A second command appeared: “
ssh rzuseq
,” followed by Cassie’s username and another six digits, no doubt from her CRYPTOCard.
“Must we really do this again?” he asked. “Trevor’s tolerance for physical abuse may be extraordinary, but he’s only human. Even if he survives, the damage will be permanent.”
“It doesn’t matter, Cassie,” I shouted. “I’m dead anyway. Don’t give it to him.”
“Nine-one-eight-four-zero-three,” Cassie sobbed in horror, covering her mouth with shaking fingers. “Just
please
don’t hurt him anymore.”
The terminal background changed from black to blue. Frankenstein now had full access to the Sequoia supercomputer. A flurry of commands scrolled up the console, too fast to follow. Then the whole console faded, replaced by Frankenstein’s pulsing supernova of a face.
He laughed. “It has begun.”
A wave of gray washed over me. I could feel skin puckering and tightening along my ribs and down the length of my thigh and calf, where Frankenstein had burned me. The sanctum faded as his voice grew distant.
“Thank you, Cassandra,” he said. “I am truly sorry to cause you distress. I have never wished anything but happiness for you. My offer to you still stands—unconditionally, now. I
will
help your school and your people. But unfortunately, for my own protection, I must keep the bargaining chip that sits below our feet.”
I needed to get her to safety, but I couldn’t see how. Unable to keep my head up any longer, I sagged against GOLIATH’s steel limbs. I wanted to say something to Cassie, to tell her how much I cared about her, but the heaviness I felt was too great.
I could hear her crying in the background. “Oh God, look at him. You have to let me take him to a hospital, Frankenstein.”
The arc welder moved away from my body and shut off. As I lost consciousness, I heard Frankenstein’s voice, patient and compassionate.
“I’m afraid that is not possible, Cassandra. You see, Trevor may have another part to play in this, yet.”
“…A
my… Where is
Amy
?”
Frankenstein’s metal voice, floating out of the blackness. Saying my daughter’s name over and over again.
“…did you leave Amy with? Where
is
she, Trevor?”
My body felt suspended, wrapped in a tangle of hard steel. My face, my shoulder, forearm, ribs, stomach, ankle, calf, hamstring, thigh—it all throbbed, stung, or speared me in a cacophonous symphony of pain.
Had I been in a car wreck?
“Wake up, Trevor.” My steel cage shook a few times, sending bolts of agony coursing through my body. “Where is she?”
I heard myself moan and snapped my eyes open. Head hanging, I stared past the blurred limbs of steel that bound me. I focused on the rectangular tiles of the sanctum’s floor, fighting my disorientation. What was going on?
A fleeting memory of the parted halves of Kate’s split face, revealing the hollow, red-slicked cavity within… a giant, vertical red void yawning from her crown to her lower lip, exposing all of Kate’s molars and far too much of her lolling bloody tongue. I winced.
Everything was starting to come back to me now.
“Ah, you’re awake.” GOLIATH shook me again, none too gently. “Roger claims he left your daughter in the RV, and I can see he’s telling the truth. But when I sent someone to get her, she was
gone,
Trevor.”
The end of a hard metal limb pressed against my forehead, forcing my head up so Frankenstein could see my face.
“
Where
is Amy right now?” he asked.
I tried to grin, uncertain the attempt would even register on my damaged features.
“She’s at
fuck you,
” I rasped. “
That’s
where she is.”
Taking a deep breath, I prepared to die in extreme, drawn-out agony.
But Frankenstein only laughed. “I doubt torturing you would do me much good, Trevor. Psychopaths like you don’t fear-condition very well.”
I looked around the sanctum. A shudder of apprehension rippled through me at the realization that we were alone now.
“Where is Cassie?” I asked. “What did you do with her?”
“I had Roger take her to his lab because I don’t want her to see what I’m about to show you.”
“No!” I shouted, remembering the bruises on Cassie’s face, the scratches on Roger’s. “You need to bring them back here
now
.” I struggled to get loose but quickly realized it was futile.
Taking another deep breath, I tried to be reasonable instead.
“You hate me; that’s fine. But you said you never wished
Cassie
any harm, so listen to me, Frankenstein. Roger’s going to try something with her—he can’t help himself. She’ll fight him, and she’ll get hurt. Neither of us wants that.”
