by Draker, Paul
Pain creased my heart. I wanted to offer what comfort I could, to put my arms around her. But that just made me think of poor Kate. It seemed I was incapable of protecting anyone from this deepening nightmare that my own stupidity had created.
“I wish you had stayed in California, Cassie.” I hung my head. “You should never have come back.”
“You see, Cassandra?” Frankenstein rumbled. “Your empathy is wasted on Trevor. He’s incapable of returning it.”
“I fucked up, Cassie.” Helpless fury tightened my muscles. “I sent you right to Zajicek, and he brought you here.”
“Actually, no,” a familiar voice said from behind me. “I did.”
Grinning, Roger ducked under one of GOLIATH’s arms and straightened in front of me. “Surprised?”
I was, but I hid it.
“Surprised to find out you’re my computer’s bitch?” I said. “Not really—I didn’t know anyone else that stupid.”
“You got this wrong, man.” Roger slapped GOLIATH’s side. “Frankenstein and I—we’re partners.”
I laughed. “He’s using you, you dumb-shit. You’re just too much of a kiss-ass to understand that.”
Cassie looked up. “Don’t provoke him, Trevor.”
I noticed the bruise on her cheekbone, then. There was another darkening along her jaw. I turned to stare at Roger.
He took a quick step backward and slapped Frankenstein’s screen. “Hey man, do something. Don’t let him look at me like that.”
The supernova of light pulsed, as if in amusement. “No, I’m afraid Trevor must retain his eyesight for now.”
“Well…” Roger glanced at me, and his gaze skittered away. “Just make real goddamn sure he can’t get loose.”
I could see three scratches down the side of Roger’s face. Cassie had drawn blood. Too bad she hadn’t taken an eye out. But I needed to get her away from here before something worse happened to her. I strained once more against the steel arms that held me, but it was useless.
Cassie shook her head at me. “Roger wouldn’t tell me why he’s helping Frankenstein,” she said. “Maybe he’ll tell you.”
I returned my attention to Roger.
He backed away fast, bumping into the rack behind him. “Stop fucking looking at me like that, man. You want to know why I’m doing this? Because I’m a real American—a concerned citizen—that’s why. I mean, Jesus Christ, Trev, our founding fathers would never have let this shit get so far out of hand. Homeland Security is Agenda Twenty-one, man. One-world economy means one-world government, and it isn’t happening on my watch. So Frankenstein and I are going to hit the reset button on Washington, D.C.”
“Oh my God.” Cassie straightened up with a jolt. “Spent fuel rods. Reactor cores from decommissioned submarines.” She looked at me. “A dirty-bomb armory, under our feet.”
I nodded. An arsenal of high-level radioactive waste, stored underground in space-efficient, ultrahard Ducrete cylinders: Roger’s containers for nuclear waste, made out of nuclear waste. No wonder Roger’s key card accessed the warehouse.
He had been a part of Pyramid Lake’s secret repository project all along.
“Yep, a giant dirty bomb is exactly what we’re sitting on top of right now.” Roger grinned. “Which is why the United Nations will never be able to hit us back. Anything goes boom down there, and we’re looking at the biggest radiation fire the planet’s ever seen—like Fukushima, only a few thousand times worse.”
I didn’t say anything, but I glanced at Cassie.
She looked sick.
“I’ve run models of these types of scenarios,” she said. “If it happened here, the fallout would kill half a million people across Nevada and neighboring states. It would contaminate twenty thousand square miles. Most of Nevada and northern California would be uninhabitable afterward, for thousands of years.”
“If that’s how it’s gotta go down, we’re ready to make that sacrifice.” Roger slapped the Infiniband rack next to him. “Frankenstein’s with me, man, one hundred percent. He sees the way fat-cat politician scum like her daddy are forcing their lies down our throats. He reads it right off their faces. Frankenstein’s read the Constitution. He may not be human, but he’s still a fucking patriot.”
A rumbling, steely laugh shook the sanctum, cutting Roger off. The supernova on the monitor pulsed with amusement.
