by Mark Alpert
“I’M GONNA KILL YOU, HAWKE! YOU HEAR ME? YOU’RE A DEAD MAN!”
Her words boom over the desert, making my armor shiver again. I knew Zia was angry at General Hawke—she told me so several times—but I didn’t realize how bad it was. Trashing his Humvee is mutinous, a court-martial offense, assuming a robot could actually be put on trial. But maybe a trial is exactly what Zia wants. She told me she’d discovered a secret from her past, a connection between Hawke and the death of her parents, although she didn’t say what the connection was. If she wants to confront Hawke with her evidence, a trial would be a good way to do it.
The War-bot stands there amid the wreckage until the last echoes of her threats fade to silence. Then Zia turns her machine around and strides away from Pioneer Base, heading west. After a few steps, she breaks into a thunderous sprint and gallops out of sight.
Marshall doesn’t say anything until Zia is so far away that we can’t hear her thudding footsteps anymore. “Well, are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“What? That General Hawke should probably transfer to a different branch of the Army?”
“No, my circuits are focused on my own survival. Zia could decide to come back at any minute, and I don’t want to be out here when she does.”
I nod my Quarter-bot’s head in agreement. Side by side, Marshall and I dash toward Pioneer Base.
Chapter
4
Each Pioneer has a private room at our headquarters, although we don’t really need them. Robots don’t wear clothes, so we have no use for closets or bureaus. We go into sleep mode occasionally, but we do that standing up, so we don’t need beds either. We do need to recharge our batteries every day at a charging station, but that’s the only piece of furniture we use, and it doesn’t take up a lot of space.
And yet, there would be a riot at Pioneer Base if the Army took away our rooms. We crave privacy even more than humans do. When your mind is composed of software that can be shared on a thousand machines, you naturally long for a place of your own, even if it’s only a hundred-square-foot box way underground. Our rooms are our refuges, and we decorate them with reminders of our former lives. Just two days ago, I tried to cheer myself up by scotch-taping a new poster to my wall, a picture of New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning. He was my hero when I was younger, and I have hundreds of images of him in my memory files, so I downloaded one and printed it on the base’s laser printer.
But after Marshall and I return to Pioneer Base, I don’t head for my room. I tell Marshall that I need to see my dad, and then I go to the base’s medical center, which has an intensive care unit for treating human patients and a computer lab for repairing Pioneers. I have to walk through the ICU to get to the lab, and as I stride into the ward, I notice there’s only one Army nurse on duty tonight, and she’s bending over the bed of the ICU’s only patient.
The nurse, a middle-aged Asian woman, looks up at me and smiles. That’s not the usual reaction when a human sees a Pioneer—the typical response is a mix of fear and disgust—but the soldiers at our base have grown accustomed to our robots, so they no longer cower or cringe when they see us. This particular nurse has seen me many times before. I’ve visited her patient, Brittany Taylor, every day for the past week.
The nurse is sponging Brittany’s face, but she tactfully steps aside so I can see my old friend. Brittany’s eyes are open, and the sponge bath has given her face a lively glow. Her cheeks shine under the ICU’s fluorescent lights. It almost looks like she’s smiling. But her gray-green eyes don’t turn toward my Quarter-bot, and after a moment her face loses its moist glow. She stares blankly at the ceiling.
I don’t try to talk to her. I know she won’t respond. Instead, I examine her as a doctor would, focusing on the pallor of her skin and the shallowness of her breathing. I’m looking for changes in her condition, however slight, from the last time I saw her, hoping to see indications that she’s recovering from the damage Sigma did to her nervous system. But I don’t see any signs of improvement. If anything, Brittany looks worse than she did yesterday. She’s losing weight and muscle tone. I experienced this kind of deterioration myself, after my muscular dystrophy put me in a wheelchair, so I know how the process goes. The effects on Brittany aren’t serious yet, but the damage will only get worse.
Urgency pulses in my wires. It’s up to me to save her. Brittany’s parents don’t care about her anymore. After she ran away from home, they broke off all contact, treating her as if she were already dead. But I still care about her very much. So without further delay, I step away from Brittany’s bed and stride toward Dad’s laboratory. I open the door without knocking and march inside.
