Lethal Velocity

by Lincoln Child

  “Come on,” Warne said, throwing his arm over Georgia’s shoulders. “Let’s get some ice cream.”

  As they approached, Hard Place finished the shake and delivered it to a teenage girl at the counter. “Here you are,” it said, pan-tilt camera nodding down toward the girl. “Your passcard, please.” Warne watched as Hard Place scanned the card with its sonar cluster, handed it back, then used its pincers to set the shake gently down on the counter. Georgia was right: he, too, had grown so used to seeing the mobot in the cramped confines of his Carnegie-Mellon lab that it was strange to see it here, in this surreal environment, serving up real ice cream to real people.

  The mobot swiveled away, trundling down the counter toward the next customer. Warne led Georgia through the knot of onlookers and found two seats at the far end of the counter. It had been Georgia who’d convinced him to plant a panning ultrasonic sensor atop the robot’s central array, and direct it to swivel toward the closest human voice. He could still remember showing it to her for the first time, the way her young face had screwed up in disapproval. “It’s got to have a head, Daddy,” she’d said.

  He had built these two robots as mere eye candy for Nightingale, platforms to demonstrate how voice recognition and image processing could be put to commercial use. But Nightingale was a man who loved details just as much as an overarching vision, and he’d been as delighted with Rock and Hard Place as he had with Warne’s prizewinning thesis on hierarchical neural nets, or his scheme for a self-learning meta-network. He’d insisted they find a home within Utopia.

  Hard Place was approaching them now. “Good afternoon,” it rasped. “How can I help you?”

  “A root beer float, please.” Warne hadn’t even needed to ask: Georgia could subsist on root beer floats alone. It had been the first thing he taught the robot to make.

  “One root beer float,” Hard Place echoed back. Warne had almost forgotten that artificial voice: digitized samples of his own. And he’d certainly forgotten just how big the robot was, almost eight feet to the top of its sensor array. “Would you like anything else?”

  “Yes. A double pistachio chocolate sundae with whipped cream, please.”

  At this, Hard Place paused. “Dr. Warne?” it asked after a moment.

  “Yes, Hard Place.”

  The robot paused again, slightly longer this time. “A double pistachio chocolate sundae with whipped cream, coming right up. Kemo Sabe.”

  Warne watched the robot as it pivoted and moved away. That joking nod to The Lone Ranger had been his own private embellishment; his signature at the bottom of the painting. He’d decided to add the routine on that day eighteen months before, when Rock and Hard Place were being crated up for delivery to Nevada. Eighteen months, but the difference was like night and day. Then, he and Sarah had just begun seeing each other; she was an amazingly confident woman, an intellectual equal, a potential second mother for Georgia. He’d begun pioneering work for Eric Nightingale, with the promise of much more to come. The future looked bright with promise.

  How quickly things had changed. Georgia hadn’t warmed to Sarah in the way he’d hoped; in fact, she seemed to resent her, became jealously possessive of her dad. His own work was coming under increasing fire at Carnegie-Mellon, seen as controversial, unproved. And then Nightingale had died. And Warne’s relationship with the corporate suits and bean counters who’d rushed in to fill the gap soured, then broke apart completely, leaving his contractual obligation to the Metanet as the lone connection to Utopia. Sarah had moved out, taken the job as Park chief. How ironic that she’d first met Nightingale through Warne himself. With the Metanet money, Warne had left Carnegie-Mellon to start a research company to help prove his theories on machine learning—only to see it lose its financial backers when the dot-com bubble burst. But through it all, he still had the Metanet—or so he’d believed until this morning.

  Now Hard Place was gliding back with the root beer float. “Here you are,” it said, placing the root beer float on the counter in front of him and turning back to the row of ice cream tins, its AI routines already working toward the goal state of a double pistachio chocolate sundae with whipped cream. The robot’s movements seemed a little more erratic, a little more hesitating, than he remembered. Almost as if its pathfinding routines had been deoptimized. Could this be a result of the daily uplink? Was it possible, really possible, that the Metanet had…But Warne refused to follow this line of thought. He’d had more than his share of bad news for one day.

