by Ian Whates
“Watch out! It’s gonna charge...!”
The turret snapped toward Harold as the ’bot determined which human was closer. At that moment, his groping hands found the cold metal surface of something that moved: a dessert cart, complete with the moldering remains of several cakes. Torture wagons, his wife called these things, and he was only too happy to use one in a less metaphorical way. As the cook rushed him, he dropped the light, dodged behind the cart, grabbed its glass handle, and slammed it straight into the robot.
The impact dislodged the ice pick from the cook’s claw. As it hit the tile floor, Harold wrenched the cart backward, then shoved it forward again, harder this time. He was trying to knock it over, but the ’bot had been designed for stability, bottom-heavy and with a low center of gravity. He was slowing it down, but he wasn’t stopping it.
The situation was both dangerous and absurd. The cook would trundle forward, its arms swinging back and forth, and Harold would ram the cart into it. The ’bot would halt for a second, but as soon as he pulled the cart back, the machine would charge again, its claws missing his face by only a few inches. It might have been funny, but when Harold glanced over his shoulder, he saw in the shadowed illumination cast by the dropped flashlight that the cook was gradually backing him into a corner between a rack and a range grill. Dale was right: these things learned fast.
“Cindy! Get this friggin’ thing off me!”
He didn’t hear anything save for the incessant ticking, high-pitched whine of the ’bot’s servos, and the loud clang of his cart ramming it again. A chocolate cake toppled off the wagon and was immediately pulverized by the cook’s wheels. He had the wild hope that the icing would somehow screw it up, make it lose traction...
“Cindy...!” Damn it, had she abandoned him?
All at once, the robot’s turret did a one-eighty turn, its lenses snapping away from him as its motion detectors picked up movement from somewhere behind it. In that instant, Cindy dashed out of the darkness, something raised in both hands above her head. The robot started to swivel around, then a cast iron skillet came down on its turret and smashed its lenses.
Nice shot. Although the robot could still hear them, it was effectively blinded. While its claw lashed back and forth, trying to connect with one of them, Cindy beat on it with the skillet while Harold continued to slam it with the dessert cart.
“Hit it, hit it!”
“Get the claws!”
“Go for the top, the top!”
So forth and so on, until one last blow from Cindy’s skillet managed to skrag the CPU just beneath the upper turret. The LEDs went dark and the cook halted. The ticking stopped.
When Harold was sure that the cook was good and dead, he came out from behind the cart. Cindy was leaning against an island, breathing hard, skillet still clutched in her hand. She stared at him for a moment, then dropped the skillet. It hit the floor with a loud bang that echoed off the stainless steel surfaces around them.
“Thanks.” Harold sagged against a counter. “Tough, ain’t it?”
“Built to last.” Her cotton tank-top was damp with sweat, the nipples of her twenty-two-year old breasts standing out. “You okay?”
“I’m good.” Harold couldn’t stop staring at her. “You?”
Cindy slowly nodded. She brushed back her damp hair, then looked up at him. Even in the wan glow of the dropped flashlight, she must have seen something in his eyes that she didn’t like at all.
“Fine. Just great.” She turned away from him. “C’mon. Let’s get out of here.”
Harold let out his breath. Looked like he wasn’t going to get laid after all, even if it was the end of the world.
CINDY TRIED TO hide her irritation, but she was still quietly fuming when she and the other guy – what was his name? Harold? – returned to the atrium. She’d noticed the way he’d been watching her for the last couple of days, of course; men had been checking her out since she was fifteen, so she’d developed good radar for sexual attraction. Given the situation everyone was in, though, you’d think he’d have the common sense to put his impulses on hold. But for God’s sake, they barely escape being killed, and what’s the first thing he does? Stare at her tits.
Enough. Cindy had heard his dejected sigh as she picked up the carton of single-serving cereal boxes she’d found and left the kitchen. She couldn’t have cared less.
