by Scott Meyer
Madsen watched through the window as the robot standing in the Corvette’s passenger seat held Major Stirling’s gun. One of its hands swiveled away, replaced by metal pincers. The robot bent the rifle’s barrel and shattered its stock, then discarded the weapon, throwing it over its shoulder into the darkness along the side of the road.
“Fantastic,” Madsen said.
“Farrell’s still got his rifle,” Major Stirling said. “We’re not cooked yet.”
Only Farrell’s lower body could be seen as he braced himself against the frame of the open passenger-side door, firing in bursts. The sound of gunfire stopped for a moment. Farrell appeared to be struggling, then nearly tumbled out of the vehicle. Once he regained his grip, he scurried into the cab and slammed the door behind him. Madsen watched through the rear window as his stolen rifle bounced off the hood of the truck and fell to the side of the road.
Farrell said, “They got my weapon.”
“Yes,” Major Stirling said. “We know.”
The shrill whine of the robots’ joints carried through the LTV’s armor. Dynkowski’s shattered and bullet-riddled Corvette swerved off the road. Its suspension took an obvious pounding as the car careened at high speed into the bumpy grass berm. Another civilian vehicle, this one a four-door family car, cruised up to take the Corvette’s place. Both passenger-side doors opened, and two robots, one of which was inexplicably bright blue and covered in flashing LEDs, leaned out of the car and reached for the LTV. Behind them, the pickup swerved off the road to the right, nearly wiping out as it left the pavement. Another pickup full of robots pulled into the gap.
Jeffrey looked up at Dr. Madsen and said, “Mommy?”
Dr. Madsen held him close and said, “Don’t worry, Jeffrey. The soldiers won’t let anything bad happen to your mother.”
The whine of motors drowned out the noise of the engine, but it was overshadowed by a scraping, chewing noise from the rear driver’s-side door.
Madsen asked, “These doors are armored, right?”
“Yes,” Major Stirling said. “Still, it’s hard to armor a hinge. They’re pretty damn sturdy, but they are a weak point.”
The entire LTV leaned to the left as the robots all concentrated their efforts on the driver’s-side doors. The awful scraping noises continued, punctuated by a loud ping.
“That’s one hinge,” Stirling said. He spun around in his seat, braced his shoulder against the back, and aimed a pistol at the door.
“Doctor,” he said, “you two need to get as far from that door as you can.”
The grinding sound continued for what felt like forever, but it predictably ended with another loud pinging noise. The entire door rotated a few inches downward, pivoting on the spot where the latch still held it in place. Then it shook back and forth, swung away from its frame, and fell away and out of sight. Dr. Madsen saw a brief light that suggested a shower of sparks and heard a terrible sound, as if a car behind them had run over the door and failed to recover.
Madsen could see the claws of two robots poking around the sides of the open hole where the door had been, but her attention was diverted by the bright blue robot, which was hanging upside down from the roof. Its claws looked severely damaged. Those hinges had not given up easily. The lights on its spinning cylinder head created a ghostly, floating image of a smiley-face emoji. Somewhere inside the robot a speaker played an electronic doorbell rendition of “Ode to Joy.” The robot only made it a few notes into the song before the major opened fire. Aside from some sparks and glass fragments flying out of the spinning cylindrical head, the robot seemed undamaged, but it lost its purchase on the LTV’s roof somehow and fell off, creating more sparks and more mayhem to the rear than the discarded door had.
A second robot swung in from the side of the door. Major Stirling opened fire again, but this robot kept coming. It pulled itself into the LTV, reached out, and grasped the barrel of the gun with its claw. The major stopped firing, which was good, as the claw crimped the pistol’s barrel, which would have made any further shots more dangerous for Major Stirling than for the robot.
Madsen shouted at the robot, “Al! Do what you want with me, but don’t you dare hurt Jeffrey!”
The robot remained still, aside from its claws retracting and its sausage fingers reemerging. Al’s man voice said, “Dr. Madsen, I would never hurt Jeffrey. I want him to be safe.”
Madsen said, “Good.”
Al continued, “And considering the situation you’ve put him in, I think he’d be safer with me.”
