by Scott Meyer
In his earpiece, Montague heard Lieutenant Reyes say, “Ma’am . . . explosion . . . possibly a fuel-run air device.”
Then he heard Bachelor say, “Looked like . . . gasoline explosion to me.”
Then he heard Brady say, “Where you were stabbed, and why, is far more important than what you were stabbed with.”
Dynkowski said, “Brady’s right. The building’s useless to us now. The whole damn thing can burn down for all I care. We have to defend the base.”
The first soldiers to engage the robots were also the first to lose their weapons, and as such had fallen back to the tents before Montague and Cousins. The three teams that had infiltrated the building had managed to regain their feet and their breath and had already set the defensive perimeter. The heavy machine guns were all in place.
Hope and Robert Torres emerged from the tent, each with one of Eric’s arms draped over their shoulders, supporting most of his weight as they hustled toward their escape vehicle. Colonel Dynkowski was holding the door open, shouting, “Go! Go! Now! Move!”
We’re going, Hope thought. We’re moving! Does she think telling us to flee while we’re already fleeing will motivate us to flee harder?
Agent Taft ran to the last LTV. All of the rest had been taken to chase the robots, then abandoned during the fight. Hope reached for her right hip with her free hand, checking on the bag slung over her shoulder, verifying that Jeffrey’s tablet was still inside it.
Colonel Dynkowski pointed at Reyes. “Lieutenant, get the civilians out of here, now!”
Reyes said, “Yes, ma’am,” and ran toward the LTV, Bachelor, Brady, Montague, and Cousins following behind him.
Bachelor took the wheel. Reyes rode shotgun. Cousins, Brady, and Montague clung to the side of the vehicle, standing on the running boards with rifles ready for trouble.
Reyes turned and looked back at the civilians. He and Hope exchanged smiles before he turned to face forward in his seat.
Hope glanced at the server farm’s main building in the rear window as they drove away. It was well and truly on fire now, but the only outward signs of the inferno were the smoke pouring out and the orange light streaming from the lobby windows.
On the LTV’s radio, Dynkowski said, “The robots have stopped advancing.”
Hope said, “Figures.” She glanced over and saw that Eric had reached into her bag and pulled out the tablet.
Eric said, “Al’s complaining that his escape plane’s onboard Wi-Fi is really slow.”
Torres said, “I suppose we should let Dr. Madsen know that we’re all okay and Al is still at large.”
Hope handed him her bag. He dug around inside and found a military-spec satellite phone. He poked at its screen a few times to connect to Madsen. When the other end of the line picked up, Torres didn’t have time to say hello before Madsen shouted, loud enough for everyone in the vehicle to hear, “We’re under attack! The whole base!”
40.
The Reasonator crested the hill with ease despite the lack of a road or pavement of any kind. The Voice of Reason stopped the truck and stepped out. He spun around once, savoring the moment.
Behind him he saw a vast sea of rolling hills, populated entirely by scrub brush, gritty soil, and animals small enough and smart enough not to be seen by him. The only sign of humanity was the single set of tire tracks he himself had left on his drive in. The sun was setting, and as it fell, the wind picked up.
He smiled with satisfaction. It’s all perfect. The desert, the sunset, the truck, my duster flowing in the wind. I must look so badass right now. I’d take a selfie but that would completely ruin the vibe.
He walked around the truck, making a sort of final inspection that involved pulling a large tumbleweed out of the grille and kicking all four tires.
He pulled a small pair of binoculars out of the cab and examined his target. He could see the A3 server farm in the distance, about a mile away. It wasn’t much to look at. In fact, it was the only place he’d ever seen where the chain-link fence surrounding the property was the most attractive architectural element. He could see that there had been some token attempt at decorative landscaping, but it was all at the front of the building, for the enjoyment of people driving up, not the side, where only the Voice of Reason and the coyotes would have seen it.
The cops did me a favor with their roadblock, he thought. In their misguided effort to protect the A.I., they led me right to its unguarded flank.
