by Draker, Paul
Roger’s grin only widened. He pressed another button, unleashing a half-second burst.
The roar of the Gatling was deafening even with the ear protection. It shook the concrete floor beneath us and rattled our teeth like a speeded-up, amplified jackhammer hitting steel plate. Beer-bottle rounds blurred through the flexing ammunition guides, and a five-foot jet of solid white flame stretched away from us, dancing at the end of the spinning, wastebasket-size multibarrel muzzle crown.
At the far end of the lab, the target—a six-foot-wide, twelve-foot-tall cylinder of shiny dark-gray concrete standing upright—erupted into arc-welder-bright drizzles of sparks and billowing smoke.
Cassie took another step back as the seven barrels of the 30mm cannon spun down, coming to a halt again.
Ears ringing, I pulled the cans from my head. Roger was laughing like a lunatic. He slapped me on the shoulder.
“Seek help,” I said. “Really.”
Cassie raised her goggles to her forehead. “Why on earth would the Navy let you have something like this here?” she asked.
Roger grinned at her. “I told them I needed it.”
“But for what possible purpose?”
His grin widened. “Destructive testing.”
She shook her head, looking flabbergasted.
I stared at the target, half-obscured by smoke now. Its shiny, dark concretelike surface was badly chipped, but still looked more or less intact. I was surprised to see that the powerful multibarreled aircraft cannon—normally mounted beneath an A-10 Warthog to kill tanks and knock down buildings—hadn’t demolished the six-foot-wide cylinder. It was made of tough stuff—another of Roger’s “special materials” projects, no doubt.
My gaze roamed the inside of the chamber, where a row of similar cylinders stood along one wall. Apparently made of the same material, they were flanged at both ends like giant thread spools. In the corner, an even bigger cylinder lay on its side, shattered and cracked. It was the same length as the others, but made of lighter-colored concrete, and so wide that its dimensions were almost square. The end cap had broken off this one to reveal a doughnut cross-section: a narrow hollow interior space surrounded by four-foot-thick walls, now crumbling and fragmented.
Roger hadn’t been kidding about “destructive testing.”
“What are those?” I asked. “They don’t look like ship armor.”
Roger glanced at the cylinders. “Some other crap I’m helping the Navy out with. Space-efficient ordnance disposal, for getting rid of old torpedoes and shit. But you know what?” Glancing around and lowering his voice almost to a whisper, he pointed at the monster Gatling. “In a few months, they’re going to forget I even have this thing. Then I’m going to mount it up on top of the Beast.”
I laughed out loud. “That’s the dumbest, most clown-assed idea I ever heard in my life. You should run away and join the circus instead, if they feel sorry enough for you to hire you.”
He looked hurt. “I’m not an idiot, Trev. I’m going to get one of those rooftop cargo pods—you know, for carrying skis and surfboards and shit—then cut out the bottom and use that to conceal it.”
I shook my head at Cassie. Then the phone buzzed in my pocket.
“Come on,” I told her. “We have to go.”
“What?” Roger’s face registered dismay, like a kid whose playdate has just been cut short.
“Don’t burn through all your ammo too quick,” I told him.
“But I’m getting more tonight.”
“Then make what you have now last all day. Cassie and I are going to be a while, and I don’t want you to get bored.”
Roger followed Cassie and me to the door of his lab. I swung it open to let in Ricky, the lead facilities engineer, who had texted me to let me know he was ready. Ricky had brought three of his guys with him. After the four of us exchanged a round of fist bumps and pound hugs, Ricky handed me two pairs of folded gray mechanic’s coveralls like the ones they were wearing. Tossing a pair to Cassie, I quickly slipped the other on over my clothes. Then I took the white hard hat Ricky was holding, and put it on, snugging it onto my scalp.
“This is so juvenile,” Cassie said, zipping up her coveralls. “I’m embarrassed.” She was grinning, though. I figured that having a senator ready to go to bat for you at any time meant you didn’t have to sweat the small stuff, like getting caught for security infractions.