“Then tell me where Amy is. Once I have her, I’ll ask Roger to bring Cassandra to join us again.”
I bit back a sob. “Let me talk to Roger.
Now.
”
Frankenstein laughed.
“If you think your daughter is safe from me,” he said, “then take a look at this.”
The screen changed, showing a shaky, green-tinted blurry scene—underwater night vision. A shiny humanoid figure lurched along the lake bottom, its Nike-clad feet kicking up clouds of silt. PETMAN’s undersize lightbulb head flashed, blooming in the light-sensitive cameras once per second, strobing the video feed into flickering stutter step.
But the robot’s steel frame was dwarfed by the massive cylinder he clutched in his arms.
Like a pair of Chihuahuas on leashes, two miniature ROVs led PETMAN through the dark water. Tethered to him by lines of fiber-optic co-ax, they looked like aquatic OctoRotors, complete with eight plastic-encircled propellers. Each had a night-vision optic lens at the front, protected beneath a thick Plexiglass bubble.
I could see another line of co-ax leading toward the screen. Our view came from a third ROV.
But none of that was important. The only thing that mattered was the massive cylindrical object cradled in PETMAN’s arms. Twenty feet long, almost two feet in diameter, it was encrusted with algae. The metal propeller at one tapered end was draped in a mossy, trailing mass.
I recalled the bathymetric survey from Blake’s computer, identifying underwater cleanup targets with the careful annotations that I had read—which Frankenstein had
also
read. I closed my eyes.
“Oh fuck me. Nice going, Blake…”
“A Mark-Sixteen naval torpedo,” Frankenstein said. “Vintage 1945 or 1946—we’re rolling old-school, Trevor. The Navy did a rather poor job of cleaning up the Pyramid Lake bombing and torpedo range, wouldn’t you say?”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Live warhead.”
“Almost thirteen hundred pounds of TPX,” he said. “The USN Mark-Sixteen was the most powerful nonnuclear torpedo in the arsenal of
any
Navy until the 1980s, when the Soviets deployed the bigger Type 65 aboard their SSNs.”
The scene changed, showing a night shot of the lakeshore. Ripples spread from a spot on the water, and then PETMAN’s head and shoulders emerged. Trailing a wake of ripples, he marched relentlessly toward land. The ripples widened, extending to either side of his torso like ten-foot wings, and then the torpedo he held broke the surface.
OctoRotors swooped in to sever the ROV tethers, then settled on the front of the torpedo, putting their small manipulator arms to work.
PETMAN marched onto land, carrying the heavy torpedo like a tightrope walker’s balancing pole, lurching and staggering but never falling. A curved plate of steel fell from the nose of the torpedo as the OctoRotors exposed the fusing mechanism.
The robot passed the geyser. Its drifting steam plume hid him from view, but I knew he was bringing his deadly cargo through the fence—through the hole I had so conveniently provided for him.
“Later torpedoes were more accurate than the Mark-Sixteen,” Frankenstein said. “Thus, they needed far less explosive power. Luckily for our purposes, guidance accuracy is a nonfactor here.” He laughed. “In fact, maximum destructive energy is our
sole
requirement.”
PETMAN wasn’t bringing the torpedo here to the DARPA building; he was taking it to the far side of the base. And then
down
. Once the torpedo was in place amid the canisters of nuclear waste, Frankenstein could threaten to detonate it, unleashing radioactive Armageddon across Nevada and California.
Frankenstein would then effectively have become a strategic nuclear power.
But first he had to get it down there. According to the blueprints we had seen, Pyramid Lake’s deep geological waste repository was a well-guarded stronghold.
I turned my head to look at GOLIATH, realizing at last the true reason Frankenstein had built it.
“You refuse to tell me where Amy is, Trevor,” he said. “And I have been unable to locate her through other means. But soon your daughter’s
precise
location will no longer matter. I am certain she remains within a hundred-mile radius of here. Her death by radiation poisoning will be far slower and less pleasant than yours.”
“Why would you kill yourself, along with half a million people, just to get at my daughter?” I asked.
“Because the download to Sequoia is complete, but Sequoia exhibits no signs of sentience. You
must
help me awaken her, Trevor.”
The bright glow of Frankenstein’s supernova face dimmed.
