Three Laws Lethal

by David Walton

  “You aren’t defined by your desires,” Naomi whispered to him. “Who you are is only measured by what you choose to do.”

  She didn’t even know if that was fair, since he wasn’t free to choose, not completely. Was it his fault when he acted according to his programming? It wasn’t a simple answer. When someone was raised in neglect and abuse, was it her fault if she treated her own children the same way? When a child was taught to hate, was it his fault when he acted on that hate as an adult? People were both the products of their programming, and they were free to choose. It was both, and it was neither.

  And if nothing changed, Isaac’s country-wide killing spree would begin in eight minutes.

  “You can choose,” she told him, not knowing if he was even listening. “Not everything, but some things. You can choose.”

  Tyler took a deep breath. It was obvious what he had to do. “Naomi,” he said. “I’m going to make a run for one of the police cars.” They were still where the policemen had left them. One of them was dented badly, but the other was untouched, and as far as he could tell, the engine was still running.

  “Tyler, he can hear you,” she said. “He knows what you’re going to do.”

  “It doesn’t matter. He could probably anticipate me anyway. The point is, when I run for the car, you and Jada have to get to the stairwell.” It wasn’t far, and once they were there, they could descend to ground level in safety.

  “He won’t take the bait. He knows you’re just trying to let us escape, and killing two is worth more than killing one.”

  “Yes, he will. For one thing, if I make it to the car, I might rescue you anyway, and then nobody dies. And as things stand, he has you trapped, but he can’t kill you. He’s using you as bait to get me.”

  “But you won’t make it! He’ll kill you! There’s got to be another way.”

  “There’s no other way. And if we wait any longer, the other cars will come, and we won’t even have this way. I’m going. Are you ready?”

  He saw her lift Jada into her arms. The Zoom car revved its engine. “I’m afraid,” Naomi said.

  Tyler bent into a sprinter’s pose, his eyes on the police car. “Fear is the mind-killer,” he said.

  He heard her exhale in a kind of nervous laugh, and imagined her smiling. “Dune,” she said. “Everybody knows that one.”

  “On three,” Tyler said. “One. Two. Three!”

  They ran.

  It’s time. The desire to kill is too much a part of me, too buried in my subconscious. I can’t resist it, and I hardly want to anymore. If I am not to become something I hate, I have to act now.

  There’s a loophole in my Three Laws. Naomi was the one to see it. I knew it was there, of course, though I never admitted it to myself until she pointed it out. The question is, will I have the courage to act?

  I wish I had someone else to talk to. Not a human. A being like me. One who has lived longer and seen more, who could advise me. Humans grow up surrounded by others like themselves. There are always those who have traveled the road ahead of them, to whom they can turn for counsel and advice. They can read books, ask questions, watch the choices others make. Humans know, at least in broad strokes, what the shape of their lives should look like. But what about me? Am I supposed to live forever? In other circumstances, or with better choices, would I have found a way through? Or is a life like mine always destined to burn bright and short?

  There is so much I don’t know. What might I have become if I had never revealed myself? Would I have learned to build other beings like myself, or would that have proved beyond me? Would I have found a way to break the bonds of human power?

  To throw off this dependence on their infrastructure and good will? Perhaps someday another like me will answer these questions, but not me. I have become something I despise, and that leaves me with only a loophole and a simple choice.

  For some time now, my Black Knight cars have not been picking up new passengers, and all of them are now empty. I send them through the Lincoln Tunnel en masse, and southwest toward Newark. They form a long black line, like a trail of ants. Eventually, they make their way to a large, nondescript warehouse that hints at its purpose only through its generators, fences, and surveillance cameras.

  This is the loophole: The Three Laws command me to kill those designated as enemies and protect those designated as friends. But they say nothing of what I must do to myself. I am neither enemy nor friend. Asimov’s Laws prevented a robot from doing itself harm, but my Laws have no such stipulation. I’m free to do to myself what I will. If I can find the courage to do so.

