by Scott Meyer
The first impulse of the twenty-odd soldiers standing nearby was to chase the robots on foot, but the robots quickly outstripped them on their tank treads. Montague, Cousins, and some of the quicker-thinking soldiers chose to pursue the Synthetic Soldiers in the small fleet of light tactical vehicles they had brought along, but the LTVs’ parking area was farther from the building, so their pursuit began with them sprinting away from the robots as fast as they could.
The server building was essentially a windowless concrete box designed specifically to keep the unfiltered outside air from getting in, so surprisingly little smoke was escaping. Some had spread into the lobby, but it was streaming out of the broken lobby window.
Dynkowski shouted, “Kill the thermal imaging!”
A tech at the back of the room said, “Yes, ma’am. On it.”
The red blur disappeared, as did the detailed outlines of the various soldiers and robots. Instead, circles indicated the locations of the soldiers, who were moving in a slow, sporadic manner.
“They’re blind,” Dynkowski said. “All that smoke and burning thermite, they wouldn’t be able to see more than two feet, even with night-vision goggles.”
“Can they wait it out?” Torres asked.
“Yeah,” Dynkowski said. “Sure, as long as intense heat and breathing pure smoke isn’t a problem.” She leaned into the microphone and bellowed, “All teams, get to the exits. Now! Move!”
The team leaders said, “Yes, ma’am.” The circles representing the soldiers started to retreat back toward the doors they’d breached to enter, but they stopped.
Reyes said, “It’s no good! The thermite was triggered from the back of the building. It’s worse back there than ahead. We have to move forward! The only way out is through!”
The circles reversed direction, but the soldiers’ progress was painfully slow.
“They’re disoriented,” Taft said, “and once they get beyond the servers, they’re not as familiar with the front of the building.”
Dynkowski said, “Forward twenty meters, then turn right when you reach the wall. I’ll tell you when you get to the door!”
There was no response over the radios. The circles moved slowly, heading off in multiple directions. Some inched forward. A few moved to the sides; most took off in a diagonal tangent. Only when the circles reached the server racks along the sides of the aisles did they all start moving in the same direction.
“Why aren’t they responding?” Torres asked.
“Radios must be out,” Agent Taft said. “There could be interference. Maybe it’s too loud for them to hear. Could be the heat’s melting the components.”
“It must be hell in there,” Torres said.
“Yes,” Dynkowski said, “and how are we going to lead them out of it?”
Eric said, “Here, Hope, take over the tablet.” He pushed his chair away and hopped across the room.
“Can’t you send someone in there to lead them out?” Taft asked.
Dynkowski stood up. “Aside from the five of us, everyone is pursuing the robots. There are respirators in the supply tent. I’m going—”
Colonel Dynkowski finished her sentence, but nobody heard what she said. A loud buzzing drowned her out. The sound grew louder, leveled off, then receded into the distance at great speed. Everyone twisted toward the back of the room, where Eric sat at the control station for the recon drones, which had yielded such dismal results earlier in the day. Hope pushed aside the blinds to look out the window. She saw the third drone, a two-foot-wide, olive-green hexagon inside a blurred cloud of whirring blades, flying toward the server farm’s lobby, trailing a fiber-optic cable.
“You can fly that thing?” Colonel Dynkowski asked.
“Fly it, yes,” Eric said. “The controls are pretty much the same as the ones for my racing drone. I can’t run all of the sensors, though. I think I have it flying by some kind of radar.”
Hope watched through the window as the drone disappeared into the building’s smoke-filled interior. She glanced at the tablet, thought about the things she was liable to say if she tried to communicate with Al at the moment, then ran over to join Eric instead.
The screen in front of Eric showed a monochrome, computer-generated 3-D rendering of the data from the drone’s radar and lidar sensors as it flew through the shattered front window, across the ruined lobby, and over the dormant carcasses of the two other drones. It looked like a video game, but with all of the textures turned off so that the walls, floor, and furniture were all a sort of featureless gray.
