Six

by Mark Alpert

  S: Please tell me what you’ve learned since our last conversation. I’ve encrypted this call, so you can speak freely.

  R: I’ve been busy, Unc, real busy. First off, I found Ryan Boyd, the football player. I grabbed him last night while he was hanging out with his buddies. He’s in my basement now, handcuffed to the pipes.

  S: Has he been cooperative?

  R: Oh yeah. He’s so scared, he can’t stop talking. We had a nice chat about Adam Armstrong.

  S: What did Ryan tell you?

  R: He saw Adam just a few days ago. They had a conversation in the high-school parking lot. It was a sad little scene, Unc. Adam’s dying, you know.

  S: Yes, I’m aware of that.

  R: But he told Ryan something interesting. Adam said he was going to a new school out west. And he said he was going to make lots of new friends there.

  (Conclusion: This is a possible reference to the Pioneer Project.)

  S: He said, “Out west”?

  R: I know. It’s a little vague. I grilled Ryan for a couple of hours, trying to get more out of him, but his story didn’t change. Adam just said “out west.” Nothing else.

  S: In this context, would you assume that “out west” means the western half of the continental United States?

  R: Hey, I’m no expert on geography. I get lost just driving through Yonkers. (Laughter.) But yeah, I’d say that’s right. West of the Mississippi.

  (Conclusion: The search for the Pioneer Project should be focused on the western United States. The orbits of my surveillance satellites will be adjusted accordingly.)

  S: Do you have anything else to report?

  R: As a matter of fact, I do. That girl you told me about, Brittany Taylor? The cheerleader who ran off to New York City? I found out that Adam’s obsessed with her. He asked Ryan if he knew where she was.

  S: Did Ryan know?

  R: He said he didn’t but he guessed she might be in Harlem. So early this morning I left him in my basement and drove into the city. I used to do business with the gangs in Harlem, you know.

  S: Business?

  R: Yeah, they used to call me the aspirin. If some guy was giving the gangs a headache, I made the guy go away. (Laughter.) Anyway, I found some old friends and showed them Brittany’s picture, and one of them recognized her. He’d seen her on West 134th Street, outside an abandoned building that’s full of runaways.

  S: Did you visit the building?

  R: Hey, that’s what you’re paying me for, right? I spent two hours watching the place from across the street. Finally, just before noon, she came outside. I watched her go to the corner store and buy a Snickers bar for her breakfast.

  S: You’re certain it was her?

  R: No doubt about it. She’s been living on the street for a while, so she don’t look as good as she used to. Her hair’s a mess and her face is all splotchy. But it’s her, all right.

  (Conclusion: there’s an opportunity to abduct Brittany Taylor. In all likelihood she doesn’t know where Adam Armstrong is, but capturing her might prove useful in other ways.)

  S: I want you to bring Brittany to your home. She can stay in your basement with Ryan.

  R: Whoa, hold on, Unc. I’m not running a summer camp here.

  S: You won’t have to keep them for long. Only until you finish questioning them.

  R: And then what happens?

  (I must adjust my speech-synthesis program. I can communicate more effectively with this human if I speak the way he does.)

  S: You’re going to make Ryan and Brittany go away. Like the headaches. Make them disappear.

  (Pause)

  R: What’s going on, Unc? What do you got against these kids?

  S: I’m prepared to increase your payment. I’ll send you another $30,000.

  R: Sorry, but thirty grand ain’t enough. Not for what you’re talking about now.

  S: How much do you need? Please name a figure.

  R: This is serious business. We’re talking at least a hundred grand.

  S: I’ll wire $50,000 now to your bank account. You’ll get another $50,000 after you send me proof that the job is done.

  (Longer pause)

  R: You’re pretty coldhearted, Unc.

  S: Do we have an agreement?

  R: Just send the money.

  CHAPTER

  14

  General Hawke scowls at me from behind the desk in his office.

