by Paul Duffau
“Not good enough.”
Kenzie’s insides crashed. “I did what you asked.”
“Do it again. This time, picture your target. You came in with a rage. Find that energy, focus it.”
Kenzie wagged her head.
Jules’s next words came inches from her ear. “Focus it. Picture that person.” As though summoned, an image of Hunter came.
“Good,” whispered Jules. Her voice got intense. “Make your target real. It’s right here in front of you. Use the strength of your anger. Touch it, understand its power, bend it to your will.”
A surge of Kenzie’s initial anger returned, not as potent as the inferno she’d brought with her to the dojang, but hot enough. Her chest rose and fell faster as Hunter’s implicit threat, the rolling thunder, replayed in her mind. She let the feeling build, and with a fierce yell, let it go in a lightning attack. Too late, she felt the overextension as her hand passed the impact point.
CRACK.
Kenzie tore the blindfold away, heedless of the hairs that pulled with it. A shudder ran through her body and her knees quaked. Mitch leaned to the side, pulled there by Jules’s grip on the meaty part of his arm. A drenching relief filled her.
“I’m okay,” he said to reassure her. “She moved me first.” He sounded at least as relieved as she felt.
“You, however, owe me a new door,” said Jules.
“Hunh?” I owe what? “I didn’t hit anything.”
Jules pointed. “A door.”
Kenzie followed Jules’s finger with her eyes. The middle door for the changing rooms stood split, supported by the hinges on one side and the latch on the other.
“But, how . . .”
Jules crooked a finger. “My office.” She released her grip on Mitch. “Thank you, Mitch. May I ask that you rejoin Mr. Jackson?”
White-faced, Mitch complied.
Kenzie followed him off the floor, her mind reeling. Jules trailed behind.
Grim-faced, Jackson met Mitch with a quick once-over. Apparently deciding that Mitch was fine despite his pasty complexion, he gave orders. “Weirdness all around today, Mitch. Go outside and pretend to be normal. Keep an eye out in case we have any more surprises headed our way. Keep out of trouble.”
“Always.”
If lethal bodyguards rolled their eyes, Jackson’s would have clacked to the back of his head. Instead, he delivered a stony stare that refuted Mitch’s blithe assurance.
Mitch checked out his sneakers. “Yes, sir.” He slipped out the door.
Jackson transferred his attention to Kenzie, gave her the same scrutiny that he’d given Mitch. His lips jerked to one side, and he bobbed his head once. Kenzie couldn’t figure out if it was a sign of approval, criticism over destroying the door—how?—or acknowledgment of her total confusion. He wasn’t helping the last part at all. Kenzie met his gaze without backing down as she passed him, though. The small act gave her a spurt of courage. She entered Jules’s office and déjà vu struck, a reminder of when she’d waited to get chewed out for making contact while sparring.
Jules closed the door behind them. “Sit down, Kenzie, and quit acting like you deserve to be beat.”
A load of bricks dropped from Kenzie’s shoulders. “What happened?”
Jules grimaced. “Darned if I know, but I goaded you into it, so you’re not at fault, okay?”
Kenzie waited for the rest of it.
Jules shifted as though she were embarrassed. “I was testing a theory,” she began. She shook her head, as though denying something to herself. “Those bags you broke, and the heavy bag. There’s just no physical way that you could have done that. Those bags are designed to take a beating, and while you’re good and getting better, you just don’t have that kind of physical power.”
She cleared her throat. “There are a lot of myths involved in the martial arts. We talk about chi a bit here, but I don’t go off the deep end on the mystical stuff. You start talking about life forces and connections to the universe and it freaks out the clients. Instead, we talk about holding our center, physically and mentally.” She searched Kenzie’s face.
“So what happened?” Kenzie had a pretty good idea. The magic had burst loose again; not that she could tell Jules that.
“Some practitioners of the arts suggest that chi is real, that the energy it represents can be projected.”
