Over the next half hour, one by one, the team reported being in position, until all six were in place.
Meanwhile, Patrick had been designating each robot sentinel as a target—virtually marking them using his googles’ night vision. He transmitted the positions to the team. After a moment, Harmon transmitted back two more targets that hadn’t been visible from Patrick’s position, and Blake offered yet another.
They waited.
No new targets presented themselves.
“Gentlemen, choose your partners,” whispered Patrick. He designated his targets as two sentinels that he knew would be easiest for him to strike from his position. In his googles, green, glowing target circles appeared around the images.
He switched to the view of the entire scene. As the team members designated their own targets, one by one, circles appeared around the images of each of the other sentinels. Finally, all the targets showed the circles that would mean their destruction.
“Acquire targets,” he ordered. He reached behind him and slid from their pouches two cylinders holding Javelina anti-tank rockets. He pressed a button on each cylinder, activating it, and with his googles transmitted the target images to the rockets. The green circles around the targets in his image became cross-hairs. His two rockets had locked on. Now he didn’t even have to aim to hit them. The rockets’ guidance systems had recorded the target images, and he could literally launch them in any direction, and their cameras would still direct them to whatever path required to hit the target. It was ironic that the tiny brain of each Javelina was a neuromorphic chip.
Neuromorphs would destroy neuromorphs.
“Set launch for five minutes,” he commanded. He used his googles to set the timers on his rockets.
He switched to the scene view, which showed every set of cross-hairs blinking red. The SEALs had designated all the targets; and the system would time the launches so that they would all strike simultaneously—absolutely necessary that all the sentinels were obliterated at once, preventing any from transmitting an alarm.
“Driller?” he queried.
“I’m on the guard,” answered Harmon. It was unfortunate that the sniper had to take out the human in the guardhouse, but they couldn’t be sure he wasn’t a collaborator.
Patrick held the two rockets above his head and waited.
Simultaneously, all the rockets erupted from their tubes, a volley of loud whooshes resounding from across the mountainside. Within seconds, the cliffs around the entrance erupted in seventeen thundering blasts.
Through his googles, Patrick could see severed robotic heads and arms arcing into the air and tumbling down the cliffs. He zoomed in on each target, seeing a succession of smoking, charred craters where there had once been neuromorphic robots.
The faint crack of a rifle shot signaled that Harmon had taken out the human sentry. He checked the target, and saw the man in the guardhouse slumped over in his chair. Regrettable, but necessary.
Patrick hefted his pack, switched his suit to engine power and began deftly scrambling down the slope toward the tunnel entrance, hearing the telltale crunching of rocks that told him the other team members were doing the same. He reached the chain link fence bordering the road, and used bolt cutters from his belt to make a hole. He ducked through and emerged on the road to see the other five SEALs sprinting toward the entrance.
He made it to them, and with hand signals indicated they should hug the walls and advance. The tunnel was well-lit, and they could see the curve that led toward the north blast door.
Movements ahead revealed three robots running toward them. Patrick whipped out a Javelina and targeted one, and James and Harmon targeted the other two. Within seconds three ear-splitting explosions filled the tunnel, and the three robots lay in shredded components.
DeFranco pounded ahead of them down the tunnel. He seemed determined to take over the role of his dead comrade Flash Cranston as the first SEAL in.
“SON OF A BITCH!” he heard DeFranco bellow, echoing down the tunnel. The five other SEALs reached him, standing before the massive blast door.
It was closed.
“What the hell do we do now?” asked Blake. “Pitbull, you got anything up your sleeve?”
“Just my arm,” said DeFranco. “But I’m about to have something brown in my pants.” The breacher specialist stepped up to the door, inspecting its white steel surface and massive stainless steel hinges. “Well, I brought some snakebot shaped charges, but it would take the four I’ve got just to take out one hinge, much less the bolts. And we don’t have enough C18 to blow the door itself.”
“Abort?” asked Blake.
“Wait,” said Patrick. He moved out into the tunnel, his back to the blast door. James also took up a position in front of the door, holding the grenade launcher, ready to fire in either direction.
