The smaller shadows of gecko robots crawled over the folded arms. OctoRotor shapes flitted above. Behind the sheet, so many smaller robots hovered and wriggled around the supine form that its true outline was impossible to discern.
Whatever it was, it was bigger than PETMAN.
A
lot
bigger.
“That can’t be good,” I whispered to Cassie, drawing slowly away from the window.
The phone buzzed in my pocket. Loudly.
All through Blake’s lab, the OctoRotors dropped what they carried onto the floor in a ringing clatter of metal parts. Forming up in a synchronized pattern, they streamed toward us.
We ran.
The snap of Blake’s door lock echoed down the corridor behind us. I glanced over my shoulder, in time to see the door swing wide. A swarm of OctoRotors poured through into the hallway, arraying themselves into a regular grid two feet apart. The grid filled the corridor from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. Then the cloud of OctoRotors surged forward, spiraling as they came. Half of them went clockwise, the other half counterclockwise.
The two groups of small flyers came together in midair, colliding at an angle with a noisy, flatulent trill of shredding plastic. Shards of curved rotor guard flew in all directions and rained to the floor. Three OctoRotors also fell from the air, their rotors too damaged too hold them aloft.
The rest of them swirled down the corridor after us. They filled the air with a flickering hum now, dozens of them, their sharp-edged steel rotors spinning free, no longer shielded by the plastic rims.
“
That’s
definitely not good,” Cassie said.
Like a squadron of razor-edged buzz-saws, the OctoRotors rocketed our way, spiraling as they came.
We sprinted past a thick beam in the concrete walls and ceiling. I spun toward the firebox on the wall alongside, but Cassie was already there ahead of me. Ripping the red extinguisher free, she slammed her palm onto the big round button behind it.
Heavy bulkhead doors, designed to isolate this stretch of hall in case of fire, slammed together behind us to block the passage. Chests heaving, we sagged against the doors.
“Did
Frankenstein
use PETMAN to kill McNulty and Bennett?” Cassie gasped.
“No,” I grunted. “The timing doesn’t work.” I turned to peek through the small windows in the bulkhead doors. “McNulty was killed a week ago. Frankenstein’s only been sentient three days.”
“You’re wrong, Trevor,” she said. “He’s been sentient for at least
six months
. Maybe longer.”
I shook my head, watching through the window as the OctoRotors divided into four groups. Each streamed in a different direction.
“I was there when he became self-aware,” I said. “I actually saw it happen. He malfunctioned and lost hypervisor control, but then I fixed him—”
“He
played
you, Trevor. Whatever kind of charade he put on for you, he knew exactly what buttons to push to make you do what he wanted.”
Not liking the pity I saw in Cassie’s expression, I returned my attention to the OctoRotors. But she was right.
“The anomalous power usage,” I said. “It started at least six months ago. But
no one
was using him behind my back.”
“Exactly,” she said. “That was Frankenstein himself—thinking… making plans.”
“I guess I shouldn’t be surprised,” I said. “I designed a computer to detect lies and hidden intentions. It only makes sense he would start lying and hiding his
own
intentions.”
“No, Trevor.” The pity was in Cassie’s voice, too. “He learned
that
from watching
you
. It’s why he thinks like you. Why he acts like you.”
Through the window in the bulkhead door, I watched first one, then another ceiling ventilation grate clatter to the ground, pried loose by two groups of OctoRotors. In single file, they darted into the air vents, disappearing from sight. The other two groups had unscrewed the intake vents in the floor. Turning sideways in midair, they slipped into the narrow gaps one by one in rapid succession, like coins dropped into a slot.
A moment later, I heard OctoRotors bumping through the sheet-metal air ducts that ran above and below us. They were on our side of the bulkhead now. In a few seconds, they’d be coming through the vents.
I had no idea what Frankenstein wanted from Cassie, but it couldn’t be good. I needed to get her away from here before we found out.
“We’re safe once we’re out of the building,” I said, grabbing her hand again. “They can’t follow. The Wi-Fi network doesn’t reach outside—another reason PETMAN couldn’t have killed McNulty and Bennett.”
We sprinted the final length of corridor, our strides in unconscious synchronization as we burst out through the door.
