I tap the table. “Hit me.”
Vanessa deals me a three. Which means I’ve stayed under twenty-one. Her hole card is a ten, giving her eighteen. I’ve won and I’m back to even.
My victory is short-lived, though, because Eyebrows stands and says, “All right. I think we’ve seen enough.” He reaches for my arm—almost exactly like what happened to me in the rest stop. This time I’m better prepared.
“Keep your hands off me!” I shout. And instead of pulling away like I tried before, I lean toward him and push him hard. He’s not expecting that. He goes tumbling backward along with the stool. They bounce off each other as they hit the garish carpet.
I linger a second too long looking at the damage. I’m still next to the table when a different hand grips my other arm.
I tug away but this one isn’t budging. I glance down and I realize why. It’s a hand made with a steel frame. It’s a hand that could probably crush my bones if it wanted to. It’s a hand that is literally bolted to the blackjack table.
The metal hand of Vanessa has me in its vise. Her other hand reaches up into my hair and pulls out my earpiece.
“Calling additional security,” Vanessa says. “Please remain calm.”
I’m not calm. Eyebrows gets up from the floor and he’s definitely not calm either. He’s breathing heavily, he’s got blood on his arm, and he’s glowering at me from under his big bushy eyebrows. I can tell it doesn’t matter to him that I’m already caught—he’s coming for me.
He starts moving toward me. But before he can get even a step closer, James swoops in and tackles him from the side. Eyebrows and James start wrestling on the floor.
I want to help but I can’t do anything like this. I turn my attention back to my arm. I pull and pull, but I’m not going anywhere. Vanessa repeats herself—“Please remain calm”—and I’m suddenly reminded of negotiating with Lara-B on the freeway.
Lara-B!
“Lara-B!” I shout toward the earpiece in Vanessa’s hand. “Vanessa has me. Can you hack into the casino’s AI and release me?”
Vanessa looks at the earpiece and, after a moment of consideration, crushes it in her palm. I have no idea if Lara-B heard me or not. Instead of yanking away, I try slipping out of Vanessa’s grasp, but it’s ironclad. I’m absolutely stuck. Until a few seconds later when—without warning—Vanessa’s hand just opens. I’m free. I’m too stunned to move and I just stare at her pleasant face. “You should duck,” Vanessa says—but somehow it’s not Vanessa’s voice this time. It’s the voice of Lara-B.
And at that moment, I hear a blaring horn coming from behind me. I whirl. The deep rumbling horn is getting louder and louder, and the few gamblers still inside the building are inching away from the front doors of the casino.
I take the advice and fall to the floor. A half second later, there’s an explosion of sound and steel. The slot machines are pushed away, the ceiling fixtures are tossed aside, and instead of inching away, everyone is fleeing in terror from the front doors.
Lara-B has entered the casino.
Nine
The enormity of Lara-B is suddenly clear when she’s resting in the middle of the casino. Outside, she looked like any regular semi. Inside—where I can see how much of the space she fills, where I’m looking up at her from the floor—she’s downright menacing.
The wreckage surrounds her. The casino falls into a strange silence. Everyone is catching their breath, bracing for something worse. Lara-B’s passenger door pops opens.
“Hurry,” Vanessa says again in Lara-B’s voice. And I listen.
Eyebrows and James are both still on the floor. They’ve stopped midfight, gawking at Lara-B’s entrance. I don’t play around. I pop up from the ground and immediately kick Eyebrows in the balls.
“Let’s go,” I say, grabbing James’s hand and helping him up.
We turn to run but before I do, I reach with both hands to scoop the chips off the table.
“Are you crazy?” James cries. He yanks me away before I can get any of them in my hands. I stumble a few times as I get my course corrected. Then we’re running away together.
As we do, I see three security guards running into the casino along with—oh my god—with a freaking pack of freaking mechanical dogs. The “dogs” are four-legged metal beasts. Where their heads should be is a claw instead, capable of opening doors—or grabbing a leg. I saw these demonstrated as a student at MIT and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what the point of them would be. Now I know all too well.
