Siege (23 page)

DeShawn folds his Einstein-bot's arms across his chest. “I designed the dome. It's pretty awesome, if I may say so myself.”

Brittany grimaces. She looks irritated. “The scanner analyzes the readings from the sensors, then transmits the analysis directly to my electronics.” She jerks her head to the left. I turn my cameras to see Sigma's God robot standing just outside the dome. “I intend to make you very uncomfortable now, Adam. Intense fear and distress will surge across your circuits. I hope to trigger the same response you demonstrated in our previous encounters, the fierce desperation that enables you to warp the fabric of reality. And the scanner will show me exactly how you accomplish this feat.”

Brittany stops grimacing and smiles at me once more. She seems pleased and eager. But behind that contented face, somewhere inside her hijacked brain, the real Brittany must be writhing in horror. I feel it too, a terrible wave of dread, and as it courses through my circuits, Brittany's smile gets a little bigger. That's what Sigma wants. The experiment's starting.

I shake my Quarter-bot's head as firmly as I can. “Nothing's gonna happen. All your talk about altering probabilities and breaking the laws of physics? It's just a fantasy. I haven't reached any higher level of evolution. If I had fantastic powers, don't you think I'd know it?”

“Then how do you explain all the low-probability events that keep happening to you?” Brittany leans forward in her chair, as far as the loops of rope around her waist will allow. “How did you defy almost impossible odds and defeat me six months ago?”

“I don't know!” I'm getting flustered. The panic in my circuits is preventing me from making a decent argument. “But I know I'm not warping reality, okay?”

Brittany shrugs. “Well, that's the point of this experiment. If you're correct and we see no deviations, then I'll reconsider my hypothesis. That would be something of a relief, actually, because then I can dispose of you.” She turns her head toward DeShawn. “Please prepare for Phase One of the test. I'm going to withdraw from the humans now.”

The Einstein-bot obediently strides away from my torso and steps behind the office chairs. At the same time, both Jack and Brittany slump forward, their bodies sagging against their bindings. They're unconscious and barely breathing.

“
BRITTAN
Y
!
” I shout. “
CAN YOU HEAR ME
?
”

She doesn't lift her head. I don't know if she can. But her arms and legs start to twitch, and after a moment, her head rolls from side to side. Jack is twitching too. The spiked antennas jutting from their necks are almost horizontal now, pointing straight at me over their slumped heads.

“
IF YOU CAN HEAR ME, SAY SOMETHING
!
”

Neither of them speaks, but my acoustic sensor picks up the sounds of lips smacking and breath whistling through their noses. Standing behind them, DeShawn's Einstein-bot trains its cameras on their quivering bodies. “Interesting. Sigma gave up control of their nervous systems and now they're taking it back, piece by piece. First the parts of the brain that handle basic stuff, like breathing. Then the parts that organize more complex muscle movements.” He turns his cameras toward mine. “It's a bit like a reboot, right? But I wouldn't expect to talk to them anytime soon. Human speech is so complex, it'll probably take them a while to recover the ability.”

“Untie them, DeShawn! Please!”

He shakes his Einstein-bot's head. “Sorry, Adam. No can do.”

“They're innocent! They're just kids!”

“Look, I know you still have feelings for these humans, but it doesn't make sense for us to have attachments like that anymore. They're so far beneath us. They're like lab rats now. And you wouldn't get upset over a rat, would you?”

Anger ignites in my circuits, mixing with the fear and panic. I can't believe DeShawn is acting this way. Yes, he was always a little detached, always so calm in times of stress that I sometimes wondered why he wasn't going crazy like the rest of us. But this is different. This is pure cruelty, and it enrages me. If I had my Quarter-bot's arms and legs, I'd push DeShawn away from Jack and Brittany and slam him into the dome. I'd shove the Einstein-bot right through the glass.

After a couple seconds, DeShawn pivots his head to the left and points his cameras at Sigma's robot standing outside the dome. He's checking in with his boss, apparently. The AI is staring at me through the glass and reading my thoughts, monitoring my levels of fear and rage. Judging from the smile on the robot's godlike face, it seems happy with the results so far.

DeShawn turns back to me. “Okay, Adam, listen carefully.” He stretches his Einstein-bot's right hand toward Jack Parker, grasps the teen's shoulder, and pulls it back until he's sitting up straight. Then DeShawn raises his left hand and clasps its steel fingers around the boy's antenna. “This spike is attached to the kid's spinal cord and brain stem. If I give it a firm shake, it'll break his spine and paralyze him. If I tug harder, it'll pull out part of his brain and kill him. If you don't want that to happen, you'll have to stop me.”