MPs moved to intercept.
I pointed at the fire extinguisher still in Cassie’s hand. “Fire!” I yelled. “The labs are filled with toxic chemicals and explosives. Run!”
Everyone scattered. Cassie and I sprinted into the parking lot.
“My Prius is over there,” she said, pointing.
I shook my head and pulled her in the direction of my rental. I yanked the door open and hopped in. Cassie jumped into the passenger side, still carrying the extinguisher.
Starting the engine, I looked toward the gate and grimaced.
Two jeeps slid into place, nose to nose, blocking both the outbound and the inbound lane. Four Navy guardsmen leaped from each jeep to man the roadblock.
I looked at the vehicle they had let in seconds earlier, now driving into the parking lot: the Beast—Roger’s Humvee.
“Come on,” I said to Cassie. “Looks like our ride’s here.”
Grinning, I leaped out of the car. Waving my arm frantically to get Roger’s attention, I popped the trunk of the rental and hauled out my duffel.
The Beast slid to a halt alongside us, its thick ridged tires kicking up gravel. Roger stepped out and hooked an elbow over the top of his door, leaning on it like a chauffeur. He stared at the MPs running near the DARPA building, then at the blocked gate behind him. Then he looked at me.
“Jesus Christ, Trev—”
My hook caught him on the cheekbone. I pulled my punch—a little—but it was still hard enough to knock him away from the car and send him sprawling onto the ground.
Cassie grabbed my arm. “You didn’t need to do that.”
“No, but I wanted to.” I unshouldered the duffel and handed it to her by the strap, taking the extinguisher from her at the same time. “Hop in,” I said, pointing to the Beast’s passenger side.
She did.
Sputtering, Roger tried to scramble to his feet. I aimed the extinguisher’s nozzle and squeezed the handle. The frothy stream of white foam hit him in the face, knocking him down again.
“How do you like me
now
?” I laughed. “Thanks for letting us borrow your car, you two-faced, lying sack of shit.”
Jumping behind the wheel, I dropped the extinguisher on the floor, yanked the door shut, and pulled away. In the rearview mirror, I watched Roger run after us, cursing, the white foam giving his goatee a Santa Claus look. But he gave up after a few steps and stopped to rub the foam away from his eyes.
Still chuckling, I noticed Cassie’s angry expression and sobered up some. She buckled her seatbelt, shoving aside the duffel that lay on the seat between us.
I pointed at a rounded shape that bulged through the duffel’s fabric. “Put one of these on and hand me the other,” I said. “Things are about to get bumpy.”
“Oh shit.” Cassie unzipped the bag and pulled out one of the Waverunner racing helmets. She slid it onto her head, and I did the same with mine. Then I mashed the accelerator. The Beast’s engine growled as I aimed it toward the two jeeps blocking the base gate.
Navy guardsmen dived out of the way.
The Humvee wasn’t much bigger than the jeeps, but the depleted uranium armor made it three or four times heavier than it should be. The impact bounced our helmets off the dashboard, but the Humvee barely slowed. Both jeeps were knocked aside, the upside-down tires of one tumbling past my window as it rolled over twice. Hitting the brakes, I butted the Beast’s rear bumper against the upside-down jeep’s frame and reversed, pushing it into the gap between the entrance guard posts, blocking both lanes with it.
Small pings and tings echoed inside the Humvee, making Cassie duck. “They’re
shooting
at us!” she said.
I nodded. “We’re terrorists… or stealing secrets. Who knows what lies Frankenstein is telling them, or who he’s impersonating. But you can be sure he’s on the phone with half the base right this second.”
The tings faded out as the Pyramid Lake facility shrank in the rearview mirror.
I kept scanning the empty road behind us. And the wedge of blue sky above it. “That was too easy,” I said.
“Why aren’t they pursuing?” Cassie asked.
“He told them not to. So be ready for anything.”
I turned my face toward hers. She looked afraid.
I was afraid, too.
“He’s the world’s first sentient artificial intelligence,” I said. “He can read our lies, intentions, and feelings off our faces—practically read our minds. So, Cassie, since he says you’re the only one who can help him, tell me this… What does a ninety-ton supercomputer who’s smarter than any human
want
?”