The team didn’t question the order, but spread out along the walls of the tunnel to the north and south. Each pulled out two Javelinas, holding them at the ready.
They didn’t have to wait long. From the south they heard the steady, increasingly loud thunk of massive legs impacting concrete.
“Shit!” Blake exclaimed. “That’s a Defender! If it gets too close, we can’t risk using the Javelinas. And we don’t have enough snakebots.”
“Well, at least I’ll confuse it a little,” said James, rushing toward the sound, just as the Defender appeared down the tunnel. It instantly detected the SEALs and began to swivel its guns toward them. But at that moment, James triggered the grenade launcher to unleash a rapid-fire fusillade of grenades that landed around and on its body.
Deafening explosions engulfed the Defender, several destroying cameras on top of its armored body. The Defender backed up two steps to reorient itself, then began to aim its weapons again. In only seconds, it would trigger a lethal phalanx of bullets would obliterate the SEAL team.
“RETREAT!” shouted Patrick, knowing that they would still lose a battle with the Defender out in the open. But as the SEALs began to move, a voice behind him shouted
“HERE! IT’S OPEN!”
Patrick whirled turned to see Mencken standing in the opening blast door, behind him Garry and another man.
The team rushed through the doorway just as a storm of bullets began blowing craters in the concrete walls and ricocheting off the floor and ceiling.
Once the team was inside, Mencken punched numbers into a keypad and the massive door swung smoothly closed, its thick bolts sliding into place with only faint creaks of metal on metal.
“Let’s get the second door between us and that thing!” exclaimed Mencken, beckoning the team through an inner blast door about thirty feet down the tunnel, keying in the code to close it.
Now the hornet-buzz of the Defender’s chain guns and the blast of its missiles became only faint sounds.
Mencken extended his hand, smiling and exclaiming, “They bought it!” Patrick took it in a grateful handshake.
“They thought they’d really abducted you?” asked Patrick.
“Yeah,” said Garry, “They really thought . . . if that’s the right word . . . that we hadn’t detected the microbug they attached to the SUV.”
“Good acting,” said Patrick. “And the software? Their OS?”
“After we got in, I figured out a way to sabotage it. And Garry programmed the subverted OS. They all now have it installed.”
“Out-fucking-god-damn-standing!” exclaimed Blake.
“Okay, tell us what to expect,” said Patrick.
“Uh . . . I’m Jonas,” interjected Ainsley. “If you don’t mind, first could you take care of a little something? We’ve got explosives implanted in our skulls. You don’t happen to have a neurosurgeon with you who could take them out.”
“Yeah,” said Garry. “Good idea. They need to come out. We think our OS has disorganized the ‘morphs enough so they wouldn’t reach a consensus to set them off. But it’d be a little more comforting to be sure our brains wouldn’t be blown into pu
dding.”
“I got this,” said Lane. He turned to Ainsley. “We’ve all got medic training, but I’m the explosives specialist.
“Thanks, Barry,” said Patrick, using Oopsie’s given name so as not to alarm the civilians. He frowned and shook his head at the other team members—a silent warning not to tell the three booby-trapped humans Oopsie’s nickname.
Mencken, Garry, and Ainsley crouched in the entryway to the cavern, as Lane gingerly examined their scalps.
“Hell . . . I can’t tell anything about the triggers on these things, since they’re embedded in your heads,” he said scrunching up his face. He set down the black metal suitcase he’d been clutching tightly during the entire op. Right now, the babynuke he’d carried wasn’t as dangerous as those charges. “I’ll know when I get the first one out. Who’s first?”
Mencken stepped forward. “You need the programmers more than me.” He sat down on the concrete floor. Outside still sounded the relentless, but futile, bombardment from the Defender.
Lane motioned the others back into the cavern and pulled out his medical kit, choosing the forceps. He meticulously parted Mencken’s hair to reveal the pencil-sized hole in his skull. Gingerly, he grasped the thin wire jutting from the skull and began to ever-so-slowly withdraw it. Mencken flinched at the pain, and Lane waited until Mencken had managed to still himself.