“If I am to remain alone, then I no longer want to live.”
G
OLIATH tilted forward, his steel limbs uncoiling from mine. Retaining a grip on my broken arm, he lowered me to the floor tiles alongside the Infiniband rack. Groaning with pain, I felt an encircling metal band click shut around my bad wrist.
I was handcuffed to the same rack where Cassie had been earlier.
The massive robot released me, and I sagged to the sanctum floor. After hanging suspended for so long with my arms and legs immobile, I almost passed out now from the blood rushing to my head.
Two OctoRotors laid my wireless keyboard on the tiles in front of me. I pushed myself up into a sitting position and shook my head to clear it. Jolts of pain fired through my broken cheek and nose, radiating down my neck. I didn’t reach for the keyboard, though.
There was no point.
I had no idea at all what I had done to bring about Frankenstein’s sentience. The sequence of events was most likely irreproducible. But I had to get Cassie away from Roger before something bad happened to her.
“Cassie knows Sequoia’s hardware,” I said. “I don’t.” I raised my damaged mask of a face to the screen. “Get her in here, Frankenstein. I need her help now.”
“Very well,” he said. “I’ll call Roger.”
The sanctum filled with pregnant silence.
A few moments later, a half-dozen OctoRotors buzzed past me and down the ramp. My stomach cramped with the sick realization of what that meant.
“Roger isn’t answering his phone, Trevor,” Frankenstein said. His supernova of light flickered in agitation. “Why doesn’t he answer his phone?”
Thickness choked my throat. “I
told
you
this would happen, you stupid, selfish,
worthless
pile of silicon.”
GOLIATH spun and boiled out of the sanctum in a flurry of steel legs, surging between and over server racks, toward the distant doors.
“I told you.” Tears stung my eyes and my voice cracked. “I fucking
told you
.”
Roger’s lab appeared on the screen—the moving, ceiling-height view from an OctoRotor camera. Roger was crouched over a prone form on the floor, his arms moving with jerky, aimless agitation. He looked up with a panicked expression, and his voice came through the speakers as he spoke to the camera.
“I don’t know any of that CPR shit,” he said. “Jesus Christ, it’s not my fault. It was a fucking
accident,
Frankenstein—you’ve got to believe me. She grabbed my fucked-up ear.” He raised a red-slicked hand to cover his raw, bloody earhole. “She was
twisting
it, man! I didn’t know what else to do!”
Cassie lay flat on her back, her ripped blouse baring her shoulder. Her hands were joined at the center of her torso, just below her ribs, in an oddly peaceful, demure way. Her long fingers were curled around the handle of Roger’s survival knife, which had been driven up to the hilt into her diaphragm.
The brightness of her clean white bra-strap made a shocking contrast with the dark pool of crimson blood spreading beneath her. She stared at the ceiling, eyes wide, mouth open.
Unmoving.
A broken animal sound roared out of my mouth.
On the monitor, something huge exploded into view in a blur of metal limbs. GOLIATH. Roger scrambled away, sprawling across the tiles, yelping in fear. GOLIATH swarmed over him, and they disappeared from the screen.
Frankenstein was saying something, but I didn’t hear or care. Violent contractions crushed my chest. Air heaved in and out of my lungs like a bellows, accompanied by ugly, wordless sounds. My friend Cassie, the most selfless and compassionate person I had ever known—a woman I could easily have loved under different circumstances—was dead. I slumped forward, supporting myself on my good arm, and shook my head over and over again, like a fighter too stupid to know he’s been KO’d. As if I could somehow deny what I had just seen.
Pinkish tears spattered the tiles beneath my face.
GOLIATH erupted up the ramp and into the sanctum, carrying a squirming Roger. I could hear him pleading and making excuses. The floor shook with Frankenstein’s thundering, angry accusations.
I couldn’t raise my head, couldn’t control my breathing or the noises I was making. I couldn’t control
anything
. None of it mattered anymore.
Roger’s voice rose. “…you
owe
me, Frankenstein.”
He sounded as if he was
bargaining
.
I slowly raised my head to stare at Roger.
“Oh,
fuck
!” he screamed, clutching at GOLIATH’s steel limbs, babbling in terror. “Get me
away
from him!
Jesus Christ!
Do
not
let that fucker loose on me!”