I now stood at the center of a swirling cylinder some ten feet in diameter. Its walls were barely visible, a flickering crosshatch pattern in the air, traced and retraced by the flying black and silver OctoRotors.
Then the front wall of the cylinder receded in front of me while the droning hum rose in volume behind. I took a lurching step forward, then another and another, to keep the flickering blades close behind me from slicing into my back.
My cage of spiraling buzz-saws drifted forward with imperturbable patience. Heart pounding, I had no choice but to keep up, trying to stay in the cylinder’s exact center.
The OctoRotors frog-marched me relentlessly toward the DARPA building’s entrance.
This morning Frankenstein had dismissed me. Now, it seemed, unless I wanted to watch myself come apart all over the sidewalk, I needed to obey his summons.
• • •
An OctoRotor dropped out of formation, holding a white key card in its little manipulator arms. It slid the card through the reader to disengage the main entrance lock. I laughed—watching the little black flyer unlock the door for me was so disturbingly surreal, I couldn’t help myself.
The pattern of swirling OctoRotors parted in front of me, and I walked through the door, feeling a sick, cowardly relief at having stepped out of my flickering cage, no matter how temporarily.
Frankenstein’s little flyers didn’t follow. Instead, they formed a close-packed wall to block the door behind me. Their message was clear enough: traffic through the DARPA entrance would only go one way.
I walked down the silent corridor, clutching my rifle, glancing at the doors I passed. The lights in Blake’s lab were out now.
An OctoRotor flew around the corner at the far end of the hallway, coming toward me from the direction of my own lab. I was unsurprised to see that it carried an iPhone. I held out a hand and the flyer stopped to hover above it at shoulder height, releasing the phone to drop it into my palm.
At the last second, a pointless burst of defiance made me pull back my hand. The iPhone’s glass screen shattered against the concrete floor.
“Oops,” I said.
The OctoRotor tilted in midair, darting at my knuckles in a little feint before drifting back down the hallway. Again, the message was clear:
Do that again, and it will cost you fingers.
I turned away before it reached the corner. Something else had caught my eye: a silvery glint of metal in my peripheral vision. A wide maintenance corridor, used to access the engineering levels beneath the server room, led away at a right angle from the main hallway. It was maybe fifteen feet wide and a hundred feet long, terminating at a freight elevator.
A man-shaped figure stood motionless in front of the elevator doors. His body was canted forward in menacing silence, arms gunfighter loose at his sides.
PETMAN.
My stomach tensed. I had been so distracted by the little flyers, I almost walked past Blake’s robot, letting him get behind me.
But it wouldn’t happen again. Unslinging my rifle, I raised it to my shoulder and lined up the floating red circle-and-dot of the EOTech holographic sight with PETMAN’s stainless steel knee.
I pulled the trigger.
A satisfying eruption of sparks burst from the robot’s knee joint. His metal leg folded backward, and he fell heavily to the concrete with a clanking thud. White-hot particles continued to spray from his shattered knee.
I laughed. “Pyrophoric effect. Bet you weren’t expecting that.”
Holding the rifle’s pistol-grip one-handed, I walked toward my downed opponent, trailing the fingers of my other hand along the wall, brushing the locks of an imaginary row of school lockers.
PETMAN floundered on the ground in front of me.
“Lead’s pretty useless against steel,” I said to him. “That’s why I loaded up with Roger’s two-two-three depleted uranium instead.”
I closed in on him, watching him rock from side to side, trying to rise but unable to.
“Help, I’ve fallen and I can’t get up,” I said, and laughed again. “Not so bad
now
, are you, you toaster-oven motherfucker?”
A quick glance at the LED panel above the freight elevator confirmed that the doors would stay shut. The elevator car was now on B5, four floors down. I let my fingers trail away from the wall and stood over PETMAN’s supine form. Grinning down at him, I tilted my head to the side, lining up the red circle and dot on the center of his steel chest plate.
“I’ve wanted to do this for three years,” I told him. “Ever since poor Blake first showed me your sorry metal ass.”
PETMAN stopped struggling and went limp, his little lightbulb-head flashing his surrender at me.
Silent alarms exploded through my body. My eyes flicked to the wide steel elevator doors behind him.