  “Can I borrow the guidemap?” Georgia asked.

  “Sure.”

  “And forty bucks?”

  “Sure, just…Wait—forty bucks? Why?”

  “I want to get one of those Atmosfear T-shirts. The weird shimmery ones. Haven’t you seen them?”

  Warne had seen them, dozens of them, adorning the torsos of teenagers wandering the concourse. With a sigh, he opened his wallet and passed over the money, watching as she slipped the headphones over her ears and took a sip of root beer.

  If he was honest with himself, he’d admit this particular stop was as much for him as it was for her. He needed to see this affirmation of his work, this reminder of better times. Until just today—when he learned it was to be deactivated—he hadn’t realized just how important the Metanet was to him. And now, despite the defiant posing, he felt a wave of despair wash over him. What was he going to do now? He’d left Carnegie-Mellon, burned his bridges. He glanced covertly at Georgia again. How was he ever going to explain it to her?

  There was a nearby whirring, and Hard Place returned. “Here you are, Kemo Sabe,” it said as it set the sundae down before Warne. He waited. Next, the robot would ask for his passcard, charge the ice cream order to his Utopia account.

  But Hard Place did no such thing. Instead, it swiveled its sensor array first left, then right. With a low whirring sound, the robot began rocking backward and forward. The movements seemed strangely hesitant, uncertain.

  Georgia looked over from her root beer, plucked the headphones away from one ear. “Dad?” she asked inquiringly.

  With a sudden, sharp grinding, Hard Place charged toward Warne. Its boxlike central housing collided with the counter, knocking over glasses and straw dispensers. Murmurs of surprise rose from the patrons. Abruptly, Hard Place rolled backward, banging roughly against the backbar, then shot forward again at high speed, servos twisting, sensor arrays spinning.

  “Georgia!” Warne cried. “Get out of the way!”

  The robot smashed again into the front counter. There were sharp gasps, a scream, as the patrons fell from their chairs, scrambling to get away from the counter. But Hard Place had shot backward once more, colliding heavily with the rear counter. A dozen bottles of colored syrup fell to the ground, shivering into pieces. With a squeal of motors, the robot came forward again.

  Warne leaped from his seat, staring at Hard Place in shock and surprise. He’d never seen the robot act like this before. In fact, it couldn’t act like this; he’d programmed it himself. What the hell is going on? It was as if the robot was trying to break free of its enclosure, force its way out into the concourse. But its pathfinding routines were primitive; if that happened, with its speed and size, it would trample anything in its way.

  The robot collided with the counter in a shattering crash. The long, transparent countertop shivered, deformed, spilling its remaining contents in a staccato chorus. Hard Place reared backward, then came forward yet again, like a caged and angry bull.

  There were shouts of warning from behind Warne, cries of alarm. He looked to his right: Georgia was standing some distance away, staring, eyes wide. He thought quickly. There was only one thing to do: try to reach the manual kill switch in the rear of the central housing and deactivate the robot.

  Gingerly, he approached. “Hard Place,” he said in a loud, clear tone, hoping to get its attention, interrupt whatever bizarre behavioral loop it had fallen into. As he spoke, he put his left hand up, fingers spread, in a placating ges
ture; he kept his right hand low, angling it slowly around toward the robot’s housing.

  At the sound of his voice, Hard Place swiveled its sensor arrays toward him. “Kemo Sabe,” it rasped.

  And then one set of pincers shot out, catching his right wrist in an iron grip.

  Warne cried out with pain as Hard Place clamped down with crushing strength. The robot yanked him forward and Warne threw himself across the counter and against the bins of ice cream, turning desperately with the robot to keep his wrist from breaking.

  “Dad!” Georgia ran forward, reaching out to pull him away from Hard Place.

