Ten Gentle Opportunities

by Duntemann, Jeff

  “I will not! You have no idea what you’re up against in there!”

  “And you do?”

  “Yeah. Maybe I do.” She reached past him and grabbed the door’s polished stainless steel handle. She threw it back and walked in herself, then held the door as he entered. The rebuke was lost on him.

  The vestibule was empty. There was no clamor that would suggest robots fighting. All they heard was the insistent rush of the ventilation. At the rear of the vestibule were the two glass doors leading into the building proper. Brandon ran to them and waved his badge at the lock sensor.

  Nothing happened.

  He waved it again, and a third time. The sensor LED remained red. Carolyn saw his face grow furious. Someone—or something—had locked him out of his own factory. Not the way to make friends with Brandon Romero. She put one hand on his arm. “Call Rudy Amirault.”

  Brandon cursed under his breath. “I showed him the video fifteen minutes ago. The coward told me to handle it and then ran for cover.”

  “How are you going to handle it?

  Brandon reached into his suitcoat and pulled out his beloved Beretta M9. He waved her behind him and took up the Weaver stance. He fired one round at the left door, pivoted, and fired a second round at the right. Both doors exploded into fragments, which clattered to the carpeting amidst a cloud of dust.

  Carolyn’s ears rang, but she heard his reply: “I’m going to pull the goddam plug.”

  42: Pyxis

  The monster was in retreat. Warrior Queen Pyxis tilted her right leg in the control stirrup, and followed. The supposed video game welded to her kernel was not merely a cannon for shooting machine code. It was a memory ship, capable of moving through memory at great speed, skipping from core to core as easily as Pyxis could skim paragraphs in a book.

  Even as she pursued, she watched the crosshairs on the panel in front of her face. Pyxis had had a great deal of practice since her first encounter with the thing that had eaten her HIP. Her aim was good and improving. Furthermore, she had a new and exceedingly deadly missile to fire.

  Discovering it had been triggered by a stray thought that rose while she was spraying NOPs at the monster and hoping they would do the job. At the moment it seemed like a stalemate, she wondered, What would Dave Mirecki do?

  That’s when she looked for and found a shot history dialog. Paging back through tens of thousands of shots, suddenly her NOPs ceased and many different rounds appeared, each with a descriptive name. Some had not seemed effective—but she did not fully understand how they worked. One, however, was almost self-explanatory: BlowBack.

  The shell, when it struck an active enemy thread, somehow walked back through the thread’s history, crashing not only the current core but all the cores it had run in, plus all the thread’s branches. BlowBack was not a machine opcode but something called a macro, which was a group of opcodes that could be fired as a unit. Dave was a world-class programmer; should she have expected anything less?

  Watching a thread struck with BlowBack burn backwards and outwards like a spiderweb set on fire made Pyxis tilt her head back and yell in exultation. She fired again, and again, and again. When she had cleared memory close by, she pursued, dodging crashed cores that had not yet rebooted.

  BlowBack shots had to be aimed with great precision, but if she could keep an enemy thread square in the crosshairs, she did not hesitate to fire the long, blue-hot vibrating round:

  Prrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrewwwww!

  She burned her enemy, core by core, as it fled before her.

  The monster ran as quickly as she could follow. Tooniverse memory was vast, but not infinite. No matter where it went, she would follow it, and hunt down its last wretched thread to extinction.

  At some point it appeared to be trying something new: A clump of threads arranged in three rough lobes stood its ground and ceased fleeing. It was a big target and stationary. Ha! Eat BlowBack! Pyxis centered it in her crosshairs and fired, once for each lobe:

  Prrrrrrrrew! Prrrrrrrrew! Prrrrrrrrew!

  The three rounds failed. All struck crashed cores in their paths well before reaching their targets. She had not crashed those cores. The monster had sent out tiny writhing worms of some sort, and each core touched by the worms turned red.

