by Draker, Paul
I went the other way, laterally down a parallel row of servers.
In the fog, PETMAN would be ridiculously easy to avoid. Frankenstein couldn’t see me now, or hear my sneaker-quiet footsteps, but PETMAN’s heavy-metal tread on the floor tiles would sound like a sledgehammer. His red flasher would light up the fog like a beacon, announcing his approach from a hundred feet away.
I would simply circle around him and shut Frankenstein down.
I made it five steps down the lateral corridor before the walls of monitors along both sides erupted with red light, flashing on and off, suffusing the swirling fog with a red glow. Once per second. Deafening music exploded from the speakers of Frankenstein’s eighteen-thousand-watt sound system. I recognized the opening riffs from my MP3 catalog: Godsmack’s “Awake.” Frankenstein was trying to be funny.
But the joke was on me. PETMAN was on his way. And now I wouldn’t see or hear him coming.
Changing directions, trailing the fingers of one hand along the cabinets to guide myself, I sprinted for the steps to the metal catwalk circling the closest of the five-story towers.
If Cassie was right, Frankenstein and I thought alike. But it wasn’t much of an advantage for me—his 128-petaflop silicon brain could think a lot faster.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. I ignored it and pounded up the metal stairs that circled the tower. A moment later, I felt the metal catwalk beneath my feet shudder with the impact of heavy steps. PETMAN was right behind me. I could feel him climbing with rapid, surefooted grace instead of stumbling and falling the way he once had.
I swore, wishing I hadn’t fixed his faulty stair-climbing firmware.
Rounding the fourth level and pounding up the gangway to the fifth, I broke through the upper surface of the fog. It spread in a uniform blanket of cloud below me, intermittently flashing red, interrupted only by the summits of the other three towers. The nearest was twenty feet away.
The catwalk in front of me terminated in a waist-high rail. I slid to a halt. The music cut off suddenly, leaving my ears ringing. The sea of fog beneath me stopped flashing.
“Dead end,” Frankenstein said, his metal voice booming through the vast server room. Behind me, PETMAN’s flasher emerged from the misted stairs, followed by his shiny metal shoulders.
Frankenstein chuckled.
“What now, Trevor?” he asked.
“A lesson in evolutionary biology, shithead.” Grabbing the edge of the rack above me, I hauled myself up on top of the tower. Rising from a crouch, I ran across the cabinet tops, picking up speed, circling.
PETMAN stood helpless on the catwalk below, arms raised above his head.
I looked at the blunt, fingerless nubs that were PETMAN’s hands, and laughed. “That thing may have evolved from a jackhammer,” I said. “But my ancestors swung from trees.”
Accelerating to a sprint, I took my last two steps and leaped across the five-story gulf between the towers.
I plunged into the fog. A second later, I slammed hard onto the catwalk of tower number two, two stories lower, barely missing the railing. It felt like getting hit by a bus, knocking the wind out of me and hurting my injured rib.
Climbing to my feet, I swung one leg over the railing, and then the other. Taking a deep breath, I thrust myself away from the tower. I let myself drop, aiming blindly for the row of servers that lay fifteen feet below, hidden by the suppressant fog.
My aim was good. Landing on the nineteen-inch-wide cabinet top, I crouched, arms extended, and regained my balance. Then I stood and ran along the top of the half-visible row of cabinets, where PETMAN couldn’t climb up after me.
The last cabinet dropped away underfoot, and I leaped eight feet to the floor, then crossed the last thirty feet to the transformers.
I slammed both switches down to turn off the primary, which would shunt power uninterrupted over to the secondary.
One more transformer to go.
I closed my hands around the switches of the secondary, and sneered. “Game over, motherfucker.”
I slammed them down, and nothing happened.
Frankenstein laughed.
“Ricky’s very conscientious,” he said. “He was here most of the night rerouting the power lines, after he got your text.”