  “Georgia, no!” Warne gasped, fighting to reach his left hand around the central housing, fingernails scrabbling on the smooth metal. Hard Place slid backward, dragging Warne with him, servos howling under the strain. The robot’s second set of pincers shot forward, arrowing toward Warne’s neck, just as his searching fingers found the small nub of the kill switch.

  Abruptly, Hard Place stopped. Sparks flew from its drivetrain. Its sensor array sagged. The whine of motors spun down. The pincers sprung wide, releasing their hold on Warne’s wrist. He fell heavily to the floor, then rose slowly from among the bins of ice cream, rubbing his aching wrist. Georgia ran toward him again and together they moved away from the smoking, darkened robot.

  A crowd had gathered around, watching the unfolding events from a respectful distance. Warne swept them with his gaze, breathing hard, dripping chocolate and vanilla, still massaging his wrist. Georgia stood beside him, shocked into silence.

  For a moment, no one said anything. Then there was a low, appreciative whistle.

  “Great act, man!” somebody said. “For a moment there, you had me convinced it was the real thing.”

  “Too much!” called another.

  And then the clapping started: first one pair of hands, and then another and another, until the air was filled with the sound of cheers.

  AS THE SUN climbed its way up the Nevada sky, all color bled out of the landscape below. The reds, yellows, browns, and purples of the sandstone canyons faded, then turned white. The high desert vegetation stood suspended as the shadows ran away to nothing.

  Atop the rocky, bowl-like escarpment that surrounded Utopia, the sun illuminated a vast moonscape of hollows and ridges. The mesa top was a crazy quilt of gullies, silent and deserted, punctuated by infrequent junipers and bristlecone pines. The sky itself was a dome of pale blue, empty save for a lone airplane, drawing a white line thirty thousand feet overhead.

  In a narrow gully near the far edge of the escarpment, something stirred. The man who had moved little since before dawn now stretched his legs and glanced at his watch. Despite the brutal heat, he had been dozing. It was training, more than anything else, that made this possible. Much of the man’s professional life had been spent waiting. For hours, sometimes days, he had waited: in the jungle canopies of Mozambique; in foul Cambodian swamps, surrounded by leeches and malarial mosquitos. The desert heat of Nevada seemed a vacation by comparison.

  He yawned leisurely, cracking his knuckles, then rolled his head around, working a kink out of his thickly muscled neck. Behind him, the geodesic dome covering Utopia rose up out of the canyon like the top of some giant’s globe. Its ribs of steel and panels of glass, row after countless row, winked and shimmered in the noonday sun. It was encircled by several bands of narrow catwalks, one above the other, separated by perhaps fifty vertical feet. The catwalks were connected by a series of access ladders. Along one edge of the dome, a vast crescent-shaped wedge was dark: the roof that hung over Callisto. Close-up, from this high vantage no tourist would ever enjoy, the dome was almost otherworldly in its massive beauty.

  But the man atop the mesa was no tourist. And he had not come for the view.

  He turned toward a long, low canvas duffel that lay in the gully beside him. Drawing back its zipper, he reached inside, found his canteen, and took a long, thirsty pull. Although there were no guards or security cameras up on this deserted cliff top, the man’s movements remained habitually brief and direct.

  He put the canteen to one side, wiping his mouth with the back of a hand. A large pair of binoculars hung around his neck, and now he raised them to his eyes. The laser range-finding system made the binoculars heavy, and he used both hands to steady them as he made a slow scan.

  From his place of concealment, he commanded an excellent view of the rear approach to Utopia. Far below, he could clearly make out the heavy-duty access road that snaked its way up from the desert. A large refrigerated truck was making the climb now; he watched the driver silently working his way through the gears. It was a good recon post: any fleeing vehicles or approaching cavalry would be spotted immediately. He raised the binoculars further, and the red numerals of the distance readout quickly rose as he panned over the more distant backdrop.

  To build their Park, the Utopia Holding Company had purchased a tract of land bordered by U.S. 95 on the south and Nellis Air Force Base on the north. Deep inside Nellis, at a site called Groom Lake, was an installation once known on government maps as Area 51. It was patrolled by personnel authorized to use deadly force against trespassers. To the east and west, Utopia was surrounded by Bureau of Land Management wilderness. The Park did not need the huge berms and perimeter fences employed by other theme parks: it let nature, and the government, do the job for it.