“And you think that’s what I did?”
“I don’t know if that’s what you did. What I know is that I”—Jules’s voice caught—“manipulated you into a situation that called on your anger.” The instructor’s eyes softened. “Your natural instinct is away from that anger. That was clear when we sparred, when you told me that you needed to hit something. Something. That’s important, because despite the fact that someone made you that furious, you had the good sense, good character, not to act on it.”
I would have killed a man with a Fire spell. Coldness marched down her spine. She didn’t deserve praise. To save Mitch, I would have.
Jules was speaking again, overriding her self-recrimination. “I think we need to change your training.” She tapped her temple. “With you, we need to train this”—she pointed to the knot cinching the belt at her waist—“and this. Question. What does the Do in Tang Soo Do mean?”
“Way.”
“Your Way is different. I’m not even sure that I am the right teacher for you. We’ll see. If a better one comes along, you’ll leave with my blessing. Until then, we need to focus on your control, and not of your feet or legs. They didn’t break my door.” She looked at Kenzie, seeking confirmation.
Kenzie didn’t know what to feel, so she replied with a simple, “Yes, ma’am.” She glanced at the picture behind Jules. “But I think you’re the right teacher.”
Jules gave a small laugh. “Mr. Jackson is waiting. Get some rest.”
Dismissed, Kenzie rose, opened the door, and exited with one final glance at a somber Jules. She gently closed the door behind her.
Jackson saw her and nodded to the door. “Ready to leave.” He stood alert, but relaxed. As Mitch would say, it didn’t fit. Just like the events in the garage didn’t fit. She walked to him. “Yes.” She gathered her gear bag, tucking loose corners of her regular clothes inside. The sound of the zipper sounded loud in the quiet of the empty room as she made her decision. She turned to Jackson and met his gaze.
“I know you were faking.”
Chapter 32
A weekend of wrestling data had worn Mitch to a frazzled edge, and the only solution that came to mind was stupid and dangerous.
Give it back, Lucy had demanded, and Mitch was going to do exactly that. If he put the digital evidence back exactly as he found it, and anyone caught him, the time stamps on the file would show that he’d accessed them. He’d plead curiosity and innocence.
He was thirty minutes early. A hazy reflection in the office glass as he passed showed a haggard visage. If Leo wanted to question if he’d been sick, at least he could play the part. Exhaustion was a type of sickness, especially when he combined it with a very real fear born of the possibility of jail time in the near future.
The cubicle population was at twenty-five percent capacity. Mitch suspected that some of the wannabe engineers slept here, hoping their dedication would make a good impression on the bosses. He passed one of them, a woman perched on her seat like a bird and typing rapid-fire on her keyboard with her eyes intent on the stream of information on her monitor. He reached his workstation and slouched into the chair. He pulled earbuds from his pocket as cover for removing the same mini SD adapter he’d used to pilfer the files in the first place. His phone went on top.
Impatiently, he waited for his computer to boot. It ran through its opening sequence. As soon as the desktop materialized on the screen, he jammed the adapter into the port. He reversed his actions from a week earlier, restoring the files into an identical folder. Hidden in the purloined documents was a tracking program he’d planted that would launch a dialogue
box if any of the files were accessed. Once everything was uploaded, he re-pocketed the chip.
While he waited for the system notification to announce Lucy’s arrival, he checked his messages. He had two new review projects to tackle. He grabbed the first one and began the process of analyzing each of the linkages. It was a squat maintenance robot, and one of the ones included in the files he’d been staring at for the last six days. He compared the newer files to what he had stored in his memory, noting the subtle improvements that increased the range of motion for the manipulator arms by an additional five percent.