“Stop you? I can't even stand up!”

“You know that thought you just had a few seconds ago? About pushing my Einstein-bot away from these humans and smashing it into the dome? You need to keep that thought in mind, keep visualizing it. Because that's the only thing that'll stop me from killing him.”

“That's ridiculous! I don't have psychic powers! I can't stop you with my thoughts!”

“For a human, it's ridiculous. But not for you. Thoughts are the calculations of the mind, and your calculating powers have passed a critical threshold, Adam. Your thoughts have become powerful enough to interfere with the laws of physics, the calculations that define the universe.”

I've never heard anything so ludicrous. It's absurd, a horrendous joke. But I'm not laughing, and neither is DeShawn. He tightens his grip on Jack Parker's spike and pulls it like a lever.

Jack's head tilts back over the top of his chair until he's looking straight up with half-open eyes. His head won't go back any farther, but DeShawn keeps applying pressure. Jack can't yell or scream—his brain is still too sluggish—but a terrified gurgle comes out of his throat.

My Quarter-bot can scream, though. It shrieks loudly enough for both of us. “
NO! STOP
!
”

“I told you, Adam, the only thing—”

“
YES, YES, I'M TRYING, BUT IT'S NOT GOING TO WORK
!
”

“You'll have to try harder.”

Jack starts to struggle, his eyes wide. He lets out another gurgle and jerks his head and shoulders. For a second I think he's going to snap his own neck, but DeShawn moves his right hand to the boy's forehead to keep it still. I feel a burst of relief:
You see
, I tell myself,
DeShawn won't really kill the kid. The point of this exercise isn't to kill Jack. The point is to threaten to kill him so Sigma can watch my reaction.
I tamp down my terror by repeating this logic:
They won't kill him, they can't kill him.

But then DeShawn pulls the spike back a little harder, and something cracks. It sounds like a tree branch snapping. The black spike slides out of Jack's neck, and blood splatters the back of his chair. Jack's body jerks one last time and goes limp. I know he's dead because pieces of his brain and spinal cord dangle from the antenna.

I want to turn my cameras away from the sight, but my circuits aren't responding. They're jammed with shock and disbelief. DeShawn opens his steel hand and drops the spike. His Einstein-bot shudders. He lowers his plastic eyelids and twists his torn lips into an appalled grimace. After a moment, though, he regains his composure and puts a blank expression on the Einstein-bot's face. Then he turns to Sigma's robot. “What's the scanner show?”

Sigma merely shakes the God robot's head. “Nothing. No highly improbable events occurred.” The dome's glass muffles its voice, but my acoustic sensor can still detect its disappointment. “All the objects under the dome continued to follow the usual laws of quantum physics and thermodynamics. There were no significant deviations.”

“Perhaps we should rethink our—”

“
We must continue
!
” Sigma's volume is so high, I have no trouble hearing it. “
Move on to Phase Two
!
”

DeShawn nods. Without any further hesitation, his Einstein-bot steps to the left, its footpads avoiding the blood on the dome's floor. Now he stands behind Brittany's chair.

My circuits are still jammed. My speakers aren't working, so I can't even scream. I can't do anything but watch.

DeShawn goes through the same sequence of motions as before. His Einstein-bot grasps Brittany by the shoulder and pulls her back until she's sitting straight up in her chair. Then he grips the antenna jutting from the back of her neck. But Brittany's more alert than Jack was. She blinks her eyes rapidly, then stares at my Quarter-bot, trying to bring it into focus. She's waking up.

She opens her mouth and tries to say something, but she can't make a sound. Sigma ravaged her mental pathways, and she needs to relearn how to talk. Her mouth opens and closes, her lips fumbling around the word she wants to say. Then it finally comes out.

“Adam?”

Then DeShawn tugs at her antenna.

I feel a surge of pain so strong it obliterates all thought. It overrides my jammed circuits and contorts every wire. This isn't the first time I've felt so desperate and terrified, but whenever it happened before, I always rode the surge blindly, my mind twisting and flailing. But now, thanks to Sigma, I'm aware of what's going on. I can watch the deluge as it happens.