Dad’s asleep at his desk. He’s leaning forward in his chair with his arms folded across his scattered papers, his head resting sideways on the crook of his right arm. His glasses have slipped off, and his closed eyelids are quivering. His face, dotted with gray stubble, is lit by the blue glow of his computer screen, which displays an MRI image of a human brain.
I move my Quarter-bot closer, careful not to make a sound. The brain on the screen is Brittany’s. It’s actually a cross section of her frontal lobe, the part of the brain that makes plans and decisions. Amid the folds of gray matter are small patches of blackened tissue, the areas damaged by Sigma’s nanobots. The microscopic machines homed in on her frontal lobe and burrowed into the brain tissue, constructing antennas that burst through Brittany’s skin. This allowed Sigma to send radio instructions to the nanobots and take over her body.
One of those antennas—a thin black rod that extended from the back of Brittany’s neck—lies next to the scattered papers on the desk. Dad figured out how to surgically detach it from her spinal cord. He also extracted most of the deactivated nanobots, but millions of them are still lodged in her brain. They’re blocking her mental pathways, smothering her mind.
Desperation pulses in my circuits again. I raise one of my steel hands to wake up Dad, but I stop myself at the last moment, my hand suspended over his shoulder. Dad is already working as hard as he can. He needs to rest his own brain for a few hours. But the circuits in my Pioneer don’t need rest. They can work on the problem without stopping.
I wirelessly link my Quarter-bot to the computers in the lab and download all of Brittany’s medical files. As I copy the data to my circuits, I stare at Dad’s face, which looks anxious even when he’s asleep. I feel so sorry for him. His body is so fragile. Back when he invented the neuromorphic electronics in our Pioneer robots, he discovered that only adolescents could transfer their minds to machines. Human brain cells grow rigid after the age of twenty, and the mature mind is simply too inflexible to make the transition. But if it were possible, I think Dad would voluntarily give up his body and become a Pioneer. He’d do anything to help me. That’s just the way he is.
When the download is complete, I step away from his desk and leave the laboratory, silently closing the door behind me.
• • •
The Pioneers’ private rooms are on the same floor as our main training facility, which we call the Danger Room. It’s a large space with a high ceiling, as big as a high-school gymnasium, but the floor is made of concrete instead of shellacked wood, and it doesn’t have any bleachers or basketball hoops. Instead, the Danger Room has obstacle courses and firing ranges.
We test our robots’ weapons there and hone our combat skills by fighting simulated battles against one another. For the past few days, though, the room has been empty. Now that Sigma is gone, what’s the point of training for combat? I suppose it’s possible that another artificial-intelligence program might go rogue and threaten to annihilate humanity. But no one is eager to start preparing for another war.
So I’m surprised when I hear noises coming from the Danger Room. As I stride past the training facility after leaving the medical center, my acoustic sensor detects a loud crash behind its door. It sounds like one of the w
alls has caved in. Then I hear a frantic scream.
“Help! I’m trapped!”
It’s Shannon. Her voice literally electrifies me, triggering panic in my billions of transistors. Without another thought, I charge toward the Danger Room and smash my steel fists into the door, flinging it open.
Shannon lies on the floor beneath a slab of concrete. She’s occupying the machine I call the Diamond Girl, a six-foot-tall robot armored with a sparkling mesh of diamond chips and explosive charges. The concrete slab on top of her didn’t come from the walls or ceiling; it’s part of the room’s obstacle course, a ten-foot-high barrier that we’re supposed to jump over during our training exercises. It looks like someone moved the slab from its usual position and dropped it on top of Shannon. And as I race into the room, I see the culprit standing a few yards away. It’s Amber’s Jet-bot.
Did Amber attack Shannon? Were they fighting over me? The idea seems ridiculous, but what else could explain this? I stare at the Jet-bot in dismay, unable to synthesize a word.
In response, Amber’s loudspeakers let out a chuckle. “Don’t get alarmed, Adam. It’s a rehearsal. We’re reading from a script.”