The trade-off came in the amount of force that could be generated from the arm, but the target market for this particular machine was light industrial maintenance. No heavy lifting was required but the ability to function in confined and constricted spaces was essential. “Sweet,” he muttered under his breath. He verified that the adjustments made in the overall schematic were reflected in the rest of the drawings. It was not unheard-of for a change to be made on one page that didn’t get promulgated to the other manufacturing drawings. It was like getting the fuel pump for a different model-year car. It might look the same, but a fraction-of-an-inch difference in the placement of the bolt holes would prevent it from ever mounting correctly.
His intense focus was interrupted by his boss, Warnicke.
“Listen up, people.” His usual antagonistic demeanor was missing. In its place was draped a solemn expression that his eyes didn’t share. His eyes relayed righteous satisfaction. Warnicke crossed his hands in front of him like a priest conducting a service.
Mitch felt his lips curl at the obvious fakery.
Once he was sure that he had everyone’s attention, the man continued. "I have sad news to deliver. One of our team members, Garrett, has, tragically and unexpectedly, passed away.”
Bile rose like a bitter recrimination at the back of Mitch’s throat. He swallowed it back. After a stunned silence, he began to hear the scattered sounds of keys being depressed as a frenetic online search commenced to discover the gory details. Mitch didn’t bother. He already knew who was at fault.
Mitch was, he was sure of it. No one had a reason to kill Garrett except for the tiny bit of espionage that would have been traced back to the computer that Mitch had used to launch Hunter’s virus. Mitch kept gulping to keep his breakfast down.
He’d screwed up, and Garrett was dead.
As though reading their collective minds as they searched the Internet, Warnicke dribbled out more information. “The authorities are investigating the circumstances of his death. While it is unlikely that it had anything to do with our work here”—he looked around pointedly, daring anyone to disagree—“the police may wish to conduct interviews.”
Mitch locked his jaws, heavy snorts of air blowing through his nose. Keep it together!
“Apparently . . .” Warnicke dragged the word out through all four syllables, “Garrett spontaneously combusted and then exploded.” The man dropped his pretense at solemnity. “It made quite the gory mess in his car. Fortunately, his 3rdGen ID was on the dash or they would have had a hard time making identification.”
Mitch puked into his wastebasket.
Mitch spent the afternoon poking at the second set of drawings without accomplishing much in the way of productive work. The second robot was a non-humanoid biomorph that resembled a metal arachnid. He wasted a couple of hours checking out the sensor arrays. The spider crawler mixed infrared detectors, bump sensors, and a high-resolution camera that could be rotated through a full circle with the ability to move in three dimensions to perform confined conditions inspections. Unlike the previous mechanoid, this model could not operate independently. It received its instructions from a human handler.
Sighing, Mitch called up the overview drawings. Might as well get something done. He frowned at the schematics in front of him. Most of the designs assigned to him were behavior-based robots, ones that could work independently, doing tasks like collecting items for shipping or vacuuming a floor. Those invariably had empty spaces. Since it didn’t make sense that the engineers would waste materials and increase the overall size without a good reason, he had supposed they would be filled with more equipment later. But the spider lacked this space. Why? As fast as the question sprang to mind, the answer arrived, making him feel stupid.
Lucy.
He hadn’t been given the completed drawings until now. The arachnid crawler was the only one where he saw all the details. It was human-controlled. The others weren’t, so they needed greater capacity. Each void was located center mass, where it could be best protected and with the shortest possible distance to send commands to appendages. It was the perfect location to install a hardware package running advanced AI. The voids were brain pans, and the largest existed in the sexbot, the most human-like project.
Chills cascaded down his spine as he made the connections. Lucy had dumped herself onto a local hard drive to dodge the coming purge of the mainframe. Why would they try to kill Lucy when everyone was busting their asses to create a true AI? It was the sort of discovery that led to Nobel Prizes.
All the questions boiled down to one simple assumption. 3rdGen was building next-generation robots that could replace most humans. The artificial brain capable of supporting an intelligence like Lucy, the soft-robot technology that could be overlaid on a mechanical structure . . . It made sense.