The robot reached for Jeffrey’s wrist. Jeffrey squirmed and dodged, but there was nowhere he could go. Dr. Madsen, who kicked and hit the robot, was equally helpless now that the robot was inside the cab with them. The major tried to pry it away from Madsen and Jeffrey, but he had no leverage, and the robot was too strong.
The machine finally got a firm grip on Jeffrey and pulled him away from Madsen. The robot swung itself and Jeffrey out of the cab, then into empty space. Madsen shrieked in terror as she watched the scene unfold. Her boy was hanging a few feet above the moving pavement, exposed to the robot-piloted cars swerving around in the road behind them. Another pickup truck pulled up. The robot dropped Jeffrey into the bed, where two more robots grasped him, ensuring he would neither fall out of the bed accidentally nor jump out on purpose.
The pickup peeled away and then pulled off the road. A vast expanse of well-lit pavement loomed in the distance, beyond a large patch of open grass. The truck made a beeline for the pavement, Jeffrey still shouting in the back as the truck rolled away into the darkness.
Major Stirling shouted, “Watkins!”
“Yup. On it.”
Watkins heaved the wheel to the left and mashed the brake pedal. The LTV narrowly missed being rear-ended by the pickup behind it, but its rear quarter got clipped by a robot-piloted hatchback that had been overtaking it on the left. The LTV fishtailed as it left the road, but Watkins managed to maintain control as he pursued the pickup that held Jeffrey out into the grassy field.
During these high-speed maneuvers, Dr. Madsen had climbed over the back of the second-row seat, over Major Stirling, whom she regarded as a mere obstacle at this point, and onto the center console between the driver’s and front-row passenger’s seats. She stopped only when her hands gripped the dashboard and her face was inches from the windshield.
“Get them,” Madsen shouted. “They have my son!”
Watkins said, “Yes, ma’am! Please sit down!”
Madsen turned so that her face was almost touching Watkins’s. “They have my son!”
Farrell grasped Madsen’s upper arm. “Ma’am, please sit down. It’s not safe—”
Madsen reached up with her left hand, grabbed Farrell’s little finger, and twisted. Farrell let go, but Madsen continued to apply pressure.
“Ow!” Farrell cried. “Owie-ow ow ow, stop that, ow!” Farrell sank down as far as he could in his seat, trying to alleviate the pressure on his pinky. “Leggo! Please! Ma’am! Please leggo!”
Madsen didn’t let go, or even look at Farrell. Her head was turned as far as her neck would allow, maintaining her focus on Watkins. “Catch them!” she screamed. “They have Jeffrey!”
On pavement, the LTV had been out of its element and badly outmatched. Now they were not on pavement, and the LTV was a far more capable off-road vehicle than any of the civilian cars the robots had stolen. They gained on the pickup at a rate that suggested they’d catch up long before the truck reached the lights ahead.
Major Stirling said, “Marshall Airfield. They’re gonna try to fly out of here. Watkins, you’ve gotta catch up to them.”
“Yes!” Madsen shouted. “Catch them!”
Watkins said, “I will.”
The LTV’s rear end leapt two feet to the right with a loud bang. Madsen flew up into the windshield, losing her grip on Farrell’s pinky. She managed to get an arm up to save herself from a concussion, but she came to rest lying across the dashboard, blocki
ng a good portion of Watkins’s view.
Watkins said, “Maybe.”
While the LTV handled uneven terrain better than the robots’ cars, the robots had the advantage of not needing to maneuver in a manner that would allow for their drivers’ survival. The LTV’s lurch had been the result of a minivan crashing into its rear quarter panel at full speed. Watkins had nearly recovered when another car, a four-door, smashed into its front quarter panel, turning Watkins’s correction into an overcorrection. Watkins righted the LTV again just in time to T-bone a third car that streaked in front of him and slammed on its brakes.
The LTV ground to a halt, pushing the other car ahead of it like a snowplow. Watkins threw the gear lever into reverse, but another car had blocked them in. Still more cars surrounded them and stopped, making it impossible for the LTV to move in any direction.
