The Silence

by Mark Alpert

  I have to admit, it’s a pretty convincing act. She seems genuinely distressed. And there’s a logic to her request—what’s wrong with double-checking the identity of the programmers? But Jenny has lied to me too many times. And I trust Zia’s instincts.

  I shake my Quarter-bot’s head. “No, I won’t help you. The programmers are talking to us through Brittany. Let’s take the deal they’re offering.”

  My refusal surprises Jenny. She steps backward and almost loses her balance. Then she narrows her eyes, and her face turns hard. The air around her body crackles with rage.

  Before she can do or say anything, though, my acoustic sensor detects a distant rumbling. At first I think the programmers have triggered another earthquake, maybe to scare us into accepting their compromise. But as the noise gets closer and louder, I realize it’s mechanical. It’s the sound of a dozen vehicles coming down Greenwood Street, a long convoy rolling into our neighborhood. But they’re not cars or trucks. These vehicles are much heavier.

  They’re U.S. Army battle tanks.

  Then I hear a voice amplified by a megaphone, coming from in front of our house. General Hawke’s voice.

  “Tom? I know you’re in there. You and your friends better step outside. Now.”

  Chapter

  29

  We all rush toward the front door. It’s an instinct ingrained in every Pioneer’s circuits: We don’t run away from threats. We confront them. And we’re not afraid of tanks.

  Dad elbows ahead of the rest of us. He assumes the soldiers won’t shoot at him, so when he reaches the foyer, he makes sure that Brittany, Shannon, and Marshall line up directly behind him. Then he raises his hands high over his head and opens the door.

  Jenny, Zia, and I aren’t worried about gunfire, so we follow Dad outside and spread out across the front lawn. It’s late afternoon, and the sun is sinking toward the woods behind our house. The weather is a bit cool for October, and the leaves on the oak trees are beginning to turn.

  The twelve M1 tanks take position in a semicircle around the house, tearing up all our neighbors’ lawns. They turn their turrets and point their main guns at my Quarter-bot and Zia’s War-bot. Each tank also has two machine guns mounted on its turret, with a crewman hunched behind each gun. The soldiers aim those weapons at us too. They’re not taking any chances. They know we escaped from the armored battalion at Pioneer Base, and they’re not going to let it happen again.

  The closest tank sits on Greenwood Street, at the end of our driveway. General Hawke commands it, his broad torso rising from the open hatch in the turret. He wears khaki fatigues and a combat helmet, and he holds his megaphone in front of his chin. His expression is stoic. Although it was his duty to track us down, he’s not happy to see us. He scowls at my Quarter-bot and doesn’t even look at Zia. I glance at the War-bot and see that her armor is vibrating again. That’s a bad sign. This is going to get ugly.

  But Dad strolls casually across the lawn, heading straight for the general’s tank. He walks with his hands in the air and a cheerful smile on his face, and Brittany and the Model S robots follow close behind. They look like a bizarre high-tech parade, and Dad makes it worse by grinning at everyone. He waves one of his raised hands at Hawke. “Congratulations, General! You found us!”

  Hawke doesn’t need the megaphone anymore, so he puts it aside. “Stop right there, Tom. This isn’t a joke.”

  Dad halts beside our mailbox. “I didn’t cover my tracks too well, did I? I guess it was a bad idea to fly commercial from New Mexico, but I didn’t have much of a choice.”

  Hawke sighs. “We were tracking you the whole time. I had a hunch you were headed for a meeting with the fugitives, so my superiors put me in charge of the recovery effort.” He points at Zia and me. “Where’s Amber? And who’s that girl?”

  He doesn’t recognize Jenny. Her healthy reconstructed body is too different from the emaciated Jenny Harris that Hawke met six months ago, before she became a Pioneer. I think she looks vaguely familiar to him, though, because he keeps staring at Jenny, as if trying to place her.

  Dad looks at Jenny too. “It’s a long story. And you probably won’t believe it. But you have to try, General. I’m serious now. You have to try.” He steps closer to the tank and lowers his voice. “Can you come inside the house? We need to talk.”

