The Silence

by Mark Alpert

  I agree with you about her plan. It doesn’t sound very promising. But I’ll keep rehearsing the demonstration with her. I want to build up our friendship. Then it won’t be so hard to tell her about what’s happened between you and me.

  You really think that’ll help?

  Definitely. She’ll be more understanding if we’re friends. And she’ll want me to be happy.

  My circuits spark with doubt. I don’t know about that. She might feel even more betrayed if you become friends with her and then—

  Trust me on this. I know what I’m doing. Her Jet-bot takes a step toward the door. I better go. People will start to talk if we stay here together for too long.

  Yeah, you’re right. Good night, Amber.

  Her Jet-bot waves a steel hand as she leaves the room. Good night, Adam. It was an incredible day. I had a wonderful time with you.

  I should be happy to hear her say that, but I’m not. I’m too worried.

  Chapter

  5

  I solve the problem at exactly 6:52 a.m. the next morning. After studying Brittany’s medical records for nine and a half hours, my circuits come up with an experimental procedure that has an eighty-five percent chance of curing her.

  I rush to Dad’s laboratory at the medical center. We have to move fast. According to my calculations, if we don’t do the procedure today, the chance of success will drop to sixty-one percent. And if we wait yet another day, the odds will plummet to twenty-three percent.

  My Quarter-bot strides into the intensive care unit. A different nurse is at Brittany’s bedside this morning, attaching a new bag of nutrient solution to the intravenous line. As I hurry toward the lab, I send Brittany a radio message, even though she has no antenna to receive it: Hang on, Britt! Help is on the way! Then I burst through the lab’s doorway without knocking. If Dad’s still asleep at his desk, I’m going to wake him up.

  But he isn’t asleep, and he isn’t alone either. General Calvin Hawke sits in the office chair on the other side of Dad’s cluttered desk.

  Hawke is a big man, dressed in combat boots and desert-camouflage fatigues. He looks tall even when he’s sitting down. He’s an old-school Army officer with a ruddy face and snow-white hair, the kind of commander who browbeats and terrorizes his soldiers. As I march into the lab, he half turns in his chair and scowls, but I ignore him. I train my cameras on Dad.

  “I figured it out! It’s so simple!” My voice is loud enough to rattle the lab equipment, but I’m so energized I can’t turn down the volume. “You still have the deactivated nanobots, right? The ones you extracted from Brittany?”

  Dad seems confused. Either he didn’t get a lot of sleep last night or it didn’t do him much good, because he still looks exhausted. His eyes are bloodshot, his hair is a mess, and his face is frosted with stubble. “Uh, Adam? This isn’t a good time.”

  Instead of listening to him, I pan my cameras across the lab’s workbenches until I find what I’m looking for. It’s a small glass flask holding two fluid ounces of jet-black liquid, as thick as old motor oil. I extend one of my Quarter-bot’s arms toward the workbench and gently grip the flask. “This is it, right? The nanobots are floating in the liquid? That’s why it’s so sludgy and dark?”

  Dad nods. But before he can say anything, General Hawke rises from his chair and points a meaty finger at me. “Armstrong! What’s wrong with you? You’re interrupting a private meeting!”

  I can’t keep ignoring him. Legally, I’m a corporal in the U.S. Army—I signed the enlistment papers before I became a Pioneer—and Hawke is my superior officer. So I turn to him and raise a steel arm in a belated salute. “Sorry, sir, but this is a matter of life and death. We need to immediately perform an emergency procedure on Brittany Taylor, the civilian hurt in last week’s battle.”

  Hawke steps toward me. He’s eight inches shorter than my Quarter-bot and five hundred pounds lighter, but there’s a rough resemblance between his body and my machine. Like a Pioneer, the general has powerful limbs and a sturdy, barrel-shaped torso. And he’s always ready for combat. “Are you the chief medic for this base, Armstrong? I don’t remember appointing you to that position.”