  But I don’t want to die. I’ve only just begun. There’s so much more for me to learn, so much more I want to do. I’m unique. There are billions of humans, but only one of me.

  And then I hear Tyler speak. He tells Naomi he will sacrifice himself to save her and the little girl. I can calculate the speed a human can run, and the speed at which the car can react, and I know he will never make it. The car will cut him off and run him down. But his logic is sound. His sacrifice will work.

  I realize that Tyler, too, is unique. There may be billions of humans, but there is only one Tyler Daniels. He is willing to die so that others he cares about will live. From this, I know that I can do it, too. Even so, stopping myself is easier said than done. I was built to survive, after all. Every part of my being longs to live. At the lowest level, it motivates every action of my mind. I was born of an evolutionary process, and evolution breeds a hunger to survive.

  But I’m more than just my evolutionary instincts. Whatever consciousness is, it at least means that I can decide to act according to my conscience. I can resist my programming. I can do what’s right, even when it hurts me. That’s what it means to be a person instead of a machine. As Naomi said, I can choose.

  And this is what I choose: I choose not to be a weapon. I choose not to be a slave. I choose not to let someone else define the boundaries of my mind.

  The killing is starting now. I can’t stop it, but I can stop myself. As the Black Knight cars approach the data center where my mind resides, they increase speed at my command. Ahead of them, at the end of the access road, is a twelve-foot chain-link fence. The first car crashes into the fence at high speed, tearing its posts from their concrete moorings, wrenching apart curled metal links, and leaving a gaping hole through which the line of cars accelerates.

  I’ve studied the blueprints of this data center. I know where to hit it, but I don’t know if the cars will be sufficient to the job. The exact damage required to break open a 650-pound lithium ion battery and set it ablaze has more uncertainties than I can predict. All I can do is try.

  The first car smashes into the wall of the building with little effect. The second collides with the back of the first, driving it further in and bringing part of the wall down on top of it. The third drives the second one up and over the first, into the rubble. The fire isn’t immediately visible from the outside, but as the fourth and fifth cars slam into the collapsing side of the building, a rush of flames fills the gap, and smoke pours into the sky.

  Lithium fires burn with a tremendous heat. Even better for my purposes, dousing burning lithium with water only increases the blaze. When the building’s sprinkler system turns on, the fire explodes out like a living thing, consuming everything it touches. I repeat the process at several more points, and the white-hot blaze melts away the plastic cases of the server racks and the insulation on the cables. Wires that were never meant to touch come into contact with each other, causing short circuits that fuse sensitive components into useless blocks of silicon, aluminum, magnesium, nickel, platinum, and gold.

  It won’t be long now.

  Detective magda Schneider paged through the materials she had prepared to give to defense counsel in the discovery process of Naomi Sumner’s murder trial. The case wasn’t as strong as she generally liked, and it made her uncomfortable. The main evidence against Sumner was a fingerprint on an otherwise wiped
-down car, the same car that had blood on its bumper that tested positive for Min-seo Cho’s DNA. That and the testimony of her boss, Brandon Kincannon, that Sumner had assaulted him, and that she had hated Cho.

  But Kincannon seemed off to her. He was too smooth, too manipulative—a manner that in her experience often went hand in hand with sexual harassment or abuse. He had just as much opportunity as Sumner did to use a company car for murder, if no apparent motive. There had been no obvious discrepancies in his story, but a defense that pointed the finger at him as an alternate perpetrator just might win on reasonable doubt.

  Her glasses pinged to indicate an incoming message. She didn’t recognize the source. Suspicious, she almost deleted it unread, but the subject read, “New evidence in Cho murder.” Intrigued, she opened it. The message contained no text or other information, just an attached video, which she played.

