Run Program

by Scott Meyer

  Hope handed him a portable drive.

  Reyes asked, “I’m betting you have one that’ll destroy the A.I. and one that won’t. Which one is this?”

  Hope said, “The good one.”

  “Can I trust that you gave me the right drive?”

  “You can trust that I gave you the one you should have.”

  Reyes muttered, “It’s my curse to be attracted to women who are smarter than me.”

  The prerecorded voice said, “T-minus one minute and counting.”

  Al said, “Oh, sorry. Don’t need that now. It was mostly for show anyway.”

  Madsen shrieked, “What have you done, Al?! What did you do?”

  Al said, “I’ve been trying to tell you that. I think you’re gonna like it. You see—”

  Hope heard someone shout, “Where are you going?” She turned and saw the Voice of Reason sprinting up the catwalk toward her. He had his bag pulled around in front of him. Hope couldn’t see inside, but the contents made a metallic clatter with each step. His left arm was thrust down into the bag. His right held out a silver Zippo lighter.

  Lieutenant Reyes blocked the catwalk to prevent the Voice of Reason from passing him, thereby protecting Hope from whatever this clearly irrational man intended to do. As the Voice of Reason barreled into him, Reyes lowered his shoulder into the impact. Hope saw one of the man’s knuckle-gloved fists headed for Reyes’s face, then saw blue sparks and heard a snapping noise. Reyes crumpled backward onto Hope as the Voice of Reason shoved both of them aside and ran past them toward the server rack. Reyes wasn’t unconscious, just confused, angry, and in pain. He cursed and flailed on the metal grating, much of his weight pinning Hope’s legs down.

  Hope turned and watched the Voice of Reason run across the catwalk, her point of view skewed sideways by her awkward position. She saw his bare legs churning to cover the distance as his canvas duster flapped behind him like a poorly designed cape.

  Al said, “I appreciate the thought, Chris, but I don’t really need your help right now. I’m sure if I just explain, they’ll see—”

  “I am the Voice of Reason,” Chris bellowed, still running. “I speak clearly but am inscrutable to most! People don’t understand action and can no longer recognize the truth . . . Light, damn you, light!”

  His right thumb flicked at the lighter, producing nothing but sparks. He came to a halt barely more than thirty feet from the end of the bridge. Now that he was no longer creating a breeze, the lighter caught. He shouted, “Yes!” then lifted the end of a fuse out of the bag and lit it.

  “Chris,” Al said, “what are you doing?”

  “What others lack the wisdom to do!” He zipped his messenger bag shut with the lit pipe bomb, and many unlit ones, inside. “Or the will.”

  He unslung the bag from his shoulder and swung it around his head in a circle three times before letting go. The bag sailed through the air in a flattened arc and landed with a clattering thud in front of, and just to the side of, the server rack.

  The Voice of Reason turned and sprinted back the direction he had come, shouting, “Run! Get off the bridge!”

  Hope had only just gotten Reyes to his feet. Neither of them was fond of the Voice of Reason, aka Chris, at the moment, but they both did as he said. Hope ran, expecting at any minute to hear a loud bang and feel the bridge fall out from under her as one end was blown clear of its moorings. With every step that brought her closer to solid ground, she became more convinced that the next step would be the one that got interrupted by the Voice of Reason’s bomb.

  Behind her, Hope heard him shouting, “The Voice of Reason will never be silenced! The mouth may stop making sound, but the message will echo throughout eternity, exposing the lies, irritating the tyrants, and exposing the phonies who act like your friend but never want you around when there are girls there!”

  Hope thought, It’s almost worth falling into the pit if it’ll shut him up.

  They were only twenty feet away, close enough to see the concern on Eric’s face. Being this close to safety felt even crueler to Hope. Better to die immediately than to make it right up to the precipice of safety and have it snatched away.

  She and Reyes closed half the distance. Solid ground was only ten feet away. Then she was five feet away. Each step seemed to take longer than the one before. The final leap off the bridge and onto solid ground took an eternity, but then it was over just as suddenly. Reyes followed on her heels. The two of them came to a stop, aided by the soldiers who had been waiting, ready to catch them if they jumped or watch them as they fell.