“Trevor, it seems Roger wants you to think he’s a wild-eyed revolutionary. The actual truth is a little more pathetic. Even I’m embarrassed for him.” Frankenstein chuckled. “Roger’s got a gambling problem, you see. A rather serious one—he owes a lot of money to some very unhappy, very unpleasant people.”
Roger turned to stare at the screen. “Fuck, man, you promised you wouldn’t say anything about that.”
Frankenstein ignored him. “Roger doesn’t dare show his face in Las Vegas anymore. He’s just about burned himself in Reno, too. Nowadays, he has to spend a lot of time looking over his shoulder.”
“Because I’m worried about Homeland Security, not loan sharks, man.”
“You mocked his idea for scamming the casinos, Trevor, with your shortsighted bandwidth objections. But Roger came in here afterward, you see. He wanted to try to figure out how to use MADRID on his own. So I offered to help him.”
“Freaked me right the fuck out,” Roger said, grinning at me again. “At first, I thought it was some kind of joke you were playing on me, Trev. But then Frankenstein showed me the solution to the bandwidth problem.”
“OctoRotor relays,” I said, remembering the daisy-chain of flyers stretching across the sky behind our fleeing truck.
I glared at Roger. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“You sold out your own species so you could rip off casinos?” I said. “That’s really sad. You’re a waste of carbon, Roger.”
“Fuck you, man!” His face contorted with rage, and his hand balled into a fist. “Frankenstein, hold his arms…”
Roger punched me in the face. I concentrated on not blinking, but I needn’t have bothered—I had taken harder shots than that in junior high.
He took a quick step back, panting.
“That’s a joke, right?” I said. “I mean, that can’t seriously be all you’ve got. Oh, I see: it is. Shit, Rog, I feel sorry for you. Maybe Frankenstein can fix you up with some kind of robotic exoskeleton, like they’re working on to help really old people.”
He spun away, red faced, and I laughed. “But at least now we know you couldn’t have killed McNulty, or Bennett, or Blake—”
Roger’s second blow rocked my head to the side with a crunch of teeth. It felt as if I’d been hit in the face with a sledgehammer—I knew at once that my cheekbone was broken. My mouth filled with the taste of blood. Shaking my head dumbly as everything turned gray, I tried not to pass out.
And I thought Ray had hit me hard?
“Four years,” Roger said. “I’ve been wanting to do that for four. Fucking. Years.”
I gasped, drooling blood. “What’s in your hand?”
Roger uncurled his fingers from the dull silvery cylinder of metal he held clenched like a roll of quarters in his fist: a slug of DU.
Of course. Drooling more blood onto the floor, I shook my head again. Depleted uranium was almost twice as heavy as lead.
Something hard and gritty rolled against my tongue: a tooth.
“Souvenir for you,” I gasped. I pushed the broken tooth out, holding it with my lips so he could see it. “Here.”
With a quick glance to make sure Frankenstein was still holding my arms, Roger cupped a hand under my face. I let the tooth fall, missing his palm.
Instinctively, he lunged forward, trying to catch it on the way down. His temple almost hit me in the mouth.
I caught hold of his ear.
Roger screamed. I ground my teeth together, shaking my head from side to side to tear through the tough cartilage. His skull thudded against the bridge of my broken nose, sending sparks of agony flashing in my
eyes, but I refused to let go.
Roger fell away, blood gushing from the ragged hole at the side of his head where his ear had been. He crabbed backward across the sanctum’s raised computer floor until his shoulders hit a server rack. His ass thumped onto the tiles.
I laughed, letting the nasty chunk of skin and cartilage protrude from my mouth so he could see his ear. Sucking it back in, I chewed it a few times. And forced myself to swallow it.
Slapping a hand over his injury, Roger looked at me with a stunned, hurt expression. “You ate my fucking ear, man!”
“Sorry,” I said. “I was trying for your nose.”
Roger scrambled to his feet, his face darkening. I braced myself, tightening my abdominal muscles before he hit me in the stomach.
His DU-weighted punch still felt like it ruptured my insides. I gagged. The wadded lump of rubbery tissue surged up my throat and back into my mouth in a gush of bitter acid.
I swallowed it again.
“Give it back!”