  Hawke shakes his head. “You’re under arrest, Tom. You stole government property when you took the Model S robots. And it looks like you helped your son and his friends disable the kill switches in their machines. What you need is a good lawyer.” He lets out another sigh. “Now, could you please tell Adam and Zia to surrender peacefully? They’ll only hurt themselves if they—”

  He’s interrupted by a banging noise from inside the tank. There’s a second hatch in the turret, to the right of Hawke’s; it opens with a clang, and another man in fatigues and a combat helmet rises from the opening. But it’s not a soldier. It’s Sumner Harris.

  “Excuse me, General, I want to see this for myself.” His voice is full of high-pitched irritation. He squints at the humans and robots standing on our lawn. “Well, it looks like one of the robots is still missing. Where’s the Jet-bot? What’s…?”

  Sumner sees Jenny. And unlike Hawke, he recognizes her. His eyes widen, and his mouth gapes. His daughter stands before him. Her cancer gone, her death reversed. She’s the normal, healthy girl he remembers. But Sumner doesn’t burst into tears at the sight. He doesn’t cry for joy.

  He’s horrified. He shakes his head and raises his hand to his chest as he mouths the word, No. Then he leans over the side of the tank and vomits down its armor.

  At the same instant, Jenny launches herself at Sumner. She doesn’t run or leap—she flies. She soars without wings or jet engines, programming herself to speed like a missile toward the tank, her body propelled by a billion calculations. Before Hawke or anyone else can respond, she swoops over the turret and grabs her father by the collar of his fatigues. Then, without slowing down, she yanks him out of the hatch.

  We all stare in astonishment. Jenny soars above the tanks, lifting her father a hundred feet into the air. He dangles and twists in her grip, like a rabbit caught in a raptor’s talons. General Hawke unholsters his pistol and takes aim at Jenny, but he doesn’t fire. There’s too great a chance he’ll hit Sumner.

  Jenny climbs another hundred feet into the virtual sky. When she reaches the top of her programmed arc, she lets out a shriek, an unearthly scream of hatred. Then she hurls her father at the ground as hard as she can.

  His body plummets to Greenwood Street and splatters against the asphalt. My stunned circuits force my cameras to turn away.

  At first, the soldiers manning the tank turrets are too shocked to react. The crewmen behind the machine guns stare in alarm at Sumner’s remains. But after a second they point their guns at the girl in the sky. They have no idea who or what she is, but they know for certain that she’s the enemy. She hovers above them, laughing in triumph, her white dress flapping in the wind.

  I can already see what’s going to happen next, and luckily Zia does too. We both run toward Dad and Brittany as the soldiers start firing. Their guns rattle and chug and spit out hundreds of fifty-caliber bullets that hiss upward from the tanks and converge on Jenny. But they don’t hit her. They strike a nearly transparent shield surrounding her, a golden bubble like the one she used to absorb the energy of the Sentinels. But this bubble doesn’t absorb the bullets; instead, it reverses their momentum and sends them ricocheting downward. They zing to the ground in a lethal shower.

  “Get down!”

  The words boom from my speakers as I bound toward Dad, who crouches low and pulls Brittany to the ground beside him. Zia dashes toward them from the opposite direction and angles her War-bot’s torso over them and the Model S robots too.

  We manage to shield them just as the ammunition rains down. Dad shudders at the sound
of the bullets pinging off our armor. But Brittany remains calm, almost peaceful. I think the programmers of the simulation are still communicating with her. She seems to be listening to the voices in her head and not fully aware of what’s going on around her.

  The soldiers exposed in the hatches of the tank turrets aren’t as lucky. They scream and curse as the ricocheting bullets hit them. But General Hawke and a few others duck into their turrets and close the hatches. The survivors maneuver their tanks away from Greenwood Street, trying to find a position where they can fire their main guns at Jenny.

  I don’t feel good about their chances, though. I send a radio message to Zia. We have to get Dad and Brittany out of here. And Shannon and Marshall too.

  Shannon overhears the message and responds before Zia can. Don’t worry about us. The control units in the Model S robots have steel casings. They’ll protect our circuits.