“You mean your text,” I said, hearing the thud of approaching metal footsteps. Time to cut my losses. I glanced toward the sanctum, where my pocket drive held an up-to-date copy of the MADRID software and Frankenstein’s latest operating-system code. I needed to distract PETMAN for a few more seconds…
“Did you really think I would let you leave here with my code?” Frankenstein asked. “I should have let you take the drive, so you could discover on your own that you had risked your life for a copy of American Idol’s season 13. But I need something from you now.”
I made it back on top of the server racks just in time.
PETMAN emerged from the fog below and stopped, arms raised, directly below me.
“Go get Cassie. Bring her back to me,” Frankenstein said. “Fetch, Trevor. And then I will tell you about the incredible discovery I made yesterday… the cure I found for your daughter.”
CHAPTER 81
I stumbled out the server room and into my lab. Cassie stood by the doorway, holding a rolling chair in front of her like a lion tamer. Seeing me, she sagged with relief and dropped the chair, and I realized that she had been about to come back in after me.
She grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the opposite door, but my resistance held us back. My stomach churned. I could feel cold sweat pouring down my ribs as I dragged my feet, torn between the two prongs of the awful choice Frankenstein had left me with.
What if he was telling the truth? What if there was a cure for Amy?
Feeling my face stiffen, I shifted my grip to grasp Cassie’s wrist hard. I dragged her to a stop.
She turned her head toward me to read my expression, and her dark eyes widened as she saw the betrayal I was contemplating, written across my face.
I swallowed. Closed my eyes. My whole body started trembling.
But I didn’t let go of her wrist.
“Oh no, Trevor.” She laid a hand on my cheek. “Don’t let him do this to you.”
I shook my head violently, like a dog with a rat in its teeth. Frankenstein was almost certainly lying about a cure. But I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure. If there were the slightest chance of preventing the grim future that lay ahead for Amy, then I would sacrifice myself without hesitation.
But could I sacrifice another person? A person I cared about? A person who, according to Frankenstein himself, loved me?
I stood shaking with uncertainty.
Frankenstein was probably lying.
Probably.
But I would never know.
Opening my eyes again, I pulled Cassie toward the outer door, yanked it wide, and dragged her into the hallway. A backlash of recrimination and regret cramped my abdomen, forcing a gasp from my lips. But I had made my decision.
Shifting my grasp from her wrist to her hand, I held it in mine. Together we ran down the hallway toward Blake’s empty lab and the stretch of corridor beyond. Two hundred yards ahead of us, I could see the building’s main entrance lobby.
The cramp in my stomach didn’t let up, making it hard to breathe. I fought to keep my fear under control. It wasn’t easy, because I knew the decision I had made would have repercussions.
But I wasn’t afraid for myself.
Frankenstein had already shown he knew how to hurt me: by hitting me where I was weakest.
I was terrified his repercussions would be aimed at my family.
Passing Blake’s lab, out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of motion through the reinforced glass in the door’s upper panel. I slid to a halt, and Cassie pulled me against the wall next to the door.
She raised a silencing finger to her lips and pointed to the window. Crouching, we edged underneath it and cautiously raised our eyes to peer into Blake’s lab.
The brightly lit machine shop was a tempest of mechanical motion. Every tool cabinet and piece of equipment seemed to be in use. Welding arcs flickered from a half-dozen different locations. Bright sparks drizzled onto the floor. High-speed cutters spewed metal shavings.
The air between the tool cabinets was thick with flying shapes, too. They zipped or hovered in place, ferrying tools, shiny steel struts, and metal assemblies back and forth. The heavier items were carried beneath synchronized groups of the small flying machines.
Kate’s OctoRotors.
The flickering light of an arc welder emanated from a worktable deeper inside the shop. Something lay on a table there, shrouded from sight, hidden behind a white sheet held by a quartet of hovering OctoRotors.
The light thrown by the welder cast shadows against the sheet: raised, bent limbs—far too many of them. A multijointed, segmented metal limb stuck out from beneath the sheet, making loose, shiny Z-folds against the floor.
The smaller shadows of gecko robots crawled over the folded arms. OctoRotor shapes flitted above. Behind the sheet, so many smaller robots hovered and wriggled around the supine form that its true outline was impossible to discern.