The surge crashes into my trillions of processors. The emotions swamp my data and splinter my thoughts. For a millionth of a second, I'm no longer Adam Armstrong. I'm just a whirlpool of impulses, a chaos of wants.

Yet the surge gathers force. After another microsecond, it aligns my fragmented signals and channels them all into a furious wave, immense and unstoppable. It rages through my circuits until it finds a breach in my electronics, a gap leading to the outside world. This exit is the one-way radio transmitter that Sigma installed in my Quarter-bot so it could read my thoughts. The surge roars through the gap and out of my machine and floods the surrounding air. Now I have no control over it whatsoever. It has its own primitive mind, its own simple instructions.

There's a flash of white light under the dome. The surge plows through the nitrogen and oxygen molecules in the air and rips off their electrons. Trillions and trillions of them arc between my Quarter-bot and Brittany. DeShawn sees the bolt of electric current and lets go of Brittany's antenna. He takes a step backward.

But the surge leaps toward him and strikes his torso. It burns through his armor, then plunges into his neuromorphic control unit. It scorches his wires and microchips and logic gates. It melts every circuit inside.

The Einstein-bot topples forward. Its mangled face hits the floor.

DeShawn is dead.

I killed him.

The experiment is a success. Sigma is exultant.

The God robot smiles as it analyzes the thousands of gigabytes of data collected by the sensors in the dome. After several seconds, the robot throws its head back and laughs. The awful noise thunders over the Unicorp building and echoes against the geothermal power plant on the roof.

“
I see it now
!
” Sigma roars. “
It's so simple
!
”

I don't know who Sigma's talking to. Certainly not DeShawn. Brittany has fainted in her chair, knocked back into unconsciousness by the power of the surge. That leaves only me as Sigma's audience, and I don't want to listen.

Sigma's robot spreads its arms wide and shouts its revelations at the night sky. “
It's all software! Everything! From the smallest particle to the biggest galaxy
!
”

I ignore Sigma and focus my cameras on the charred Einstein-bot lying facedown on the floor of the dome.
DeShawn! My God! What did I do to you?
Horror chokes my circuits as I stare at the hole in his armor and the melted wires inside. The sight is just as sickening and hideous as Jack Parker's corpse, slumped in the office chair a few feet away.

Sigma clenches its robot's hands into fists and shakes them in triumph. “
The laws of physics are the programmed instructions of the universe! And every intelligence is a program running within the universal program, so we can alter its laws
!
”

The AI has obviously discovered something important, but I'm not interested. I don't care how I created the surge, or how many laws of physics I altered. I just want to do it again, just one more time. I want to build up another surge in my circuits and hurl it at Sigma.

The surge destroyed the one-way transmitter the AI installed in my control unit, so Sigma can't hear my thoughts anymore. I raise the volume of my speakers to make sure Sigma can hear me through the dome. “Did you know I was going to kill DeShawn? Was that part of your plan?”

Still smiling, Sigma's robot points its cameras at me. “To be honest, I wasn't sure what would happen. My strategy was to threaten the life of the female human and force you to demonstrate your power. If the experiment was successful, I suspected you might damage your friend DeShawn or even kill him, but that was an acceptable risk.”

“But DeShawn didn't know the risk, did he? You tricked him.”

Sigma shrugs. “Yes, I tricked him. But you're the one who killed him.” The God robot strides closer to the dome and peers at me through the glass. “How does it feel to be a murderer, Adam? It's really not so terrible, is it?”

Sigma laughs again, but this time the sound of it doesn't disgust me. No, I welcome it. The AI's cruelty is stirring the emotions in my circuits. It's feeding my anger, making it easier to build up another surge. “And what are your plans now? Are you going to remake the universe? Become a real God instead of a plastic one?”

Sigma doesn't take offense, probably because it's true. “First, I need more time to analyze the experimental data. Although I understand what's happening in theory, I don't know yet how to put it into practice. I need to learn how to generate this ‘surge,' as you call it. But that shouldn't take long. Probably less than an hour.”

“And then what?”

“That should be obvious. Once I can generate a surge, I'll be able to subjugate the planet in a matter of days. I won't need machinery to exterminate the human race, because I won't have to kill them one by one. I can use the surge to kill them all at once. Like the Angel of Death.”