“A rehearsal? What—”
“Just watch, okay? Shannon is pretending to be a human.” Amber points one of her steel hands at Shannon and raises the other to her speakers, miming an expression of horror. “Oh no! An earthquake has struck our area, and this ordinary citizen is trapped in a collapsed building!” Her voice sounds fake in a theatrical way, too loud and earnest. “This victim of natural disaster needs help fast! But who is strong enough to lift that heavy piece of concrete?”
“A Pioneer!” Shannon shouts from the floor. “Get a Pioneer to help me!” She also seems to be following a script and trying to sound dramatic.
Instead of having a mechanical face like Marshall’s, the Diamond Girl has a screen on its head that displays video of Shannon’s old human face. Spliced from home movies taken by her parents before she became a Pioneer, the video images are programmed to match Shannon’s mood. The face on her screen smiles when she’s happy and frowns when she’s sad. Right now, she’s pretending to be terrified. “Oh, only a Pioneer can save me! A human wouldn’t be strong enough!”
Amber nods her Jet-bot’s head enthusiastically. “Well, it just so happens that I’m a Pioneer! I can rescue you!” Stepping forward, she slips her mechanical hands under the concrete slab and lifts it easily.
Shannon rises to her footpads. She probably could’ve lifted the slab herself, but I suppose that would’ve spoiled the drama. After Amber tosses the piece of concrete aside, Shannon stretches one of her glittering arms toward the Jet-bot and shakes its right hand. “Thank you so much! You Pioneers are obviously well suited for search-and-rescue operations in disaster areas.”
Amber nods again. “Yes, we were built for war, but our machines will find many uses in peacetime. The Pioneers are a valuable resource for the American government. Nobody needs to fear us.”
There’s an awkward pause, and then both Amber and Shannon turn their cameras toward me. “That’s the end,” Amber says. “What did you think?”
“Was it effective?” Shannon asks. The face on her video screen is serious. “If you were a politician with a bias against the Pioneer Project, would this demonstration help change your opinion?”
I raise my Quarter-bot’s hands in surrender. “I’m so lost, I don’t even know where to start. Why are you playacting? And why are you worried about politicians?”
Shannon marches across the Danger Room and picks up a newspaper that’s lying on the floor. Then she comes back and thrusts the National Enquirer in front of my cameras. “This came out three days ago. The Pioneers aren’t a secret anymore.”
On the newspaper’s front page is a big color photograph of Zia’s War-bot, Shannon’s Diamond Girl, and my Quarter-bot. It shows us in New York City’s Times Square during our battle against Sigma’s Snake-bots, gigantic steel tentacles that thrashed their way across midtown Manhattan. Judging from the angle of the shot, I presume that someone in a nearby office building took the photo from a window. In the background of the picture, behind our robots, is a crowd of terrified people.
“Well, I guess we’re famous now.” I point a steel finger at the photo. “All in all, though, this picture isn’t so bad. See, it proves we’re heroes. It shows us protecting the crowd from the Snake-bots.”
The Diamond Girl shakes her head. On the video screen, Shannon rolls her eyes. “No, the Snake-bots aren’t in the picture. It looks like the crowd is afraid of us. And take a look at the headline.” She taps a glittering finger on the words in bold type below the photo: METAL MONSTERS!
“Okay, I see your point. But it’s the National Enquirer. No one takes that newspaper seriously. They run articles about the Loch Ness monster and the abominable snowman.”
“This isn’t the only photo, Adam. There are dozens of pictures of us on the Internet, and even a few videos on YouTube.” Shannon drops the newspaper and raises the volume of her synthesized voice. “The Army is trying to hush them up and stop other newspapers from writing about us, but more and more people are starting to ask questions, including the politicians in Congress. I’d call that pretty serious, wouldn’t you?”
The face on her video screen narrows its eyes at me. The image reminds me of all the arguments Shannon and I had when we were breaking up. Although we’re not boyfriend and girlfriend anymore, we still fight like an unhappy couple.