  Perhaps Utopia and its predecessors were lulled by the same unthinking sense of security and well-being they worked so hard to impart to their visitors. When they thought of their perimeters at all, most parks were primarily concerned with keeping nonpaying guests from sneaking in. Security measures did not take into account someone whose skills at evasion and penetration had been honed in half a dozen hostile environments.

  The man took another pull at the canteen. Then he replaced it in the duffel and pulled out an M24 Sniper Weapon System rifle. Whistling tunelessly, he gave it a quick, automatic inspection. The SWS was based on a Remington Model 700 receiver: there were newer rifles, but none more accurate. At ten pounds it was relatively light for a sniper’s tool. The flash hider and lens hood ensured it would not visually betray its presence when used.

  Cradling the rifle on his knees, the man fished in the bag and brought out four 308 Winchester cartridges, loaded with 168-grain boat-tails: the most accurate .30-caliber bullet-cartridge combination available. He filled the magazine, ran the bolt to load the first cartridge, then laid the rifle carefully back inside the duffel. He was not concerned about the sun warping the Kevlar-graphite stock, but he did not want the heavy target barrel growing too hot to touch.

  The second rifle he pulled from the duffel was a Barret M-82 “Light 50.” It was considerably meaner-looking than the M24, and less accurate; but with .50-caliber machine-gun cartridges for ammunition, it would drop anything it hit even a thousand yards out.

  With the rifles and other materials in the duffel, the man had lugged more than eighty pounds of gear on the sheer climb up onto the escarpment the night before. But weapons redundancy was a discipline that had been drummed into him since his boot days at Parris Island.

  His radio gave a muffled chirrup, and he plucked it from his belt, quickly tapping in the scrambler’s decryption code.

  “Water Buffalo, Water Buffalo,” came the voice. “This is Prime Factor. How’s your read?”

  The man lifted the radio to his lips. “Still five by five.”

  “Status?”

  “Ready to party.”

  “Very good. Monitor this frequency, we’ll update you within the hour. Prime Factor out.”

  The radio went silent and the man returned it to his belt. He glanced again at his watch: one o’clock precisely. Then he turned back to the M-82, giving it the same check he’d given the first rifle. Satisfied, he ran his hand along the tactical telescopic sight. It was permanently fixed, of course—removable sights couldn’t be relied on to hold zero—and the weapon had already been sighted in. He glanced toward the vast dome t
hat rose behind and above him, his eye falling on a small speck of black that was crawling across it. He snugged the beavertail stock against his cheek and fitted his eye to the scope. Now the black speck was a man in a white maintenance uniform, moving slowly across the network of metal ribbing, checking for broken panes. He occupied two grids in the scope’s range-finding system: approximately three hundred yards away.

  The man’s finger snaked inside the guard, caressing the trigger. “Be real careful, now,” he whispered. “Wouldn’t want you to fall.”

  Then—carefully, lovingly—he slid the rifle back into the duffel.

  HIS SUIT HAD been cleaned and pressed at Valet Services, an incident report logged with Security. And now Andrew Warne found himself pausing in the corridors of B Level, rubbing his chin perplexedly. As a child, he often had one recurring dream following particularly traumatic days: he’d be walking down a school corridor on his way to the principal’s office, passing classroom after classroom after classroom, but never getting any closer to the intimidating door at the end of the corridor. He felt as if he were living that dream right now.

  Beside him, Georgia stirred restlessly. “Are you lost?”

  “No.”

  “I think you are.”

  “What’s this you business? I put you in charge of following the cutaway diagrams, remember?”

  They stepped to one side to let an electric cart purr past. Warne glanced again up and down the intersection. Hadn’t they been here before? The layout looked familiar. But with the constantly changing streams of cast and crew passing by, it was difficult to orient himself.