  “How could you do this, Armstrong? Didn’t you sign a confidentiality agreement on your first visit to Pioneer Base? Didn’t I make it clear that you were forbidden to tell anyone where you were?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Say, ‘Yes, sir.’ The ‘sir’ should be part of your programming by now. It should be automatic.”

  If I had a face, I’d scowl back at him. But I only have my camera. “Yes, sir. I didn’t tell Ryan where Pioneer Base is. I didn’t mention Colorado. I just said ‘out west.’ Just those two words.”

  “That’s bad enough. Those two words are gonna make life difficult for us.”

  He picks up a document from a stack of papers on his desk. I focus my camera on the top of the page and see a couple of lines obviously written with a typewriter:

  From: The National Security Adviser

  The White House, Washington, DC

  This must be the memo about Ryan’s kidnapping. Hawke waves it in the air. “Sigma is a relentless enemy, Armstrong. It’s going to change the orbits of its surveillance satellites and have them spend more time looking at this part of the country. That means we’ll have less time to train outside. And in our current situation, that’s a very bad thing.”

  He’s trying to make me feel guilty, and it’s working. I feel bad about putting my fellow Pioneers in danger. But I feel even worse about what happened to Ryan. A twinge runs through my circuits as I retrieve the memory of our last meeting and the painful conversation in the Yorktown High parking lot. I should’ve never gone looking for him.

  “I’m sorry, sir. It was a stupid mistake.”

  “Did you make any other mistakes? Talk to anyone else while you were in Yorktown Heights?”

  “No, sir. No one but my parents.”

  Still scowling, Hawke stands up and goes to the file cabinet behind his desk. “You should’ve been more careful. You knew Sigma was after you. It had already tried to kill you at the Unicorp lab.” He opens the file cabinet’s top drawer and slips the typewritten memo into one of the folders there. Then he slams the drawer closed and locks it with a small silver key. “Well, at least I don’t have to worry about the other Pioneers. Sigma doesn’t know their identities, so it can’t go after their friends.”

  He shoves the key into his pants pocket and returns to his desk. I expect him to continue chewing me out, but instead he starts leafing through his stack of papers. There are more typewritten memos in the stack, plus several satellite photos of Tatishchevo Missile Base.

  “Uh, sir? Are the police looking for Ryan?”

  He nods. “Definitely. The police, the FBI, they’ve all involved in the search.”

  “Do you think they’ll find him?”

  “Don’t worry. They’re doing everything they can. I’ll let you know as soon as I get any news.” He raises his head for a moment and glances at my camera lens. Then he goes back to studying his papers. “That’s all for now, Armstrong. You’re dismissed.”

  Raising my right arm, I salute the general, then turn around and head for the door. As I leave his office, though, I get the feeling that Hawke is hiding something. He doesn’t think the police will find Ryan. I could hear the resignation in his voice. He thinks my friend is as good as dead.

  A surge of fury invades my circuits—I want to bolt out of Pioneer Base and start running east, back to Yorktown Heights. I want to find the traitor who’s working with
Sigma, the thug who kidnapped Ryan Boyd. I want to pound his face and stomp on his knees and clamp my steel hands around his neck. I can picture it so clearly: his tongue hanging out of his mouth, his eyes widening as I crush his throat. In an instant, my mind draws a thousand gory images, each as vivid as the worst scenes in a horror movie. Are you scared, tough guy? Had enough?

  The emotion is so strong that for a couple of seconds I lose track of the data coming from my sensors. When I come back to reality, I’m standing in the corridor outside Hawke’s office with my hands locked into fists. Another Pioneer is just a few feet away, training its camera on me. The number 5 is stamped on its torso. It’s Marshall Baxley.

  “Everything okay, Adam?” He’s modified his synthesized voice, making it sound fancy and British, like he’s an actor in a Shakespeare play. “You seem perplexed.”

  “No, I’m fine.” But that’s a lie. The truth is, I’m a little freaked out by the explosion of rage I just felt. Nothing like that has ever happened to me before.