By the time they reached the pool, though, she’d almost forgotten the incident. As soon as she and what’s-his-name walked in, the kids were all over them, jumping up and down in their excitement to see what she’d found. Cindy couldn’t help but smile as she carried the carton to the poolside terrace and put it down on a table. There were a half-dozen children among the refugees, the youngest a four-year-old boy and the oldest a twelve-year-old girl, and none of them seemed to mind that they didn’t have any milk to go with the Cheerios and Frosted Flakes she handed out. Even kids can get tired of Spam and candy bars if that’s all they’ve had to eat for three days.
Once they’d all received a box of cereal, Cindy took the rest to the cabana room she was sharing with Officer McCoy. She’d never thought that she’d welcome having a cop as a roommate, but Sharon was pretty cool; besides, sleeping in the same room as a police officer assured that she wouldn’t be bothered by any horny middle-aged guys who’d holed up in the Wyatt-Centrum.
Sharon was dozing on one of the twin beds when Cindy came in. She’d taken off her uniform shirt and was sleeping in her sports bra, her belt with its holstered gun, taser, and baton at her side. She opened her eyes and watched as Cindy carefully closed the door behind her, making sure that she didn’t accidentally knock aside the pillow they’d been using as a doorstop. With the power out and even the emergency generator offline, there was nothing to prevent the guest room doors from automatically locking if they closed all the way.
“Find some food?” Sharon asked.
“A little. Ready for dinner?”
Sharon sat up to peer into the carton put down beside her. “That all? Couldn’t you find something else?”
“Sorry. Didn’t have a chance to look.” Cindy told her about the cook. Sharon’s expression didn’t change, but Cindy figured that cops were usually poker-faced when it came to that sort of thing. And she left out the part about what’s-his-name. No point in complaining about that; they had worse things to worry about.
“Well... anyway, I’m glad you made it back alive.” Sharon selected a box of Cheerios, but didn’t immediately open it. One of the hand-held radios the cops had borrowed from the hotel lay on the desk; their own cell radios no longer worked, forcing them to use the older kind. Sharon picked it up and thumbed the TALK button. “Charlie Baker Two, Charlie Baker One. How’s everything looking?”
A couple of seconds went by, then Officer Overby’s voice came over. “Charlie Baker Two. 10-24, all clear.”
“Ten-four. Will relieve you in fifteen minutes. Out.” Sharon put down the radio, then nodded to the smartphone that lay on the dresser. “What’s happening there? Any change?”
Cindy picked up her phone, ran her finger down its screen. The phone would become silent once the charge ran down, but there was still a little bit of red on the battery icon. She pressed the volume control, and once again they heard the only sound it made:
Tick... tick-tick... tick-tick-tick-tick... tick... tick-tick...
Like a cheap stopwatch that skipped seconds. That wasn’t what she immediately noticed, though, but instead the mysterious number that appeared on its screen: 4,576,036,057, a figure that decreased by one with each tick.
For the last three days, Cindy’s phone had done nothing else but tick irregularly and display a ten-digit number that changed every second or so. What these things signified, she had no clue, but everyone else’s phones, pads, and laptops had been doing the same thing ever since the blackout.
It started the moment she was standing on the curb outside the airport, flagging down a cab while at the same time calling her f
riend in St. Paul to tell her that she’d arrived. That was when the phone suddenly went dead. Thinking that her call had been dropped, she’d pulled the phone from her ear, glanced at the screen... and heard the first weird ticks coming from it.
She was still staring at the numbers which had appeared on the LCD display when the cab that was about to pull up to the curb slammed into the back of a shuttle bus. A few seconds later, the pavement shook beneath her feet and she heard the rolling thunder of an incoming airliner crashing on the runway and exploding. That was how it all began...
Cindy glanced at her watch. Nearly 6 pm. Perhaps the atrium would cool down a little once the mid-summer sun was no longer resting on the skylight windows. Unfortunately, the coming night would also mean that the robots would have an easier time tracking anyone still outside; their infrared vision worked better than their normal eyes, someone had explained to her. Probably Dale. He seemed to know a lot about such things.