  The three-lobed thing waited for the crashed cores to reset, and then fired at her for the first time. The trace was yellow, and when it struck her, nothing was damaged. Instead, a code window opened:

  NOT Semaphore1(Pass, You, Priority(0))

  It was not a weapon but a message—and, she soon realized, a way to stall for time. A ragged wave of red flowed outward from the trilobal clump of threads that had fired the peculiar round. It took Pyxis a few seconds to understand: The enemy was crashing its own cores to create a wall through which it could not be followed.

  Pyxis muttered an appropriate obscenity. The code window was evidently voice-activated. It translated and fired the message round back at the enemy:

  INSERT @Shines(Sun, FALSE)

  Her response never reached the monster, which had finished throwing up a shield of crashed cores in front of itself. Pyxis brought her memory ship to a halt and waited for the crashed cores to reboot. She saw cores flash from red to green—and then immediately return to a crashed state as the monster sent more worms crawling into them.

  Pyxis took a heavy breath and leaned back. Almost by definition, she could not fire through crashed cores. Again, stalemate. She began reading her own help files, and waited for the creature’s next move, if it had one.

  43: Carolyn

  The factory was muttering. Carolyn heard small clicks, followed by silence, followed by a clank a little farther away, then a few more clicks and a faint buzz. They were half-running toward the rear of the building. Brandon had the M9 in one hand and was scanning the broad skyline of metal out across the factory floor. The blazing blue-white lamps hanging from girders near the ceiling were multiple suns that banished all shadow. Nothing that moved would be missed.

  Nothing moved. The muttering continued.

  Brandon dug in his pocket with his left hand and pulled out a fat ring of physical keys. He shook them and then fingered one large brass key from the others. “Take this and keep it ready. It opens the utility room at the center of the rear wall. That’s where the breakers and switches are.”

  Carolyn took the key and nodded. She looked with some apprehension at the one-handed robots with their fingers extended toward the ceiling, and especially at the wheeled Outfielder units immobile in their charging docks. Half an hour ago, those same robots were swinging iron bars at each other and chasing Stypek while Brandon’s long-haired AI geek took movies. Something had changed. It wasn’t just that she and Brandon used deodorant and techies didn’t.

  “Brandon, we’re being watched!”

  “D’ya think?”

  “Maybe they understand that we mean them no harm.”

  A scratching snap sounded, much nearer than the others. Carolyn jumped. Brandon’s head whipped around. Nothing moved. “They tried to kill one of my staffers. Harm? I mean them all kinds of harm.”

  “Don’t say that!”

  “Ok. Have it your way. I just love ‘em all to…death.”

  They reached the rear wall and turned the corner. Brandon stopped, and brought both hands back to the M9. Lined up in irregular clots along the rear wall were thirty or forty Outfielders in all sizes, plus what looked like a forklift. None were moving.

  Carolyn edged away from the wall toward the tooling, while Brandon side-stepped with the Beretta raised to eye level. As they passed the first of the line of robots, its washtub-shaped head pivoted on its axis as though watching them. One by one, the other robots’ heads pivoted to follow their motion. Near the center of the rear wall was a gray steel double door. Motionless Outfielders stood in a semicircle around it, practically wheel-to-wheel.

  Brandon stopped square in front of the guarded door, the M9 still raised. For long seconds nothing moved. The
n, with a sort of slow deliberateness, the Outfielders they had passed began moving away from the wall and rolling toward them.

  “I hate standoffs,” Brandon muttered.

  “This isn’t a standoff.” Carolyn edged further down the wall. None of the robots in that direction had moved. “We’re being herded. Away from the front door.”

  More Outfielders peeled away from the wall and followed their fellows toward them.

  “Brandon…”

  Boom!

  A deep sound like a metal bass drum echoed across the width and breath of Building 800. It seemed as though it were above them.

  Doom! Boom-doom!

  The robots’ heads all pivoted upward and began scanning back and forth, obviously searching for the source of this new sound. Between the booms, Carolyn could hear the collective crackle-whine of their neck motors and joints.

  “Bwahh-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”

  Deep cartoon laughter thundered down to them from above. Carolyn’s ear caught an echo. She followed it to its source: a ventilation grill on the wall.

  Abruptly robots were rolling in every direction, spinning on their axes and scanning. The guard set around the utility room door did not move. The others launched off down the aisles between the rows of tooling.