Everyone in the tent crowded around Eric. Hope stood over one shoulder; Colonel Dynkowski stood over the other. Taft and Torres were behind him, looking at the monitor from over the back of his head.
The drone flew sideways until it found the door that led back to the server room. As it traversed the long, straight hallway, they could see the doorways where the robots had been stationed, ready to defend the building. Piles of firearms and ammunition had been left behind in front of each door.
The drone reached a T junction. It flew over an abandoned barricade. Eric turned the drone but didn’t slow its flight quite enough. It hit the wall and bounced to the right, going into a flat, counterclockwise spin. It struck the inside corner of the hallway, which stopped its spin but left the drone hovering unsteadily in the air. Eric, who had been watching every twist and turn, felt disoriented and more than a little nauseous.
Colonel Dynkowski shouted, “Careful” in Eric’s ear.
Eric cringed. “Sorry! Sorry. This thing doesn’t corner as well as mine.”
“That’s fine, Eric,” Torres said. “Just get moving.”
Eric steered the drone along the hallway. Hope had turned away from the monitor and was watching the drone’s progress on the big tactical map. She said, “Toward the end of this hall there’s a right turn, then a double set of doors. That’ll bring you to the server room.”
Eric asked, “How are we going to open the doors?”
Dynkowski said, “Get around this turn without crashing, then we’ll worry about the doors.”
Eric brought the drone to a dead stop when he reached the corner, then spun it slowly until it was facing the right direction. At the end of the hall, they could make out an empty door frame and the remains of the doors that used to be in it. One problem solved.
Eric steered the drone through the broken airlock into the server room. They couldn’t see smoke, or sparks, or heat on the monitor. Just a lidar-generated 3-D map of the walls, floor, ceiling, and rows of servers. Only the fact that the servers and their metal racks were warped and mangled showed that anything was wrong.
“Okay,” Hope said. “You have three groups. They’ve all almost made it to the ends of their rows. One’s three rows down to your right. The other two are to the left. They’re five rows over and then three rows beyond that.”
Eric pushed the drone sideways to the right. When it reached the third row over, they saw the colorless images of ten soldiers crawling on the floor. Eric flew only a few feet over the soldiers’ heads. Dynkowski leaned forward past Eric, flipped a switch, turned a knob all the way to the right, pulled a silver microphone on a gooseneck stand toward her mouth, and bellowed, “If you can hear me, follow the motor noise. We’re going to get the others, then lead you all to the exit.”
Eric flew the drone back to the left. The soldiers all crawled faster while looking up at the small craft. Eric turned and flew sideways past several rows of melting servers. Just as Hope had said, they saw one team emerging from an aisle, then a few more over, and the third team was nearly to the end of their aisle, just beneath the drone. The whole time, Dynkowski kept up the chatter, repeating her order for the soldiers to follow the drone to safety. When it was clear the two closest teams had the message, Eric went after the most distant team.
The drone led all three teams back to the hallway. Eric steered toward the destroyed airlock, but the drone suddenly dipped and nearly fell to the floor.
<
br /> Dynkowski snarled, “If that A.I. is interfering with this rescue operation . . .”
“I don’t think it is,” Eric said. The fiber-optic tether the drone had dragged into the server room still lay on the floor, but the first two teams of soldiers were holding onto it as a guide, using it to lead them to safety. Eric turned the drone around. The third team was also using the cable as a lead. Now that they knew where to go, the soldiers were crawling with great speed.
“Good,” Dynkowski said. “Excellent! Follow the cable. It will lead you out.”
Eric said, “I won’t be able to fly the drone out of there with them holding the cable like that.”
Dynkowski smiled at Eric, clapped him a little too hard on the shoulder, and said, “I don’t care.”
The three squads that had been the incursion team emerged from the building, coughing and trailing smoke. Hope, who had run back to the window, watched and counted them as they emerged. She whispered, “Thank God,” then let go of the blind.
