by D L Young
Maddox fired. The shot struck the concrete floor half a meter from her head, leaving a sizable divot and showering Blayze with a cloud of dust and debris. The girl froze and fell silent.
At the sound of the discharge, Dezmund had fallen to his knees, believing the bullet was meant for him. He was sobbing loudly now.
“Who, Dez?” Maddox repeated.
“An AI,” he blubbered. “A fucking AI.”
A shiver shot down Maddox’s spine. “What AI? Whose?”
“I don’t know,” Dezmund said. “He never gave us his name or build version.”
Maddox glanced over at Blayze. She’d managed to rise into a sitting position. “You fool,” she said tiredly. “You bloody fool.” The fight in her seemed gone. With her legs splayed out in front of her, she stared expressionless at the floor.
“He had stuff on us,” Dezmund went on. “I don’t know how he got it, but he had enough dirt on us to put us away for life. He said if we didn’t help take you out, he’d hand it all over to the feds.”
No. It couldn’t be true. Couldn’t possibly. He’d scanned through hours of recorded conversations from their hideaway in New Fulton. They’d never said a word about some mystery AI.
“That’s bullshit,” Maddox said.
“I swear it’s the truth,” Dezmund insisted.
“Then the truth makes no sense,” Maddox countered.
“Yeah,” Tommy said, joining in. “If some big bad AI wanted boss man out, why didn’t he just hire a merc?”
“He did,” Blayze said, still staring at the floor. “Or he made one, I suppose. That killer tech in the DS. That was his. He created it to take you out.”
Still on his knees, Dezmund turned halfway around. “Blackburn, you have to believe me. He knew you’d been undercutting us. He knew about our plant inside BNO. He knew what we planned to do. Somehow he knew all of it. He forced us to bring you in on the job. He wanted you there so he could flatline you. He wanted it to look like a jacking job gone bad.”
Maddox stood there. He hadn’t lowered the gun. Hadn’t lowered his guard either. Blayze and Dezmund were smart. Deviously smart. This whole thing had to be a ruse. An improvised distraction to plant a seed of doubt in his mind. He might be a lot of things, but a cold-blooded murderer wasn’t one of them, and they knew that. Maybe they thought he wouldn’t go through with it if they could confuse him enough, if they could trick him into having second thoughts.
“Why?” Maddox pressed. “Why did it want to take me out?”
“We don’t know,” Dezmund said. “He never said. All we know is he hated you. I didn’t even know AIs could hate. But this one did. It’s like he wanted to get revenge or something. Like you’d screwed him over and he wanted to pay back the favor.”
No, Maddox insisted inwardly. This had to be some trick, some play. Maybe they’d found out about his recent run-ins with AIs from Tommy, and now they were trying to use it against him. He’d listened to the recording, and there hadn’t been anything…
Then he remembered Blayze’s call. The recording’s only portion he hadn’t been able to decipher.
He stepped toward the girl. “Did you talk with him today? On your specs?”
She glared at him defiantly and didn’t answer.
Maddox put the gun to her forehead. “There’s only one bullet left in this thing, and it’s got your name on it if you don’t tell me, right now. Did you talk with him today?”
She said nothing, stubbornly tightening her mouth into a straight line. Maddox took his finger off the guard and placed it on the trigger.
“Don’t, Blackburn!” Dezmund cried. “Yes, yes, she talked with him today. On her specs. I was there when the call came in.”
Maddox lowered the gun and took a backward step. His thoughts started scattering in a thousand different directions. Was it possible? Could an AI be after him?
It’s like he wanted to get revenge. The girl’s words repeated themselves, echoing inside his head.
There was only one AI that might have sought revenge against Maddox. But that entity was long dead.
Behind Dezmund and Blayze, the parking garage wall exploded.
22 - Killer Machines
A bomb. That was Maddox’s first thought when the wall blew apart, blasting concrete chunks through the parking garage. He crouched reflexively as pebble-sized debris stung his exposed skin, slicing small cuts on his hands and face. In the next moment everything was quiet, and a cloud of gray dust slowly crept across the rubble-covered floor as Maddox’s mind tried to grasp what had happened. Large fragments of concrete lay strewn about. Only by sheer luck had he avoided getting struck by one.