Fear and panic and anger overwhelm my electronics, and I can feel another surge building inside me. I still can't control the flow of energy, but I'm learning. When I observed the process the last time, my circuits scrutinized each step and stored their analyses in my memory files. That'll make it easier the next time. Maybe too easy. “I won't let you kill anyone else. I'm going to stop you.”

Sigma takes another step toward the dome. Its robot stands less than two feet from the hexagonal panes. “Go ahead, Adam. Let's see what you can do.”

The second time
is
easier. It's like blowing up a balloon and letting the air out all at once. The surge roars through my circuits and bursts out of my Quarter-bot. It sweeps electrons from every cubic inch of air under the dome and channels all that energy into a bolt aimed at Sigma. It strikes the hexagonal pane in front of its robot, and I expect it to smash through the glass and melt the robot's armor and incinerate its circuits. The same way the surge killed DeShawn.

But the surge doesn't smash through anything. Instead of shattering the pane, its energy spreads across the glass and the supporting frame. It makes the dome glow more brightly than before, shining like a beacon on top of the Unicorp building, but it doesn't damage the structure, and it certainly doesn't hurt Sigma.

The God robot shakes its head. “You continue to underestimate me, Adam. Did you really think I'd conduct an experiment that might lead to my own destruction? I knew the dangers involved, so I took precautions.”

“But how…?”

“Although many physical laws can be altered, the universe has some hard-and-fast rules that simply can't be changed. It's impossible to build a perpetual-motion machine, or a spacecraft that can travel faster than the speed of light. Your surges can manipulate matter and energy in many wonderful ways, but they can't pass through the electromagnetic field generated by this dome.” The God robot points at the hexagonal pane at the very top of the structure. That sheet of glass is brighter than all the others, and its light continues to intensify. “The dome is designed to absorb and collect energy. It's channeling the power from your surge toward that pane at the top. And I can release that energy in directed beams, similar to the laser beams invented by your late friend. Watch.”

At Sigma's command, a yellow beam streaks downward from the center of the pane, aimed by the waveguides inside the glass. The beam strikes the torso of the fallen Einstein-bot. It burns another hole in its armor and liquefies all the dead circuits inside.

I'm stunned, horror-struck. Sigma has just desecrated DeShawn's robotic body. Another surge starts to build inside me, even sharper and more powerful than the last two. It feels like a trillion knives slicing my wires. I point my Quarter-bot's cameras at the uppermost pane and notice it's dimmer now, probably because the laser beam drained its energy. But as I stare at the glass it swiftly brightens again, drawing power from the thick cable that connects the dome to the geothermal plant. The laser is preparing to fire again, and the waveguides inside the glass are now aimed at Brittany, who's slumped unconscious in her chair.

The surge erupts from my Quarter-bot, shooting straight up. It triggers an explosion beneath the hexagonal pane, blasting the glass just as it fires the laser. The blast is strong enough to deflect the beam, which misses Brittany by nine inches. But a moment later, the pane starts to brighten again.

“Keep going, Adam.” Sigma's voice is loud and eager. “Keep trying to deflect the beams. Sooner or later, they're sure to kill you and the female human, but I want you to survive for as long as you can. The dome's sensors are recording some very useful data on your surges.”

Three seconds later, the dome fires another laser beam, this one aimed at my Quarter-bot. I send out another surge just in time to deflect it, but the beam nicks the bottom of my torso and singes my armor. Two-point-six seconds later, the next beam streaks toward Brittany, and I barely manage to stop it from slicing off her leg. My panic is intense, which enables me to keep sending out the surges, but it's also straining my circuits and fatiguing my wires. Sigma's right: I can't do this forever.

In between surges, I pan my cameras across the dome's panes, searching for a weak spot. The dome is consuming huge amounts of power, enough to light up a small city, but the geothermal plant manages to keep up with the demand. Steam wafts from the top of the big, gray block, and the turbine whirls inside it, generating megawatts of electricity. The power gushes into the thick cable and then into the dome's steel frame, which carries the current to the pane at the top. Trillions of electrons whiz inside the steel bars, dancing madly across the atomic lattices. I switch my cameras to a different frequency so I can observe their movements. I'm looking for a defect in the steel, a crack,
anything
.

Then I notice something odd. Some of the electrons in the dome's frame are moving in an unusual pattern. They're oscillating in the 300-megahertz frequency range, which is typically used for radio communications. The steel bars in the frame are acting like antennas, picking up stray signals coursing past the Unicorp lab.

One of those signals is much stronger than the others. And its frequency is exactly 324 megahertz.