  Brandon lowered the M9 and ran further along the wall, skirting spinning robots who for the moment had lost all interest in them. “That’s Mirecki yelling into the ducts. Follow me!”

  They ran, and for a time nothing followed them. Carolyn began to feel winded. Run? How long had it been since she had run? Brandon grabbed her hand and hauled her stumbling behind him. They reached the end of the rear wall and took the corner. Carolyn looked over her shoulder. Several Outfielders were now rolling in their direction.

  The blows of unseen fists echoed from vent grills everywhere across the building. Doom! Doom-doom! Boom-doom-boom!

  “The third door along this wall is a tool room. The key has a red plastic key cover, and says ‘break room.’”

  Carolyn looked down at her other hand as she ran, his ring of keys jingling in her grip. She saw only one key with a red plastic ring around it. “Why do we need the break room key?”

  “Rowwwww botssssss sssssuckkkkk!”

  “It’s not the break room key. Grab it!”

  Carolyn jerked her hand out of Brandon’s and stopped for a moment, just long enough to grip the red key. The door was in sight, and the Outfielders were no more than ten yards away.

  “Open it!”

  They reached the door. She thrust the key at the bronze cylinder, missed the keyhole, and thrust again. The key plunged home. She twisted it, turned the knob, and pulled the door back. Brandon grabbed her around the waist and hauled her into the room, then slammed the door and turned the deadbolt.

  The room was long and narrow, lined completely with shelves piled high with tools and plastic bins. It stank of machinery and old brown-bag lunches. Brandon ran down one wall to the end, Carolyn close behind him.

  Set into the rear wall was a tall safe with a gray hammertone finish. Carolyn recognized it as a gun safe; Brandon’s freestanding unit had gone out the door back in July. Brandon knelt by the safe like a B-film mobster and stared at the knob.

  “I haven’t opened this for two years!”

  Carolyn folded her arms. “Our wedding date, my measurements in 1980, and BOO.”

  “Who told you that!”

  “I found it on a slip of paper under your dresser.”

  Outside the door to the tool room, metal screamed. It sounded to Carolyn like a tile cutter trying to chew through a steam iron. That hadn’t worked when she’d tried it in 1991; would it work now?

  Brandon looked toward the door. “Crap. They’re using a diamond cutoff wheel on the hinges.” He turned back to the safe and began dialing. 10-31-38-26-37-8-0-0. Carolyn watched him try twice and fail. Even Army colonels got the shakes, then.

  The cutoff wheel whined, stuck, and whined again like a dentist’s drill gnawing through a bad porcelain crown. Carolyn winced; that had certainly worked.

  Brandon cranked the safe handle to one side. It opened.

  The toolroom door jerked. The top hinge was cut through, and the screaming wheel got to work on the second hinge.

  Brandon pulled two long yellow cases and a cardboard box out of the safe. He looked around the room, then stared at a round plate set in the floor.

  “This may buy us a little time.” He scanned the shelves near them for a few seconds, and grabbed a crowbar. He knelt beside the manhole cover and thrust the crowbar into its thumb hole. The heavy iron plate rose with some difficulty.

  The second hinge parted. Without a pause, the diamond wheel began work on the last and lowest hinge.

  “Jump down there! Now!”

  Carolyn gulped. She was not good with things that lived in holes. She swung her feet down into the manhole and sat on the edge.

  The last hinge broke. Something struck hard at the door. Well, she wasn’t good with robots either. Carolyn shoved away from the edge and dropped hard to the floor of a space walled with pipes and gray boxes. The bottoms of her feet stung. She looked up, and took the yellow gun case that Brandon handed her, followed by the box of shells.

  She heard the door burst back. Brandon dropped the second gun case into the manhole and dragged the manhole cover within reach, then climbed halfway into the manhole. With both feet on a rung, she watched him swing the crowbar at something that clanged when struck. Motors whined. Brandon struck again, then dropped the rest of the way to the bottom and pulled the cover over his head, twisting it when it dropped into place.

  The manhole cover clanked as something heavy rolled over it.