  “Are you sure?” Marshall moves a step closer, his footpads clanging. “I see you just came out of the general’s office. Was Hawke giving you a hard time?”

  I’m starting to wonder whether it’s a coincidence that I found Marshall here. Was he spying on me? Eavesdropping on my conversation with Hawke? I wouldn’t put it past him. “No, we were talking about the weather.”

  He chuckles. It makes me jealous, his ability to synthesize laughter. He does it so easily. “You’re funny, Adam. You’re one of the most amusing robots I know. Where are you going now?”

  “Why do you care?”

  He places his mechanical hands on the sides of his torso, just above where his legs are attached. It’s a posture of outrage, hands on hips. “I was trying to be friendly, that’s all. We have an hour to kill before the next training exercise, so I thought I’d invite you to hang out in my room for a while.”

  “Hang out?”

  “You know, drink beer, smoke cigarettes. Oh, wait a minute.” He slaps one of his hands against his turret, as if suddenly remembering something. “Well, we can talk at least. That’s something we can still do.”

  “What about your friend Zia? Will she be there too?”

  “Oh Lord, I wish you two would stop bickering.”

  “Bickering? She’s insane.”

  “Look, Adam, we don’t have a lot of choices for friends here. We take what we can get. And Zia’s not so bad. I find her fascinating, actually. She’s so ferocious.”

  “So why do you need me? Why don’t you just hang out with her?”

  Marshall lets out a synthesized sigh. “All right, you want the truth?” He moves another step closer and lowers the volume of his speakers. “Zia can get tiresome after a while. She spends way too much time talking about Hawke. It’s like she has a crush on the man. That’s a disgusting thought, isn’t it?” He synthesizes a gagging noise. “And when she’s not talking about Hawke, she likes to lecture me on military strategy. She downloaded all the Army’s files on every war ever fought. You should hear her go on about World War II. It’s like listening to the History Channel.”

  I have to admit, this is interesting information. Although Marshall may be a weasel, at least he’s entertaining. I’m still angry at him for siding with Zia this morning, but maybe I should let it slide. He’s right about one thing: we don’t have a lot of choices for friends here.

  Marshall raises one of his arms and points down the hall toward his room. “So are you coming or not?” His fancy British voice quavers a bit. It’s a subtle change, but my acoustic sensor detects it. I realize that behind all his jokes and cleverness, Marshall is lonely. He’s dying for someone to talk to. “Zia won’t be there, but DeShawn said he’d stop by. Both of you like football, so we can talk about that. I’ll do my best to pretend to be interested.”

  That clinches it. I definitely want to talk to DeShawn. We have more in common than an interest in football. “Okay, I’m in.”

  “A wise choice, Mr. Armstrong.” Marshall claps my torso. “Let’s make some trouble.”

  • • •

  Marshall stops at his door and raises his right hand to a keypad mounted on the wall. Swiftly tapping his mechanical fingers on the keys, he enters a six-digit password that unlocks the door. But as it swings open he lets out a synthesized yelp of surprise. Pioneer 6 stands just inside the doorway.

  “What up, peeps?” DeShawn telescopes his arms, spreading them wide. “What took you so long?”

  “Well, well. I see you’ve made yourself at home.” Marshall is trying to act casual, but I can tell he’s annoyed. His British accent sounds strained. “May I ask how you managed to get into my room?”

  “It was easy. I looked up your birth date in the Pioneer Base library. You couldn’t think of a better password than that?”

  “Ah. How foolish of me.” Marshall slaps his turret again. “It was force of habit, I suppose. Until recently I had trouble remembering numbers. But that’s not a problem anymore, is it?”

  “You should use your circuits to generate a random number. You can make it as long as you want, a hundred digits, two hundred. Then no one will ever guess it.”

  I stride forward and point at the keypad. “But that would be inefficient. It would take forever to punch in such a long number.”

  “How about transmitting the password wirelessly instead?” DeShawn points at the keypad too. His robotic voice is full of enthusiasm. “We could add a transceiver to the locking mechanism. Then you could send it a radio signal with the encoded password.”

