But before the startled SEALs could bring their guns to bear, the obsidian sphere sprouted a set of six thin, metal legs, hoisted itself up and scurried away to the gap in the fence, springing through and disappearing.
“Holy-Jesus-shit-a-brick!” breathed Blake. “What was that?”
“Data recovery,” said Patrick. “They sent that unit as a probe to see how we’d react to a replica, and what weapons we had. Now, they’re going to assess the data and evolve their strategy. You can be sure they’ll come back with new weapons, better armor. Anybody want to ring out?” The reference was to the traditional ringing of the bell in training that was a SEAL’s signal that he was quitting.
Various versions of “Hell no!” came over his earphone.
“Okay, then. Jammer, set a charge in that ‘bot that will blow it apart, so they can’t use it again. I’ll take care of Andy’s body. And start loading up the weapons and supplies. They think we’ll sit here on our asses and wait for the next attack. But I’ve got an idea for the next op that will take it to them.
“Hooyah!” came the answering chorus.
As he’d been directed, Garry pounded desperately on the steel door to Mencken’s warehouse.
“Greg, let me in!” he exclaimed. “I need to talk to you!”
Between pounding episodes, he fidgeted and paced nervously. Patrick had told him to do that, too, but he needed no coaching. He was scared shitless. He wondered to himself why people used that phrase. He was more likely to shit his pants; luckily he had already taken a nervous dump an hour earlier.
He pounded again and stood back so the cameras could see him. He and Patrick had been acutely aware that a breach entry would have been suicide, given the shaped charges Mencken had arrayed around the building. So, Patrick said he needed Garry to help “smooth-dog” the entry—SEAL slang for conning their way in with subterfuge. Besides, if possible, they didn’t want the neuromorphs to know they’d taken the facility, or that they had Mencken—that is, if they took him alive.
Garry was beginning to feel renewed intestinal urgency when he heard Mencken’s voice over the intercom.
“Garry, what the hell are you doing here?”
“I think that programmer Ainsley hacked into my skills algorithm. I don’t think he knows about the mimic neuromorphs, so I think he told Blount he found where I’d sabotaged it. But I was monitoring the message traffic, and I intercepted it and got out. But it was only a matter of time before he—”
“Why didn’t you contact me?”
“Just let me in!” Garry exclaimed, swiveling his head around fearfully. He tried to keep from peering down the block, where the SEALs waited.
Finally, a series of metallic clanks resounded within the warehouse, and the door swung ponderously open. Now Garry would really have to keep himself from collapsing into quivering, panicked jelly. He stepped in, reached around behind him, and yanked out the pistol Patrick had given him, leveling it at Mencken. His hand shook, and so did his voice.
“I know what you were doing, Greg. I know you were helping them . . . making the armored robots, the new secondskin.”
Mencken backed slowly into the workshop, holding his hands up.
“Garry, you don’t understand. I was—”
He stopped in mid-sentence, as the warehouse door slammed open with a deafening crash and Patrick burst in, followed by four SEALs. Without a word, the four fanned out into the sprawling warehouse, assault rifles at the ready, grenades hanging from their belts.
Patrick spun Mencken around, and efficiently bound him with plastic cuffs.
“You little fucker,” he said with contempt. “You worked with them. You helped them. You betrayed us . . . everybody.”
“No, let me explain. I didn’t—”
“You didn’t engineer their new armor? You didn’t develop their new skin? You didn’t develop that escape mechanism? Damn, we saw all of those things! We watched the goddamned brain launch out of a robot’s chest and escape! Now, the safe house is compromised.”
“Look, I had to. I had to play along to stay in with them. First of all, for them not to kill me. And second, to let me engineer in vulnerabilities.”
The four SEALs returned, reporting that there were no active neuromorphs; just ones that had been damaged.
“They look like ones that were at the fence. We tagged some of those fuckers pretty good,” said James. “The problem is that they still look operational. It’ll take heavy ordnance to take them out.”