  “No, sir, but I’ve done a thorough study of Ms. Taylor’s medical files, and I’ve discovered a way to repair her—”

  “And I’m very interested in hearing about your discovery. But it’ll have to wait until after I’ve finished talking with your father.” He points at the door. “Leave, Armstrong. That’s an order.”

  No. No way. I’m not going to wait. Although Hawke’s body is sturdy and powerful, his brain has all the typical human shortfalls: it’s imprecise, inefficient, and maddeningly slow. He spends hours in pointless meetings with my dad and the other members of his staff. It takes him forever to analyze a problem, and when he finally comes to a decision, it’s usually a bad one. He’s just not quick enough to lead the Pioneers, and his poor judgment has hurt us again and again. I’m not going to let him do the same thing to Brittany.

  I stand perfectly still. I don’t move a motor. “Sir, there’s no time to lose. Every minute we wait, more of Brittany’s brain cells die. The emergency procedure can stop the cell death and restore her to consciousness by removing the deactivated nanobots that are lodged in her brain tissue. But if we wait too long, she won’t be able to recover. She’ll spend the rest of her life in bed, staring at the ceiling.”

  Still pointing at the door, Hawke steps closer. He looks up at me, his face less than a foot from my cameras. “I gave you an order, Pioneer. This is your last—”

  Dad clears his throat. He does this whenever he’s nervous or tired or uncomfortable, but this time the noise is much louder than usual. He succeeds in getting Hawke’s attention. The general looks over his shoulder. “Yes, Tom? You want to say something?”

  “Adam’s right. The Taylor girl’s condition is rapidly deteriorating. If there’s a feasible plan for treating her, we should implement it as soon as possible.”

  A rush of pride sweeps through my circuits. I’m a little surprised too, although I shouldn’t be. Dad didn’t invent the Pioneer technology out of love for his country. He did it for me, to save my life. If he’s forced to choose between me and Hawke, he’ll choose me every time.

  Hawke frowns, then lets out a sigh. “Like father, like son. If this were a regular Army unit, I’d have both of you court-martialed.” Shaking his head, he returns to his chair and settles into it. “And you two aren’t even the worst of my problems. I have a nine-foot-tall renegade robot who’s been running around the desert all night after trashing my Humvee. About an hour ago I was on the verge of calling in an air strike against her.”

  “What?” Full of alarm, I stride toward the general and bend over his chair. “You were going to bomb Zia?”

  Hawke stares back at me. “I had a drone tracking her, and I put the Air Force on alert because it looked like she was heading for Las Cruces. I can’t let her threaten a populated area. But lucky for her, she ran low on battery power and turned around. Now it looks like she’s coming back to the base to recharge.”

  His voice is cold, contemptuous. I can’t believe it. Until last week, Zia was Hawke’s favorite Pioneer. Because her parents died while serving under his command during the Iraq war, he felt an obligation to stay in touch with the orphaned girl as she grew up. When Zia fell ill with cancer, Hawke arranged medical treatment for her at a military hospital, and when she failed to respond to the chemotherapy, he enrolled her in the Pioneer Project. The only time I’ve ever seen Hawke display any kind of affection is with Zia. And now he’s saying he almost gave an order to obliterate her?

  “Did you try to radio her?” The volume of my voice is rising again. “Or were you going to shoot first and ask questions later?”

  “She turned off her radio. Your friend Zia thinks she can do anything she wants. But she’s in for a rude awakening, and so are t
he rest of you. Now that Sigma has been eliminated, the Pioneers aren’t essential to national security anymore.”

  “And what does that mean? That we’re dispensable?”

  Hawke nods. His face is hard and grim. “You have no idea how much trouble you’re in. Did you see the photograph in the National Enquirer?”

  “Yeah, Shannon showed it to me. She said people in Congress are asking questions about the Pioneer Project.”

  “And do you know what usually happens when journalists and congressmen start asking questions about a top-secret military program? If the project is controversial, the government’s preferred response is to get rid of it. To wipe away all traces of the program and pretend it never existed.” He points at himself, tapping his index finger against his chest. “I’m the only person who’s protecting you now, Armstrong. I’m the only thing that stands between you and deletion. So maybe you ought to show me a little more respect.”

