant?”
“We’re ready to go out here. You wanna go save the city or should it wait for you two to do your thing?”
“Get out.”
Savant backed out of the office and shut the door while Hailey scooped up the shotguns in her arms.
Jake turned back to Hailey and smiled. “Where were we?”
“You were about to go save the city and I was going to go report this incident to HR.”
“I should never have hired you.”
“It’s too late now.” She dropped the shotguns into Jake’s arms. “Let’s go beat the hell out of Colton.”
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