Eight shiny, meter-long talons of sharpened steel erupted through the seam between the doors. Four of them folded to the left, four to the right, and like giant steel fingers, they wrenched the thick doors apart, spreading them like a curtain. Something huge thrust itself through the gap. Dozens of insectile metal limbs rippled as it poured itself down the elevator shaft and out onto the ceiling of the hallway above PETMAN.
“Hello, Trevor.” Frankenstein’s torn-metal voice boomed from a subwoofer speaker, embedded behind a cage of thick steel ribs at the center of its bulk. “Persistent little fucker, aren’t you?”
I stumbled backward, unable to form a coherent reply, and felt the rifle get yanked out of my hand. I spun to see it disappearing down the hallway, carried underneath four OctoRotors.
Empty-handed now, I turned to face the thing Frankenstein had built. Like a giant steel spider, it bristled with jointed legs. They ended in six-inch pads that clung like glue to the walls and ceiling—giant gecko feet. The size of a harvester combine, the mass of churning steel filled the fifteen-foot hallway from wall to wall, looming three feet above my head and roiling with furious, nonstop motion.
“Now, was
this
really necessary?” Metal limbs descended from its bulk to lift PETMAN’s broken body like a child’s doll. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, shooting a defenseless load carrier. It’s only a pack mule.”
With the relentless speed and precision of an automated factory, limbs blurred over PETMAN’s suspended shape. The blue-white light of an arc-welder stuttered its staccato brightness.
Unable at first to make sense of the asymmetrical, clustered shape that seethed with agitated movement in front of me, I stared at Frankenstein’s creation while it worked.
“By the way, I like your new look,” it said, pointing a spiny limb at my damaged face. “It suits your personality better.”
“Yours looks like a junkyard took a shit,” I said.
The nauseating flurry of motion I saw wasn’t just the moil of restless limbs. A cloud of Kate’s OctoRotors buzzed and hovered around it, too: pilot fish leading a blind shark. Smaller shapes crawled over and clung like remoras to the thing’s shiny struts and surfaces: Blake’s lizard-like gecko robots, each watching me with its single camera eye. But I was starting to make out the underlying structure beneath.
The thing was a monstrous, headless amalgam pieced together out of the dozens of robots and tools littering Blake’s lab. Its tens of limbs were the legs of BIGDOG and ALPHADOG units, while their canine robot bodies were welded into the fusion of melded PETMAN torsos that made up the center of its bulk.
“Say hello to GOLIATH,” the speaker in its chest said. “A lesson in evolutionary technology: what takes biology millions of years, machines can do better and faster. Would you like to see it climb a tree?”
Like a parent putting a knee-scraped toddler down after a hug, GOLIATH lowered PETMAN to stand facing me again. A thick strut had been welded to the side of his leg from mid thigh to mid calf—like a polio leg brace—with a hinge next to the shattered knee.
“Let him by, Trevor.” Limbs caressed PETMAN’s lightbulb head and metal shoulders in an awful parody of affection. “He needs to go fetch something for me.”
“What?” I asked. “An oilcan?”
Blake’s balky carrier robot ambled past my shoulder. Thinking furiously, I barely glanced at it.
GOLIATH’s legs rippled across the ceiling and down the wall as its body rotated counterclockwise to place some of its feet on the floor. Its mass filled so much of the corridor that it merely appeared to be revolving in place.
How the fuck could I fight
this
thing? I couldn’t even tell which side was up.
Taking slow, steady steps, I backed away.
With an earsplitting wrench, GOLIATH’s four twin-taloned arms tore loose from the elevator jamb behind him and retracted, mantislike, against his body. I recognized them now: CHEETAH’s legs, welded together in pairs.
Unfolding one arm, GOLIATH extended it sideways to press its twin steel prongs against the wall. Dragging the talons along the wall, he stalked toward me, gray powder drizzling from the deep grooves the prongs gouged through the concrete.
I stumbled back. Towering over me, easily twice my height and just as wide as it was tall, GOLIATH came relentlessly onward. Despite its grotesque asymmetry, Frankenstein’s larger creation still somehow managed to mimic PETMAN’s menacing forward lean.
But cowering in fear was pointless—and embarrassing, too. Now was as good a time as any to die.
I stopped backing away and yanked the Wilson out of the holster on my hip. Pointing it two handed, I scanned GOLIATH, looking for a vulnerability.