  No, they won’t. A fifty-caliber bullet will go straight through that casing. I’m gonna carry you and Dad to the woods behind the house, and Zia will take Brittany and Marshall. Then you need to run away from here as fast as you can. Zia and I will deal with Jenny.

  Marshall shakes his spherical Model S head. Don’t be ridiculous. We’re not splitting up the team again.

  We don’t have time to argue! Zia, let’s go!

  The War-bot springs into action, clutching Brittany and Marshall to the front of her torso. Bending over to shield them, she sprints away from the tanks on Greenwood Street, and I do the same for Dad and Shannon. We run past the house and the backyard, heading for the woods.

  The soldiers don’t try to stop us. They’re too busy fighting Jenny, who’s now flying low over the houses across the street. One of the tanks fires its main gun at her, but the shell hits her golden shield and rebounds right back to where it came from. The warhead explodes against the tank in a deafening blast, and thick smoke billows from its turret.

  I almost stop running, but the crewmen inside the tank are already dead. There’s nothing we can do for them. Jenny laughs again as she circles the battlefield, fifty feet above the ground, daring the other tanks to fire at her. She’s gone berserk, her software completely corrupted. As soon as we get Dad and the others to safety, we have to figure out a way to shut her down.

  Zia and I rush into the woods and run another hundred yards before stopping on the slope of a steep hill. I let go of Dad and Shannon, and Zia drops Brittany and Marshall on the leaf-littered ground. I clap a steel hand on Dad’s shoulder and point him up the hill. “Go that way. Keep running till you get to Ridge Street.”

  “Adam, you can’t fight her. She’s too—”

  “She’s killing people. We have to stop her. End of story.” I give him a gentle push. “Go on. Take care of Brittany. I’ll find you as soon as this is over.”

  He seems unwilling to go, but then Shannon clamps her two-finger gripper on his right hand. “Come on, Mr. Armstrong. I don’t like it either, but Adam’s right.”

  Marshall extends his own gripper and grasps Dad’s left hand. “For once, I have to agree. Your son is prone to blunders, but this isn’t one of them.”

  I’m so grateful to Shannon and Marshall that I can’t speak. Instead, I cup my hands over their spherical heads, trying to show my gratitude by touch. Then Zia and I turn around and race down the hill.

  As we run through the woods, two more tanks explode, destroyed by the shells they fired at Jenny. The soldiers haven’t figured out yet that she’s killing them with their own armaments. But then my Quarter-bot’s antenna picks up a transmission on one of the Army’s radio channels, coming from General Hawke’s tank: Cease fire! Cease fire! Retreat to the staging area!

  Unfortunately, Jenny picks up the radio signal too. She changes course and flies straight toward the general’s tank. As she descends, she enlarges her body again, but this time she gets even bigger than before. She grows until she’s seven times her normal size, almost forty feet tall, as big as the oak tree next to our house. Her hands swell to the size of chairs, her bare feet to the size of sofas. She’s a twenty-ton human missile, her skin glowing like a meteor as she dives toward the tank on Greenwood Street.

  Hawke’s in serious trouble now. Zia and I run faster, but we’re still in the woods when Jenny lands next to the tank. Her enormous feet thump the lawn and make muddy craters in the grass. First she leans over Hawke’s tank and tears off its treads, disabling the vehicle. Then she grips the barrel of the tank’s main gun and snaps it off the turret. Finally, she grasps the turret itself and pries it off the tank’s chassis.

  By this point Zia and I are out of the woods and bounding past the house. As we hurtle across the lawn, Zia raises the volume of her loudspeakers to the limit and bellows at Jenny. “If you touch him, you’re dead! You hear me?”

  The giant Jenny smiles and reaches one of her huge hands into the tank’s chassis. “You mean this guy?” She pulls Hawke out of the tank by his torso and holds him thirty feet above the ground. “I thought you hated him. Didn’t he kill your parents?”

  “LET GO OF HIM! RIGHT NOW!”

  “Poor Zia. I know all your secrets. I saw them when I shared circuits with Adam.” Jenny shakes her head in mock sympathy. Then she examines the man in her hand, holding him up to the light. Hawke squirms in her grip, his eyes bulging. She’s squeezing him too hard. He can’t breathe. “Oh, now I remember something else. He’s your real dad, isn’t he?”