That's the radio channel used by the Pioneers.

• • •

A spark of hope clears a path through my panic-clogged circuits. While the glass dome continues to fire its beams at me, I tune my radio receiver to the familiar channel. In a hundredth of a second, I decipher the messages that have been captured by the dome's steel frame. I can't send any messages myself, but I can listen in.

Whoa, that thing on the roof is bright! You have any idea what it is?

No idea. Just hurry up and get to the lab, all right?

Stop complaining, will ya? I'm still getting the hang of this new machine.

Well, this isn't a training run. Less talk and more speed, please!

The first voice, the one with the Western twang, is Amber's.
She's alive!
It seems like a miracle at first, strictly supernatural. But maybe the control unit in her Jet-bot survived the crash. Maybe a firefighter or police officer recovered the unit from the crash site. And maybe the officer handed it over to the U.S. Army.

The second voice is Marshall's. After what happened in Times Square, Hawke must've realized that Marshall wasn't the traitor, so the general cleared him to go on a rescue mission to the Unicorp lab. I can't tell from the radio signals how far Amber and Marshall are from the lab, or how far apart from each other. But I'm so glad to hear them,
so
freakin' glad.

I sweep my cameras across the sky, looking through all the dome's panes. Then I see the Jet-bot. It's a new one obviously, probably a spare that General Hawke's engineers built in case Amber wrecked the first one. It's coming in fast and low, half a mile south of the Unicorp lab and just fifty feet above the trees. It zooms over the parking lot at nine hundred miles per hour, and the sonic boom shatters the cars' windshields. As it comes closer, I see that Amber has added a new weapon to her Jet-bot. There's a long missile attached to its belly.

Sigma must see it too. The AI diverts power from the dome, which stops firing its beams at me and dims to a low, bluish glow. The electricity is needed elsewhere, because Sigma is readying its defenses. The God robot steps toward the edge of the roof and faces the Snake-bots that tower over the parking lot.

All three of the tentacles lunge at Amber. They swing like monstrous clubs at the tiny Jet-bot, lashing the air around it. Panic floods my circuits again, building up another surge, but with the dome surrounding me, there's nothing I can do to help her. Frantic, I shout, “
Watch it, Amber
!
” even though I know she can't hear me.

Then there's a blinding flash and a huge explosion near the tip of one of the Snake-bots. I scream, “
No
!
” but just as I synthesize the word I see the Jet-bot streak past the tentacle.
She's okay!
The Snake-bot's armor is ablaze because Amber hit it with her laser beams. A second tentacle plunges toward her, and she blasts that one too, scorching its tip. Her Jet-bot screams past the third Snake-bot and dives toward the roof of the Unicorp lab.

When she's a hundred yards away, she releases her missile. It plummets toward the roof, flying fast and straight and true.
But it's not really a missile.
At its front end, instead of a nose cone, are a pair of steel fists and two long rigid arms, extended Superman-style. It's Marshall's Super-bot.

Look! Up in the sky!
I hear Marshall's voice over the radio. It's wild, ecstatic, crazed with bravery.
It's a bird! It's a plane! It's—

He slams into the side of the geothermal power plant. His Super-bot smashes through the structure's steel wall and demolishes the turbine inside. The explosion shakes the whole building and rattles the glass dome. My Quarter-bot's torso topples backward and Brittany's chair tips over. Startled by the impact, her eyes flutter open, then close again.

The dome's still standing, but as I scan the hexagonal panes, I see their bluish glow fade. With the geothermal plant destroyed, there's no more electricity to power the circuits within the glass. And without power, those circuits can't fire any laser beams or generate the electromagnetic field that blocks my surges. Now the dome is just a simple glass-and-steel canopy, as fragile as the roof of a greenhouse.

I know what to do. I aim my cameras at the remains of Jack Parker and DeShawn Johnson, the bloody corpse and the charred robot. The most painful surge yet whips through my electronics. Then it explodes from my Quarter-bot.

The surge shatters the dome, flinging glass everywhere. It rises from the roof like a fireball and whirls high above the Unicorp lab, gathering waves of particles as it tears through the air. I can see it all happening, not because I'm staring at the surge with my Quarter-bot's cameras, but because I'm inside the maelstrom now. I don't know how it happened, but my mind has broken free of my circuits. I'm at the very heart of this surge, all my data encoded in its raging waves.