Ordnance

by Andrew Vaillencourt

  There was no delay between decision and action. Roger keyed into the security loop and accessed the fifth floor. He located the old man and a woman on the cameras and leapt into action with all the speed his new body could muster.

  Roland followed.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Leland Fox didn’t know where he should be. Reflex and instinct had driven him to head directly to the black site building, but as soon as he landed on the roof it occurred to him that his being there brought absolutely no measurable improvement to the situation, and exposed him to the threat of arrest should they need to burn the site. He could have coordinated and administered the various moving parts to this problem just as well from home.

  He was considering climbing back into his car and retreating to a safer locale when his comm chirped again, and the stock photo of Johnson that popped on screen told him that at the very least he should secure that twit of a scientist before scrambling away.

  “I’m on the roof, Johnson, what is it?” he barked into the comm.

  “Dawkins went to take on Breach!” Johnson was screaming.

  “Settle down!” Fox barked back, “Isn’t that what we wanted?”

  “I told him to secure Ribiero, first, he ignored me and went right to Breach!” To Fox’s mind, Johnson was not making a lot of sense.

  “What’s the problem, then?” Fox really wanted to know.

  “Ribiero has escaped! Someone let him out of his cell when security went to fight Breach! He’s out and we can’t find him!”

  “So, have Dawkins track him down and… Oh.”

  That stupid, egomaniacal, pig-headed piece of criminal trash had gone off to have his big macho punch-up with his nemesis, when he was supposed to be on-mission. Fox was no military man, but he had been around them long enough to understand how important it was to stay on-mission.

  “What’s the situation, then? How long before Dawkins puts Breach down?” Fox was walking and talking with brisk efficiency now. He needed to get to the command center in the penthouse fast. Johnson was not going to salvage this clusterfuck without his direct assistance. That much was painfully obvious.

  “I don’t know… it’s not… I just don’t know!”

  Fox slammed the comm closed and pushed through the command center doors to find Johnson still shouting into his comm. The scientist dropped it when he saw Fox and gibbered, “They just crashed through the floor of level two, and are smashing each other to pieces in the lobby now!”

  Fox wasn’t listening to Johnson any more. He had the screens and readouts arrayed around him and was absorbing all they had to say as quickly as he could. This was a shit show coming and going and he knew it. But the exterior was still quiet and Donald Ribiero did not appear to have gotten outside yet. This was bad, but salvageable. The feed from the lobby showed the two armored giants smashing the hell out of each other and destroying everything around them. Fox caught sight of Roland taking Dawkins to the ground and watched their struggles as Roger tried to escape Roland’s pin.

  He opened the channel to Roger just as Breach let him up from the ground. Part of Fox’s brain told him that was a strange thing for Roland to have done, but he was already talking. Roger had closed all the channels though, and Fox was talking to dead circuits.

  “That arrogant piece of shit,” he mumbled and tabbed through the menus in front of him until he was in the command tree for the Better Man communications suite. He entered his PIN and initiated a command-level override. He turned Roger’s comms on remotely just in time to hear Roland say words that made Fox swear like a sailor with a stubbed toe:

  “The only man who knows how to remove that program is being held prisoner on the fifth floor.”

  He saw his prized armature turn and bolt for the freight lift and knew in the pit of his stomach that he was losing control of the situation faster than he could re-establish it. “Dawkins!” Fox shouted into the mic, “You get on-mission right now and secure that prisoner!”

  The shouted response was so loud it made the speakers crackle, “WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU PUT IN MY HEAD!?!”

  “Calm down, Dawkins!” Fox didn’t know what to do. He did not understand these criminal types well enough to feel confident in his standard responses, “you need to focus on doing your job!” Fox tried an appeal to professionalism. Roger had demonstrated a proclivity towards protecting his professional reputation in the past. Fox hoped that the proclivity still existed.

  The armature was at the lift and heading to the fifth floor. According to the telemetry, Dawkins was not calming down. His verbal responses supported that conclusion as well, “You fucking corporate pieces of shit! Did you put that thing in my fucking head?”

  “Put what in your head, Roger?” Fox tried to play the innocent, but he knew with cold certainty exactly what Roger was talking about.

  “THE GODDAMN FAIL-SAFE!”

  Fox didn’t respond. This was a waste of time. He turned to Johnson. “Shut him down.”

  Dr. Johnson nodded, it was the first sign of confidence the squirming academic had demonstrated all night. Johnson was always confident in his toys.

  Now they would see what the Fail-Safe could do.

  With a few deft keystrokes, Johnson switched Roger Dawkins off, and turned the Better Man on.

  The Better Man had been Dr. Warren Johnson’s crowning achievement. Fox remembered the day Johnson had brought the seed of this idea to his attention and implored him to rekindle Project: Golem so he could try it out. Fox had rejected that idea as a non-starter; but he had pitched it as a new, unrelated project and gotten the funding and clearance he needed to raid the Golem archives. It had taken seven years of setbacks, meetings, and two extra rounds of fundraising to get to this point. As he watched the armature stiffen on the screen, he could imagine exactly what was happening inside. Johnson had explained it to him a thousand times.