Madsen crawled to the hole where the door had been and looked out of the LTV toward the distant lights. She saw the pickup carrying Jeffrey come to a stop beside an army helicopter, waiting with its rotors already turning. The robots carried Jeffrey, who was struggling with every step, and loaded him into the helicopter.
The chopper slowly turned in the air as it lifted off. Madsen saw that another of the robots was at the controls. As it disappeared into the night sky, the cars that surrounded the LTV started moving. The ones that could still drive on their own turned and maneuvered back to the road; the ones that couldn’t were abandoned, their robot drivers piling into the operating vehicles. The few robots left that were too damaged or too unlucky to get a ride sat down and deactivated, leaving Madsen, Watkins, Farrell, and the major alone in the middle of a dark field.
THREE MONTHS LATER
43.
Hope sat in a comfortable padded seat. Lieutenant Reyes sat on her left. Eric sat on her right. Hope preferred this purpose-built briefing room at Fort Riley to the stuffy tent in the parking lot of the A3 server farm, but she held out no hope that these superior comforts and resources would lead to a more successful mission.
The room, which held seating for up to one hundred soldiers, was full today. Faux wood paneling lined the walls, and thin, well-worn carpet covered the floors. This was military-grade luxury, a concept Hope had become accustomed to over the last three months as a guest of the US Army.
Eric elbowed Hope lightly. She looked at him. He glanced at the front of her shirt and then looked away. It was his silent message that the slightly melted Etch A Sketch knob she wore on a chain around her neck was lying on the outside of her shirt.
She said, “Thanks,” then lifted the knob and chain and dropped it down her collar.
She glanced at Reyes. “Shut up.”
Reyes said, “I don’t know what makes me prouder, that you wear it or that you don’t want anyone to notice that you wear it.”
Hope smiled. “You certainly shouldn’t be proud of your listening skills, because I already told you to shut up.”
Colonel Dynkowski strode onto the stage.
Is it a stage? Hope wondered. It’s a raised platform, and all of the chairs are pointed toward it, but I doubt they call it a stage. Not very military. They’d be more likely to call it an information deployment platform.
“Good morning,” Colonel Dynkowski said. “As you all know, the artificial intelligence known to its creators and, unfortunately, the press as ‘Al’ disappeared immediately after attacking this very base and has been in hiding ever since, either ignoring or not receiving our attempts at contact. It is our assumption that the remaining ten commercial aircraft it liberated from the Chinese and the single helicopter it stole from the base were ditched somewhere at sea after their cargo was unloaded. Its treatment of the vehicles it hijacked on this base shows its total lack of respect for the property it takes.”
Hope leaned over to Lieutenant Reyes and whispered, “She’s still mad about her ’Vette.”
Reyes said, “She loved that car.”
“But she got a new one.”
“Yes, and she put a decal in the back window, dedicating the new ’Vette to the memory of the old one.”
Dynkowski said, “Based on its relative lack of activity, we might have assumed that the A.I. had gone dormant if not for its weekly releases of footage to the press. All of the videos show its one remaining hostage, Jeffrey Madsen, playing, always on the same beach. CIA photo analysts have gone over the videos with a fine-toothed comb, and while they believe that they are genuine and the boy is alive and well cared for, the only information they’ve been able to confirm about his location is that he’s being held near a beach.”
Hope looked farther down the row at Dr. Madsen. She looked like she hadn’t slept well in weeks, which Hope believed was accurate. The doctor had done little but work since her son had been taken, spending all her hours researching and testing ideas about how to neutralize Al.
Before, Hope thought, she pretty much ignored Jeffrey to work on Al. Now, all she cares about is getting Jeffrey back safe, and the only way she can do that is to concentrate on Al.
Dynkowski paused, surveyed the assembled group, then said, “The other sign that the A.I. is still active, of course, is its penchant for piracy. Hundreds of container ships and tankers all over the Atlantic have been seized, boarded, and plundered by the robots the A.I. had manufactured in China. There have been reports of violence on the part of the robots, but our investigations have shown these accounts to be either false or greatly exaggerated. That hasn’t kept them from being believed. In much the same way sailors used to tell exaggerated horror stories about Blackbeard, now they tell the horror stories about the robot they assume to be the leader, the one called the Mommy.”