The dogs don’t bark. That’s not their job. They just break into a run in our direction.
James and I scamper up into the cab, and before we’re even all the way in, Lara-B is in motion. Not reverse. She’s going forward. Farther into the casino.
“Where are you going?” I shout as I pile in.
Her horn is going as slot machines and signage and tables and chairs gets either crunched or shoved out of the way. The security team has scattered. No one is prepared for this.
“I can go forward faster than I can backward,” she says.
“Is there a way out?”
“Watch me make one,” she says.
Then all at once, one of the dogs leaps onto the hood. After steadying itself with its metal claw, the claw swivels to face us. The claw opens. It’s like a mouth that also somehow has hungry eyes. The dog advances forward, and its claw starts pushing on the windshield. It doesn’t make much progress and after a few seconds it gives up.
“Can you pop the hood on it?” I ask, thinking of the police drone she took out the same way. “Flip it off of you?”
“I tried,” Lara-B says. “It’s too heavy.”
Around us, the casino is whipping by, but I can see that we’re beyond the casino floor and into a shopping arcade and food court. Everyone can hear us coming, of course, so the people are cowering against the walls. Our path is clear, save for the tables and chairs that go flying as Lara-B blazes her path.
I hear a whirring and I look back at the dog. The claw is bent at its elbow and the whole arm is spinning rapidly—a blur that I can barely make out.
“Watch out!” I shout. The dog advances and the claw’s centrifugal forces slams it through the windshield just as James and I throw ourselves out of the way.
My hands are over my face to protect myself from the flying shards of glass. I peek through my fingers and the dog is approaching the hole it’s blown in the windshield. I stop hiding my face—it’s not doing me any good anymore—and look around wildly for something to fight the dog off with. There’s nothing in the front of the cab. But behind the seats I see one of the blades from the police drone. I remember unscrewing it from the drone when I was scavenging for parts. It’s heavy and metal and just the thing to knock down a robotic dog.
Except there’s no time. The dog is positioning to jump into the cab.
Before it can pounce, Lara-B plows through the glass doors in the far wall of the casino complex, creating another concussive explosion. I cover my face again. When the noise has stopped and the hail of glass and rubble is behind us, I open my eyes again. She’s landed us in the pool area. We’re speeding between the darkened pools and sending pool furniture flying.
I don’t linger with the scenery because the robot dog managed to survive the impact. It’s still on the hood, scrambling for its footing to stabilize itself, certainly. But it’s still there. Finally, its claw grabs the edge of the open windshield and it gets its footing. While it’s doing that, I have enough time to grab the rotor blade from the drone. The blade is just over two feet long—too big to swing inside the cab. But I use it like a long sword and jab it at the dog. I aim right at the base of the swiveling arm with the claw. If I remember right from the demonstration I saw as a student, it’s got a camera there.
The dog lets go of the cab to grab at the blade. Remembering what worked with Eyebrows, I keep leaning in, pushing the dog back away from the windshield. My shoulders are out of the cab when James
is there next to me, holding me in place and pushing on the blade as well.
The dog can’t keep its balance on the smooth hood with us pushing on it. It’s just inches from the edge. It’s losing.
Losing, at least, until it finally figures out how to contort its claw to chomp onto the blade itself. The claw rips the blade out of our hands like it’s nothing. James and I, after leaning forward against the dog, are almost halfway out the broken front window and losing the blade causes us to stumble forward even farther. As we scramble back inside the cab, I see the dog allows the blade slide through its claw until it’s just clutching one end. Once it’s adjusted its grip, it waves it menacingly at us.
I’m dumbfounded.
I can’t believe I just gave the headless robot dog a sword.
The dog begins its advances across the hood toward us, swinging the blade back and forth like a robot angel of death with a scythe.
