“Just look away when he does it,” I said.
“He was lying about putting that ridiculous thing on top of his car, too.”
“I know.”
“I was watching his face when he said it.” She raised an eyebrow. “But how did
you
know he was lying?”
Cradling my MacBook Pro on my forearm, I tapped the keyboard with my other hand, bringing up Frankenstein’s diagnostic displays.
“Roger may be socially retarded,” I said, “but he’s a damn good engineer. The A-Ten Warthog that carries that gun is a twenty-five-ton aircraft, and its engines generate twenty thousand pounds of thrust, but when it fires its GAU-Eight the recoil force practically stops the plane in midair. Roger may be carrying a lot of extra armor weight on his dumb little truck, but even so, he’s got to know firing a half-second burst would flip the Beast over backward and leave it lying upside down like a stranded horseshoe crab. And if he held the trigger down, his Humvee would go cartwheeling end-over-end across the desert.”
“Why would he say that to us, then?” she asked.
“A cry for attention. It’s kind of sad.”
“You aren’t very nice to him.”
“He needs to harden up and be less needy.”
“If that’s how you treat your friends, I’d hate to see how you treat your enemies.”
“I don’t have enemies. Nobody is
that
dumb.”
• • •
With Cassie and me supervising the engineering guys and running our own diagnostics, the installation of the new server racks went fast. In less than three hours, Frankenstein’s expanded GPU capacity was fully online.
I looked at the system benchmark I was running, and grinned.
Before the upgrade, he had already been the fastest supercomputer on the planet by a substantial margin—a secret known only to Cassie and me. But
now,
with a new peak capability of 125 petaflops—125 quadrillion flops, or 125 x 10
15
floating-point operations per second—Frankenstein had more processing power on tap than the world’s twenty next-fastest supercomputers
combined
.
We were now only a factor of eight away from exascale computing.
A lot of the theoretical guys like Kurzweil and Markham made a big deal about reaching exascale—a quintillion flops. They considered it some kind of important milestone because, at that level, a computer could fully simulate all the neurons of a human brain in real-time.
But simulating biology wasn’t what we were doing with MADRID, and besides, Frankenstein’s nonlinear pattern-matching algorithms were actually a lot more efficient than the evolutionary kluge that was the human brain. For our work, the exascale threshold was an arbitrary and meaningless milestone.
Ricky and the engineering guys gave me a final thumbs-up, and with another round of fist bumps and arm-wrestling grips, I led them out through the lab.
At the door, Ricky pointed to our badges. “You can keep those until Monday.”
“This was really nice of you guys,” Cassie said.
“Returning the favor,” Ricky said. “Your partner here hooked us up big-time. In a couple hours, my team and I are heading down to Vegas to party like rock stars all weekend: suite at the Wynn, front-row seats at the Rave show, and some… uh, other shows—all totally comped. Hey, Trev, this guy we’re supposed to be working for, who was down there last week—what’s his name again?”
I glanced at Cassie and grinned.
“Grayson Linebaugh,” I said to Ricky. “You’re campaign staffers, so don’t forget to wear some sort of suit or tie.”
“Oh, for shit’s sake…!” Cassie turned away, and stalked back into the server room.
When I’d gone out for a long run after breakfast, it had taken me a half hour working the phone to find the right hotel in Vegas. But once I did, it took less than four minutes to convince the assistant manager I was who I said I was, and to have him reserve the same suite and make the necessary arrangements.
I winked at Ricky. “The senator’s used to dealing in billions of dollars, so make sure you put a big-ass dent in his tab.”
C
assie seemed pretty annoyed with me, so I left her in the sanctum running diagnostics on Frankenstein’s new processors while I headed over to Blake’s lab. My objective was the contents of McNulty’s hard drive, which I had copied to Blake’s workstation. I didn’t want to leave a digital trail by transferring the data over the network to Frankenstein, so I was doing it the old-fashioned way instead. In my pocket, I had a USB flash drive that I planned to use to copy the data, which I would then erase from Blake’s machine.
After making sure the interior hallway was clear of MPs, I peeked through the reinforced-glass panel in the door to Blake’s machine-shop lab. I could see only darkness. Nobody home.