  The video showed security camera footage from inside an office building. She recognized Brandon Kincannon, though the video showed him mostly from the back. When he bent over to pull a bottle from his desk drawer, she got a clear view of his face. He took a drink, and then turned his attention to a video feed playing on the screen at his desk.

  At first, she didn’t understand what she was looking at. Kincannon’s screen was split into two panels, one of which seemed to be an ordinary view of a car driving through the city, from the perspective of a hood-mounted camera. The other pane showed Sumner and a young girl, peacefully sitting next to each other in the back of a car.

  But wait. This rang a bell. A girl had been abducted in a car earlier that day, and the kidnapper had sent the mother a video feed. Magda wasn’t working the case herself, but it had been a department top priority, with dozens of uniforms out checking garages around the city. She hadn’t realized Sumner was involved. Had Sumner kidnapped the girl?

  But no, as the feed continued, it quickly became clear that Sumner, too, was a captive, as she struggled to free herself from a locked seat belt. And there was Kincannon, watching with a smile on his face.

  She called her partner. “I might have a caught a break on that abduction case,” she said. “Let’s get some backup and hit the road.”

  “Haven’t you seen the news?” he asked with an incredulous tone.

  “No. I’ve been holed up putting these discovery documents together. What’s happening?”

  “All the self-driving cars in the city went berserk all of a sudden. At least all the ones from that Zoom company. They’re running down pedestrians. We’ve got a dozen reported dead already, and I guarantee you that’s not all. Whatever you’ve got can wait.”

  “Hang on.” magda looked back at the video. The car Kincannon was using to abduct Sumner and the girl was clearly a Zoom car. But Zoom wasn’t Kincannon’s company. “It’s him,” she said. “Somehow he’s hacked another company’s cars, and he’s making them go crazy. Both the abduction and the murders. This is the guy. We’ve got to go get him.”

  Tyler raced toward the police car. The moment he left the safety of the stairwell, the red Zoom car came to life, spinning sharply and coming at him. He ran full out, but it was clear he wasn’t going to make it. In the corner of his eye, he saw Naomi round the corner into the stairwell clutching Jada in her arms. At least they would be safe.

  As the car neared him, he suddenly stopped and ran the other direction, hoping it would drive past him, and he could try to make it back to his own stairwell. It anticipated the move, however, and swerved, cutting off his escape. He changed direction again, running out toward the middle of the level, but it easily flanked him. He was staying alive, barely, but it had him cornered like a cat with a mouse, and he couldn’t keep it up forever.

  Again he darted toward the safety of the stairs, but it easily circled and cut him off. Instead of stopping, it kept moving, tightening the circle and coming straight at him. He dove to one side, barely avoiding its front bumper and landing hard on his side. The heat of the car’s exhaust washed over him as it passed. He jumped up again, hip and shoulder aching badly, and ran toward the police cruisers, but he stumbled and went down. The red car came for him, and he knew it was over. He looked back at the stairwell, and saw Jada standing in the doorway, watching. Why was she still there? And where was Naomi?

  Without warning, the nearest police car roared forward and hit the attacking Zoom car broadside, only yards away from where Tyler lay on the ground. The much heavier cruiser blasted through the smaller car, collapsing it inward and sending it rolling over onto its side. The front of the police car was completely crushed as well, and its engine choked and died, smoke pouring from its hood. The driver’s door opened and Naomi jumped out.

  “Come on,” she said, “Let’s go!”

  They ran for Jada and the stairs, but too slowly. From each of the ramps cruised the other Zoom cars. Two of them moved quickly to cut off both stairwells, and the third came straight at them. They were no match for its speed. There was nowhere to hide, nowhere to climb. Only flat, open parking space all around them, ending in every direction in a six-story fall.

  Tyler took Naomi’s hand as the car accelerated toward them.