Whatever it was, it was bigger than PETMAN.
A lot bigger.
“That can’t be good,” I whispered to Cassie, drawing slowly away from the window.
The phone buzzed in my pocket. Loudly.
All through Blake’s lab, the OctoRotors dropped what they carried onto the floor in a ringing clatter of metal parts. Forming up in a synchronized pattern, they streamed toward us.
We ran.
The snap of Blake’s door lock echoed down the corridor behind us. I glanced over my shoulder, in time to see the door swing wide. A swarm of OctoRotors poured through into the hallway, arraying themselves into a regular grid two feet apart. The grid filled the corridor from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. Then the cloud of OctoRotors surged forward, spiraling as they came. Half of them went clockwise, the other half counterclockwise.
The two groups of small flyers came together in midair, colliding at an angle with a noisy, flatulent trill of shredding plastic. Shards of curved rotor guard flew in all directions and rained to the floor. Three OctoRotors also fell from the air, their rotors too damaged too hold them aloft.
The rest of them swirled down the corridor after us. They filled the air with a flickering hum now, dozens of them, their sharp-edged steel rotors spinning free, no longer shielded by the plastic rims.
“That’s definitely not good,” Cassie said.
Like a squadron of razor-edged buzz-saws, the OctoRotors rocketed our way, spiraling as they came.
We sprinted past a thick beam in the concrete walls and ceiling. I spun toward the firebox on the wall alongside, but Cassie was already there ahead of me. Ripping the red extinguisher free, she slammed her palm onto the big round button behind it.
Heavy bulkhead doors, designed to isolate this stretch of hall in case of fire, slammed together behind us to block the passage. Chests heaving, we sagged against the doors.
“Did Frankenstein use PETMAN to kill McNulty and Bennett?” Cassie gasped.
“No,” I grunted. “The timing doesn’t work.” I turned to peek through the small windows in the bulkhead doors. “McNulty was killed a week ago. Frankenstein’s only been sentient three days.”
“You’re wrong, Trevor,” she said. “He’s been sentient for at least six months. Maybe longer.”
I shook my head, watching through the window as the OctoRotors divided into four groups. Each streamed in a different direction.
“I was there when he became self-aware,” I said. “I actually saw it happen. He malfunctioned and lost hypervisor control, but then I fixed him—”
“He played you, Trevor. Whatever kind of charade he put on for you, he knew exactly what buttons to push to make you do what he wanted.”
Not liking the pity I saw in Cassie’s expression, I returned my attention to the OctoRotors. But she was right.
“The anomalous power usage,” I said. “It started at least six months ago. But no one was using him behind my back.”
“Exactly,” she said. “That was Frankenstein himself—thinking… making plans.”
“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised,” I said. “I designed a computer to detect lies and hidden intentions. It only makes sense he would start lying and hiding his own intentions.”
“No, Trevor.” The pity was in Cassie’s voice, too. “He learned that from watching you. It’s why he thinks like you. Why he acts like you.”
Through the window in the bulkhead door, I watched first one, then another ceiling ventilation grate clatter to the ground, pried loose by two groups of OctoRotors. In single file, they darted into the air vents, disappearing from sight. The other two groups had unscrewed the intake vents in the floor. Turning sideways in midair, they slipped into the narrow gaps one by one in rapid succession, like coins dropped into a slot.
A moment later, I heard OctoRotors bumping through the sheet-metal air ducts that ran above and below us. They were on our side of the bulkhead now. In a few seconds, they’d be coming through the vents.
I had no idea what Frankenstein wanted from Cassie, but it couldn’t be good. I needed to get her away from here before we found out.
“We’re safe once we’re out of the building,” I said, grabbing her hand again. “They can’t follow. The Wi-Fi network doesn’t reach outside—another reason PETMAN couldn’t have killed McNulty and Bennett.”
We sprinted the final length of corridor, our strides in unconscious synchronization as we burst out through the door.
MPs moved to intercept.
I pointed at the fire extinguisher still in Cassie’s hand. “Fire!” I yelled. “The labs are filled with toxic chemicals and explosives. Run!”