  A swarm of nanomachines quietly disconnected Roger’s brain from the armature and swapped its priority decision-making apparatus with the custom-built artificial intelligence that ran the body.

  The AI needed Roger’s nervous system to run the machine, but the catch was that it didn’t need Roger’s will to make that happen. Roger Dawkins’ brain was simply a framework upon which the larger OS was built. The whims and desires of Roger Dawkins were carefully compartmentalized to a non-operative section of the neural architecture and the AI moved its own priority matrix into the body’s command role.

  Johnson had designed the system, so that there was no hierarchy between Roger’s brain and the armature’s brain. They existed symbiotically in parallel decision trees. While Roger may have thought that his brain was filling a gap in the armature’s control system, it was not. The neural network was a separate, symbiotic entity that mirrored his own. The AI that lived there simply existed to make sure that the armature reacted in the same way Roger’s body would have.

  Roger Dawkins’ brain was essential to building that network and controlling the armature because coding an entire lifetime of reflexes and reactions into the OS would have taken centuries. Without a live, augmented, and functioning human brain the AI was going to be no better than any other robot’s. But with a pre-built, highly trained, and fully evolved neural framework like the brain of professional fighting man to work off of the AI became a sublime combat tool. It was so much better than the Golem had ever been. Instead of a becoming a remote drone like the Golems, the Better Man AI retained the skills of the man inside, even if that man wasn’t exerting conscious control over it anymore.

  That meant that the AI was more than sophisticated enough to handle most missions without input from anyone. Even better, the more time it spent linked to Roger’s brain, the more like Roger it would become. As it recorded and duplicated the pilot’s neurological activity, the Better Man would gain more skills and more sophisticated subroutines. Over time, there was hope that a soldier’s entire lifetime of instincts and experiences could eventually be duplicated in a Better Man AI.r />
  An army of symbiotic armatures that multiplied and acquired the talents and abilities of the best soldiers, and could preserve those even beyond the death of an operator was what Fox had been selling. The response from potential buyers had been beyond positive: every military in the galaxy was watching this project very closely.

  Currently, Fox had to admit that the project was suffering some setbacks. Without Ribiero’s expertise in creating synthetic nervous systems, Johnson was stuck trying to duplicate the system from Project Golem notes. This was not Johnson’s area of expertise, and the resulting product was very much inferior to the original.

  The AI was only as good as the connection between the organic and the synthetic nerves, Fox had learned. If the symbiosis was poor, the signals each system shared would lose fidelity in transit, and the AI would be highly inefficient at acquiring and duplicating the skills of the pilot. As it stood now, the signal latency was so high in the AI that a regular brain suffered dyskinesia and ataxia executing anything but the simplest of tasks. It wasn’t as simple as the armature performing no better than power armor, but that it actually fared far worse. Fox couldn’t show that sort of data to the board.

  Fox didn’t understand a quarter of it, but his impression was that there was just too much ‘ghost in the machine’ still. So they cheated. They couldn’t build a better machine, so they went and found a faster brain. Using heavily augmented individuals as a template took what would have been catastrophic signal delays and made them manageable. Finding someone like Roger, who had acquired multiple neurological upgrades without irrevocably damaging his mind had been a godsend. Those signal delays had been all but eliminated by his hyper-fast brain. Fox remembered highly qualified candidates who could barely make the suit walk without stumbling. With Roger? It could dance.

  Fox and Johnson had never accepted this as a viable solution though. There was only one Roger Dawkins, and they were trying to sell an army of Better Man armatures. But it was enough for now. Showing the board just a few hours of the trials with Dawkins in the machine had saved the program from cancellation.

  There were other unsavory limitations as well. The pilot had to be awake the whole time the Better Man AI was operating. The sleeping brain was far too chaotic for any sort of reliable symbiosis. In the event of loss of consciousness, the link would be severed, and the armature became as stiff and limited as any other robot. So, until full symbiosis became possible, the pilot needed to be awake and aware while the AI was in charge.

  Fox shuddered at the thought of that, and the telemetry monitoring Roger’s biologicals indicated that this was exactly as hellish as Fox could have imagined it to be. Norepinephrine, cortisol, adrenaline all spiked, and alpha wave activity in his brain nearly broke the gauges. If Roger stroked out, the suit would end up little more than an ambulatory and expensive coffin. But the Better Man would never allow that to happen, and the appropriate drugs were automatically introduced to the paralyzed man sealed inside the towering white goliath.

  Roger could only manage a silent, wordless scream as he realized what had just happened. He felt his own body betray him as arms and legs stopped responding to his mental commands and a leaden, numb weightlessness came over him.

  His eyes, however, stayed open, and he was forced to watch as his new masters twitched the strings of the hapless marionette that had once been Roger Dawkins.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Roland had opted for the stairs, figuring that the lift would be shut down as soon as the company realized that their man was off the reservation. He took a moment to ping Lucia for her status.