“Or information on their vulnerabilities,” interjected Mencken. “And that’s what I can give you.”
“We’ll see,” said Patrick, directing the SEALs to open the large overhead door of the warehouse, so the trucks could back up to be unloaded of weapons, ammunition, and supplies.
Patrick leveled his assault rifle at Mencken. “The truth, or you’re dead. Is this site being monitored? Any drones? Microbugs?”
“You think I’m a moron?” asked Mencken, staring grimly down the barrel, then at Patrick. “They wanted me to assess the battle damage on the ‘morphs. To come up with ways to harden them further. They didn’t want any of the people in the lab to see the damage; to know that they were sending androids into battle. So, I told them to bring the damaged units here and to make this place a dark site. And I’ve got my own surveillance.”
Patrick kept his rifle aimed at Mencken, but began to give orders. “Deploy DGMs and Stingers on the roof. I want to own the airspace. And place the Gatlings to give optimum field of fire.”
The orders given, he turned over to Blake the job of watching Mencken, and called Leah. She answered after far too long a pause.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “Where are you?”
“I’m fine. I’m outside the city.”
“We’re at Mencken’s workshop. It’s safe here. Please come as quickly as you can.”
“I will,” she said simply. She hung up the phone before they could exchange “I love yous.” Patrick shook his head. He worried that she might be going into shock at the trauma she’d experienced.
“What next?” asked Garry. “What can we do to get out of this mess?”
“Tell me the status of the skills algorithm,” said Patrick. “Can it be used to our advantage?”
Garry sat down heavily in a chair and rubbed his face to shake off the fatigue and fear.
“Well, before I left, I stuck a coleslaw code into the algorithm.”
Blake shoved Mencken onto a chair and hauled himself onto a workbench, his rifle at the ready. “Coleslaw? What the hell is that?”
“Well, Ainsley could analyze the code and see the glitches I installed. But if he tries to do any alteration at all on the software, the coleslaw code shreds the whole program . . . like coleslaw. I’d bet that’s happened already, so the ‘morphs don’t have squat.”
“And no backups?” asked Patrick.
“Just so they’d think things were okay, I did all the usual backing up. But all the copies have the coleslaw code.”
“But you can fix that.”
“I have my own backup in the cloud that doesn’t have the coleslaw code.”
Patrick began to pace—as much to figure out the next strategy as to worry nervously over Leah. Finally, he stopped, glancing back and forth between Garry and Mencken.
“You could finish the skills algorithm?” he asked Garry.
“Uh . . . sure, but why would I want to do that? That gives them the final piece of the system they need to take over everything.”
“How about if you finish it, but embed, say, a suicide code in it?”
Garry shook his head in slow resignation. “The survival algorithm overrides everything. It’s deep in the OS.”
“Okay, okay, okay,” mumbled Patrick, still pacing. “The next best thing would be some way that we could distinguish the neuromorphs from humans. That would enable us to prove that they’ve infiltrated; that they plan to take over.”
Garry’s brow knitted in thought. Aft
er some minutes, he stopped, a smile rising on his face for the first time in weeks.
“I could add code to the motor control algorithm. It’s the one that controls their movement. That links naturally to the skills algorithm. I could sneak in a code that would make the neuromorphs make some movement that would identify them.”
“Okay, do that. And as fast as you can. We need it yesterday!” Garry slipped on his googles and connected himself to Mencken’s system. He pulled out his haptic gloves and slipped them on. He instructed his processor to display what he saw on one of the wall-sized screens in the workshop. Shortly, there appeared the three-dimensional diagram of luminescent colored globes, cubes, polyhedrons, and glowing vine-like interconnections that portrayed the computer subroutines and their connections.
On the screen, Garry’s virtual hands began to probe the shapes, editing the letters, numbers, and symbols of the computer code within them, and rearranging the connections by yanking and reconnecting the vines.
