by Scott Meyer
“Misdirection,” Hope said. “He made us focus on this computer while he moved somewhere else over the network. I’m the one who taught him how to do that.”
What do you know? she thought. The stupid Easter game was educational. Of course, it’d probably be better if it hadn’t been, but that’s life.
Eric shook his head. “He wasn’t pretending not to know what we were talking about. It was an earlier build. He honestly didn’t know. And, for the record, I was against you playing that game with him from day one.”
“The point is, this isn’t the Al that was causing the trouble.”
“Yeah, but that just brings up more questions. Where is our Al? Did he destroy or damage himself at all while moving? Is he working against us?”
A painfully loud siren blasted from a grate in the ceiling and did not stop. A strobe light flashed over the door, and the building’s fire sprinklers went off, instantly drenching Hope, Eric, and Al’s former computer, which shorted out and went dead.
“That answers at least one of your questions!” Hope shouted.
The breaching charge made a dull, barely audible pop, drowned out as it was by the building’s fire alarm. The door flapped open violently, but the continuing deluge from the overhead sprinklers suppressed much of the smoke.
Two soldiers dashed out of the stairwell, taking care to maintain their footing on the wet marble tiles in front of the elevator and stairs. One of the soldiers made a hand signal, and three more followed them out of the stairwell and into the hallway.
The officer in charge shouted, “Get ready with the breaching charge. It’s the last door on the right.”
No sooner had he finished the order than all of the doors spontaneously unlocked. The OffiSmart employees and their visitors had been trapped in their offices, getting soaked and going deaf. As soon as the doors unlocked, they all shot out into the hall.
When the panicked, confused office workers found heavily armed soldiers standing between them and the elevators, they became even more panicked and confused. The soldiers stepped aside, allowing the civilians to pass.
The crowd moved past the soldiers in a tight herd. When they had passed, they left the hallway empty, save for the soldiers and a small, dark-haired woman who stood before them, soaked to the bone, holding an open three-ring binder over her head.
“Welcome to OffiSmart,” Hope said. “You’re here for the A.I., right?”
A soldier stepped forward. His soaking-wet uniform and helmet hid pretty much every characteristic beyond that he was a he, and he was youngish.
The soldier extended a hand. “Ma’am, I’m Lieutenant Reyes. As you say, we’ve come to take custody of the artificial intelligence and any related personnel or materials. And you are?”
Hope let go of the binder with one hand, allowing the back cover and water-logged pages to flop down on the side of her head. She shook the lieutenant’s hand. “I’m related personnel,” she shouted, trying to be heard above the fire alarm and the din of the sprinklers. “Follow me.”
Hope couldn’t hear the squishing sound the carpet made with each step, but she felt it through the soles of her shoes. It was aggressively unpleasant.
She heard one of the soldiers say, “Christ, what a hellhole! This is almost as bad as basic!”
Another soldier, with a deep, gravelly voice, said, “There is adversity everywhere you look, so a wise man doesn’t look.”
“What are you saying, Brady?” the first soldier asked.
“He’s telling you to pipe down, Cousins,” Lieutenant Reyes said. “There’s enough noise in here.”
Hope led the soldiers to the lab, where they found Eric, also wearing a plastic three-ring binder like a hat, trying to keep his head and the phone dry.
“Gone,” he said, to whomever was on the other end of the call. “Totally gone. Copied himself somewhere offsite, I guess. Oh, the army’s here.”
Hope brought the soldiers into the next room, which was, of course, empty other than a single table and Al’s waterlogged computer. As they went, she heard Eric shout, “We didn’t say impossible. We said we hadn’t tried it.”
“This is the lab,” Hope said. “And that was Eric.”
Reyes nodded. “Our orders are to escort you, your colleagues, and the machine back to the base.”
Hope swept her arms wide and said, “Have at it. I suggest you start with the waterlogged computer, then move on to the first-grade homeschool syllabus.”