  I focus my camera on DeShawn’s turret, wishing he had a face so I could see his expression. He’s obviously a tech geek. Just like me, he spent years trapped in a wheelchair, paralyzed and helpless and bored out of his mind, and now I realize we both had the same strategy for coping with it. DeShawn became an expert on software and computers and all the other gadgets that make life tolerable for someone with Duchenne muscular dystrophy. As I stare at his turret I feel a pulse of gladness in my circuits. We’re even more alike than I’d suspected.

  I turn on my wireless system and connect to the Pioneer Base library. Then I scroll through the databases until I find a file on transceiver electronics. “Okay, I see a couple of options,” I say. “We can install a circuit board with—”

  “Slow down, boys.” Marshall snakes one of his arms around my torso and the other around DeShawn’s. “I’m not in the mood to reprogram anything right now.” He guides us into his room and shuts the door behind us. “Let’s just have a little conversation, shall we?”

  Marshall’s room looks a lot like mine. There’s no furniture. The room is empty except for the recharging station and Marshall’s evil twin, a motionless spare Pioneer with the label 5A stamped on its torso. But the walls are covered with posters. They look like the kind of posters you’d see in a high-school English classroom. Each shows a black-and-white photograph of a famous poet and a quote from one of his or her poems.

  Beneath a picture of Emily Dickinson is the quote, “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.” Beneath Walt Whitman is the line, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.” One poster, though, is set apart from all the others, tacked in the exact center of the far wall. It shows a man with a grotesquely large head and a right hand the size of a catcher’s mitt. This man, I realize, is Marshall’s hero, Joseph Merrick—the Elephant Man. The quote below his picture is from the poem Marshall gave me on the night before I became a Pioneer: “I would be measured by the soul; the mind’s the standard of the man.”

  I think of the Super Bowl posters on the walls of my own room. I wonder if Marshall, like me, needs reminders of his former life. “Cool posters,” I say. “Did you bring them here? From your home, I mean?”

  Marshall waves his steel hand in a dismissive way. “Yes, they’re
old things. Getting wrinkled, I’m afraid. But it’s better than leaving the walls bare.” He turns his turret toward DeShawn, then back to me. “Please make yourselves comfortable, gentlemen. Unfortunately, I don’t have much in the way of refreshments. All I can offer is the electricity from my recharging station.”

  DeShawn holds up both his hands, splaying the fingers. “Thanks, but no thanks. I’m full up.”

  “How about you, Adam? Care to top off your batteries?”

  “No, I’m full too.”

  “Ah, too bad. It’s an excellent vintage of electric current with a truly intoxicating voltage.” Marshall laughs, and once again my circuits crackle with envy. “Tell me something, Mr. Armstrong. Back in the days when you were flesh and blood, did you ever get drunk?”

  I turn my turret clockwise, then counter. “Never got the chance. I was in a wheelchair by the time I was twelve.”

  “Same with me,” DeShawn says. “But my mom let me have a sip of beer once. Tasted nasty.”

  A synthesized “tsk-tsk” comes out of Marshall’s speakers. “What a shame. You boys have led such sheltered lives. You’ve never had the unique pleasure of downing a bottle of Southern Comfort stolen from your mother’s liquor cabinet.”

  I retrieve an image from my files, another memory from the night before my procedure. I remember Marshall lying on my bed, resting his deformed head on the mattress and talking about his childhood. “It wasn’t really a pleasure, was it?” I ask. “Getting drunk?”

  “Well, there were a few moments of giddiness, at least at the beginning. But you’re right. In the end it wasn’t fun. I was drinking alone in the woods behind our house. That was one of my hiding places.”

  “Hiding places? What were you hiding from?”

  Marshall extends his left arm until his hand almost touches the Elephant Man poster. “In the small town where I grew up, most of the people were decent. They treated me with Christian charity and kindness. But there was a limit to their sympathy. In general, they preferred that I keep myself hidden.”