He continued to scan the grounds, sweeping over them with the binoculars, looking for anything of interest. He stopped when he found the army tents and a single LTV parked out front.
Not a surprise, really. The A.I. has conned the police into doing its bidding somehow. I should’ve expected that it would dupe the army as well. Again, they’re camped out between the front of the building and the main road. The fools. Clearly they thought only a crazy man would try to cross the desert and attack from the side. Unfortunately for them, I am that crazy man.
He shifted his binoculars back toward the main building. A column of smoke was rising from the grounds. At first glance he’d figured it was exhaust from some piece of machinery, but now he saw that it was too large for that.
Bonfire, he thought. They’re burning evidence. Of what? I don’t know, and I’ll never find out. That’s fine with me. I’m here to kill the A.I., not investigate it.
He heard a faint sound that his brain immediately identified as a jet airplane. He lowered his binoculars and turned his head toward the noise. Three large jets with commercial markings, flying very close to each other, were coasting in low over the desert, coming in for a landing.
What is this? What are they? What does this mean? The planes aren’t military. Maybe the A.I. has corporate backing. What could be in the planes? Weapons? Supplies? Materials? More soldiers? I see some sort of Asian markings on two of them. Are they Chinese? Maybe they’re carrying those robots who were stealing trucks.
Glancing at the Reasonator, he pictured the small Oregon city he’d just driven through overrun by robots. There were a lot of trucks to steal in The Dalles.
While he didn’t have enough information to really know what was going to happen, he had enough to know that he wanted to prevent it. He set about preparing the Reasonator for its final run, much more quickly and haphazardly than he had originally intended.
He ran to the back of the truck, dropped the tailgate, and jumped up into the bed. Once there, he disconnected all of the bungee cords that had held the minibike in place during his drive up from San Jose, leaving the bike splayed precariously in the back of the truck. He took a coil of high-strength cord with carabiners at both ends and attached one end to the frame of the bike. Stepping carefully over the bike and around the metal drums, he set the free end of the cable on the roof and then leapt off the truck. He opened the driver’s door, leaned into the cab, opened the sunroof, and then pulled the glass out completely. Having created his escape hatch, he reached up through the hole and pulled the rope’s free end into the cab.
He stepped back out of the cab and looked at the planes, the last of which was just disappearing behind a hill as it landed. Then he dived back into the cab and pulled out a large duffel bag. The BASE jumping parachute went on over his duster, and he finished his preparations by putting on a bright red helmet with an empty hardware mount for a camera.
As he fastened the helmet’s chinstrap, he thought, I could have gotten a camera, put footage of my attack online, but no. There’s a fine line between claiming credit and providing evidence.
He threw the now-empty duffel bag into the cab and took a moment to think things through and make sure he hadn’t missed anything. He looked at the bed of the truck. He looked down at himself.
Let the tube drag, he thought. It won’t hurt anything now.
He looked at his hands, rolled his eyes, then reached into his pocket and flipped the switch that activated his shock gloves, just in case things went south and he had to fight his
way out.
For the last time, he entered the cab of the truck and closed the door. The roof was high enough to accommodate his helmet, but the parachute forced him to hunch forward in his seat. He grabbed the rope hanging through the sunroof and attached it to his parachute harness.
He allowed himself a moment of silent reflection, or at least he attempted to, but it was spoiled by the sound of gunfire in the distance. Perhaps the soldiers were practicing, or perhaps someone else was attacking the base. He felt the most likely answer was that the A.I. had turned on the army after deciding it didn’t need human help anymore. In any case, he had to act now.
He turned the key. The engine roared to life and a buzzer sounded. He looked at the dashboard, which asked him to please fasten his seat belt. He smiled.
Fitting that during my final assault I’ll be ignoring a machine that’s trying to tell me what to do.
He pressed the gas pedal to the floor and aimed for the side of the server building.
