by Tarah Benner
My bitter drama is cut short when I turn over my shoulder to look at Maggie. She’s been trailing behind me and Ping for the past five minutes, and I’ve been so caught up in hating Van de Graaf that I didn’t notice the shape she was in.
Maggie looks pale and a little woozy. She’s exhausted, and who can blame her? She hasn’t slept in more than twenty-four hours, and she’s still dehydrated from her ordeal.
I stop moving and turn to face her.
“What are you doing?” she huffs, though it’s clear she’s grateful for the break.
“Jones, er, Barnes . . .” I scowl. I don’t know what to call her or what to say. I have no idea how I’m supposed to relate to her after she lied to me and pretended to be someone else for almost a month. “Jones . . .” I continue. It feels the most natural. “No offense, but you look like hell.”
“What?”
“You do,” says Ping with a cringe.
“I’m fine,” says Maggie, a little too quickly to be convincing.
“No, you’re not,” I say patiently. “You were kidnapped. You’re exhausted. You shouldn’t be here.”
Maggie frowns. “I’m coming with you.”
“You should be resting,” I say. Now that she’s not technically a member of my squad, I’m not sure I still have the authority to order her around.
Maggie lets out a huff of annoyance. “Oh, yeah. That sounds nice . . . I’ll just take a little catnap while the bots murder everyone in their sleep.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.” Maggie narrows her gaze. “I can’t rest — not now. Not when the bots are running amok and Buford . . .”
She trails off, looking as though his name alone is enough to fill her with a choking fear. It makes me want to put my fist through a wall.
Maggie doesn’t finish. She doesn’t have to.
If I’m being honest, I don’t want to let her out of my sight — not with him still skulking around the space station. Buford is a snake that sneaked through all the Space Force’s security screenings, and I don’t trust Flaccid Greaves to lock him away.
“Fine,” I say.
“What?” Ping quips. He’s not used to seeing me give in like this.
I shrug. I’m probably going to regret letting Maggie come, but having her near gives me a temporary sense of calm. Besides, I reason, the girl is tough. If she made it through three weeks of Space Force basic, she can make it through this. I’m the one who trained her.
We take the stairs to Sector C, and I get a shiver of déjà vu. We’re approaching another restricted area like the one where Maggie was held. The walls are the same slate gray, and the halls are silent and empty.
According to Van de Graaf, Sector C is the nerve center of the entire colony. Before we left, he told us that whatever high-level access tag Ping managed to stick on my ID isn’t going to be enough to get us in. Only top-level administrators are allowed in C.
As it turns out, Boy Wonder has one of the exclusive codes that allows him to access virtually any room on Elderon. I’m not convinced that he’s allowed everywhere, but hopefully his code will at least get us into the control room.
When we reach the door leading to the colony’s nerve center, we’re confronted with a big yellow warning sign. It tells us that only top-level personnel are allowed beyond the door, which seems redundant, considering nobody else can get in anyway.
I ignore the sign and follow Van de Graaf’s instructions. I hit pound eighty-nine eighty-nine on the keypad to get to a screen that will allow me to override the three-way biometric authentication. It prompts us for a code, and Maggie punches it in.
The light on the keypad turns green, and the automatic door whooshes open with a burst of cold air. We step inside, and I get a shiver of foreboding. I’ve never been inside Sector C.
We’re standing in a long gray hallway lined with reinforced steel doors. They don’t have windows. They don’t even have numbers — just color-coded symbols on hexagonal signs in the middle.
It’s strange to think that everything on Elderon is controlled from a room in this sector — every light, every toilet, every bot and security camera.
Our footsteps echo down the long narrow hallway, and another set of lights near the end flickers on as we approach. I count nineteen doors down per Van de Graaf’s instructions. This is the room that tracks and controls the functions of the entire autonomous workforce.
We punch in Van de Graaf’s code again, and I hear a low click as the door unlocks. We rush inside, and my jaw drops to the floor. Maggie freezes beside me, and the two of us just stare.
I’m not sure what I was expecting. Maybe I thought that it would look like the sort of low-tech control room you see in movies. Part of me was hoping for a big red button in the middle of the console — an automatic self-destruct feature in case of emergency.
There isn’t one.
Instead, the wall in front of me is covered with a concave 3-D screen — a prism of images unfolding on their own. The view is almost like being inside a diamond, where each tiny facet represents a video feed.
I can’t take it all in. No human could. It’s like being inside a hive and trying to monitor the movement of each worker bee.
Squinting at the wall, I focus in on a single facet of the screen. It’s a live feed from the dining hall.
“These are the bots’ feeds,” says Maggie, pulling me out of my trance.
“What?” I say, still mesmerized by the scale of surveillance going on inside the colony. I can’t even count all the feeds I’m seeing. There must be hundreds.
“Each of those feeds . . . They’re from the bots’ point of view,” Ping explains.
I whip my head around to look at him. He, like Maggie, is still staring at the screens — focusing in on a single facet.
I follow his gaze to a view of the fitness center, and I realize he’s right.