Looking up, he found Dezmund hadn’t been so lucky. The dead datajacker lay facedown, his hands still manacled behind his back. A pool of blood had formed around his grotesquely misshapen head.
His vision blurred by grit and dust, Maddox looked down at himself. His clothes were covered with a powdering of concrete. His hands looked like he’d been in a fight, full of small oozing cuts and stinging abrasions. Someone coughed. He looked over and saw Blayze lying on her side, her hair white with concrete ash.
“What happened?” Tommy said. The kid and Z Dog had been standing farther away from the wall than the others. They both had ghostlike coverings of dust and shocked expressions on their faces, but neither of them looked injured.
A bomb, Maddox almost said, then he realized he’d never heard a detonation or felt a shock wave. Blinking hard, his eyes teary and stinging with dust, he inspected the enormous hole where a wall had been moments before. It was almost dark outside, and what little daylight remained poured through, dull and orange and diffused by the still-settling cloud of debris.
“Dez,” the girl said, sobbing. “No, no, no.” As she rolled to turn away from her dead companion, a shadow passed over her lying form.
Maddox looked up and saw the silhouette of a long appendage-like shape framed by the wall’s gaping hole. Recognition hit him as he heard the noises coming from the thing: grinding motor gears and whining hydraulics. It was the excavator’s crane arm from the construction site. The crane, not a bomb, had obliterated the wall and killed Dezmund. Or rather, the inept fool operating the machine had.
The crane arm pushed through the hole, its enormous digging claw with ragged steel teeth poking through the debris cloud like some monster sticking its head into the garage to inspect the damage it had done. The claw thrust forward crudely, barely missing Dezmund’s body. What the hell was that operator thinking?
“Move back!” Maddox shouted to Tommy as he helped Blayze to her feet and hustled her away from the thing.
The crane jerked back and forth inside the garage like some enormous steel tentacle, its claw folding in and out, as if searching for something to grab. Standing well away, the awestruck four watched as it knocked against Dezmund’s body, sending it tumbling across the floor. Blayze shrieked and turned away.
With the dust mostly settled now, Maddox had a clean view of the adjacent lot through the cratered wall. And the excavator’s empty cab.
“There’s nobody driving that thing,” Tommy said, seeing the same strange sight.
Blayze’s eyes went wide with terror. “It’s him! He’s going to kill us!”
She tried to run away, but Maddox held her tight. She squirmed and pleaded for him to let her go. “It’s him, I’m telling you. Let me go!”
Her face was contorted with fear. But what she apparently believed was too outrageous for Maddox to swallow. The operator had to have fallen out of the cab or had a heart attack or stroke or something. It couldn’t possibly be an AI—
The crane arm suddenly stopped its violent movement. It hung in space, gently bobbing. Someone had stopped the machine.
Maddox started to let out a breath of relief, and then he saw them. Four bumblebee drones appeared in the wall’s gaping hole and slowly floated into the garage.
“Let me go!” Blayze begged. “Let me go!”
; Maddox pulled out his specs—thankfully undamaged—and put them on. He subvocalized a scanning app and fixed his gaze on the nearest drone, hovering fifteen meters away. He waited a moment for the app to ID the drones as construction site bees, but the scan came back with nothing. Strangely, the app didn’t appear to see the drones at all. Maddox ran a diagnostic, found nothing wrong with the scanner. He quickly rebooted and gave the drone a second scan, only to get the same odd result. It was as if the tiny machines were invisible.
Stealthy bumblebee drones? He’d never heard of such a thing.
The nearest drone, now ten meters away, stopped and hovered in place. The red blinking light on its underbelly changed to solid green.
“Boss,” Tommy said, “I got a bad feeling.”
Maddox did too. “Let’s get out of here,” he said.
As they turned away from the drones, the excavator engine roared back to life. The giant machine lurched forward on its tracks, its crane arm penetrating deeper into the garage, straight at Maddox and company. The four broke into a run. The outstretched monster claw reached for them as they scrambled around a corner, its steel teeth taking a large bite out of the wall.