Almost as if she’d read her mind, Sharon looked up from strapping on her belt. “Oh, by the way... Dale asked me to tell you that he’d like to see you.”
Cindy was halfway to the bathroom; its door was closed against the stench of an unflushed toilet. She stopped and turned around. “Dale? Did he say why?”
“You said you’re carrying a satphone, didn’t you? He’d like to borrow it.”
“Yeah, why not?” Cindy shrugged. “We won’t get anyone with it. I’ve already tried to call my folks in Boston.”
“I told him that, but...” Sharon finished buttoning her shirt. “C’mon. I’d like to see what he’s got in mind.”
Dale’s cabana was on the other side of the pool. Like Cindy, he was rooming with a cop: Karl Overby, Sharon’s partner. In his case, though, it was a matter of insistence. Cindy didn’t know much about him other than that he worked for some federal agency, he knew a lot about computers, and his job was important enough that he requested – demanded, really – that he stay with a police officer. Dale was pleasant enough – he faintly resembled Cindy’s old high school math teacher, whom she’d liked – but he’d been keeping a certain distance from everyone else in the hotel.
“Cindy, hi.” Dale looked up from the laptop on his desk when she knocked on the room’s half-open door. “Thanks for coming over. I’ve got a favor to ask. Do you...?”
“Have a satphone? Sure.” It was in the backpack Cindy had carried with her on the plane. She’d flown to Minneapolis to hook up with an old college roommate for a camping trip in the lakes region, where cell coverage was spotty and it wasn’t smart to be out in the woods with no way to contact anyone. “Not that it’s going to do you any good.”
Dale didn’t seem to hear the last. “So long as its battery isn’t dead –” a questioning look; Cindy shook her head “– I might be able to hook it up to my laptop through their serial ports. Maybe I can get through to someone.”
“I don’t know how.” Sharon leaned against the door. “Internet’s gone down. My partner and I found that out when we tried to use our cruiser laptop.” She nodded at the digits on Dale’s laptop. “We just got that, same as everyone else.”
“Yes, well...” Dale absently ran a hand through thinning brown hair. “The place I want to try is a little better protected than most.”
“Where’s that, sir? The Pentagon?” Sharon’s demeanor changed; she was a cop again, wanting a straight answer to a straight question. “You showed us a Pentagon I.D. when you came over here from the airport. Is that where you work?”
“No. That’s just a place I sometimes visit. My job is somewhere else.” Dale hesitated, then he pulled his wallet from his back pocket. Opening it, he removed a laminated card and showed it to Sharon. “This is where I work.”
Cindy caught a glimpse of the card. His photo was above his name, Dale F. Heinz, and at the top of the card was NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY. She had only the vaguest idea of what that was, but Sharon was obviously impressed.
“Okay. You’re NSA.” Her voice was very quiet. “So maybe you know what’s going on here.”
“That’s what I’d like find out. Tonight, once we’ve gone upstairs to a balcony room.”
MINNEAPOLIS WAS DYING.
From the balcony of a concierge suite – the only tenth-floor room whose door wasn’t locked – the city was a dark expanse silhouetted by random fires. No lights in the nearby industrial park, and the distant skyscrapers were nothing but black, lifeless shapes looming in the starless night. Sharon thought there ought to be the sirens of first-responders – police cruisers, fire trucks, ambulances – but she heard nothing other than an occasional gunshot. The airport was on the other side of the hotel, so she couldn’t tell whether the jet which had crashed there was still ablaze. Probably not, and if its fire had spread from the runway to the hangars or terminals, those living in the Wyatt-Centrum would have known it by now; the hotel was only a mile away.
A muttered obscenity brought her back to the balcony. Dale was seated at a sofa end-table they’d dragged through the sliding door; his laptop lay open upon it, connected to Cindy’s satphone. He’d hoped to get a clear uplink once he was outside, and a top floor balcony was the safest place to do this. And it appeared to have worked; gazing over his shoulder, Sharon saw that the countdown had disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by the NSA seal.