  “Where are you?” His voice was terse with exertion when she acknowledged his call.

  “Maintenance shaft, heading for the basement,” a pause, “Dad isn’t… uh… he just can’t move very fast.”

  Roland had to admit he had been expecting to hear something like that. His captors were trying to coerce and break him. He couldn’t imagine that they had been feeding him steak and lobster while giving him massages for the last four days.

  “I’m headed to level five. There is something that I have to settle here. Don’t wait for me. Get clear of the building as fast as you can. It’s about to get kinetic.”

  ‘Kinetic’ was the code word for the ‘Roland loses his shit and blows everything to hell’ part of the plan.

  “How much security is between us and the gate?” Lucia asked with professional demeanor impressive for someone only three days into her combat career.

  I really dig this chick, was all he could think, she really has her shit together.

  “Honestly?” he gave it some thought, “None. I’m pretty sure I’ve taken out the whole force,” He scowled, “with one exception. I’m handling that now.”

  “Roger that,” her voice changed tone, and the fear that always plagued her was a little more noticeable, “No stupid shit, Corporal. If you get yourself killed, I swear I will kick your metal ass.”

  “Understood, boss.” He tried to sound nonchalant, “just some old business I need to handle.”

  “Roland…” there was an admonition coming, he could hear it, so he cut her off.

  “Just get you and your father clear. The police will be here shortly. Tank, out.” He killed the connection and sprinted up the stairs.

  With is customary subtlety, Roland crashed through the stairwell doors into the fifth-floor lobby. He tried to orient himself to where the freight lift would be, but ended up not needing to.

  All he had to do was follow the sounds of crashing and stomping to locate his quarry. It didn’t take long.

  Roland wasn’t sure if it was a suit of armor, a cyborg, or something else entirely, but the big white humanoid made plenty of racket as it stomped through the corridors of the detention level.

  He found it after a barely minute or two of searching. He turned a corner to find the alabaster giant tearing one of the metal doors out of its frame. It paused, and Roland realized it was scanning for something.

  “He’s not in there, pal,” Roland interrupted the search, “We’ve already gotten him out.”

  Roland tried to sound reasonable, “It’s over. Give it up. We can help you.”

  The machine stiffened and pulled its head out of the doorway to turn and look at Roland.

  The voice that came out of the metal man differed greatly from the one Roland remembered from mere minutes before.

  “Corporal Tankowicz. You are looking well.”

  The voice, amplified and altered by the speakers in the machine, was still vaguely familiar. Roland strained his too-human memory for a clue before he wised up and ran it through the helmet’s recognition routines.

  “Fox.” It was one word. One tiny syllable with decades of fear, rage, shame, and hatred layered over the three letters.

  “I see you remember me? How flattering.”

  Roland didn’t really remember Fox that well. Fox had been a project manager for the Golem program, but Roland had only interacted with him occasionally. What Roland did remember of the man was not, in fact, flattering. The mechanical voice continued, “Dr. Johnson is pleased to see you running up to spec as well.”

  Johnson Roland did remember. Johnson had written the fail-safe and had been the one to make them all slaves. Roland suddenly felt the urge to shout, rage, and spit a blistering diatribe to the both of them. He wanted to make them understand what they had done to him, and to the rest of his team. He needed them to grasp the horrific toll their avarice and arrogance had exacted on hundreds, maybe even thousands, of innocent people. Roland wanted his catharsis, he wanted his closure, he wanted his big dramatic moment of truth.

  Then he looked at the nine-foot thing in front of him; and Roland Tankowicz realized he wasn’t going to get what he wanted. Johnson and Fox would never lose a moment’s sleep over any of it. Roland thought of Marko, and the Combine, and even Rodney the goddamn Dwarf and he knew that this thing he wanted was a childish pipe dream. It would amount to little more than a ta
ntrum.

  These were the kinds of people who would never change. Marko had a dozen slave pens, and the Combine happily paid for them. Corpus Mundi would be positively thrilled to sell mindless slave-drones to a slew of militaries; who in turn would be thrilled to have soldiers that could have their morality switched off when it became inconvenient.

  The glittering white insult that stood before him was living proof that no amount of suffering by others was going to spontaneously make either of those two bastards realize anything of value. The problem, Roland realized, was that they already understood.

  They just didn’t care.

  The regular folks would suffer, and the companies would make billions. That was all they needed to know to make something like Project: Golem and whatever that towering pale machine was seem like a good idea.

  Roland was at a loss for words. But he had to say something.

  “Shut this thing down,” Roland whispered, but with a voice like steel on stone, “This is your only warning.”

  Fox laughed through his machine, incredulous, “Oh no. I don’t think so, Corporal. What you don’t seem to understa-“

  Roland charged the armature, covering the intervening thirty feet in two strides. A giant white fist tried to intercept his head as he closed, but Roland slipped it and put an answering blow directly into the gut of his opponent.

  That seemed to shut Fox up.