I ran Roger’s key card through Blake’s lock, and the dead bolt disengaged with a loud snap that echoed down the corridor. Pushing the door open, I stepped inside and let it click shut behind me.
The main overhead lights were off, and the only illumination in Blake’s cavernous lab came from the few dim, widely spaced bulbs of the emergency lighting system. The bulky machine-tool cabinets, drill presses, mills, lathes, and 3-D printers were all shrouded in semidarkness.
I didn’t want to turn on the main overheads, which might be noticed by a passing MP, so I stood just inside the door while my eyes adjusted. In the room’s twilight, I could see the faint glimmer of polished steel struts and hydraulic assemblies lying on nearby worktables.
A stupid twinge of apprehension tightened the back of my neck. I pictured PETMAN standing silently on its treadmill in the gloom less than thirty feet away, hidden behind the head-height machine-shop equipment.
Of course, with Blake out of the lab, the robot would be powered down. It was embarrassing to let myself react this way to a dumb chunk of metal. Cowardly, even.
With forced briskness, I headed toward the center of the lab, where Blake had a freestanding office-style modular cubicle set up, surrounded on all sides by the metalworking machines. The mini office was where he kept his computer workstations and paperwork.
I refused to look in the direction of PETMAN’s shadowed treadmill, focusing instead on the cubicle wall ahead as I skirted the jumble of shiny quadrupedal robots—ALPHADOG, BIGDOG, and CHEETAH—in the center of the floor.
Blake really needed to put his old toys away when he was done with them, instead of leaving them lying around.
But my imagination was starting to play tricks. Small movements skittered across my peripheral vision. Little indistinct shapes seemed to twitch in the dark margins between the lathes and presses, going still as soon as I stared in their direction. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
On a worktable next to my elbow, something shifted with an audible clank. Leaping away, I spun about, my heart pounding in my throat.
“Fuck!” I shouted.
The cat-size metal crawler lifted another pair of splay-toed feet and sealed them soundlessly against the concrete wall behind the table. It hitched itself upward a few more inches. Blowing out a breath while my pulse slowed, I watched it march up the wall and onto the ceiling, where it hung from its eight starfish-shaped feet, like a giant mechanical gecko lizard.
I was looking at a biomimetic robot, one of a couple of dozen climbers Blake had created for an earlier project. Just like a gecko, the pads of its feet were covered with millions of tiny nanoscale hairs, or setae, whose remarkable stickiness came from the molecular van der Waal’s forces generated by contact with any surface—even Teflon.
Blake had grown his synthetic setae using carbon nanotubes, and they generated four times the adhesive force of the natural setae found on gecko feet.
Watching the crawler move across the ceiling now, I remembered a demonstration from three years ago. Blake had used a two-inch-square patch of the setae to attach a four-foot pipe-wrench to the wall at head height, with its handle sticking straight out. He had asked me to pull it down, but I couldn’t budge it, even when I hung from it with my full body weight. Then Blake had simply tilted the handle upward, effortlessly unsealing the wrench from the wall.
A twelve-inch by twelve-inch square of the setae matrix, pressed against a wall, would form a seal that supported three tons of weight, but it would peel free again with ease—as long as you pulled it in the right direction.
Grinning, I was tempted to jump up and grab the robot crawling above my head, but I could do pull-ups on it without prying it loose. Blake
really
needed to clean out his closet and get rid of his old junk.
“Trevor, is that you?”
I tensed at the sound of Blake’s voice. It sounded querulous in the silence, coming from behind the cubicle walls just ahead.
With the lockout in force, Blake shouldn’t even be on base. How had he gotten into the building? And why was he lurking in his darkened lab right now?
What the hell was he doing?
Silently, I slid a three-foot section of heavy steel tubing from the table and wrapped my hand around it. Blake was old and slow, but I had seen how easily he lifted the heavier sections of his robots, and I still had no idea who had killed McNulty.
“Yeah, it’s me,” I called back.
No answer.
Hefting the chunk of steel tube, I started toward the entrance gap in the cubicle walls. “We need to talk, Blake.”
Silence.
My internal alarms were jangling now. Growing up where I had, in the ’08, I had developed a sort of radar sense that alerted me to imminent danger. It was an entirely subconscious awareness, and it had kept me alive more than once.