Reyes frowned. “We were told to keep the machine powered up, ma’am.”
Hope shrugged and pointed at the sprinklers.
The squad collected the computer and all of the documentation they could carry. When one of them picked up the computer, water poured out of it as if the case were a spaghetti strainer.
“Al’s not in that thing anymore,” Hope said. “I don’t know what use it’ll be to you.”
“You’re probably right,” Lieutenant Reyes agreed, “but we were ordered to take the computer, so that’s what we’ll do.”
Eric ran in, having hung up the phone, and shouted over the alarm, “The CEO’s coming. We gonna get out of here or what?”
Reyes looked Hope in the eye and shouted, “Yes, we’re moving out now. Ma’am, please come with us.”
Displaying the natural enthusiasm for physical activity that had led to his love of sports, Eric walked briskly ahead of the soldiers into the hall, saying, “Let’s go! Right this way, guys.”
Reyes shouted, “Sir, please stay with us. We’ll lead you out safely,” but Eric was already running down the hall at an impressive speed. Between his distance from the lieutenant and the fact that he was holding his hands over his ears, it was obvious he couldn’t hear a thing.
“Sir,” Reyes shouted. “Sir!”
Hope shouted, “Eric! Slow down!”
Displaying the innate grace that had led to his level of success in sports, Eric reached the wet marble flooring at the end of the hall, and his foot immediately slid out from under him. He twisted in the air and landed hard on his knee, then his rear, before sliding into the elevator door. Hope and the soldiers ran to where he lay grasping his left leg. A female soldier knelt down beside him, gently pushed his hands away from his knee, then squeezed it. Eric cried out in surprise and pain.
The soldier looked up at Reyes. “Might be broken, Lieutenant.”
“Thanks, Bachelor,” Reyes said wearily. “Okay, someone carry this man down the stairs.”
Eric gave Bachelor a dubious look. “You don’t have to carry me.”
She said, “I’m not going to. Brady will.”
The largest of the soldiers—the one called Brady—knelt down, put a massive hand on Eric’s shoulder, and in his deep rumble of a voice said, “Your enthusiasm is commendable, but sometimes not doing a thing is the correct thing to do.”
Eric said, “Yeah, I know. Look, you don’t have to carry me. Just give me a second and I’ll get up and walk out on my own.” He attempted to get up but couldn’t, because Brady’s hand was still on his shoulder, pinning him in place.
Eric said, “Let go of me.”
Brady said, “I will not,” and effortlessly lifted Eric up and slung him over his shoulder.
16.
Hope followed Lieutenant Reyes and two other soldiers out of the stairwell, into the hallway. She could see daylight in the distance, through the water still spraying from the sprinklers and the damaged frames of the two sets of bullet-resistant security doors the soldiers had blown through on their way in.
The soldier directly in front of Hope—Cousins, according to the name stitched on his uniform—carried Al’s former computer, which was still taking in water through the vents on the top of the case and dribbling water out through the vents on the bottom. Behind Hope came Brady, carrying Eric draped around his shoulders like the world’s least glamorous feather boa. Torres followed, walking under his own power, trailed by a final soldier, who covered their rear.
Torres’s ex
ecutive secretary, Chet, chased the group, and as they hustled down the entry hall toward the outside world, Torres shouted instructions to him, mostly about whom to call, what to tell them, what not to tell them, and when they could expect more information.
Employees were gathered everywhere. They looked wet and agitated, but above all else, confused.
“Sorry for the inconvenience, everybody,” Torres shouted as the soldiers hustled him toward a school bus that was parked just outside the main entrance with its engine running. “Everything’s fine. It’s just a malfunction with the building’s systems. Take the rest of the day off.” He kept smiling and speaking in a calm, even tone, acting as if this sort of thing happened all the time.
The bus’s door folded open, the stop sign on the opposite side extended, and the yellow crossing arm swung out from the front bumper. Another soldier was waiting in the driver’s seat.