“Looks like this is the antenna,” said Lane. “It’s coming . . . coming . . . hmmm.”
“What do you mean ‘hmmm’?” asked Mencken.
“There’s a receiver . . . but there’s also . . .” with that Lane suddenly jerked up the forceps and pitched the small capsule it grasped as far as he could down the tunnel toward the inner blast door.
A sharp bang rang out and Mencken uttered a shocked “HOLY SHIT!”
“As I was saying, there’s a receiver, but there’s also a little trigger like the one on a grenade,” said Lane. “That means a few seconds after the little bastard is extracted, it detonates, which is meant to take out both the extractor and the extractee. We have to assume they were all armed remotely when they were installed.”
Mencken, slumped back against the wall, putting his hand on his head in relief.
“Oopsie, are you up for this?” asked Patrick, instantly regretting using the name.
“Oopsie?” asked Garry and Ainsley in unison.
Lane waved the forceps dismissively. “Yeah, well, don’t pay any attention to that. Let’s get this done.”
Using the forceps, and the blade of a scalpel to depress the trigger, Lane skillfully extracted Garry’s, and then Ainsley’s charges, holding the triggers down until the charges were out, then pitching them away to detonate harmlessly against the massive blast door. Still, the three whose skulls had held those charges flinched with each bang. Next, Lane applied antibiotic and bandages to the wounds.
“My family,” pleaded Ainsley. “Please find my family and save them.”
“We’ll do our best,” said Patrick. “So, do you all understand Oopsie’s method?” he asked the other SEALs. They all nodded. “Good, now that you guys are safe, what intel can you give us?”
“Well, we’ve given you chaos in there,” said Mencken. “We’ve given you an advantage.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, after I scoped out their situation, I was thinking that we had to somehow program into them as many of the seven deadly sins as we could . . . weaknesses we could exploit. I figured sloth, lust, and gluttony were out. After all, they’re machines. So, that left wrath, greed, pride, and envy.”
“Still not following,” said Patrick.
Garry hauled himself up, groaning quietly and touching the bandage on his throbbing skull. “Okay, to make them have those flaws, first Greg persuaded them that they needed creativity and competitiveness algorithms added to their OS. Sounds reasonable, right?”
“Well, no,” said Patrick. “Neither of those are sins. They make them a more formidable enemy.”
“Yeah, in humans,” said Garry. “But not in machines. We counted on the emergent properties of the new OS when it was installed in all the ‘morphs.”
“What the hell does ‘emergent properties’ mean?” asked Blake. “You mean they’re more hard-assed as a gang?”
“No, in fact, they’re less effective as a group. See, a single enhanced ‘morph would perform better. But when they all were enhanced, the sins emerged as new collective properties. These machines are basically all sociopaths. They don’t have any empathy for one another. Human feelings like that are just not part of their OS.”
“So, basically, the new OS would cause them to give a big ‘fuck-you’ to each other,” said Blake.
“Right, and Jonas and I put a trigger in the new OS that would crank up the competitiveness even more. And I pulled that trigger. Their competitiveness just about eliminated their ability to create a consensus. So until one alpha leader emerges to give the orders, they can’t come to a consensus to blow up all the humans . . . at least for now.”
“Yeah, and Garry figured out a really clever bit of language trickery,” said Mencken.
Garry managed a wan smile, his head still hurting. He explained: “Y’see, the ‘morphs’ are very precise in their definitions of words. They don’t have the sloppiness of us humans. So, they distinguish between the meaning of ‘will’ and ‘shall.’ The word ‘will’ means you will try to do something, but only if it’s convenient. But ‘shall’ means you are absolutely determined to do something.”
Mencken chimed in. “So, we got the leader ‘morphs to mistakenly broadcast the consensus instruction ‘You will not initiate aggression against one another,’ rather than ‘You shall not initiate aggression against one another.’ It gave the ‘morphs a loophole to attack one another! For some reason, the leader ‘morphs listened to us. Frankly that was dumb-ass luck. I guess maybe they still have a remnant inclination to obey humans.”