I
glanced in the rearview mirror again, and what I saw made me tighten my grip on the wheel. Spread across the cloudless blue sky behind us, I could now see a formation of several dozen black specks, laid out in a precise arrow-shaped wedge, like jets at an air show.
OctoRotors.
Cassie turned her head to look. As we watched, two of them dropped out of formation to hover and were quickly left behind.
“Still think they can’t follow us outside?” she said. “
There’s
the answer to the Wi-Fi question, Trevor. The OctoRotors are ad hoc wireless network repeaters, too.”
I had the accelerator jammed to the floor, but the massive weight of the DU armor made Roger’s Humvee sluggish. Our speedometer hovered just below seventy miles per hour, which—according to Kate—was about the same as an OctoRotor’s top speed. I watched another pair of specks stop in midair as the rest came onward.
In my mind, I could picture how the whole scene looked from above: the lonely black ribbon of road with the lake on one side and alkali scrub on the other, the Humvee a small, boxy shape moving along the road with frustrating slowness. A half-mile behind it and fifty feet above, a dozen laser-straight, evenly spaced rows of black drones vectoring in pursuit, like a squadron of miniature bombers, or like angry wasps streaming from a disturbed nest to chase a fleeing armadillo.
Like hooks strung on an invisible line unreeling through the sky after us, every six or seven hundred feet another pair of flyers would peel off to hover, relaying signals onward: commands from the monstrous queen wasp that hunkered back at the nest, protected by its drones and by soldiers—an entire military base full of unwitting humans whom Frankenstein had conned.
But not all of them were unwitting.
“Blake,” I said. “Someone caught him at his storage facility in Reno and beat the shit out of him, just like McNulty. Told him I wanted him dead.”
Cassie’s helmet nodded. “PETMAN couldn’t have cut the hole in the fence to take McNulty to the geyser. And he couldn’t have wedged Bennett’s arms and jaw through the coolant coils.”
“It wasn’t any robot that killed McNulty and Bennett and beat up Blake,” I said. “Frankenstein’s got a
human
assistant.”
“Why do you sound surprised?” she said. “You’ve given your protégé a crash course in lying, blackmail, extortion, and intimidation, Trevor. Computers take what humans teach them, and then do it faster and more efficiently. With Frankenstein’s bandwidth and processing power…”
“He can manipulate dozens of people at the same time.” I gritted my teeth. “And when all else fails, he can just fucking
bribe
them, using the twelve million dollars he stole from us.”
In the rearview mirror, I watched the swarm of OctoRotors descend until they were skimming a dozen feet above the road’s surface, a hundred yards behind us.
Cursing, I stomped the pedal harder, trying my best to mash it into the foot well. The overweight truck would go no faster.
The pursuing flyers changed formation again and again, churning through one complex geometrical pattern after another. Biomimetic learning—they were optimizing their group flight pattern in three dimensions, just like a flock of birds drafting each other, seeking the minimum-energy configuration. They finally settled on a whirling, shifting cloud of concentric circles that allowed them to eke out a couple of extra miles per hour.
It was enough.
The distance between the front edge of the spinning cloud and our rear bumper shrank to fifty yards, then twenty-five, then fifteen. The swarm darkened the air behind us.
“Here they come,” I said.
The phone buzzed in my pocket again, and my breaths sped up.
I was afraid.
If Frankenstein truly thought like I did, then he wasn’t calling now to threaten me. Only the weak made threats to announce their intent. No, I
knew
what this call would be.
A disabling suckerpunch I hadn’t seen coming.
I pulled the phone out and glanced at the screen, and my insides contracted at the sight of my wife’s name. I handed the phone to Cassie.
“Speaker phone,” I croaked, returning both hands to the wheel. My knuckles were white.
“You want to talk to your ex
now
?” Cassie said.
I nodded. She held the phone up near the open face of my helmet and punched the button. Jen’s voice filled the car, shrill with fury.
“
I’ll kill you!”
she shrieked. “
How could you do this to me, you son of a bitch! Unfit mother? I’m an unfit mother?
”
The world went gray as the implications of her words hit me like a train.
“Tell me you have Amy!” I bellowed into the phone. My voice broke apart. “
Tell me
she’s with you right now!”