The Reasonator picked up speed, bounding across the gritty soil of the desert. The ride was rough but nothing the truck and its pilot couldn’t handle. The Voice of Reason lost sight of the target as the truck dipped into the trough between two hills. When it rose out of the valley, it had veered noticeably to the left, even though he had kept the steering wheel perfectly straight.
The terrain is working against me. If I want to hit the building, I’ll have to stay with the vehicle longer than planned.
He steered back toward the building, staying behind the wheel as the truck crested two more substantial hills. The rest of the Reasonator’s path looked flat enough, so he set the cruise control and then attached the two ropes he’d tied to the interior door handles to the steering wheel, holding it steady, aimed straight ahead. He carefully slid out of the driver’s seat and lifted himself up through the sunroof. He stood on the cushioned seats, his entire torso exposed from his pelvis up.
For the first time since he’d started planning this operation, he felt real fear. The wind pushed him back. He could hear the tails of his duster snapping about like a flag in a storm. The truck bucked and swerved over and around lumps on the ground, and the fact that he was standing on padded seats did not make him feel more stable. He sat down on the truck’s roof and put his left hand down to steady himself, grasping the frame of the sunroof.
The server farm was getting close. He figured he was two hundred yards from the fence, two hundred and fifty from the building. It was time. He reached his free right hand into the pocket of the duster and pulled out a road flare. He bit the cap with his teeth and pulled, igniting it. As he’d expected, the move looked really cool, though he was surprised at how much it hurt his molars.
He held the burning flare over his head for a second, letting out an incoherent shout of fury and triumph that he himself barely heard over the whipping wind. The fence was close now, a hundred yards or so. He threw the flare down into the bed of the truck between the drums full of gas, then immediately reached into a pocket on the parachute and grabbed the pilot chute, which his BASE jumping gear used as a release mechanism instead of a rip cord. He pulled the pilot chute free of the pocket and threw it off to his right as hard as he could.
The pilot chute gripped the air immediately and disappeared in a blur behind him. He felt a persistent tugging at his back for a few heartbeats as it drew the main chute from its pack, which intensified into a yank so hard he thought he’d been hit in the chest with a bowling ball. He heard a loud rip and felt the edge of the sunroof frame scrape along the backs of his thighs and calves. He watched the truck get smaller beneath him. It would have felt like an out-of-body experience if not for the pain and the sight of his arms and legs dangling in midair beneath him. He watched the end of the surgical tubing spin in the air, suspended from the bottom of his pant leg next to his red canvas high-tops.
The rope attached to his harness suddenly pulled tight. The minibike had slid toward the end of the open tailgate, but one of its foot pegs was wedged into the seam between the tailgate and the truck bed. The Voice of Reason hung there, helpless, parasailing behind a rolling bomb of his own making. The competing forces of the parachute and the truck pulling on him caused the line to drag at a forty-five-degree angle. He hung with his back aimed at the ground and his feet dangling beneath him. To look at the truck, he had to lift his head and look past his own torso. The truck had almost reached the chain-link fence. Once it hit the fence it would only slow down, which would make it more unlikely the minibike would spontaneously dislodge from the bed. He fumbled at the carabiner, but there was too much tension on the line and not enough time.
The truck did slow slightly when it hit the fence, but the fence was at the edge of a slab of asphalt that stood off the ground by several inches. The truck hit this edge and leapt into the air, jostling the minibike out of the bed and onto the pavement below.
The Voice of Reason’s forward motion ended abruptly. The line to the bike went slack, and he swung backward until it pulled tight again. He heard the crash of the Reasonator compacting against the side of the building, then he hit the ground hard. The parachute draped over the top of him. He felt fear verging on panic. The truck could detonate at any second, and he was far too close to the blast zone.
