Authors: Mark Alpert
Marshall shakes his head again and twists his plastic lips into a frown. “Oh, I agree with you on that score. There's no doubt that Sigma's in charge of those North Korean factories. We may not have any proof yet, but I'm sure of it.” He falls silent, still shaking his head.
Six months ago Sigma captured and tortured Marshall the same way it did me, forcing him to watch Jenny's deletion too. Now there's a look of agitation on his face, which probably means he's remembering the experience. After a couple of seconds, though, he grins again. “But that's not my point, Adam. My point is that Zia's feelings for the general are intensifying. She's moving beyond hero worship, if you know what I mean. The girl is in love.”
Another twinge of discomfort runs through my electronics. It's not just Marshall's mocking grin that bothers me. It's the implication that Zia is acting like a fool, that it's completely ridiculous for a Pioneer to have romantic feelings for anyone, whether it's a human or another robot. I don't believe that, not for a nanosecond. If anything, I have too many of those emotions roiling my circuitsâfeelings for Shannon, who's been avoiding me since we returned to New Mexico, and also for Jenny, who's gone forever.
And then there's Brittany, a friend from my old life in Yorktown Heights, my secret crush when I was human. She used to come to my house every weekend and practice her cheerleading routines in my living room while I watched from my wheelchair. Dad told me she's in New York City now, going to a special high school for runaway teens. She knows I'm still alive but has no idea what I've become.
I raise my right arm and point a steel finger at Marshall. I want to tell him how much I disagree with him. I want to make him feel the same discomfort I'm feeling. “You know what I think? I think you're the one who's obsessed.”
“Really? How so?”
“You're jealous. You like Zia, and you're jealous of Hawke.”
Marshall cocks his Super-bot's head and trains his cameras on me. He says nothing and his plastic face reverts to a blank stare. At first I think he's taking time to think of a good comeback, but as the seconds pass and the silence lengthens, I realize he's making a point. I've hurt him.
He finally synthesizes a long, theatrical sigh. “Ah, Adam. You've just proved you know nothing about me.”
Now I feel terrible. I forgot how vulnerable Marshall is. Before he became a Pioneer, his life was a total nightmare. His sickness was worse than anything the rest of us had; while DeShawn and I wasted away from muscular dystrophy and Shannon and Zia fell victim to cancer, Marshall had to endure the agony of Proteus syndrome, the rare genetic illness better known as Elephant Man's disease. In the final years of his short life, his arms and legs swelled to enormous size and his head became studded with bony, hairless knobs. Horrified and ashamed, his mother hid Marshall in the basement of their house rather than let him go out in public. He spent most of his time reading poetry and occasionally sneaking upstairs to steal bottles from his mother's liquor cabinet.
For Marshall, the Pioneer Project was a chance to start over. It was more than just an escape from his deformed bodyâhe thought he could erase his whole shameful past. That's why he put Superman's face on his robot instead of his former human face. But no matter how hard Marshall tries, his old life is still there, just beneath the plastic skin. The pain of it is embedded in his circuits.
I want to apologize, but I don't know what to say. A simple “I'm sorry” doesn't seem like enough. I devote more of my computing power to the problem, and after a hundredth of a second I come up with a good apology, a few words that might make Marshall feel a little better. But before I can send the sentence to my voice synthesizer, I hear rapid, clanging footsteps behind me. A bolt of joy and dread slices through my circuits. It's the commander of the Pioneers, Lieutenant Shannon Gibbs.
She has an official Army name for her robotâthe Air-Land Unit with Reactive Armor, or ALURAâbut I like to call it the Diamond Girl. Her machine is only six feet tall and doesn't have thick steel armor like my Quarter-bot or Marshall's Super-bot. Instead, her robot's skin is lined with a mesh of diamond chips and small explosive charges, each the size of a bottle cap.
Her armor is reactive, which means that when a high-speed missile or artillery shell approaches ALURA, the robot shoots one of its charges at the incoming projectile. The charge detonates on contact, destroying the missile before it can hit her. The great advantage of this system is that it's much lighter than ordinary armor, giving Shannon incredible speed and maneuverability. Her Diamond Girl can run across rough terrain at fifty miles per hour and accelerate to twice that speed for short distances.
The other advantage of her armor is that it's mind-blowingly beautiful. The diamond chips reflect and scatter all the light beams that strike her. Even in the drab Danger Room she's a dazzling sight, sparkling in all directions.
I stride toward her. Like me, Shannon decided against building a humanlike face for her robot, but she came up with a cool alternative: a virtual face that's displayed on a video screen at the front of her Diamond Girl's head. This face is modeled on Shannon's human face, which her parents recorded on hours and hours of home videos before she became a Pioneer. Shannon's software splices the video images to give the impression that her old face is speaking for her. As her voice comes out of her robot's synthesizer, the screen shows her human face mouthing the words. The software allows her to display emotions too. The face on the screen smiles when Shannon's happy, and it frowns when she isn't.