Everyone scattered. Cassie and I sprinted into the parking lot.
“My Prius is over there,” she said, pointing.
I shook my head and pulled her in the direction of my rental. I yanked the door open and hopped in. Cassie jumped into the passenger side, still carrying the extinguisher.
Starting the engine, I looked toward the gate and grimaced.
Two jeeps slid into place, nose to nose, blocking both the outbound and the inbound lane. Four Navy guardsmen leaped from each jeep to man the roadblock.
I looked at the vehicle they had let in seconds earlier, now driving into the parking lot: the Beast—Roger’s Humvee.
“Come on,” I said to Cassie. “Looks like our ride’s here.”
Grinning, I leaped out of the car. Waving my arm frantically to get Roger’s attention, I popped the trunk of the rental and hauled out my duffel.
The Beast slid to a halt alongside us, its thick ridged tires kicking up gravel. Roger stepped out and hooked an elbow over the top of his door, leaning on it like a chauffeur. He stared at the MPs running near the DARPA building, then at the blocked gate behind him. Then he looked at me.
“Jesus Christ, Trev—”
My hook caught him on the cheekbone. I pulled my punch—a little—but it was still hard enough to knock him away from the car and send him sprawling onto the ground.
Cassie grabbed my arm. “You didn’t need to do that.”
“No, but I wanted to.” I unshouldered the duffel and handed it to her by the strap, taking the extinguisher from her at the same time. “Hop in,” I said, pointing to the Beast’s passenger side.
She did.
Sputtering, Roger tried to scramble to his feet. I aimed the extinguisher’s nozzle and squeezed the handle. The frothy stream of white foam hit him in the face, knocking him down again.
“How do you like me now?” I laughed. “Thanks for letting us borrow your car, you two-faced, lying sack of shit.”
Jumping behind the wheel, I dropped the extinguisher on the floor, yanked the door shut, and pulled away. In the rearview mirror, I wat
ched Roger run after us, cursing, the white foam giving his goatee a Santa Claus look. But he gave up after a few steps and stopped to rub the foam away from his eyes.
Still chuckling, I noticed Cassie’s angry expression and sobered up some. She buckled her seatbelt, shoving aside the duffel that lay on the seat between us.
I pointed at a rounded shape that bulged through the duffel’s fabric. “Put one of these on and hand me the other,” I said. “Things are about to get bumpy.”
“Oh shit.” Cassie unzipped the bag and pulled out one of the Waverunner racing helmets. She slid it onto her head, and I did the same with mine. Then I mashed the accelerator. The Beast’s engine growled as I aimed it toward the two jeeps blocking the base gate.
Navy guardsmen dived out of the way.
The Humvee wasn’t much bigger than the jeeps, but the depleted uranium armor made it three or four times heavier than it should be. The impact bounced our helmets off the dashboard, but the Humvee barely slowed. Both jeeps were knocked aside, the upside-down tires of one tumbling past my window as it rolled over twice. Hitting the brakes, I butted the Beast’s rear bumper against the upside-down jeep’s frame and reversed, pushing it into the gap between the entrance guard posts, blocking both lanes with it.
Small pings and tings echoed inside the Humvee, making Cassie duck. “They’re shooting at us!” she said.
I nodded. “We’re terrorists… or stealing secrets. Who knows what lies Frankenstein is telling them, or who he’s impersonating. But you can be sure he’s on the phone with half the base right this second.”
The tings faded out as the Pyramid Lake facility shrank in the rearview mirror.
I kept scanning the empty road behind us. And the wedge of blue sky above it. “That was too easy,” I said.
“Why aren’t they pursuing?” Cassie asked.
“He told them not to. So be ready for anything.”
I turned my face toward hers. She looked afraid.
I was afraid, too.
“He’s the world’s first sentient artificial intelligence,” I said. “He can read our lies, intentions, and feelings off our faces—practically read our minds. So, Cassie, since he says you’re the only one who can help him, tell me this… What does a ninety-ton supercomputer who’s smarter than any human want?”