It seems obvious now that he’s said it, but I didn’t notice it before. There’s a reason I don’t see any bots on screen. It’s first-person footage. Each bot is essentially a mobile security camera, able to access and monitor every corner of the colony.
“But if all their feeds are working . . .” I begin, my heart rate speeding up.
Ping nods, and I can feel his dread. “It means all the bots are awake.”
5
Maggie
As we stare at the mosaic of feeds, the magnitude of the bot problem begins to sink in. It’s not just half a dozen rogue maintenance bots and a few humanoids we have to worry about. There are hundreds of feeds — hundreds of bots.
What makes it worse is that the console laid out beneath the screens is like nothing I’ve ever seen. I don’t know what I was expecting — big round keys with obvious labels to make deactivating the bots easy? An eject key that would shoot me back to Earth — back to my apartment on the Lower East Side?
Instead I’m staring at a console with literally hundreds of buttons. The top six rows are numbered, and below that is a row of buttons marked with symbols. The console has a glowing white orb in the center for navigation and several smaller levers, but I have no idea what those might control.
Jonah looks just as dumbfounded as I feel, but Ping eases himself into the swivel stool and cracks his knuckles. He leans forward, peruses the keyboard, and deftly taps a combination of buttons that causes the feeds to disappear.
I feel my mouth fall open. For all I know, Ping could be logging in to the mainframe to play Tetris, but then a long column of numbers appears, and Ping uses the orb to toggle over the entire column and highlight the numbers. He hits another combination of mystery keys, and it occurs to me that the numbers and symbols are part of some crazy nerd language that Ping understands.
The screen changes again, and suddenly the entire digital prism is filled with crawling lines of code in different colors. Letters and numbers march across the page like lines of ants, but they’re also scrolling vertically. Watching the code makes me instantly queasy, but P
ing seems to find what he’s looking for.
Jonah and I watch dumbfounded as Ping writes a new function for the bots to override any existing modifications and restore the bots’ factory settings. The idea is to stop the bots in their tracks, but Ping’s puny lines of code don’t seem like a match for the complex malware Buford and his accomplice installed.
When he’s finished, Ping hits the last button with a flourish. The screen with all the code disappears, and suddenly the feeds are back. We all wait with bated breath.
It’s difficult to tell what’s going on without focusing on a single feed. I choose a screen near the upper right-hand corner — a bot moving through the mall as though it’s searching for a victim.
“Shit,” says Ping.
“What?” snaps Jonah. I know that he, like me, isn’t sure what the hell is going on.
Ping sighs, and my heart sinks. It didn’t work.
“Well, this is no good,” says Ping in the tone of someone who just discovered a flat tire.
“What’s no good?”
Ping doesn’t answer right away. The screen switches back to the scrolling rainbow of code, and he hunches over the console, squinting for something in the never-ending stream of characters.
His hand hovers over the orb, and I watch as he catches a line of code with his cursor.
“Ugh . . . I should have known. Whoever Buford’s been working with is no slouch.” Ping’s tone is a mixture of admiration and disappointment.
“What is it?” Jonah presses, looking as though he wants to claw his own eyes out.
“Whoever did this overrode the bots’ ability to receive input remotely.” Ping releases the orb and pushes back from the console.
“What does that mean?” I ask.
“I’m locked out.”
Jonah and I exchange a look of dread.
“So we can’t turn them off?” Jonah asks.
Ping rubs his face with his hands, looking as though his brain is working through a complex problem. “Not without a code to break the override.”
It takes a moment for that horrible reality to sink in. I look up at the screen, which has reverted back to the mosaic of feeds. One in particular catches my eye: a feed from the food-science labs in Sector D.
I’m staring into the eyes of a terrified female officer, who’s backing into a cart full of plants. She’s gripping a heavy metal rod in both hands and shaking in fear.
“Oh my god,” I murmur.
“That’s Walker,” says Jonah suddenly. “We have to go.”
“Go?” says Ping.
“To the food-science labs.” Jonah turns over his shoulder to Ping. “How long can the bots last on one charge?”
What he really wants to know is how long we will have to wage war on an army that doesn’t eat, doesn’t sleep, and doesn’t feel any pain.
Ping shrugs. “I’ve heard the bots can last forty-eight hours on a single charge. We know the maintenance bots got a fresh charge right before all this started. The rest of them . . .”
“Forty-eight hours?” Jonah repeats.
“Yeah,” says Ping with a cringe.
Jonah lets out a growl of frustration, and I know we’re all thinking the same thing: We don’t have forty-eight hours to fight. The bots could kill the entire colony by then.
We leave Ping in the control room to try to crack the code on Buford’s override. Jonah and I sprint over to the food-science labs to help Walker and the rest of the Space Force.
We haven’t even reached the set of heavy metal doors when I hear the sounds of battle emanating from the labs. Muffled voices echo through the walls, and I hear bangs and clashes that sound like medieval war.
I can’t see anything through the porthole windows. The hallway on the other side is dark and deserted, but I know we’re getting close.
Jonah uses Tripp’s all-access pass to swipe us through, and the sounds of battle become deafening. We jog down the long hall toward the sounds of fighting, swiping ourselves into the staging area and rushing through the last set of doors.