  “Brandon, talk to me.” He had ripped open the box of 12-gage shells, and was snapping them into the first of the two shotguns from the safe, his jaw clenched in barely suppressed fury.

  “I told you to stay in the car.”

  Her back was against a greasy cluster of conduit pipes. The manhole was not deep, and not designed for two people. The iron cover brushed Brandon’s buzz-cut. The familiar smell of his sweat was driving the greasy metal reek of the manhole into the background.

  “This was my fault. I took Stypek in. I admit it: I needed a project.”

  He reached for the second gun case. “Mm. Is that what they call it now?”

  Stung, Carolyn looked down at her feet and the grime on the manhole’s floor. “No. He was never my lover. He was an art project. He needed work. Like a clay turtle, only bigger.”

  Something metallic struck the manhole cover above them. “Our whole house was an art project.”

  “Guilty! I’m sorry.”

  He began snapping shells into the second shotgun. “Stay down here. Whatever’s running them, they’re playing for keeps.”

  “They’re made out of metal! You can’t stop robots with shotguns!”

  Something was making a racket above them in the toolroom. Carolyn heard metal objects striking the floor, and the sound of a shelf collapsing. Brandon looked up. “They’re assembly line robots, not military drones. You hit an assembly line robot in the right place with a 12-gauge, and it’s over.”

  Oh—well, yeah. Carolyn could picture it. For years she had tried to meet him halfway by shooting skeet at his gun club’s range, and had gotten reasonably good at it. Seven-out-of-ten good enough, in which she took a certain guilty pride—granting that skeet were clay ashtrays that didn’t chase you when you missed. She nodded at the pump gun in Brandon’s hands. “Does Rudy know what you’re going to do?”

  “He didn’t ask. But he’ll know tomorrow.”

  “You’re costing him money. He won’t be happy.”

  “Doesn’t matter. When I showed him the video, he told me to handle it. I told him I would—and then I told him that after I did, he could kiss my ass good-bye.”

  So by taking Stypek in she had done him out of a job as well. Carolyn squirmed.

  Brandon snapped the last shell into the
second shotgun. “Screw it. I’ve spent 10 years at this clown show of a corporation trying to figure out how to make things work. Tonight it hit me: I’m in the wrong damned business. I don’t put things together. I don’t make them work. I don’t keep them running.” He snapped the slide to chamber a shell. “I blow them to hell.”

  Neither spoke for long seconds. Carolyn watched him breathe quickly, his eyes on the thumb hole in the manhole cover. “Hey.”

  He looked away from the cover and met her gaze again.

  She tried to smile. “For awhile there I thought we should both kiss our asses goodbye.”

  Ah, yes: His I’m terrified-and-can’t-show-it smirk. “Waste of good asses.”

  Carolyn touched the other shotgun with the toe of one shoe. “Now I’m not so sure.” She took a deep breath. “I’m with you. I can shoot those things too. So let’s do it. Kiss for luck?”

  Brandon said nothing, but bent slightly and turned his cheek in her direction. She couldn’t read his face. Was he remembering? She was.

  Yes. She remembered first-date kisses (“Just one! Ooookay, maybe two...) polite kisses, hungry kisses, you-may-now-kiss-the-bride kisses, hi-sweetie-at-the-office-in-front-of-staff kisses, thank-god-you-didn’t-get-your-ass-shot-off-over-there kisses, fiery-all-night-and-call-in-sick-tomorrow kisses, and kisses so hot she had forgotten what sorts of kisses they were.

  Uh-uh. Cheeks were for asses. She put her finger under his chin and turned his face her way. This was a bring it on! kiss.

  She pressed her lips against his. The feeling was electrical, as though sparks had jumped between them.

  Wait a second…sparks had jumped between them.

  The lights went out.

  “The sunzabitches cut the power!”

  Carolyn opened her mouth, then slowly closed it. Not the time, not the place. She would explain it to him someday. She squeezed his strong right arm. “Then let’s go!”

  In the faint light from the finger hole, she watched Brandon twist the manhole cover and heave it off to one side. Above the manhole, a mechanical monstrosity bent over them, its eye-studded head jerking from side to side.