With the girl still firmly in his grip, Maddox, Tommy, and Z Dog burst out of an emergency exit onto the walkway. A thick crowd of onlookers had gathered around the construction site, gawking at the spectacle of the runaway machine. No one seemed to notice the dust-caked four who’d just emerged from the building. Construction workers in hard hats had cautiously surrounded the wildly spinning excavator but hadn’t yet come up with a way to stop it. A dozen football-sized camera drones with news feed logos hovered high overhead, recording the drama.
A motorbike pulled up beside the four. The rider removed her helmet.
“Girlie,” Tommy said.
“What’s going on over here?” she asked. “Looks like the end of the world, bruh.” Then, looking them over, she said, “What happened to you guys?”
“I’ll tell you later,” Tommy answered. “Give Z a ride home, will you?” When Z Dog began to protest, Tommy said, “I’ll be there soon. Go on.”
Z Dog reluctantly climbed onto the girl’s bike, and the two left the scene, snaking their way through stalled ground traffic.
Maddox released his grip on Blayze for a moment as he and Tommy patted and brushed away the concrete dust from their clothes. Over at the construction site, the excavator pushed further into the parking garage, destabilizing an entire side of the building. Several floors’ worth of brick facade and concrete wall collapsed on top of the runaway machine. Crushed under a mountain of rubble, the steel beast finally stopped moving. Smoke rose from the debris pile, and Maddox heard the weakening hiss of broken hydraulics. The thing was dead.
“This isn’t over,” Blayze said. Terror filled the girl’s face. “He knows where we are,” she said, her voice quivering. “He’s not going to stop.”
“Tell me,” Maddox said. “Tell me everything you know about it. Right now.”
She looked at him, a hateful fire igniting in her eyes. “Screw you, jacker,” she spat. “All this is your fault. All this death, all this insanity. If he didn’t hate you so much, none of this would have ever happened. You can rot in hell.” She looked over at Tommy. “The both of you can.”
Maddox grabbed her by the shoulders, shook her. “Tell me what you—”
Cries of panic filled the air. They came from somewhere inside the cluster of onlookers, but as Maddox turned to look, he couldn’t see what was happening beyond the crush of bodies. Then he heard an engine racing, growing quickly louder. A wave of screaming grew louder and the crowd erupted into a shrieking pandemonium. He was vaguely aware of Blayze breaking away from him as he gawked at the sudden parting of the crowd. Dozens scrambled and dove out of the path of a speeding ground car. Others were struck head-on, flying high into the air, arms and legs flailing like rag dolls. The vehicle cut a path of human carnage, barreling straight at him.
As the machine bore down on him, Maddox froze as he saw who was driving the vehicle. Or more precisely, who wasn’t.
The car had no driver.
23 - Raining Bots
The sound of a high-speed vehicular collision is unlike any other. The violent, crunching thud of a ton of steel and glass. It’s a noise you feel as much as you hear. Up close it’s terrifying, triggering a panic hardwired into your genes. You become a deer with wide eyes, muscles scared stiff by the sight of a tiger leaping at you from its hiding place in the brush. You’re a mouse, suddenly aware of the raised head of a cobra about to strike you dead.
For a fraction of a second, Maddox believed he was a goner. A surge of animal fear had frozen his legs for a small moment, and he was sure the instinctive reaction would be the end of him, a fatal delay preventing his escape, leaving him crushed under the wheels of the death machine hurtling at him. The meat had its limitations.
Fortunately, Tommy’s meat reacted more swiftly. Had the kid not tackled him, knocking him out of the car’s deadly path, Maddox would have been sandwiched between the vehicle and the parking building’s outer wall. The moment passed in slow motion, the same way time sometimes dilated in virtual space. The car’s front bumper nearly on top of him. Tommy’s rugby tackle slamming into his ribs. The both of them tumbling away, somehow avoiding the deafening, powerful collision of car against wall.
Sprawled out on the sidewalk, Maddox and Tommy slowly rose to their feet, unable to take their eyes off the smoking wreckage a few meters away. Most of the car had disappeared inside the building. Only its trunk and still-spinning rear tires were visible. Like the excavator, the vehicle was buried under a heap of fallen masonry. A few bricks tumbled down from above, falling like the last drops from a rainstorm. Along the walkway and into the street, a trail of broken bodies marked the vehicle’s path.