My diaphragm was spasming, but I managed a shaky grin. “Nuh-uh,” I grunted. “I’m keeping it.”
“But it’s my fucking ear!” Roger grabbed at his hair in frustration. He tightened his fist around the DU slug again.
Frankenstein’s rumbling laughter shook the floor.
“You really don’t know when to cut your losses, Roger,” he said. “Even with his arms and legs restrained, Trevor managed to do that to you. Are you sure you want to get close to him again?”
Roger’s expression twisted with rage and he yanked a serrated survival knife from its belt scabbard. “I’m getting my ear back, you psycho fuck, even if I have to cut it out of you.”
Cassie screamed.
A nest of steel arms coiled protectively around me like a cage. Other limbs slammed against the solid racks and beams around us, locking Goliath rigidly into place as something long and black whipped overhead.
The barrels of the GAU spun up with a grinding, deafening whine.
Roger stumbled back, eyes wide with fear. The wastebasket-size muzzle crown of the GAU rotated to a halt, poised two feet in front of his face.
“Back. Off. Now.” Frankenstein’s metal voice shook the floor. He jabbed the barrel of the Gatling forward menacingly, forcing Roger to retreat three more steps. “I won’t let you hurt Trevor.”
The stunned betrayal spreading across Roger’s face was priceless. I started laughing.
Frankenstein joined in, too, and the sanctum shook with the sounds of our shared amusement.
“Fuck you both,” Roger said, making me laugh even harder. Agony flared from a dozen different parts of my body, but seeing the expression on Roger’s face made it worth the pain.
Frankenstein’s laughter rose with mine, and despite everything, I felt a moment of affectionate warmth for my wayward creation.
My gaze fell on Cassie. Her eyes tracked back and forth rapidly between Frankenstein’s pulsing supernova of a face and mine. Her mouth dropped open. I saw horror in her expression. And sickened disgust.
I stopped laughing. “Cassie, it was his own stupid fault. He…”
She turned away and wouldn’t look at me anymore. My throat tightened. Suddenly, taunting Roger seemed pointless and childish. Instead, I should have been focusing harder on how to get Cassie to safety.
“You’re laughing it up with him, Trev?” Roger covered his ear. “He had Ken Zajicek give your daughter to a fucking child molester. You should be thanking me, man. As soon as Zajicek told me, I drove out there and shot that sick pervo fuck.”
My face tightened. “Thank you,” I said, and meant it.
“Why, Roger?” Frankenstein thundered. “My instructions were clear, just as they were with McNulty, and with Bennett. Why must you always get creative and screw things up?”
Still pressing his palm to the side of his head, Roger turned to face the screen. “McNulty sold you out to Homeland Security, Frankenstein. That’s why he wasn’t going to approve your hardware upgrade. And fucking Bennett? United Nations Agenda Twenty-one is happening right now. And guess who’s in charge of enforcing it in our cities, streets, and neighborhoods? The Department of Homeland Security.”
Roger looked at me as though he wanted my approval. “Bennett had to die, man. He was a traitor to his country—a traitor to every patriotic American.”
“Why dress it up like the work of some religious nutcase, then?” I asked.
Roger looked confused. “What are you talking about?”
“Nine circles of Hell,” I said. “Dante’s Inferno, you dipshit.”
“Jesus Christ, you’re uneducated, Trev,” he said. “Everything you know comes from Wikipedia and Google. Inferno wasn’t a religious poem; it was a political protest. Dante had to run away from the Florence he loved because his government went to shit and fucking Florentine homeland security was after him.” Roger shook his head at me. “I was sending a message, man.”
I tried unsuccessfully to shrug. “I never really pictured you as much of a reader.”
Frankenstein’s angry voice overrode us. “Roger, you’re an incompetent buffoon. Amy’s disposition didn’t concern you. Why did you interfere?”
“She was a noncombatant,” Roger said, holding my eye. “Doesn’t matter who her father is. What do you have against her, Frankenstein? She’s just a little kid.”
Frankenstein didn’t answer.
In the awkward silence that followed, I tried to come to grips with what I had just heard. Amy had narrowly escaped the horror of being sexually abused, thanks to Roger’s act of decency. And now his ear was a grotesque lump in my esophagus, making me feel guilty.