Even with her hair tucked up underneath the hardhat, Cassie’s earrings were a problem. They were just too recognizable.
Roger was frozen in place, staring at us with a stunned expression. I reached over, lifted the earmuffs off his head, and handed them to Cassie.
“Wear these underneath.”
Ricky handed us two key-card holders. “Emerson and DuChenne, from my team. They were planning to take a long weekend in Vegas, but it seems they came in to work, instead.”
“Nice of them,” I said.
Cassie and I clipped the borrowed key cards onto the belts of our coveralls. At the door, I turned back toward Roger, who was still wandering after us in a daze with his jaw hanging open, and I yanked his key-card holder off his belt, too.
“Don’t go anywhere,” I said. “We’ll need a ride home.”
CHAPTER 43
Inside the server room, Cassie and I helped Ricky and his three guys slot server blades into the newly assembled rack enclosures and connect them to power and cooling lines beneath the frosted-glass raised floor.
During a lull in the action, she leaned toward me. “Is Roger always like that?”
“No. He’s usually worse.”
“The way he looks at me makes me uncomfortable,” she said.
“Roger lacks social skills,” I said. “And you’re very attractive. I’m sure lots of guys look at you.”
“Not like that, Trevor.” She shoved a server blade into place with more force than necessary. “Sometimes I wish I couldn’t read faces so well.”
I felt a pang of sympathy, remembering what she had said last night about not being ready to live in a world without lies. Because, far more than most people, Cassie already did.
“Just look away when he does it,” I said.
“He was lying about putting that ridiculous thing on top of his car, too.”
“I know.”
“I was watching his face when he said it.” She raised an eyebrow. “But how did you know he was lying?”
Cradling my MacBook Pro on my forearm, I tapped the keyboard with my other hand, bringing up Frankenstein’s diagnostic displays.
“Roger may be socially retarded,” I said, “but he’s a damn good engineer. The A-Ten Warthog that carries that gun is a twenty-five-ton aircraft, and its engines generate twenty thousand pounds of thrust, but when it fires its GAU-Eight the recoil force practically stops the plane in midair. Roger may be carrying a lot of extra armor weight on his dumb little truck, but even so, he’s got to know firing a half-second burst would flip the Beast over backward and leave it lying upside down like a stranded horseshoe crab. And if he held the trigger down, his Humvee would go cartwheeling end-over-end across the desert.”
“Why would he say that to us, then?” she asked.
“A cry for attention. It’s kind of sad.”
“You aren’t very nice to him.”
“He needs to harden up and be less needy.”
“If that’s how you treat your friends, I’d hate to see how you treat your enemies.”
“I don’t have enemies. Nobody is that dumb.”
• • •
With Cassie and me supervising the engineering guys and running our own diagnostics, the installation of the new server racks went fast. In less than three hours, Frankenstein’s expanded GPU capacity was fully online.
I looked at the system benchmark I was running, and grinned.
Before the upgrade, he had already been the fastest supercomputer on the planet by a substantial margin—a secret known only to Cassie and me. But now, with a new peak
capability of 125 petaflops—125 quadrillion flops, or 125 x 1015 floating-point operations per second—Frankenstein had more processing power on tap than the world’s twenty next-fastest supercomputers combined.
We were now only a factor of eight away from exascale computing.
A lot of the theoretical guys like Kurzweil and Markham made a big deal about reaching exascale—a quintillion flops. They considered it some kind of important milestone because, at that level, a computer could fully simulate all the neurons of a human brain in real-time.
But simulating biology wasn’t what we were doing with MADRID, and besides, Frankenstein’s nonlinear pattern-matching algorithms were actually a lot more efficient than the evolutionary kluge that was the human brain. For our work, the exascale threshold was an arbitrary and meaningless milestone.
Ricky and the engineering guys gave me a final thumbs-up, and with another round of fist bumps and arm-wrestling grips, I led them out through the lab.