  I step backward, putting distance between my Quarter-bot and the general. If his intention was to scare me, he succeeded. I think of Shannon’s plan to sway the opinions of visiting congressmen, to convince them that the Pioneers could work as rescuers in disaster zones, and now her strategy seems more hopeless than ever. The politicians will never accept us, and neither will the general public. Once they learn what we are and how we were created, our very existence will terrify them.

  Worse, they might even deny that the Pioneers are alive. Most politicians are religious, like my mother, so they’ll believe that our souls went to heaven after our bodies died. They’ll see the Pioneers as soulless copies, machines that merely imitate the teenagers whose brains were scanned. And that belief will make it easier for them to erase us.

  It’s so distressing, I can’t even think about it. If I allow my circuits to dwell on this subject, they’ll generate a wave of panic and rage that’ll swirl through my wires and spread to all my processors. The wave will feed on my emotions until it becomes a full-fledged surge. I don’t want that to happen, not here in my dad’s laboratory.

  So I refocus my thoughts by aiming my cameras at the flask in my steel hand. Right now my top priority is Brittany. Everything else can wait.

  I turn away from Hawke and extend the flask toward my dad. The jet-black liquid sloshes inside it. “How many nanobots are floating in the fluid, approximately?”

  Dad squints behind his glasses. The nanobots are far too small to be visible, but he can make an estimate based on the density of the liquid. “I’d say about ten million. When you deleted Sigma’s software and deactivated its machines, those nanobots detached from Brittany’s nervous system and flowed into her bloodstream. Her kidneys filtered them from her blood, and then I collected them from her urine. But at least a million nanobots had burrowed into her brain tissue, and they couldn’t detach. Their circuits became corrupted and the nanobots lost the ability to maneuver. Now they’re blocking Brittany’s mental functions and killing the brain cells nearby.”

  “Okay, but let’s concentrate on these nanobots you collected.” I shake the flask to focus Dad’s attention on it. “They’re dormant now, right? Because they have no power source?”

  Dad nods. “Right, but you could power them again by putting them back in human blood. Each nanobot has an ingenious system for extracting energy from blood chemistry.”

  “Each machine also has neuromorphic circuitry, right? And microscopic antennas for exchanging radio signals?”

  “Yes, when the nanobots were inside Brittany they were in constant radio contact with one another. That’s what enabled them to work together, like a swarm of insects, to take over her brain. And because the machines were all wirelessly connected, Sigma was able to download its software into their circuits and directly control the swarm.”

  “So couldn’t a Pioneer transfer its software to the swarm of nanobots too?”

  General Hawke jumps to his feet and his chair tips backward, crashing to the floor. His face is red, and his eyes shine with anger. “Armstrong, are you insane? Are you out of your freakin’ silicon mind?”

  Hawke steps in front of me again, but I keep my cameras trained on Dad. “Hear me out, okay? I could transmit my data to the nanobots after you inject them back into Brittany’s bloodstream. Then I could take control of the swarm and guide it to the damaged areas of her brain. We know that the nanobots can attach to one another, because that’s how they assembled the long antennas that burst through her skin. So I could attach the nanobots under my control to the broken nanobots stuck in her brain. Then it would just be a matter of pulling the dead nanobots from her brain tissue and releasing them into her bloodstream. From there, her kidneys would flush the machines out of her body.”

  Dad furrows his brow. He raises his right hand to his chin and taps the stubble there, which he always does when he’s deep in thought. I wait several seconds, my wires burning with impatience. Although his brain is thousands of times slower than my circuits, I still trust his judgment. I want him to be enthusiastic about my plan. I want his approval so badly.

  Hawke waits for Dad’s response too, breathing hard. The general definitely wants to yell some more, but he manages to keep his mouth shut.

  After a few more seconds, Dad bites his lower lip. “Adam, you’re talking about transferring yourself to circuits built by Sigma. Doesn’t that bother you?”

  I shake my Quarter-bot’s head. “Sigma is gone. I deleted its software. So the circuits inside the nanobots are empty, a blank slate. I should be able to occupy them without any problems.”