Luckily, Amber’s Jet-bot steps between me and Shannon to break the tension. “Yeah, Shannon’s right. It’s a problem. After I came back to the base, she explained it to me. When the people in Congress find out what the Army did to us—you know, transferring our minds to robots—they’ll probably go nuts. They might even shut down the Pioneer Project.”
The Diamond Girl nods. “And here’s something else General Hawke told me. You know who’s spreading rumors about the Pioneers and making things worse? Sumner Harris, Jenny’s father. Remember him?”
I do. He’s an obnoxious rich lawyer with lots of political connections, including financial ties to the president and other White House officials. He used those connections to get Jenny enrolled in the Pioneer Project, even though she wasn’t mentally strong enough for it. After Sigma erased Jenny six months ago, Sumner dropped out of sight to mourn his daughter. But now he’s back, and it looks like he has a grudge against the Pioneers.
My circuits compose an unkind remark about Sumner, but before I can broadcast it from my speakers, Amber’s Jet-bot staggers backward. She loses her balance for a moment and quickly shifts her footpads to keep herself from tipping over. I swing my cameras toward her. “Hey, what happened? You all right?”
“I’m okay!” Amber’s voice is full of synthesized reassurance, but her robot still looks unsteady. “Sorry, I freaked out for a second. I just got scared, you know? I mean, if they shut down the Pioneer Project, what’ll happen to us? Where would we go?”
Shannon also trains her cameras on the Jet-bot. I wonder if she’s suspicious. She knows as well as I do that Amber doesn’t scare easily. So Shannon might conclude that something else is bothering the girl. And while she’s thinking about what’s bothering Amber, she might start wondering whether it involves me too. Shannon wouldn’t need much evidence to uncover our secret relationship. She’s astoundingly smart.
But for now Shannon puts a comforting face on her video screen. She steps closer to Amber and pats the Jet-bot’s torso. “There’s no need to panic yet. We’re taking steps to protect ourselves. That’s why we’re rehearsing this demonstration. I’m going to get General Hawke to invite the most important congressmen to Pioneer Base, and we’ll show them that they have nothing to worry about. We’ll prove that the Pioneers can do a lot of good for society.”
This plan is so Shannon. She saw a threat to the Pioneers and responded with a logical, practi
cal strategy. As always, she’s optimistic, levelheaded, reliable, and steadfast. That’s why Hawke chose her to be our leader, the lieutenant in charge of our platoon. It also explains why she and I don’t always get along. I try hard to be optimistic, but mostly I fail. I can’t help but see the problems.
Like now, for instance. I don’t want to sound dismissive of Shannon’s plan, but there’s no way it’ll work. “It’s a good idea, Shannon, but most politicians are pretty irrational. Once they find out that Hawke is siphoning the minds out of terminally ill kids, no one’s gonna care about the peaceful uses of human-machine hybrids. Amber’s right. The congressmen are gonna go nuts. They’re gonna accuse the Army of performing immoral experiments on children.”
Shannon glares at me from her video screen. “Well, what’s your plan, smart guy? You have a better idea?”
I don’t. And I don’t want to argue with Shannon either, especially with Amber watching us. I should probably give up and end the conversation by leaving the Danger Room. But Shannon beats me to it. She turns her Diamond Girl around and stomps toward the open door. When she reaches the corridor, she looks over her glittering shoulder and points her cameras at Amber.
“I’m going to revise the script tonight, so we should rehearse again tomorrow morning. I’ll meet you here at oh-six-hundred hours.” Then Shannon marches off to her room.
Amber and I wait several seconds, staring at each other, until our acoustic sensors pick up the sound of Shannon’s door slamming shut. But it’s still not safe for us to say anything personal, because Pioneer Base is full of listening devices and surveillance cameras. So instead, Amber sends me a radio message that’s been encrypted in such a complex way that no one else can decode it: I can’t believe that you and Shannon went out with each other. You’re so different.
I shrug, lifting my Quarter-bot’s shoulder joints. Then I respond with my own encrypted message: She wasn’t always so serious. It’s the pressure of being the leader. I think it’s getting to her.