Hope doubted that the repetitive jolting of being carried down nine floors had done Eric’s knee any favors, and hopping into the school bus obviously didn’t feel great either. He dropped himself into the very first seat. When everybody else had filed past, he turned and stretched out his leg. Hope sat behind him, her practical desire to be able to get out of the bus in a hurry overriding her remembered instinct to sit as far from the school bus driver as possible. Torres and the soldiers clustered in around them.
Lieutenant Reyes said, “Montague, let’s get going.”
The soldier in the driver’s seat said, “Yes, sir,” closed the door, and pulled the bus into the line of cars waiting to leave the parking lot.
Torres peered over the tall back of the seat in front of him. “Lieutenant?”
Reyes turned to face him. “Yes, sir?”
“Thank you. Thank all of you for coming to get us, and for carrying Mr. Spears down the stairs.”
Reyes said, “You’re welcome, sir. Just doing our job.”
“Well, we appreciate it. That said, why are we in a school bus?”
Hope, who had been asking herself the same question, looked to Reyes for the answer.
Reyes smiled. “Had to improvise, sir. That box of yours managed to shut down our LTVs, so we had to procure an alternate means of transportation.”
“I understand, but why a school bus?”
“We determined that most vehicles owned by private individuals or corporations would be vulnerable to hacking due to their autonomous safety devices, fleet management systems, and GPS routing software. Montague, why aren’t we moving?”
Montague head checked for a lane change, then stepped on the gas. “Sorry, Lieutenant. Picked a bum lane. It was moving fine, then it stopped, and the car ahead waved me around.”
Lieutenant Reyes turned back to Torres. “Sorry about that, sir. We needed something with no efficiency management or safety systems of any kind. We found this bus and the postal van Yow and Smith have taken to collect your Dr. Madsen.”
“Sound thinking, Lieutenant,” Torres said. “Strange to think that a bus designed to carry children has no safety systems.”
“Those systems cost money, sir, and these buses are paid for by school districts.”
“These things don’t even have seat belts,” Cousins added.
“Seat belts wouldn’t make kids safer,” Hope commented. “They’d just use them to tie each other up.”
The soldiers chuckled at this, then Reyes asked, “Montague, why are we still in this parking lot?”
“Got into the new lane and it stopped dead, Lieutenant.”
Reyes eyed the waterlogged computer dripping on the seat next to Cousins. “That thing’s out of commission. It couldn’t still be messing with us, could it?”
“I’m afraid so,” Hope said. “We think the program copied itself to another machine somewhere over the Internet.”
Bachelor shook her head. “Christ! What kind of monster were you people trying to make?”
“Private, these civilians are our guests,” Reyes said.
“Sorry, Lieutenant.”
Reyes nodded at Bachelor, then turned to Hope. “It’s a good question, though.”
“Al wasn’t supposed to be a monster,” Eric said. “It’s just an artificial intelligence model of a kid’s brain. None of us had any idea it’d be able to do any of this.”
“None of us in this bus, anyway,” Hope muttered.
“And we disconnected it from the Internet,” Torres said. “It found a back door last night, through someone’s smartphone.”
“Wouldn’t a model of a brain be huge?” Reyes asked. “How could it possibly copy itself over a wireless connection in one night?”
“My boss used a new method to design it,” Hope said. “One that allowed it to be very lightweight . . . you know what, there’s really no reason to go into this again. I’ll give you the address of a podcast that sums it up pretty well.”
Montague sighed. “Now this car’s waving us around.”
“Montague, get us moving by any prudent means,” Reyes said.
“Define ‘prudent,’ Lieutenant.”
Reyes smiled. “I find that ‘prudent’ is one of those words that we all have to define for ourselves. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Yes, Lieutenant!” Montague said. He leaned heavily on the horn, letting out three long blasts, then drove the bus up onto the grassy median between the road leading into the parking lot and the one leading out. The bus rocked violently as he drove over a curb and across the landscaping, past the line of cars waiting to exit. He veered into the inbound lane, blew past the guard shack, then veered back over the curb and across the berm, cutting behind the OffiSmart sign. Before he could make a right-hand turn onto the street, he had to stomp on the brakes to avoid hitting some guy on the sidewalk.