We’re standing on a narrow metal catwalk that crosses over the warehouse. Below are several dozen of the creepy help bots — the kind that populated the dining hall and the food labs before.
These bots have faces like department-store mannequins and humanlike bodies, but many have odd metal attachments where they should have hands. Clear plastic caps cover the backs of their heads, revealing tangles of wires, sensors, and chips.
Below is a scene of absolute chaos. Bots are upending carts of plants growing on shelves and ripping larger plants out of raised beds along the walls. Two dozen Space Force operatives are already on scene, engaging the bots to stop the destruction.
Gunshots reverberate throughout the warehouse, and I see familiar expressions of horror as the operatives’ bullets ricochet off the bots. They don’t stop or cease to function. The nasty things just keep on going.
I don’t know how long the Space Force has been here, but it seems long enough that they should have learned their weapons were useless. But the shell-shocked officers keep shooting at the bots. Their bullets ricochet off walls and shelves, and Jonah lets out a groan of frustration.
A few officers have abandoned their rifles and are beating the bots with improvised weapons — pieces of pipe and metal shelving, wooden boards, and plastic trays.
“Walker!” Jonah cries, spotting the woman from the feed. She’s trapped between two rows of shelving, cowering as a bot upends a cart of strawberries.
Jonah leaps over the railing as he nears the ground floor, snatching up a wooden board. He brings it down on the bot’s head and continues to beat it until it turns toward him.
The bot’s face is completely expressionless. Its features are dumb, plastic, and doll-like. It reaches out and snatches the board, but Jonah holds on for dear life.
They struggle for a moment, Jonah and the bot, but the bot is clearly stronger. It rips the board away and breaks it in two, and my stomach drops to my knees.
The girl, Walker, is standing stock-still, cowering between two shelves of herbs.
I scramble down the steps to help Jonah, casting around for something I can use. The bot lunges, but Jonah leaps to the side. The bot misses his target but doesn’t reengage. Instead, it turns to the right and gives a shelf of greens a hard push to the side.
The shelf teeters dangerously before falling with a crash. It careens into the shelf beside it and starts a domino cascade of shelves across the entire first floor.
Then it hits me. The bot didn’t care about Jonah. It didn’t care about Walker. They aren’t after the humans. They’re here to destroy the food supply.
Whoever is controlling the bots is planning to starve us out. The bots must have orders to trash the labs — killing any human who gets in their way.
Jonah seems to have reached the same conclusion. He pulls Walker out of the bot’s path and sends her up the stairs. He’s yelling instructions at the other officers, but all sense of order is unraveling.
A man in the corner continues to shoot. He’s a sergeant. He’s unloading a clip on a bot in front of him, his pockmarked face as white as a sheet.
The bot continues to plow forward, aiming for a bed of corn. The officer’s eyes are wide with panic, and I can sense him shutting down.
“Whitehead!” Jonah yells. “Get out of the way!”
But the officer doesn’t respond. He continues to unleash a storm of bullets, creating a field of fire no human can penetrate.
“Whitehead!”
Jonah yells his name again, but the guy is trapped in a bell jar of panic.
The bot draws closer, and the man’s eyes widen. I watch in horror as the bot walks up and snatches Whitehead’s rifle away. The bot tosses it to the ground with a heart-stopping clatter, and Whitehead seems to return to his senses.
He whips his head around like a cornered animal, locking eyes with his comrades in arms. Jonah rushes to close the distance between them, but he’s
four seconds too late.
In one fluid motion, the bot shoots out an arm with a metal claw attachment. It thrusts it forward so easily that at first my brain can’t process what’s happening. But then Whitehead’s eyes bulge in agony, and his mouth stretches into a scream.
The bot shifts to the side, and I see that its arm is in Whitehead’s abdomen. It’s immersed to its elbow in flesh and organs, and its eyes are blank — expressionless.
The bot withdraws its claw in a fountain of blood, and Whitehead’s body convulses. His guts spill from the opening like candy from a piñata, and Jonah freezes on the spot.
A surge of bile burns my throat as I watch Whitehead collapse on the ground. It seems to happen in super slow motion, and the bot moves on as if it’s already forgotten.
People are running toward the exit — rushing the stairs in a storm of panic. I hear Greaves’s voice above the din, and every Optix light begins to flash.
I don’t immediately realize what’s happening until Jonah lets out a holler of rage. It disappears in the clamor of footsteps, and I back up against the wall to avoid being trampled.
Greaves isn’t regrouping, and he isn’t issuing new orders. He’s calling the Space Force to retreat.
The food-science lab empties of humans within minutes. Greaves’s forces have fled the lab, leaving me, Jonah, and Walker to extract the wounded.
Once we get the injured Space Force operatives out of the bots’ paths, they begin to act as though we aren’t there at all. They continue to demolish the crops — destroying the food scientists’ work with intensity and precision.
Greaves’s hasty mission was a failure, and the human cost was high. The Space Force fought for less than twenty minutes, and five operatives were killed.
A dozen more were injured in the battle. Some of them had never seen action before.