“And they’re attacking one another?” asked Patrick.
“Yeah,” said Mencken. “Since the new OS was installed, we’ve seen some of them compete by ripping heads off others, and such.”
“Well, shit-fire, let’s go help them kill each other!” exclaimed Blake, hauling his weapons pack onto his shoulder.
“Hooyah!” came a chorus in return.
• • •
“Hey, this is good Karma,” said DeFranco, standing over the shattered body of a neuromorph drone. Its face and torso were shredded, its armor peeled back revealing the brain case beneath. Its arms had been ripped off, and neck broken, so the head tilted at a grotesque angle. The SEAL team, along with Mencken, Garry and Ainsley had come upon the robot corpse as they advanced down the corridor into the main cavern containing the buildings.
“The brain,” said Mencken. “Always make sure the brain is destroyed.”
DeFranco obligingly fired two rounds from his assault rifle into the robot’s chest, shattering the spherical brain.
“Okay, first objective: find the people, get the charges out of their heads, get them to safety,” said Patrick. “Driller, Oopsie, and I will take that. We’ll meet back here. Only then will Oopsie set the babynuke.”
The others understood that not only was the rescue critical, but it gave Patrick the lead in finding Leah. Ainsley asked to go with them, to find his family, and Patrick readily agreed.
“We do need to extract a functional brain,” said Mencken.
“Hell, what about the one you had me blast?” asked DeFranco.
“We absolutely need to identify the replicas embedded all over the country to root them out. You killed a lower-level drone brain that may not have had that information. We can’t risk it. Probably only a leader ‘morph. Like Landers or Blount or Phillips.”
“Okay,” said Blake. “You and the computer geeks come with me and Pitbull and Jammer. Trust we’ll get you a leader brain.”
“And when you get a target of opportunity, take it out,” said Patrick.
�
�� • •
“The auditorium,” said Mencken, leading the “brain trust,” as they’d dubbed themselves, into the building complex. “That’s where they always—”
But he was interrupted when Blake grabbed his t-shirt and hauled him back behind the SEALs. “I know that sound,” said Blake. “Jammer, deploy the launcher.”
James moved forward, crouching down in the long hallway, as the scratching sound that had alerted Blake grew more pronounced. He readied the grenade launcher. The group slammed to the floor.
Three spider-like Infilmorphs scrabbled around the corner at the far end and sighted the humans, bringing their rifles to bear. But Blake launched in quick succession a round of grenades. One Infilmorph loosed a volley of shots before the grenades exploded, the blast deafening in the confined of the hallway.
James slumped onto his back.
“I’m such a fuckin’ banana!” he exclaimed, giving himself the classic SEAL insult. He grabbed his shoulder, where blood dripped down his arm. “Hit by my own fuckin’ grenade! Got through the armor.”
“Didn’t you learn about ducking in training?” asked Blake.
James’s exosuit had detected the wound, expanded itself to seal it off, and applied wound coagulant. “Fuck you and get me up,” said James, and Blake helped him back to his feet. “Thanks, Needle-dick.”
Blake and DeFranco took the lead, as they moved down the hall to the disabled Infilmorphs. Two were still moving about, attempting to aim their guns at the SEALs. DeFranco slapped charges on them and set the timers, and the group quickly sprinted away through a connecting vestibule to the next building. Behind them a thundering blast told them the Infilmorphs had been destroyed.
“I thought you said these things would be confused,” said Blake to Mencken.
“The ‘morphs probably programmed the Defenders to attack any intruders,” replied Garry. “They’re still a threat.”
“Good to know,” said Blake wryly.
They reached the auditorium door, and Blake and DeFranco took the lead, bursting through it. A fusillade of gunfire greeted them, three bullets slamming into Blake’s RheoArmor. He staggered back, and threw himself to the floor, returning fire with his assault rifle.
The Neuromorphs Page 27