Hope heard the pedestrian shout, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
Montague opened his wing window and replied, “Waiting for you to move!”
“You could have run me down!”
“But I didn’t,” Montague said. “I spotted your ugly Hawaiian shirt and your Gilligan hat, and I stopped the bus, saving your life! You’re welcome, by the way.”
Hope stuck her head out of the bus’s window. She saw a portly young man standing less than five feet from the front bumper of the bus. The pedestrian looked out of place wandering around a street full of office buildings and industrial parks, but because of his clothing—a bright yellow Hawaiian shirt, white bucket hat, mirrored aviators, and shorts—he probably would have looked out of place anywhere that didn’t feature ten-dollar beers in collectible plastic coconut-shaped glasses.
Hawaiian Shirt glared up at Montague in the driver’s seat and shouted, “I have the right of way!”
“And I stopped, giving you the right of way,” Montague countered. “Now kindly be on your way by moving to your right.”
Hawaiian Shirt smiled, planted his hands on his hips, and did not move one inch from where he stood. “You have no right to be driving on the grass, you were going way too fast anyway, and I don’t believe you’re qualified to drive that bus.”
“Montague, we have to get moving,” Reyes said.
“Yes, Lieutenant. Sorry, Lieutenant.” Montague reached over and pulled on the handle that opened the passenger loading door. As the door folded open, the stop sign hinged away from the opposite side of the bus and the crossing arm swung out from the front bumper, hitting the pedestrian in the shins. The pedestrian leapt to the side and ran a few steps to get out of the way. Montague immediately mashed down on the gas pedal. They heard the pedestrian’s protests through the open door as they jumped the curb, drove diagonally across the apron, and merged with traffic.
It was smooth sailing until the first red light. When the light turned green, none of the cars in front of the bus moved. Hope scrunched down in her seat to see the green light and said, “Traffic cams.”
Montague blasted the horn and steered into the oncoming lane across the intersection. Farther down the road, two cars stopped
, blocking both lanes in one direction, then two more cars coming from the other direction stalled alongside them, nearly blocking the entire road.
Montague slowed way down and maneuvered the bus through a gap in the cars that did not look wide enough for it. “Sorry, everybody,” he said. “It looks like it may take a while for us to get back to the airstrip.”
Lieutenant Reyes said, “Just do your best, Montague. We understand.” He looked at the seat in front of him, shifted his gaze to the ceiling of the school bus, then smiled at his fellow soldiers and their guests.
Reyes sang, “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer.”
Hope joined in moments before the rest of the squad did. Montague’s protestations that the singing was not helping only made them sing louder.
17.
The Voice of Reason stood alone on the sidewalk, watching the school bus drive away. When it disappeared from sight, he made his way toward the main entrance of the OffiSmart building. Inside, the sprinklers and fire alarms were still going full blast. Outside, people wandered around in wet clothes and utter confusion. He chuckled to himself, enjoying the moment, until he heard sirens. It was probably just the fire department, but they sometimes brought police with them, and it would not do to be captured returning to the scene of the crime. He turned his back on the building and walked away.
Once he felt safely removed from the chaos, he pulled out his smartphone, opened his notebook app, set it to transcribe, and started muttering into the microphone. Anyone watching would assume he was making a simple call.
“I am the Voice of Reason. The establishment can hear me at their gates, but they can’t see me coming . . . because nobody can see sound, except for those who suffer from synesthesia.
“I’ve read that LSD can cause synesthesia. Was that the CIA’s plan with MKUltra, to create supersoldiers who saw sounds, heard pain, and smelled the enemy in their sights? Most formidable. Must investigate.”
He paused to pull up his to-do list and make a note, then returned to his dictation.