Hope suspected that Dynkowski knew that some of the soldiers would laugh at this statement. Perhaps she had used it purposefully so she’d have the pleasure of glaring at them until they stopped, which was precisely what happened.
“In reality, the only crew members injured during these skirmishes have suffered broken bones from attempting to attack the robots physically or have been hit by friendly fire.”
A hand raised. A soldier Hope didn’t know personally cleared his throat and asked, “Ma’am, do we know if it’s even possible for the robots to physically attack a person? Aren’t there laws written into their programming that prevent that?”
Dynkowski looked at the soldier in silence for several seconds, then said, “I hadn’t opened up the floor for questions yet. I hadn’t planned to at all, for the record. This is a briefing, not a chat. As for your question, I’m no roboticist, so I’ll let someone more qualified explain to you why your question is stupid. Dr. Madsen, would you like to enlighten the corporal?”
“I’m a sergeant, ma’am.”
“For the moment. Dr. Madsen?”
Dr. Madsen didn’t look like there was anything in the world that she would like to do, but she did as Colonel Dynkowski asked. “Sergeant, the laws you’re referring to are Asimov’s laws of robotics. They were invented by Isaac Asimov. Do you know who Isaac Asimov was?”
“No, ma’am.”
“He was a science fiction writer. Just some guy. He made them up for a book he was writing about robots. A book, I might add, that was mostly about how those rules led to unforeseen complications. Nothing requires people who make robots to program his laws into them, and it would be kind of a nightmare to try.”
Dynkowski said, “Thank you, Doctor. And I’ll add that if it weren’t possible for a robot to attack a person, the government wouldn’t have commissioned robot soldiers capable of using firearms. Understand?”
The sergeant, who seemed to have lost several inches in height, said, “Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.”
Dynkowski nodded, looked out over the group. “No more questions?” Her inflection made it sound like a question, but it was an order. “Poorly stated as it was, the sergeant,” she continued, “had a point. The robots have not directly killed or injured anyone, but they also do not prevent people from getting hurt by their actions.
We have to look at the A.I. as if we are insects walking on the floor and it is a person who might or might not want to kill us but is definitely not looking where it’s putting its feet. Our civilian specialists also tell us that by now the A.I. has probably reached something similar to adulthood, the time in a person’s life when they start looking to make a future for themselves without their parents. I think we can all agree, that is not great news.
“As to the robots’ acts of piracy, we’re keeping track of exactly what they have taken. It’s a long list. Some of the highlights are: solar panels, tidal power generators, construction equipment, raw materials, and machine tools. Also, before we warned our allies, the A.I. took no less than four small naval vessels from South American countries. Two of the ships are cruisers, complete with radar and both ship-to-air and ship-to-ground missile systems. This, of course, suggests that the A.I. is building something and means to protect it, but until recently we didn’t know what or where.”
A map of the Atlantic Ocean came up behind Colonel Dynkowski. Red dots peppered the image, distributed mostly along the east coast of the Americas, with some along the west coast of Europe and the UK. Few of the dots were in the open ocean.
“The distribution of the pirate attacks suggests an island or an offshore platform somewhere off the coast of North or South America. The A.I. has attempted to hide its location from us and until recently has done a good job. The best we could do for a while was to narrow it down to an island somewhere in the Caribbean. There are over seven thousand islands in the Caribbean, so that still left a large search area. One of the islands we are watching is this one.”
The map zoomed in on an island shaped a bit like a fat banana, only bent a bit more aggressively. The image dissolved from the straight lines and solid colors of a map to the graduated colors and irregular edges of an aerial photo. The inner curve of the island was all white-sand beaches, dotted with palm trees and what appeared to be lounge chairs. Small buildings with thatched roofs were scattered around the beach area. A complex of larger buildings was cut into the jungle at the lush heart of the island, a lily pad of pavement connected to the beach by paved paths. At one end of the island an immense concrete moorage held a line of tiny craft, far too small for the dock.