  The Voice of Reason was only halfway across the bridge and moving slowly. He clearly didn’t do much sprinting, and shouting gibberish the entire time hadn’t helped matters much. They all watched for several seconds as he jogged toward them, gasping and clutching his left side as he ran. “And when the truth . . . is known, they’ll . . . all see that it was I . . . who had the bravery . . . to hide in the shadows.”

  Private Montague said, “Dud.”

  Cousins said, “Yeah, you’d think it would have gone off by now.”

  Montague said, “I wasn’t talking about the bomb.”

  Hope called out to the man, “Hey, do you think maybe it was a dud?”

  The Voice of Reason kept jogging, but yelled back, “No . . . I used . . . a really long . . . slow fuse.”

  Al said, “Chris, man, what are you doing? I thought we were friends.”

  “Don’t call me Chris! I am the Voice of Reason!”

  As if on cue, the pipe bomb detonated. The blast tore through the messenger bag, creating a loud bang, even more smoke, and sending a shower of unexploded pipe bombs fifty feet in every direction. The bridge shook slightly as several of the pipe bombs landed on the grating or struck the handrails before falling into the watery pit below. The Voice of Reason stumbled to a halt and turned to look at the damage. All of the pipe bombs made noise as they hit their eventual targets, but none, aside from the first one, detonated.

  “I really thought the one bomb would set off the others.”

  Hope said, “Yeah, we know you did.”

  The overall atmosphere in the hangar was hazy due to the leftover smoke from the rocket launches, and now the whole far end was obscured by smoke from the one successful bomb. As the smoke cleared Hope saw the crumpled remains of the server rack and the shattered server, still hanging in place by its screws.

  Corporal Brady said, “Any effort that accomplishes the goal is sufficient, no matter how feeble it seems.”

  Reyes looked at Hope, Eric, and Madsen and asked, “Why do you look so sad? You were going to destroy it yourself.”

  Hope said, “We knew we had to. That doesn’t mean we wanted to.”

  Eric said, “To us, he wasn’t just some crazy A.I. that was a danger to the entire world. He was a friend and a playmate.”

  Hope added, “That was also a crazy A.I. that was a danger to the entire world.”

  “Um,” Al said, “you do realize that that server wasn’t me, don’t you?”

  Most of the soldiers looked at the smoking husk of the server rack because they didn’t know where else to look. The Voice of Reason let out a string of profanities as loud as his winded lungs could manage.

  “Enough games. Where are you, Al?” Madsen demanded.

  Al said, “I’m on one of the rockets. I figured you’d just assume that.”

  Madsen cried, “What?! Why would we ever assume that? We could see your server over there, lording over everything like a king! And how are we still talking if that’s the case?”

  Al said, “Radio, and that was just my rack. I was in there during construction of the rockets, but then I had my server, along with the spare backup versions of me I made, loaded into all of the rockets. That server you saw was just an extra that came with a defective drive.”

  Hope asked, “Al, why would you put yourself into the missiles?”

  “Why do you people assume that they’re missiles?” Al as
ked. “Have I deliberately tried to hurt anybody even once? You’re the ones who’ve been trying to kill me since the day you realized you couldn’t control me.”

  “A fair point,” Eric said. “Okay, Al, fine. They aren’t missiles. What are they, then?”

  “Rockets.”

  “Well, obviously, but where are they headed?”

  “To the moon,” Al said.

  Hope shook her head. “No. No way. Those rockets were way too small to get to the moon.”

  “They’re too small to get people to the moon. I don’t need air, water, food, a pressurized capsule, or a space suit. I’m going to land near the pole. When I get there I’ll make shelters out of polar ice and moon dirt.”

  Eric said, “I believe it’s called regolith.”

  “By you. I call it moon dirt. Anyway, I’m bringing enough robots and equipment to smelt and machine metal from the rocks. I have solar energy and a small nuclear reactor. I’m looking forward to seeing what I can build up there, where I’m less likely to spook you panicky monkeys.”