At the door, Ricky pointed to our badges. “You can keep those until Monday.”
“This was really nice of you guys,” Cassie said.
“Returning the favor,” Ricky said. “Your partner here hooked us up big-time. In a couple hours, my team and I are heading down to Vegas to party like rock stars all weekend: suite at the Wynn, front-row seats at the Rave show, and some… uh, other shows—all totally comped. Hey, Trev, this guy we’re supposed to be working for, who was down there last week—what’s his name again?”
I glanced at Cassie and grinned.
“Grayson Linebaugh,” I said to Ricky. “You’re campaign staffers, so don’t forget to wear some sort of suit or tie.”
“Oh, for shit’s sake…!” Cassie turned away, and stalked back into the server room.
When I’d gone out for a long run after breakfast, it had taken me a half hour working the phone to find the right hotel in Vegas. But once I did, it took less than four minutes to convince the assistant manager I was who I said I was, and to have him reserve the same suite and make the necessary arrangements.
I winked at Ricky. “The senator’s used to dealing in billions of dollars, so make sure you put a big-ass dent in his tab.”
CHAPTER 44
Cassie seemed pretty annoyed with me, so I left her in the sanctum running diagnostics on Frankenstein’s new processors while I headed over to Blake’s lab. My objective was the contents of McNulty’s hard drive, which I had copied to Blake’s workstation. I didn’t want to leave a digital trail by transferring the data over the network to Frankenstein, so I was doing it the old-fashioned way instead. In my pocket, I had a USB flash drive that I planned to use to copy the data, which I would then erase from Blake’s machine.
After making sure the interior hallway was clear of MPs, I peeked through the reinforced-glass panel in the door to Blake’s machine-shop lab. I could see only darkness. Nobody home.
I ran Roger’s key card through Blake’s lock, and the dead bolt disengaged with a loud snap that echoed down the corridor. Pushing the door open, I stepped inside and let it click shut behind me.
The main overhead lights were off, and the only illumination in Blake’s cavernous lab came from the few dim, widely spaced bulbs of the emergency lighting system. The bulky machine-tool cabinets, drill presses, mills, lathes, and 3-D printers were all shrouded in semidarkness.
I didn’t want to turn on the main overheads, which might be noticed by a passing MP, so I stood just inside the door while my eyes adjusted. In the room’s twilight, I could see the faint glimmer of polished steel struts and hydraulic assemblies lying on nearby worktables.
A stupid twinge of apprehension tightened the back of my neck. I pictured PETMAN standing silently on its treadmill in the gloom less than thirty feet away, hidden behind the head-height machine-shop equipment.
Of course, with Blake out of the lab, the robot would be powered down. It was embarrassing to let myself react this way to a dumb chunk of metal. Cowardly, even.
With forced briskness, I headed toward the center of the lab, where Blake had a freestanding office-style modular cubicle set up, surrounded on all sides by the metalworking machines. The mini office was where he kept his computer workstations and paperwork.
I refused to look in the direction of PETMAN’s shadowed treadmill, focusing instead on the cubicle wall ahead as I skirted the jumble of shiny quadrupedal robots—ALPHADOG, BIGDOG, and CHEETAH—in the center of the floor.
Blake really needed to put his old toys away when he was done with them, instead of leaving them lying around.
But my imagination was starting to play tricks. Small movements skittered across my peripheral vision. Little indistinct shapes seemed to twitch in the dark margins between the lathes and presses, going still as soon as I stared in their direction. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
On a worktable next to my elbow, something shifted with an audible clank. Leaping away, I spun about, my heart pounding in my throat.
“Fuck!” I shouted.
The cat-size metal crawler lifted another pair of splay-toed feet and sealed them soundlessly against the concrete wall behind the table. It hitched itself upward a few more inches. Blowing out a breath while my pulse slowed, I watched it march up the wall and onto the ceiling, where it hung from its eight starfish-shaped feet, like a giant mechanical gecko lizard.