Right now those instincts were telling me to turn around and head back the way I had come, as quickly and quietly as I could. I almost never second-guessed my instincts, which gave me a crucial half-second advantage in any physical confrontation, because I trusted them enough to strike first.
But Blake was an old white-collar scientist—a gentle doofus who, despite his bearish size, had never tripped a single one of my subconscious warnings before. At least, not until that brief look of rage when I made his precious robot dance. That flare of intensity had surprised me, and so had the speed at which he had made it disappear.
I reconsidered my options and sped up, shifting directions at the last instant.
Instead of going around the cubicle wall, I vaulted over it.
My high-tops slapped against the floor on the other side, amid a scattering of rolled blueprints and loose papers that I had knocked to the ground when I went over the wall.
Holding my makeshift club, I dropped to a crouch in the middle of the cubicle area, which now stood empty except for the usual office clutter and two dimmed monitor screens along one side. I swung around to check the gap on the opposite side, which was the cubicle office’s only other exit.
It opened onto more shadowy metalworking machinery. No one there, either.
I froze in place, listening. I could hear distant fumbling noises from behind me, in the direction of the lab door where I had entered.
Blake had slipped out of his cubicle through this other gap, then, right after he spoke, and now he was circling around to the front of the lab.
But the workstation I wanted was right in front of me now. I might never get another chance. Keeping my head up to scan my periphery, glancing at the monitor for only fractions of a second at a time, I slipped the USB thumb drive into Blake’s computer and started the file transfer.
The distant noises had stopped now, and the dimly lit lab floated in silence again. Blake’s weird behavior was creeping me out.
Dropping my gaze in brief glimpses at the screen, I quickly located all Blake’s directories that he had touched in the past calendar year. I started copying those to my USB key, also.
Several minutes went by in eerie silence before both file-transfer progress meters hit 100 percent and the popup windows closed.
Done. I slid the USB key out, dropped it into my pocket, and, with a few keystrokes, permanently scrubbed McNulty’s files off Blake’s computer. Then I hard-formatted the hidden sector I had used, overwriting it a few thousand times with random gibberish that would make data recovery impossible.
Time to go.
I straightened up from my crouch.
Out in the dimness beyond the cubicle walls, something made a noise, louder than before. Small metal parts clinked against the concrete, like a handful of coins brushed off a table.
Right next to my face, Blake’s querulous voice issued from the computer’s speakers: “Trevor, is that you?”
My gut clenched, and my fist tightened around the steel tube again. Blake’s intonation and words were exactly the same as before. It was a prerecorded audio file, whose replay had probably been triggered by the sound and movement out on the lab’s machine-shop floor. The cubicle where I now stood had been empty all along.
Another furtive sound came from somewhere out in the darkness separating me from the lab’s only exit.
I was no longer so sure it was Blake.
Looking up at the ceiling four feet above, I scanned the unlit fluorescent lights in their aluminum-and-glass cages. There were four rows of cylindrical bulbs, one bulb every eight feet or so. They stretched the length of the lab’s reinforced-concrete ceiling.
The only switch was right next to the distant door, a hundred feet away. To get to it, I would have to cross the machinery-crowded lab in semidarkness while someone I couldn’t see stalked me through the shadows.
It seemed like a very bad idea.
Right now, the only illumination came from six small emergency bulbs, which always stayed on, interspersed among the larger, unlit fluorescent tubes overhead. The emergency lights were on a separate circuit, and one of the bulbs was almost directly above the monitor screen in front of me. I hopped up onto the desktop, yanked the monitor’s power cable free, and bit the female end off, quickly stripping the wires with my teeth. I needed an insulated plug, too, about three-quarters of an inch in diameter.
I glanced down at the computer mouse next to my foot, seeing exactly what I needed. Blake was old school all the way, evidently preferring a traditional computer mouse to an optical one or a trackpad. I stomped the mouse hard, shattering it, and knelt to dig out the rubber ball inside. Then I straightened up and used my steel-tube club to smash the glass cover of the nearest unlit fluorescent fixture in the ceiling. I broke the long bulb inside, too, sending more fragments of glass raining onto the floor below, and scraped its metal end out of the socket to fall free.