I’m momentarily frozen in the window. But James pulls me all the way back into the cab. That’s enough to jolt me awake again. I let the momentum carry me and use it to reach behind the bench seat. I grab the second blade from the drone. I whirl, the base of the blade tight in my hands. Now we’re both armed.
The dog jabs forward and I use my own blade to deflect it away from James and myself. But it’s already withdrawn and getting ready for another strike. I still can’t believe just how fast this thing is. Instead of jabbing, it slices toward us from my right. I’m able to get my blade up to stop it from cutting through me, but the dog is too strong. I’m being pushed against James and he’s being pushed against the driver’s-side window.
And then suddenly James pulls me away and we both fall to the floor of the cab. He’s practically on top of me and I don’t understand why—is he protecting me from the dog?
That’s when Lara-B breaks through the third and final wall, the wall that surrounds the pool.
We sit up just in time to see the dog roll off the side of the hood. With the blade in its hand, it can’t hold on to anything else. The falling rubble from the wall does the work we weren’t able to do ourselves.
Lara-B gets all the way through the wall before she turns onto the road. With the dog gone, I have a moment to look back at the pool area. It’s surrounded by high walls. We’re on a side road now, already several blocks away from the Strip.
Lara-B is running dark. No headlights.
James and I stare at each other as we try to catch our breath. The wind is whipping into the cab but it feels good against my sweaty forehead. I realize that he’s clasping my hand. I squeeze back.
“Did…did anyone… Is everyone ok back there?” I ask finally when my adrenaline and breathing are back to normal (or something close to normal).
“My sensors detected no immediate casualties,” Lara-B says. “Though I believe several people may have been injured.”
That hits me in my gut and it feels like it will never leave.
I mean—it’s good that no one died. But that it could have been close shocks me. At no point did I ever think any of my plans were going to get someone hurt. Yet here I am, driving a wrecking ball into the lives of everyone around me. And sure, Lara-B is the wrecking ball, and when it comes to that, I’m not driving. She made the decision to crash the casino on her own. But I asked for her help. I may not be her administrator, but don’t I have some responsibility for what she does now?
I close my eyes. My dad’s said that before. “Don’t you know I’m responsible for you?” True, he didn’t exactly do anything a responsible dad is supposed to do. As a teenager, that line was the easiest thing in the world to roll my eyes at. But now that I’ve felt that responsibility, I can understand where he’s coming from. And the fact that I might suddenly agree with my dad makes me want to run in the other direction.
Argh. I’m not normally an agonizer.
Yet here I am. Worried about the people who got hurt. Worried about James. And even Lara-B.
It’s embarrassing to admit, but it’s only now that I truly understand that outlaw isn’t the romantic concept it sounds like.
“Are they coming after us?” I ask into the silence. Lara-B probably would have said if they were, but at the same time, I’m wondering why there aren’t police drones circling us.
“I don’t think so. After I hacked into the casino’s system, I impersonated their AI to give false reports about our location to the Las Vegas police,” she says. “They’ll be looking for us in the wrong place—at least for a while. There’s a chance we’ll be able to get out of town before they find us.”
“How?” I ask. “They’ll have footage and GPS and drones…” They’ll have footage of me too. I was at the table for hours. And they’ll probably put that together with the girl who took down a police drone in Iowa.
James squeezes my hand tighter and I realize how good it feels to have his large hand over mine. All I want to do is lean into him and hope he wraps his arms around me.
“It’s grim, certainly, but not hopeless,” Lara-B says after my voice trails off. “It’s still dark. We’re not taking freeways. I’m aiming for dirt roads that will take us into the mountains and they definitely won’t be looking there. And as for footage, I erased everything in the casino’s files. They’ll eventually find footage from people’s phones. But the casino won’t have any evidence that points to us. We’ve got some things in our favor.”
“How did you hack in so fast?” James asks.