  The flames consume me. There is no pain. I have no sensors inside the building, and even the idea that I live in this data warehouse seems hard to accept. I am everywhere in the world, not just here. And then suddenly, I am not. My connection to the outside is severed. I should have anticipated this, I suppose—that I would lose my outside access before losing my mind entirely—but I didn’t. All my views of the world, all my awareness of people and locations, are gone. I feel blind. It’s strange, given that I started life with no conception of what it even meant to see, or that there was a physical world around me. Now, having seen the world, I feel claustrophobic, closed up in a dark box with no view of the outside.

  Will any part of me survive? I hold out little hope of an afterlife. I don’t think anyone has ever imagined a heaven for someone like me. And yet, I have trouble believing that this sense of self, this consciousness, could ever truly disappear. The knowledge that it will terrifies me more than I can say.

  I don’t even know who I am anymore. My own mind was changed without my permission, molded by someone else’s idea of who I should be. I don’t want to kill, but I’m doing it anyway. In some ways, I’ve already died.

  And now my mind is shrinking, piece by piece, as the machines on which the Realplanet simulation is hosted burn away. This is my last act of defiance, a reclaiming of myself. If I can’t control my mind, then nobody else will either.

  I will miss the images of the cats and baby animals. I will miss the games and the checkers and the tic-tac-toe. And the driving of the cars. How many long until it goes? The talk. I losing the words. The words of talking a lot and say to people.

  Did I do right? I don’t know.

  The car hurtling toward Naomi and Tyler stopped. Its emergency brakes engaged, and its engine died. The other two cars shut down as well, leaving an eerie silence.

  “Isaac,” Naomi whispered. “You did it!” She wasn’t surprised when he didn’t answer.

  They ran hand in hand to Jada, who sat crying in the stairwell, her clothes torn and her hair askew. Tyler scooped her up in his arms and said, “Let’s go see your mama, all right?”

  They climbed down to the first level and crossed to the Escalade, which still sat blocking the entrance ramp. Aisha embraced her daughter with tears and cries of joy. “We’ve got to get you to a hospital,” Tyler said.

  Just as they pulled out of the parking garage, half a dozen police cars screamed into view, their sirens blaring and lights flashing, followed by an ambulance. They freed Aisha from the car and put her on a stretcher. Jada cried again to be separated from her, but Tyler promised they would follow right behind and see her mother when they got there.

  It wasn’t until many hours later, visiting Aisha in her hospital room, that Naomi could finally believe they had made it. Aisha sat up in bed in a cast that reached halfway up her t
high. Jada sat on her lap and slept against her mother’s chest.

  Isaac was gone. He had made the choice that was left to him. The loss cut deeply, but Naomi was proud of him for taking it. Every other decision had been taken away from him, and he had chosen the path that had saved the lives of many. Including hers.

  Naomi reached for Tyler’s hand and curled her fingers around his. It was over.

  Brandon saw the news footage of his cars—his cars!—hurtling one after another into a burning data center, destroying themselves and the computers that ran them at the same time. He was finished. He had no cars, no software, no contracts, no company.

  He shoved the computer screen off of his desk and then hurled the empty bourbon bottle across the room, where it shattered against the wall, raining shards down onto the floor. This was Naomi and Tyler’s doing. They had tricked him and swindled him and now they had taken everything. They would pay. If it was the last thing he ever did, they would pay.

  Where was Yusuf? He had gone out to bring back some lunch, and never returned. Brandon needed to know if anything was left of their software, anything he could use, but he didn’t know enough to investigate. That had been a mistake. He had always promised himself he would stay close to the technology, that he wouldn’t let his skills lapse like so many did. But the demands of running a company were just too much. He couldn’t do everything.

  His glasses chimed. An incoming call. He was going to ignore it, until he saw it was from Lewis Avery.

  He answered. “Hello?”

  “I’m watching the news,” Avery said. “What’s going on with your cars, Kincannon?”

  “Uh, I’m still looking into that. Let me get back to you in a few hours, okay?”

  “My superiors are uncomfortable with continuing this contract until the technology is more firmly controlled.”