“Did you see it?” Tommy said, breathing heavily. “There was nobody driving that thing. Just like that big crane.”
Maddox’s heart raced. He didn’t want to believe it, but no other explanation made sense. Moments ago he’d been convinced the girl’s story was some piece of misdirection. But now…
“Where’s Blayze?” Tommy asked.
“I don’t know,” Maddox said, looking around. “But we’ve got to find—”
“Oh, shit,” the kid said, grimacing at something behind Maddox. Turning, Maddox spotted her, mostly buried beneath the brick rubble. Only her head, right shoulder and arm were visible. Her death mask was a misshapen, wretched version of her living face, barely recognizable.
“Shit,” Tommy said again, under his breath.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Maddox said. He pulled the kid’s arm, but Tommy was frozen in place, still staring at the dead girl.
“Tommy,” he said, tugging the kid’s arm gently but urgently, “she’s gone. Come on.”
The kid pulled himself away, and the pair left the grisly scene behind them.
***
Sirens wailed as police cars and ambulances, blue and red lights flashing, plodded impatiently through standstill traffic, making their way toward the chaos of destroyed machines and broken bodies. From above, their airborne counterparts descended, their own sirens and lights announcing their arrival as they glided down from the skyward transit lanes. Maddox and Tommy walked briskly away, knifing their way through the stunned crowd.
“You have those extra veils on you?” Maddox asked. Earlier that morning in the hotel, he’d instructed the kid to bring some spare lenses with him. Just in case they needed them, which they did.
The kid absently patted his jacket. “Right here,” he said, still looking gut-punched by the horror they’d left behind.
“Let’s get them on.”
In a city where nearly everyone wore specs in public, walking the streets nakedfaced would draw attention to them. And the last thing Maddox wanted to be at the moment was conspicuous.
Both pairs of specs were undamaged, protected by hard-shell cases. The kid passed hi
m a pair and he put them on. Booting up the lenses, Maddox skipped past the calibration sequence, going straight for the stack of stolen IDs. There were two dozen to choose from. He selected a masseuse from Queens.
“You pull up an ID already?” Maddox asked.
“Yeah,” Tommy answered, pushing his own pair up the bridge of his nose. “Hover mechanic from Long Island.”
Nearly all street cams keyed on the unique PIN every pair of lenses possessed and, by law, broadcast at all times. Like a ground car’s vehicle ID code or a citizen’s social security number, the spec’s PIN was uniquely associated with its owner, which enabled local authorities—via their ever-watchful network of street cams—to quickly and easily identify the wearer. Lenses illegally stacked with stolen IDs, like the ones Maddox and Tommy had on at the moment, were referred to as “veils” since they masked the wearer’s identity by broadcasting someone else’s PIN.
“Think they got any face cams around here?” Tommy asked worriedly.
“I don’t know,” Maddox said.
Facial recognition cams still existed, here and there throughout the City, but they were few and far between. Used widely in a previous era, facial recognition technology had been mostly abandoned since the ubiquitous adoption of specs, the direct descendants of an earlier age’s cell phones. Tracking the general population via spec PINs had turned out to be more practical and less error-prone than trying to keep up with all those faces. Of the scant number of face cams still around, though, Maddox knew most of them were out of service.
“I doubt it,” he added, hoping to ease the kid’s concern. They walked on, Maddox’s mind buzzing, still trying to process what had happened.
An AI, Jesus. Could an AI really be after him? Even after what he’d just witnessed, he still had trouble swallowing it. He’d dealt with only two AIs in his time. One was a corporate entity owned by his former employer, Latour-Fisher Biotechnologies, a psychotic machine that had killed Rooney and nearly killed him too. Maddox had managed to destroy it, thanks to some help from the second AI he’d ever known, a nameless rogue entity that had been the Latour-Fisher AI’s mortal enemy. The two AIs had been engaged in some mysterious secret war for years. A war Maddox had helped bring to an end. Had another AI, one sympathetic to the Latour-Fisher entity’s cause, discovered what had happened, and now it was avenging its comrade’s death?