He pushed the chute off, taking great care to keep from tangling the cords. When he made it out from under the canopy, he scrambled away from the crunched, burning truck until the tether to the minibike pulled tight. He rose to his feet, grasped the rope as if he were in a tug-of-war, and dragged the bike as quickly as he could. Only as he was pulling did he realize that the back of his pants had been utterly destroyed during his dismount from the Reasonator. The entire rear was now nothing but rags held onto his body by the waistband and cuffs.
After over thirty seconds of pulling, he finally felt he was far enough from the eventual explosion. He sat and watched the Reasonator sit there, dripping and smoldering, wondering why the gas in the drums hadn’t ignited. Suddenly slow, orange flames leapt out of the truck bed, but still there was no explosion. He stood up, stared at the fire, then shielded his eyes as the truck erupted into an immense orange fireball that rose into the air, trailing black smoke, forming a wispy mushroom cloud with a raging fire at its base.
He took off the parachute, unhooked the line from the minibike, and tucked the surgical tubing into his sock (which was less than ideal but far superior to the prospect of it getting caught in the bike’s chain). Then he gathered what was left of the back of his pants and carefully straddled the bike, using his duster to hold the torn fabric in place well enough to hopefully not expose himself.
The bike seemed to be in good condition, all things considered. The right handlebar and foot peg were both bent at strange angles, but he could easily adjust for that.
He rode off into the desert, returning the way he’d come, never once bothering to look back. When he reached town, he used his smartphone to book a room at a hotel that offered a continental breakfast complete with a make-it-yourself waffle machine. He did a quick search of the local news and found that the fire department had been called to a large fire at the A3 server farm. The entire building was involved. He smiled, pulled up a map, and started a search for the nearest place to buy pants.
41.
Dr. Madsen sat in the command center at Fort Riley, staring intently at her tablet as a live feed of the battle in The Dalles unfolded on large screens set into all four walls of the room. All of the soldiers present were watching the action. Madsen’s tablet was instead showing a research paper about implanting recursive algorithms into complex computer systems through audio signals, and she was the only person looking at it.
Major Stirling cleared his throat. “Dr. Madsen, you might want to watch the battle.”
“I might, but I don’t. You handle the fighting—” Dr. Madsen paused, looked up to see who was addressing her. “Major. I’m busy coming up with a solution to the problem.”
Major Stirling eyed her
for a moment. “Do you know my last name, Dr. Madsen?”
“Do I need to?”
“It seems like you’d want to, and I’m wearing a name tag. It wouldn’t be hard to call me Major Stirling, Dr. Madsen.”
“But you answer to Major, don’t you?”
“Yes, proudly.”
“Then the last name would be wasted effort. Frankly, the ability to address people solely by rank is one of my favorite things about the military. I’m thinking of implementing it in my own workplace. Life would be much easier if I could just say ‘assistant’ and have people respond.”
Major Stirling said, “Speaking of your assistants, ma’am, it’s just that shots are being fired in Oregon, the building is on fire, and you have friends on the ground there.”
“Coworkers, Major. I have coworkers there, doing their jobs. I need to do mine. Besides, I doubt that my lab assistants and the CEO of my company are actively involved in the gunplay.”
Major Stirling started to respond but was interrupted by one of the other soldiers gasping. “What the hell?”
The four primary screens, which were broadcasting footage from Corporal Bachelor’s helmet camera, showed a distant shot of soldiers advancing on a small cluster of robots, two of which were carrying Al’s server and a generator to a Gulfstream in the distance. Two large passenger jets and a UPS cargo carrier rolled by in the background. Bachelor turned her head to follow the motion. The jets swerved in three different directions and ran aground in the loose earth beyond the end of the runway.
Bachelor repeatedly glanced back and forth between the standoff and the three crashed jets. The first time she looked, the jets seemed unchanged. The second time, the hatches were opening and escape ramps deploying. The third time, many large objects were rolling down the ramps. As the objects reached the ground they unfolded, revealing themselves to be more robots. From that point onward, Bachelor remained focused on the jets and the new robots. She didn’t bother glancing back at the Gulfstream at all.