I was looking at a biomimetic robot, one of a couple of dozen climbers Blake had created for an earlier project. Just like a gecko, the pads of its feet were covered with millions of tiny nanoscale hairs, or setae, whose remarkable stickiness came from the molecular van der Waal’s forces generated by contact with any surface—even Teflon.
Blake had grown his synthetic setae using carbon nanotubes, and they generated four times the adhesive force of the natural setae found on gecko feet.
Watching the crawler move across the ceiling now, I remembered a demonstration from three years ago. Blake had used a two-inch-square patch of the setae to attach a four-foot pipe-wrench to the wall at head height, with its handle sticking straight out. He had asked me to pull it down, but I couldn’t budge it, even when I hung from it with my full body weight. Then Blake had simply tilted the handle upward, effortlessly unsealing the wrench from the wall.
A twelve-inch by twelve-inch square of the setae matrix, pressed against a wall, would form a seal that supported three tons of weight, but it would peel free again with ease—as long as you pulled it in the right direction.
Grinning, I was tempted to jump up and grab the robot crawling above my head, but I could do pull-ups on it without prying it loose. Blake really needed to clean out his closet and get rid of his old junk.
“Trevor, is that you?”
I tensed at the sound of Blake’s voice. It sounded querulous in the silence, coming from behind the cubicle walls just ahead.
With the lockout in force, Blake shouldn’t even be on base. How had he gotten into the building? And why was he lurking in his darkened lab right now?
What the hell was he doing?
Silently, I slid a three-foot section of heavy steel tubing from the table and wrapped my hand around it. Blake was old and slow, but I had seen how easily he lifted the heavier sections of his robots, and I still had no idea who had killed McNulty.
“Yeah, it’s me,” I called back.
No answer.
Hefting the chunk of steel tube, I started toward the entrance gap in the cubicle walls. “We need to talk, Blake.”
Silence.
My internal alarms were jangling now. Growing up where I had, in the ’08, I had developed a sort of radar sense that alerted me to imminent danger. It was an entirely subconscious awareness, and it had kept me alive more than once.
Right now those instincts were telling me to turn around and head back the way I had come, as quickly and quietly as I could. I almost never second-guessed my instincts, which gave me a crucial half-second advantage in any physical confrontation, because I trusted them enough to strike
first.
But Blake was an old white-collar scientist—a gentle doofus who, despite his bearish size, had never tripped a single one of my subconscious warnings before. At least, not until that brief look of rage when I made his precious robot dance. That flare of intensity had surprised me, and so had the speed at which he had made it disappear.
I reconsidered my options and sped up, shifting directions at the last instant.
Instead of going around the cubicle wall, I vaulted over it.
My high-tops slapped against the floor on the other side, amid a scattering of rolled blueprints and loose papers that I had knocked to the ground when I went over the wall.
Holding my makeshift club, I dropped to a crouch in the middle of the cubicle area, which now stood empty except for the usual office clutter and two dimmed monitor screens along one side. I swung around to check the gap on the opposite side, which was the cubicle office’s only other exit.
It opened onto more shadowy metalworking machinery. No one there, either.
I froze in place, listening. I could hear distant fumbling noises from behind me, in the direction of the lab door where I had entered.
Blake had slipped out of his cubicle through this other gap, then, right after he spoke, and now he was circling around to the front of the lab.
But the workstation I wanted was right in front of me now. I might never get another chance. Keeping my head up to scan my periphery, glancing at the monitor for only fractions of a second at a time, I slipped the USB thumb drive into Blake’s computer and started the file transfer.
The distant noises had stopped now, and the dimly lit lab floated in silence again. Blake’s weird behavior was creeping me out.
Dropping my gaze in brief glimpses at the screen, I quickly located all Blake’s directories that he had touched in the past calendar year. I started copying those to my USB key, also.
Several minutes went by in eerie silence before both file-transfer progress meters hit 100 percent and the popup windows closed.