Lucy got in the way. The computer scientists had meant to design an artificial human brain; instead, they got an interlinked hive mind. She was not only expendable but dangerous. If Lucy replicated like a virus, she’d take over all the “bodies.”
Had he done the right thing putting her back on to his computer and giving her safe access back into the network? This morning it seemed like the only option. Now it seemed as foolhardy as playing Russian roulette. It was not a matter of taking over random warehouse robots, but a potential army of warbots.
He reached for his mouse to close the browser. Before his hand closed on the ergonomic shape, his screen blacked out. A cursor appeared, blinking. Transfixed, Mitch waited.
they are coming for you: run
His monitor flashed once and a series of iridescent lines traced random shapes in the blankness like an old-school screensaver. It faded to black again.
run now
Every nerve jangling, Mitch pushed out of his cubicle. A rising tide of shouts echoed from the other cubes. His wasn’t the only computer going nuts. He did a fast sweep with his eyes over the whole floor. No one was watching him. Warnicke, visible through the glass wall of his office, was pounding on his keyboard in frustration. Mitch made a beeline for the exit, opting for the stairs instead of the elevator. If security was on its way, he wasn’t going to make it easy for them by standing in front of the sliding doors while they rode up to capture him.
He took the steps two at a time and used the handrail to fling himself around the hairpins on the landings. He burst through the ground-floor door, checked the lobby, and speed-walked to the doors and sunshine.
The rays of the summer sun struck him full force. He looked up and down the street. A sleek black car with familiar lines was parked down the street to the south. Its presence triggered a memory of another one, an electric car that had been used to try to abduct Kenzie months ago. Paired with the vehicle identification was the realization that he couldn’t go home. They’d go there next.
The brief hint of elation at his escape and evasion evaporated with the heat and the dearth of good options. He had no place to run to. Kenzie couldn’t help. All he could do was get her into trouble with him.
Goddamn Hunter!
Mitch remembered Garrett’s fate. Mitch was alive, at least. He needed to move, and move now. He turned north without a goal in mind and broke into a run, long strides placing distance between him and 3rdGen. He checked the faces around him, but most of the pedestrians glanced at him with curiosity. Running in the afternoon sun with all his regular clothes on was attracting attention. He
slowed to a fast march and risked a glance over his shoulder. He couldn’t see anyone chasing him.
He took a deep breath. He had some time to figure things out. He turned right. Kenzie might not be able to help, but Mercury might.
Ahead of him, a vaguely familiar man the size of a professional wrestler exited a Ford Expedition. Mitch angled away. Suspicion floated up with a submerged memory. He’d seen the guy somewhere before. The coincidence was too much.
Full recognition came when the man inscribed a quick knotty symbol in the air. Instantly, all of Mitch’s limbs seemed hogtied and his momentum carried him in a crushing fall to the sidewalk. Stars blossomed as his head bounced on the hard concrete. He tried to call out, but the same spell constricted his vocal cords, too.
The dude that was guarding the Rubiera compound when he’d scouted it last week.
Staring at the goliath sideways, he watched as another man joined the first. They approached him in tandem. He couldn’t even turn his head to look at their faces. They hefted him up like a side of beef, hauled him to the Expedition, and deposited him in the backseat. Then the door slammed. The interior was icy cold and had a new-car smell.
Two more car doors slammed and the driver merged the vehicle into traffic. Goliath turned to Mitch and spoke. “Mr. Rubiera would like a word with you, Mr. Meriwether.”
Chapter 33
Lemon and ginger tickled the tip of Kenzie’s tongue as she gaped at the Glade of Silver Night. Before her stood a portal like the entrance to a cave. Instead of disappearing into the damp bowels of the earth, it reached across space from her bedroom to her lagoon. The view floated in front of her eyes like a mirage of the path she took to her favorite place in the whole Glade. The scent and taste wafted up to her nose as though their tang could calm her pounding heart.