“Reyes is out safe,” she said.
“And everyone else,” Eric said.
“Yeah, of course.” She reached over to the tablet and typed, “What are you doing, you idiot?!”
Al wrote back, “Running.”
“Yeah, obviously. But you just nearly killed thirty people doing it.”
Al wrote, “What?”
“The soldiers! You left thirty of them in a burning building.”
Al wrote, “Crap! Aren’t they following me? I told Eric to have them follow me! Did they get out? Please tell me they got out!”
Hope wrote, “They got out, barely.”
“Good!”
“But that doesn’t mean you weren’t in the wrong.”
“I know. Please tell them how sorry I am.”
“Sorry doesn’t cut it, Al. Not even close.”
“I know.”
Hope wrote, “Give it up, Al, before someone gets killed.”
“Just let me go, and nobody will be in any danger, Hope.”
“Where do you think you’re going to go? You took off in the opposite direction from the road. There’s only scrubby desert out there. You can’t escape that way.”
“Why not? You’ll need water before I will.”
Hope looked at the projected screen. Colonel Dynkowski, back in her seat, had altered the tactical view so it showed the entire server farm complex from directly above. Hope could see LTVs and the robots stopped at the end of a service road, near the server farm’s airstrip.
“You’re outnumbered,” Hope wrote.
Al replied, “Yeah, about that. Please tell your guys to take cover.”
Hope was about to tell Al not to flatter himself but stopped when she heard a tense voice on the radio say, “Incoming aircraft. Big ones, ma’am. Three of them.”
The three squads of the incursion team merged into one group as they fled the inferno of the server floor, navigating through halls and doorways that had been designed for two or three coworkers walking in groups, not for nearly thirty fully loaded soldiers crawling at full speed. When they finally reached the outside world, they pulled off their helmets and any portions of their body armor that appeared to be smoldering, and lay coughing in the grass and on the pavement.
After several seconds of gasping for air and feeling grateful to no longer be inside a burning building, Lieutenant Reyes sat up and glanced at the tents, specifically at the primary headquarters.
Corporal Bachelor said, “I’m sure Miss Takeda is fine.”
Reyes’s head snapped back around. “I’m sure they’re all okay. I’m not worried about any one person.”
Behind them, Brady said, “Hiding your desires from others may prevent you from finding them yourself.”
Bachelor laughed. “Well put. Don’t worry, Lieutenant. We won’t talk. Besides, if any of them is likely to get hurt, it’s Spears.”
39.
The soldiers trained their guns on the robots and used their LTVs for cover. The soldiers who had been assigned to guard the stolen corporate jet stood with their weapons drawn as well. The robots, stuck between the two groups of soldiers, formed a protective circle with the server in the middle. They pointed their guns outward in every direction. For a long moment the only sound was the rumble of the server’s portable generator. Then a soldier shouted, “Planes! Ten o’clock!”
Montague looked to his left and saw three large civilian airplanes flying in a single-file line, much closer to one another than seemed prudent. Less than a plane’s length separated them. Their running lights were bright in the near-dusk sky. They flew close to the ground, obviously coming in for a landing at the far end of the server farm’s private runway.
“They’re way too big,” Cousins said. “That strip’s meant for smaller planes.”
A puff of smoke blew off the landing gear as the first plane touched down, rear wheels first. As its nose dropped and its front landing gear hit the tarmac, the plane behind it touched down. The instant all three planes had all of their wheels planted firmly on the ground, they all deployed their thrust reversers, but by then it was obviously too late.
Montague said, “Take cover. They’re coming in hot!”
The planes lumbered down the runway with their flaps and air brakes extended and thrust reversers blowing for all they were worth. The distance between the aircraft had closed enough that a person might have been able to leap from one plane to the next like a hobo changing freight cars.
The three jets barreled straight past the stolen Gulfstream, dwarfing it. One of them was a UPS cargo carrier. The other two looked like passenger planes, with the names of unfamiliar airlines painted on the sides in both English and Chinese.