Patrick turned to Mencken. “For now, I’m going to take you at your word that you’ve been working for us, not against us.” Behind him, Blake made a derisive snort and pointedly clunked the butt of his rifle on the workbench. “Do the ‘morphs still trust you?” asked Patrick.
“Yeah, I’ve given them everything they’ve wanted and then some.”
“Okay, when Garry has the skills algorithm complete, contact them. Tell them Garry and you have resolved the problems with the skills algorithm. Tell them to come here and you’ll demonstrate it.”
Despite being immersed in programming, Garry uttered a quiet whimper.
• • •
Mencken unfastened the multiple locks and opened the steel door to admit the eight neuromorphs who had appeared outside the warehouse.
Garry stood back in the warehouse. Despite trying not to, he glanced occasionally at the various hiding places where the SEALs lurked, weapons at the ready. The fact that the warehouse could quickly become an inferno of gunfire added a few more beads of sweat, hand tremors, and voice quavers to those he already suffered.
The eight neuromorphs filed in, regarding the two humans with the same impassive expression they used to inspect a piece of equipment.
First to enter were the gangly Melvin Blount, the dumpy, middle-aged Gail Phillips, and the rotund Robert Landers. Again, they would be the judges of the skills algorithm.
The same five test neuromorphs lined up as they had before.
“To make sure any coding errors are restricted to these units, you will hard-wire the algorithm into them,” said Landers.
Garry quickly found cables and strung them from Mencken’s computer to the hidden sockets in the navel-like holes in the five test androids. A few instructions to the system, and he nodded that the algorithm had been uploaded.
“We have decided to use a more directly relevant test of skills transfer,” said Landers. “Mr. LaPoint, back against the wall and remain perfectly still.”
“Why?”
“We need you as a component of the test.”
“But assembling the gun . . . isn’t that a good test?”
“Back against the wall, Mr. LaPoint.”
“Look,” said Mencken, “I don’t see how this is relevant.”
“You will,” said Landers. “We have trained the unit in a complicated physical skill.” He paused, apparently transmitting an instruction to the fatigues-clad neuromorph.
The android sprang at Garry, unleashing a rapid-fire salvo of vicious kicks and pounding punches, each barely missing Garry. Some sliced the air within a millimeter of his face and body, but others slammed into the wall beside him, blasting from its surface brick chips that splattered onto the floor.
“Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus!” cried Garry, cowering against the assault.
“What the hell!” exclaimed Mencken. “What are you doing?” He glanced nervously at the SEALs’ hiding places, expecting them to attack.
“This is a more relevant test of skills that the units will need to share in field training and action,” said Landers flatly.
The four other test neuromorphs stood silently for a long moment, apparently as the soldier neuromorph transmitted its martial skills to the others.
The skill transferred, the spare, middle-aged Lanny Malcolm stepped toward Garry.
“Please, no,” he whimpered.
“Can’t you use a target . . . or a dummy?” pleaded Mencken.
But the Lanny Malcolm android launched the same rapid fusillade of kicks and punches at Garry, again including those that smashed into the wall, dislodging still more brick, tearing secondskin from Malcolm’s hands. Garry shrank back and began to move aside, but fortunately for him, the android adjusted its aim, still barely missing Garry. Malcom finished his assault and stepped back, the secondskin on his hands hanging in tatters, revealing the metal fingers beneath.
“Satisfactory,” said Landers. “The unit is dynamically adjusting to the movement.”
Randall Black attacked next, launching another round of near-strikes. Garry began to pant with fear. John Travis took his turn, followed by the other android.
The assaults over, Garry sank to the floor, slumped over, his round body quivering, covered with brick dust from the wall.
Landers, Blount, and Phillips stood silently, apparently sharing their observations among themselves, transmitting the data to the neuromorphs’ hive mind.
“We accept the algorithm,” said Landers. “We will conduct further performance tests. Then we will upload it to all the units.”
Without further word, the neuromorphs walked to the door and began to leave.