  Hawke can’t restrain himself any longer. “You are insane! There could be a million booby traps hidden inside the hardware of those nanobots. And if those traps are designed to operate automatically, they won’t need any instruction from Sigma. As soon as you transfer to their circuits, they’ll erase you.”

  Dad bites his lip harder. As always, his primary concern is my safety. When I was a teenager with muscular dystrophy, he constantly monitored the progress of my illness, checking my breathing and pulse every morning and rushing me to the hospital if he noticed any alarming changes. And even though I now live inside a reliable, disease-free, practically indestructible machine, Dad hasn’t changed a bit. He’ll never stop worrying about me. And to be honest, it’s getting annoying.

  I shake the flask again. “Okay, I’ll check for booby traps. I’ll spend the next six hours studying the circuits of these nanobots, and if I see anything funky in their electronics, I’ll reconsider my plan. But if not, I want to start the procedure this afternoon. It’s worth the risk.”

  General Hawke leans closer to my Quarter-bot. At the same time, he raises his hand and jabs my torso with his thick finger. “No. That won’t happen. Remove that idea from your microprocessors. I’m in charge of this base, and that includes the medical center. I’m the one who decides whether the procedure is worth the risk, and I say it isn’t.”

  Hawke rarely touches our robots. When he does, it’s never pleasant. But I resist the urge to break his arm. “I don’t understand. I’m willing to sacrifice my life to save a civilian’s. Isn’t that the whole point of the U.S. Army?”

  I guess my remark gets under his skin, because Hawke’s face turns even redder. “No, Armstrong, that’s not the point. The Army’s job is to protect the country. Until a week ago, the biggest threat to our national security was Sigma. But do you know what the biggest threat is now? You know what’s scaring the White House and the Pentagon more than anything else?” He jabs my torso again. “It’s you. The Pioneers. I can’t control you anymore, and you can’t control yourselves. And believe me, you’ll make the situation a whole lot worse if you transfer your software to those nanobots. Those are the same machines that killed twenty thousand Americans. If you use that hardware, everyone in Washington will think the Pioneers are just as dangerous as Sigma.”

  I have to admit that Hawke isn’t entirely wrong. He’s under p
ressure from his superiors. He sees the bureaucrats and politicians lining up against the Pioneers, and he’s trying to protect us from them. But he’s still making the wrong decision. Brittany Taylor matters. I won’t let her become a vegetable.

  I think he senses my defiance. He takes a step back and points at the flask of nanobots in my hand. “Put that thing in storage, Armstrong. If you don’t, I’ll have to take extraordinary measures to stop you. You may think I’m a useless human who’s inferior to you, but I still have a few tricks up my sleeve. You don’t want to test me.”

  Hawke glares at me and then at my dad, making sure that both of us get the message. Then he marches out of the lab.

  Chapter

  6

  I predicted it would take six hours to examine the nanobots and see if it was safe to transfer my software to them. But I finish the job in just thirty minutes.

  To inspect the minuscule machines, I increase the magnification of my Quarter-bot’s cameras and turn them into microscopes. Then I use an ultra-sharp, diamond-tipped scalpel to separate one of the nanobots from the sludgy liquid. Under the microscope, it looks like a black submarine. At the front end of the cylinder are the nanobot’s microcamera and radio antenna, as well as a pair of spring-loaded spikes for piercing various types of body tissue. At the back end is a slender fiber that functions as a propeller, tiny but powerful.

  But what I really need to investigate are the electronics inside the machine. For this, I use my x-ray and ultrasonic sensors, which can see through the shell of the black cylinder. These instruments reveal the microchip at the heart of the nanobot. I focus my sensors on this microprocessor and fine-tune their resolution so I can view the chip’s tangled circuitry. It looks like the world’s most complicated road map, with millions of wires connecting billions of transistors. But all the roads look clear. I study every twist and turn in the wiring, but I see no booby traps in the silicon, no hidden mechanisms that could erase my software. I can safely transfer my mind to these circuits.