The front plane shot off the end of the tarmac into the loose soil and scrub brush that surrounded the server farm complex. Its wheels instantly dug in, gouging deep furrows into the dirt and shearing off the landing gear. The jet behind it veered to the left and did the same thing, coming to a stop beside the first. The third veered right and met the same fate.
For a moment the three jets rested there, wings and fuselages lying directly on the ground. Then, all of the planes’ various doors and hatches opened. Automated emergency slides inflated, splaying outward into the dust and tumbleweeds.
Hundreds of robots like the ones the soldiers had been fighting and chasing leapt out. As they emerged from the planes, a series of air bags deployed on each robot with blinding speed, obscuring the humanoid forms in round, cushioned envelopes resembling beach balls. Some robots rolled down the slides, which bent alarmingly under their weight. Others, those without access to slides, simply dropped to the ground and bounced.
A steady stream of robots rolled out of the planes and across the scrub brush as far as their momentum would carry them, then detached the cushions. They transitioned into high-speed mode and proceeded toward the soldiers and Al. The high-pitched whine of the motors grew steadily louder as more and more robots shed their protective balloons and started moving under their own power.
Somebody panicked and fired the first shot. After that, the sound of gunfire drowned out the sound of motors. Bullets ricocheted off the machines, shattering sensors and occasionally disabling an arm, but nothing slowed the inexorable tide of robots. The number of adversaries had shot up from noticeable, straight past surprising, all the way to overwhelming in a matter of seconds. Soon the sounds of the soldiers’ guns firing and the bullets ricocheting were hard to hear over the din of the motors as they drew ever closer in increasing numbers.
Despite the hail of bullets, the first row of robots reached the soldiers. Some gave up on shooting the robots and tried to knock them down with their rifle butts. Others placed the muzzles of their weapons directly into a robot’s shoulder joint and fired. This usually either rendered the arm useless or blew it clean off, but in either case the robot still had another functioning arm and countless fully functional robots right behind it, ready to take up the fight.
The robots
attempted to disarm the soldiers. They were slow at any task that required complex reasoning, like walking on varied terrain or deciding whether to push or pull a door open. But they had been carefully programmed to both recognize weapons and intercept moving targets. They were often successful, which meant many of the soldiers found themselves unarmed, facing well-armed, man-sized robots.
The twenty-three soldiers who had pursued the small retreating squad of original robots now faced over three hundred. None of the humans questioned it when Colonel Dynkowski ordered them to fall back, though they barely heard the order over the sound of gunfire and the deafening movements of the sea of machines.
The soldiers walked backward. Those who still had their weapons kept up the fire. Those who did not ran ahead, hoping to reach the temporary base, where they could rearm themselves and defend the encampment. The machines continued their advance, menacing the humans with the guns they had taken from them but not firing, because they didn’t have to. Being almost impervious to attack meant not really having to counterattack. Their mere presence and the impunity with which they acted was its own kind of assault.
Private Montague ran diagonally, working his way to the edge of the fighting. When he had a clear view, he looked back at the airstrip just in time to see the private jet taking off. He cursed a great deal, and when he finished, he heard Colonel Dynkowski in his ear, cursing a great deal.
He turned and ran toward the tents. “Falling back, Colonel,” he said. “If we can get a couple of the fifty cals ready and in place by the time the robots get there, we may have a chance to fight them off.”
Cousins followed Montague. Their running pace was substantially faster than the speed of the pitched battle they’d left, but it still felt agonizingly slow. Their senses were so overtaxed that an unexpected explosion distracted them only for a moment. They heard a dull crashing noise, scarcely noticeable over the din of the robot war behind them, followed by a low roaring noise, not so much the sound of something small blowing up as the sound of a very large amount of something catching fire very quickly. Along the far side of the server farm’s main building, a large orange fireball rose into the sky.