“Uh . . . do you want me to repair the units’ hands?” asked Mencken after them.
“That will not be necessary,” said Blount. “We will have it done at the factory. It doesn’t look like battle damage.”
With that, they were gone, and Mencken shut and locked the steel door, bringing up the security camera video on one of the large screens, to check that the androids had, indeed, left.
“Shit, we shouldn’t have let them go.” It was the voice of Blake, emerging from behind one of the steel shelves cluttered with robot parts. Other SEALs appeared from the hiding places that had given them the best vantage point, in case of a fire fight.
Patrick appeared, slinging his rifle on his back and staring intently at Garry.
“Are you damned sure you hid that motor control code well? And does it work? Our lives . . . everything depends on those two things.”
Garry took a deep breath and managed to recover his composure. “I did it as well as I could. And I couldn’t very well test it, since it would’ve meant giving us away.”
“What’s next?” asked Blake.
“We wait,” said Garry. “I think I can monitor whether the algorithm’s been uploaded to all the ‘morphs. Once that’s done, we’ve got a way to show the world that these things really exist . . . these replicas.”
“Okay,” said Patrick. “Next order of business. Mencken, you said you found vulnerabilities in their structure. We need to know how best to use the ordnance we have.”
Leaving Garry peering through his googles, Mencken and the SEALs made their way through the huge equipment-cluttered warehouse to a crumpled collection of damaged androids lying inertly on the concrete floor, like broken, staring dolls. Bullet holes pierced some androids’ chests; others had limbs torn by bullet impacts; and a few had faces shattered by a sniper round.
“I deactivated them for repair, so they won’t be transmitting to the others,” said Mencken, hauling one of the androids to a sitting position. “You guys did damage, no doubt. But not any that would knock them out.”
“Okay, then, what does it take to stop these fuckers?” asked James, the heavy weapons specialists. “We’ve got lots of toys.”
“Nothing short of a shaped charge attached right to their chest—”
“We’ve only got a limited number of MEs,” interrupted Lane, the explosives e
xpert. “And even the stupidest robot ain’t gonna let a little explosive-carrying snake climb on it and detonate.”
“Just let me continue,” said Mencken, waving his hands impatiently. “There is a way to neutralize their ability to fight, so you can plant a charge.”
“Shit, yeah,” said Flash Cranston, always eager to be first into any battle. “You give me just a little window, I’ll plant some C18, blast the motherfuckers.”
“Aim your weapons at the mouth,” said Mencken. “Until they know to harden it, their mouth is vulnerable. Aim an explosive round, or a grenade . . . whatever explosive will detonate . . . precisely into the mouth and you’ll take out the whole head. They’ll still have the ability to move and fight, because it’ll leave their brain and limbs intact. But they’ll lose their sight and hearing. And also critically, they’ll lose communications, because that’s where their antenna is.”
“Tough shot,” said Harmon. “But I can make it.”
“The DGMs could do it, too,” they heard James say over their communications link. He was on the roof, along with Blake manning the drone-guided missiles—the phalanx of small precision-guided rockets.
“Good,” said Patrick. “Any action up there?”
“Nope,” said James. “All is—” he stopped in mid-sentence. “Shit, the system just acquired an aerial target!”
“Civilian?” asked Patrick. He wasn’t concerned yet, because the flying robotic drones were ubiquitous over cities for traffic management and other mundane missions.
But the answer was alarming, as they heard the whoosh of a rocket launch over their comm lines and an explosion reverberating faintly through the thick walls of the warehouse.”
“Police drone,” said James. “Coming in over us, and armed. We took it out. A drone like that only means one thing.”
“Jesus!” said Blake. “What are the cops doing here?”
“Leah’s outside!” Exclaimed Mencken, pointing to a display screen showing her standing by the door. A faint pounding from small fists arose on the steel door.
Patrick ran across the warehouse to the door, unlocked it, and Leah rushed in.
The Neuromorphs Page 19