  Zia charges at her, thrusting her thick arms forward like battering rams. But the golden shield still surrounds Jenny, its spherical surface shining in the late-afternoon light. I watch in horror as the War-bot rushes toward it. I send her a frantic radio signal—No, Zia, stop!—but she either doesn’t hear it or doesn’t care.

  Then a bolt of energy erupts from the War-bot’s steel fists. It streaks into the space between Zia and Jenny, tearing apart trillions of air molecules and funneling all the particles into a radiant spike, as bright as a lightning bolt. It slams into Jenny’s bubble at almost the speed of light and ignites a firestorm of electrons and ions, spraying in all directions from the point of impact.

  I’m so amazed that it takes me a few nanoseconds to realize what’s happening. Zia has just unleashed a surge. She figured out how to do it.

  And it’s an especially powerful surge. Zia’s circuits are packed with fury, and she’s hurling all of it at Jenny’s protective bubble, deforming its golden surface and bending it inward. Jenny stops smiling. She lets her arms fall to her sides and drops General Hawke, who hits the lawn with a dull thud. Then she narrows her eyes and sends new instructions to the simulation, which bolsters her shield with billions of joules of new energy.

  An instant later, I get a radio message from Zia: What are you waiting for, Armstrong? I could use a little help here!

  I don’t need any more encouragement. Fear and anger are already storming through my circuits, aching to be released. I position my Quarter-bot a few yards to the right of the War-bot and point my arms at the same part of the bubble that Zia is hammering with her rage. Then I throw my surge like a spear at Jenny’s shield.

  My thoughts and emotions merge with Zia’s, and their combined fury ravages the golden bubble. Its surface trembles and flashes and bends farther inward, like a balloon about to burst. Jenny grimaces, the muscles tensing in her huge neck and arms. She’s reprogramming the simulation and reinforcing her shield as quickly as she can, but there are limits to how fast she can move data through the system. With the energy of my surge added to Zia’s, we might have just enough power to defeat her.

  Then a figure appears about a hundred yards down Greenwood Street, materializing out of thin air. It’s a human figure, but unnaturally large, nearly forty feet tall, exactly the size of the giant Jenny. In fact, the figure is a replica of Jenny, composed of dark energy. Its dress is black, and so is its body. Its face is featureless and utterly opaque.

  It
’s a Sentinel. It’s mirroring Jenny because it’s programmed to erase her.

  The figure takes long strides down Greenwood Street. Within seconds, it stands on the other side of Jenny’s bubble, opposite Zia and me. Jenny is wide-eyed with terror. Globules of sweat the size of golf balls slide down her neck. She faces the Sentinel and draws energy from all around her body, siphoning virtual particles from the virtual air and transferring their data to her golden shield. She bends her knees slightly, and her hamstrings quiver.

  “Go ahead!” Her voice is thunderous and defiant, aimed at her twin on the other side of the shield. “Go on and try it!”

  The Sentinel says nothing. Speech isn’t part of its programming. It simply extends its jet-black arm and touches the surface of the bubble.

  This time, the bubble doesn’t absorb the Sentinel. Instead, the figure establishes a link to Jenny’s shield and deletes its data. The bubble’s surface stops shining as the Sentinel erases its energy. Then the sphere collapses and disappears.

  Jenny lets out a wordless scream of frustration. She was right about the Sentinels—they don’t give up. They rewrote their own software and kept evolving until they learned how to beat her defenses. Now she’s facing enemies on both sides.

  On the lawn near her huge feet, General Hawke rolls onto his stomach and groans. Zia points her War-bot’s cameras at the man, then trains them on Jenny. “Now it’s time to keep my promise. I’m going to kill you before that Sentinel does.”

  “No, I don’t think so.” Jenny’s eyes flick upward for a millisecond. “I still have a few surprises left.”

  My circuits are clanging. Why did Jenny look up at the cloudless sky? Then I remember what’s hovering above the neighborhood, silent and invisible, hidden by Jenny’s cloaking software.