“You got through.” Cindy stood in the open doorway, holding a flashlight over Dale’s computer. The satphone belonged to her, so she’d insisted on coming along. Sharon had, too, mainly because Dale might need protection. After the incident in the kitchen, there was no telling how many ’bots might still be active in the hotel, as yet undiscovered.
“I got there, yeah... but I’m not getting in. Look” Dale’s fingers ran across the keyboard, and a row of asterisks appeared in the password bar. He tapped the ENTER key; a moment later, ACCESS DENIED appeared beneath the bar. “That was my backdoor password. It locked out my official one, too.”
“At least you got through. That’s got to count for something, right?”
Dale quietly gazed at the screen, absently rubbing his lower lip. “It does,” he said at last, “but I don’t like what it means.”
He didn’t say anything else for a moment or two. “Want to talk about it?” Sharon asked. “We’ve got a right to know, don’t you think?”
Dale slowly let out his breath. “This isn’t just any government website. It belongs to the Utah Data Center, the NSA’s electronic surveillance facility in Bluffdale, Utah.” He glanced up at Sharon. “Ever heard of it?”
“Isn’t that the place where they bug everyone’s phone?”
“That’s one way of putting it, yeah. Bluffdale does more than that, though... a lot more. They’re tapped into the entire global information grid. Not just phone calls... every piece of email, every download, every data search, every bank transaction. Anything that’s transmitted or travels down a wire gets filtered through this place.”
“You gotta be kidding.” Harold appeared in the doorway behind Cindy, apparently having found the restroom he’d been searching for. He’d tagged along as well, saying that Sharon might need help if they ran into any more ’bots. Sharon knew that this was just an excuse to attach himself to Cindy, but didn’t say anything. Her roommate knew how to keep away from a wolf... and indeed, she left the doorway and squeezed in beside Dale, maintaining a discrete distance from the annoying salesman.
“Not at all. There’s two and half acres of computers there with enough processing power to scan a yottabyte of information every second. That’s like being able to read 500 quintillion pages.”
Harold gave a low whistle. “All right, I understand,” Sharon said. “But what does that have to do with us?”
The legs of Dale’s chair scraped against concrete as he turned half-around to face her and the others. “Look... something has shut down the entire electronic infrastructure, right? Electricity, cars, phones, planes, computers, robots... everything networked to the grid was knocked down three
days ago. And then, almost immediately after that, every part connected to the system that’s mobile and capable of acting independently... namely, the robots... came back online, but now with only one single purpose. Kill any human they encounter.”
“Give me another headline,” Harold said drily. “I think I might have missed the news.”
“Hush.” Cindy glared at him and he shut up.
“The only other things that still function are networked electronics like smartphones and laptops... stuff that runs on batteries. But they don’t do anything except display a number and make a ticking sound just like the robots do. And that number seems to decrease by one every time there’s a tick.”
“Yeah, I noticed that, too,” Cindy said. “It began the moment my cell phone dropped out.”
Dale gave her a sharp look. “You were on the phone when the blackout happened?” Cindy nodded. “Do you happen to remember what the number was when it first appeared on your phone screen?”
“Sort of... it was seven billion and something.”
“About seven and half billion, would you say?” Dale asked. She nodded again, and he hissed beneath his breath. “That’s what I thought it might be.”
“What are you getting at?” Sharon asked, although she had a bad feeling that she already knew.
“The global population is approximately seven and a half billion.” Dale’s voice was very low. “At least, that’s about how many people were alive on Earth three days ago.”
Sharon felt a cold snake slither into the pit of her stomach. A stunned silence settled upon the group. Her ears picked up a low purring sound from somewhere in the distance, but it was drowned out when both Cindy and Harold started speaking at once.
“But... but why...?”
“What the hell are you...?”