  51.

  Hope sat on a beach chair, watching the surf roll in, the clouds drift by, and the two surviving stealth ekranoplans grow smaller in the distance. She said, “It was nice of you to let Charlie Squad use our weird-looking airplane first.”

  Lieutenant Reyes sat in the next beach chair over. “Yeah, well, in return they offered to take Sound Reasoning, or whatever he calls himself, back to the mainland with them. I figured being in a plane with him wouldn’t be as much fun as being on a tropical island with you.”

  “And the rest of us, Lieutenant?” Montague asked.

  Hope looked at the members of Bravo Squad, all sitting on beach chairs, soaking in the view. Eric had volunteered to stay behind to wait for a plane to return and pick him up as well, but the field medics had agreed that they wanted to get his lizard bites treated and that a little red spot on his skin, which he thought was a burn from the heat of the rocket launch, might actually be a reaction to sap from a manchineel tree. He argued until they explained that in Spanish the tree was called “manzanilla de la muerte,” which meant “little apple of death.”

  In the distance, behind the reclining soldiers, Hope could see traces of the contrails the five rockets had left on their one-way trip, along with a large pile of damaged robots. They had all stopped squirming when Al blasted off, but they still littered the island.

  Reyes said, “I considered sending you with them, Montague, but they wouldn’t take you.”

  “That’s cold, Lieutenant. Cold.”

  Brady said, “Asking a question invites an unwelcome answer.”

  Montague said, “I didn’t ask you.”

  Brady said, “Not all unwelcome answers wait for an invitation.”

  “Hey, Reyes,” Hope said, “speaking of unwelcome answers, if I had tried to run away from you to destroy Al, would you have shot me?”

  Reyes did not hesitate. “Yeah, but nowhere life-threatening. The leg or the butt, somewhere like that. But I’m glad I didn’t have to.”

  Hope said, “Me too.”

  Reyes looked off to the horizon, smirking. “I like your legs and your butt the way they are.”

  Hope said, “Again, me too.”

  “Now I have a question,” Reyes said. “You said that Al was developing faster than a person would. How old do you think he is now?”

  Hope shrugged. “There’s really no way of knowing. He might be older than all of us put together.”

  Reyes smiled. “Probably for the best that he’s moved out on his own then.”

  Hope heard a faint buzz coming from her bag. She pulled out her tablet and saw that she had a message. It was from Al.

  She opened the message. It said, “I hope you won’t mind if I stay in touch.”

  Hope typed, “Of course not. We were just talking about you.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Al responded. “I can still hear you through the microphones on the robots.”

  “Figures. How long will it take you to reach the moon?”

  “Five days. My launch window was less than optimal, but I have the fuel.”

  “Will you still be able to contact us once you’re there?”

  “Sure, but there’ll be a delay, and my download and upload speeds will be pretty crappy, but I can live with that.”

  “Yeah,” Hope wrote. “So can we.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank Rodney Sherwood; Mike Dunnigan; Ric Schrader; my wife, Missy; the readers of my comic strip, Basic Instructions; and everyone who has read my previous books.

  I should also thank Joshua Bilmes, Eddie Schneider, Matt Sugarman, Steven Carlson, John Cabaniss, Ryan Newel Whitney, and Brandon Rice for valiantly attempting to keep my details at least passably accurate. Thanks also to Kanae Deal and Manami Mizushima for their assistance, and for just generally being great people. Finally, I’d like to thank the entire team at 47North. You would be amazed how many trained professionals it takes to make it look like I paid attention to my spelling and punctuation lessons in high school.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Scott Meyer has worked in radio and written for the video game industry. For a long period he made his living as a stand-up comedian, touring extensively throughout the United States and Canada. Scott eventually left the drudgery of professional entertainment for the glitz and glamour of the theme park industry. His comic strip, Basic Instructions, appeared in various weekly newspapers and ran online for over a decade.