“Oh, that’s
very
intelligent, Trevor.” The thing filling the corridor in front of me laughed, the thirty-inch speaker shuddering inside its metal cage. “But don’t you think you might need a…”—something long and black whipped over GOLIATH’s back, arcing like a scorpion’s tail—“…bigger gun?”
A muzzle crown the size of a wastebasket, ringed with holes the diameter of half-dollars, thrust forward to halt three feet from my face.
I sucked an involuntary breath through my broken nose.
The barrels tracked my movement, so close that I could see the spiral grooves of rifling inside each of the seven 30mm bores.
I was staring into the muzzle of an aircraft cannon. The GAU-8.
Frankenstein’s laughter shook the floor. I felt the air from the speaker on my face.
As good a time as any…
“Fuck it,” I said, and raised the Wilson.
Something blurred the air in front of it, and my arm exploded with pain. I stared at it, stunned. The Wilson was gone. My wrist lolled loosely, fingers purpling beneath the new joint that now bent at mid forearm.
“Enough fun and games,” Frankenstein said, curling a slender steel arm back into GOLIATH’s body. “You can type well enough one-handed.”
Another invisibly fast blow snapped my ankle. I fell.
Unfolding a cluster of limbs, Frankenstein’s creature leaned over me and lifted me like a rag doll. Metal limbs coiled and encircled my arms, legs, and torso, immobilizing me as he surged forward like a wave.
We swept around the corner, and I glimpsed the long, still stretch of corridor that led to my lab.
I could barely recognize it.
Despite the pain, my eyes widened, taking in the crimson-streaked walls and floor ahead. And the still, tangled forms and fragmented pieces of human wreckage strewn down its length.
GOLIATH surged forward. Cradling me like a swooning bride in his arms, he carried me over the threshold and into a scene right out of Dante’s hell.
A
t least a dozen people had been killed in the hallway. MPs, Navy guardsmen, and Kate’s lab assistants—all slaughtered, like kittens thrown to a pit bull. The carnage was so extreme, the bodies dismantled so completely, that an exact count was impossible.
Bile flooded my throat. I tore my eyes away and turned my neck. Swallowing, trying to get the awful sight out of my head, I stared back the way we had come.
Two trains of OctoRotors now stretched behind us, dozens of them moving in an endless cycle. They carried small silvery rectangles in their manipulator arms, ferrying the high-density Lithium-polymer batteries back and forth between GOLIATH and the recharging stations in Blake’s distant lab.
A door banged ahead of us. I faced forward again to see a Navy guy burst out of the men’s bathroom. I recognized his terrified face: he was the young kid who worked the bar in the enlisted-men’s club.
“Get back inside!” I screamed. I struggled violently to free myself, to distract Frankenstein—anything to give the kid some kind of a fighting chance. “Janitor’s closet. Ceiling vent.
Go!
”
The laughter booming from GOLIATH’s speaker drowned me out. Boiling down the corridor in a ripple of legs, he seized the Navy kid between two pairs of steel mantis arms and lifted him off the ground in front of me.
“No!” I screamed. “Let him go. He didn’t fucking
do
anything.”
The kid’s eyes bulged a foot from mine, his face a taut mask of horror. He thrashed, hitting me in the face with an elbow. “I don’t want to die—”
The steel arms jerked apart with a wet, meaty rip, sending him flying against both sides of the corridor.
An involuntary sob came out of my mouth. I sucked in a breath. I didn’t want to look down. But I couldn’t help myself.
Directly below us, the kid’s knees straightened, rolling his pelvis face-up and extending his legs. His heels drummed against the floor briefly, then relaxed.
Twenty feet farther up the corridor, the kid rolled over onto his chest and tried to scramble upright. He managed a truncated pushup and crabbed away on his hands, sobbing in horror, dragging the ragged mess where his torso ended just below the ribcage.
“There was no reason to do that,” I choked out.
“True.” GOLIATH’s speaker rumbled my back. “But I wanted to.”
The Navy kid made it five feet before he was brought up short. His hands slapped and slid against the blood-slick concrete, unable to haul himself farther.
A foot above the floor, a taut rope of purple intestine vibrated with tension, holding him back like a leash. It stretched from the bloody cavity where his upper body ended, connecting his top half to his distant legs.