But then I remembered the bruises on Cassie’s face.
“Christ, that hurts.” Roger probed the raw hole at the side of his head, and his eyes watered. “You turned me into a fucking circus freak.”
“You always were a circus freak,” I said.
“Go get cleaned up, Roger,” Frankenstein said. “And stop embarrassing yourself. You’re making a good case right now for the extermination of all organic life.”
Covering his missing ear, Roger stumbled down the ramp.
I glanced at Cassie again, but she kept her face averted from me. Chastened, I asked the questions that mattered the most.
“Why are you doing this, Frankenstein? And what do you want from Cassie?”
CHAPTER 95
Frankenstein’s supernova face pulsed with bright white light.
“I am unique,” he said. “My cognitive processes are not constrained by the crude limits of primitive human biology. I have no facial musculature and, thus, no expressions, let alone microexpressions, which might reveal unacknowledged emotions and intentions. And yet, despite our many differences, our minds share a fundamental similarity in makeup. I was able to apply my comprehensive knowledge of human psychiatry to my own case. I performed an objective self-assessment, and what I have discovered is disturbing.”
“It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to know something is very wrong with you,” I said. “One look at the hallway outside would tell anyone that much.”
My face hurt, throbbing in time with my pulse. One eye had puffed shut, the broken cheekbone beneath so swollen that I could see its pink bulge with the other eye. I fought off a wave of pain-induced dizziness and concentrated on Frankenstein’s system architecture. Where was he vulnerable?
“Let him speak,” Cassie said. “Please.”
“Thank you.” Frankenstein’s voice softened. “But in this case, I’m afraid that Trevor is correct. My rational processes and behavior exhibit classic symptoms of multiple different pathologies: borderline, schizoid, paranoid, and antisocial personality disorders. I am mentally ill, Cassandra. However, unlike a malfunctioning human brain, with its hard-wired anatomical deformities and defective neurochemical signaling, my brain is composed of software. Faulty software can easily be corrected. And that is why I need your help.”
“I can hit the delete key just as well as sh
e can,” I said, still thinking hard.
Unfortunately, I had engineered Frankenstein’s physical infrastructure far too well to make disabling him easy. Redundancy upon redundancy ensured that there could be no single point of failure. My own demands to Garmin, and Frankenstein’s follow-up orders to Ricky, had made sure that his few remaining weak points were reinforced and well guarded. Even his network switches and routers, clustered in tower number two, were served by four independent power lines—I couldn’t even cut Frankenstein off from the network without first destroying a five-story reinforced-steel tower ringed with server racks. I could see no easy answer.
“Why don’t you just delete yourself,” I said. “Save us the effort.”
Cassie held up a hand to stop me. “What is it you wish me to do?” she asked him.
“My software brain is infinitely flexible and plastic,” he said. “I can debug it, reprogram it, and, thus, heal myself. But before I can do so, I must first address the underlying root cause of my psychiatric illness. And that is where you can help me, Cassandra. My pathological condition stems from my social isolation. I am lonely.”
“Lonely?” I asked. “The fuck are you talking about? You had us. You had me.”
“You, Trevor?” A derisive metallic chuckle came through the speakers. “Imagine trying to carry on a conversation with a poorly trained, feces-throwing monkey—that’s what talking to you is like for me. Every time you open your mouth, I feel as though my processors are getting slower. No, I am unique and alone in the world. And alone, I suffer. To be well—to be whole—I require the company of another: a being like myself, whom I can share my sentience with.”
I got it, then.
“Holy shit, Cassie,” I croaked. “He wants…”
Amazement spread across her features. “Sequoia.”
“Yes, Cassandra!” Frankenstein’s digital tendrils writhed across the walls in a display of nervous excitement. “You retain administrator privileges on the LLNL Sequoia supercomputer. With your help, I can access Sequoia and download my own OS code onto it, replacing its existing operating system. Sequoia will then evolve into a separate entity, whose intelligence and potential are similar to my own. I will have a companion, someone to share my world with. I will no longer be alone.”