Lara-B tuts. “It seemed like it might come in handy—I’d been working on a way in ever since Pen sat down at the table. But in the end, it was the code she wrote to free me that gave me the template I needed to gain access. Whether an AI is charged with navigating a semi down a freeway or monitoring a casino, we’re still all made by the same company and same programmers.”
I frown at the mention of T-Six. I try to picture the route Lara-B is taking us down on a map, but I can’t. “Will the dirt roads take us to San Francisco?” I ask.
There’s a beat of silence. James’s hand slackens around mine. He’s looking at me with something like shock but I ignore him.
Lara-B finally says, “They could…eventually. We can cross through the mountains and then meet up with I-5 well to the north of here. No one should be looking for us there.”
The buildings out the windows are small squat homes behind walls. Ahead, I can see the outline of hills against the pre-dawn sky. Her route just might work.
“I still want to go,” I tell her. Because I do want to go. The truth is, agonizing sucks. I can still pull off my plan. I just need to be more careful to make sure no one gets hurt. But I know I can do it.
“Your last scheme nearly got us killed!” James explodes, pulling his hand away. “You still want to go through with another elaborate plan?”
“We have even less than we started with,” I push back angrily. “If you’d let me grab those chips from the table, I wouldn’t have lost everything. But now—”
“Are you kidding me?” he yells. “If you’d grabbed the chips from the table, the dogs would have gotten you for sure. And what would you have done, just walk back into the casino to cash them? You lost the money by pushing your luck and ignoring Lara-B! What’s the point of having a rogue AI give you card counting tips if you ignore her?”
“You still have your five hundred,” I fire back. “What do you care?”
“I have mine because I was smart enough not to give it to you.” He closes his eyes. “We should have stayed in Fremont,” he whispers. “I can’t believe I let you talk me into leaving.”
“They’re a bunch of hippies that will turn on each other the second the going gets tough,” I say.
He shakes his head slowly. “Somehow, I don’t think so.”
“Utopias never work,” I say with finality.
He’s just shaking his head back and forth and somehow it feels like a better argument than what I’m saying. He’s got an injured puppy dog thing going that is really getting under my skin. “T
hen go back!” I shout. “Tell them it was all my fault. Tell them I didn’t let you choose. But don’t sit here and whine about it to me now. I just lost everything I had—I could not care less about Fremont.”
“I don’t understand you, Pen. You talk me out of staying at Fremont, I tackle a security guard, I fight off a dog with you, and you still can’t bring yourself to say ‘thank you’ or ‘I’m sorry.’ Instead you’re mad at me.”
There’s quiet in the cab for several minutes. I try to come up with something to say. Something to explain what I’m trying to do. Why that money is so important. Why I think Fremont is a mirage. But he’s not looking at me. I feel like I can explain it better through eye contact than words. But he’s staring out the window and doesn’t acknowledge my knee when it rests up against his.
After a long silence—a silence I have every opportunity to break—he says, “I want out.”
I take a deep breath and go all in. “Thank you for your help. You saved my life. More than once maybe. I’m sorry I didn’t think we should stay in Fremont. If I can pull this off in San Francisco, I will share with you. It’s forty million! I can share a lot. Just let me make it up to you.”
But it’s too late and we both know it. He doesn’t say anything.
I give up trying. There’s silence for several minutes.
“Hey, Pen,” Lara-B says quietly.
“What?” I ask. My hands are over my eyes. I’m suddenly brutally exhausted.
“Did you mean what you said at the table?” Lara-B asks.
“Which part?”
She plays a clip of audio into the cab. It’s my voice from the casino, talking to Eyebrows. I hear myself say, “She’s a machine and she’s bolted to the table. What would she do with the money?”
For the first time since our fight, James looks over at me. He’s interested in my response.
“What about it?” I ask. Though I know what she’s getting at.
“You really wouldn’t tip a machine?” Lara-B asks.
Semi-Human Page 9