The Diamond Girl's head is turned toward Zia, who's still lying on the floor with a few hundred of DeShawn's modules clinging to her armor, completing their repairs. I step closer to Shannon to get her attention and notice that her video screen is turned off. Shannon has no face today. Her camera lenses pivot behind the blank screen, looking past me. “Zia!” she shouts. “What are you doing on the floor?”
In response, Zia's War-bot flexes its repaired arms and legs. Then it levers itself upright and stands on its footpads. “I didn't lose,” Zia insists. “DeShawn cheated. He's an outrageous cheater.”
The last of DeShawn's modules detach from Zia's armor and rejoin the hovering swarm. “That's the thanks I get for fixing you?” His voice buzzes above her, sounding amused. “Next time I won't bother. I'll just leave you lying there.”
Shannon shakes her Diamond Girl's head. “All right, DeShawn, get yourself together. And I mean that literally.”
“Yes, ma'am!” All the hovering cubes suddenly dive and converge at a spot about ten feet from Zia. The thousands of modules snap together, each piece finding its place. Within seconds the box is reconstructed, except for the few hundred missing pieces that Zia crushed.
I take another step toward Shannon and point at DeShawn's box. “Pretty amazing, right? He used hydrochloric acid to burn holes in Zia's armor. But I still can't figure out how he got the acid into the cubes without burning them too.”
Shannon doesn't turn toward me. Her camera lenses stay fixed on Zia and DeShawn. “The insides of the cubes are lined with Teflon, which is acid-resistant. DeShawn gave me a briefing on the technology last week.”
This clears up the mystery, but I'm disappointed. DeShawn and I usually share all our ideas as we work on them. I didn't know he was giving private briefings to Shannon. Yeah, she's our commander, so it makes sense for DeShawn to offer her the first look. But I still feel left out. “Well, it's ingenious, that's for sure. So are you going to challenge him next? Match your Diamond Girl against his Swarm-bot?”
Instead of answering, Shannon steps away from me. She completely ignores my question and strides across the arena. My dismay turns to shock. Shannon's supposed to be my girlfriend! How could she treat me like that?
She marches about ten feet forward, then turns around to face us. Although her screen remains blank, she strikes a commanding pose, folding her robotic arms across her Diamond Girl's torso. “Listen up, Pioneers. General Hawke is on his way down to the Danger Room. Can you please try to create at least a semblance of military order before he gets here?”
Reluctantly, we assemble in a line next to Shannon. When it comes to discipline, the Pioneers are probably the worst unit in the whole U.S. Army. The only one who takes the rules seriously is Zia, and that's because she comes from a military family. Marshall rolls his Super-bot's eyes as he takes his place in line. DeShawn's Swarm-bot doesn't budge from its spot on the floor, and its interlocked modules let out a low, rude buzz.
A moment later, General Hawke bursts into the room. He's breathing fast, his face is flushed, and there are dark patches of sweat on his desert-camouflage fatigues. But I'm not alarmed by his condition, because Hawke is one of those Army commanders who's always rushing down hallways and charging across parade grounds, stopping only to scowl at his men and bellow orders. He's a big manâsix-foot-four and 251 pounds, according to my sensorsâand though he's almost sixty years old, he's in great shape. His forearm muscles bulge under his rolled-up sleeves, and he has a full head of white hair above his ruddy face.
Shannon raises one of her sparkling arms in a salute and synthesizes a deafening “ATTTENNNNNN-SHUN!” Zia is quick to salute too, her War-bot snapping to attention. Marshall is deliberately slower, and so am I. DeShawn's robot can't salute at all because it has no arms, and I envy him for it. I have mixed feelings about the general.
Hawke turns his head slowly from left to right, inspecting each of us. He's doing his best to keep his face stern and unreadable, but my circuits analyze his expression to give me a sense of what he's thinking. Partly, he's proud of the Pioneers. He's led the project since Day One, when we were just a bunch of scared kids flailing around in steel bodies, and he can take a lot of credit for turning us into warriors. But he's also a little scared of us, though he'd never admit it. He knows we've grown so powerful that the Army can't really control us anymore.
Also? I think he's a bit jealous. The rules of biology make it impossible for anyone over the age of eighteen to become a Pioneer. Once you're past adolescence, the mind becomes too inflexible to be transferred to silicon circuits. But if Hawke could somehow break those rules, I'm pretty sure he'd make the transition himself. The general has no wife, no kids, and no strong ties to any of his fellow humans. And he loves power.
His gaze lingers on my Quarter-bot for an extra couple of seconds. I wonder if he's trying to read my mind the way I'm reading his. He clears his throat.
“Good morning, Pioneers. As you know, we're reviewing the data from our operation in North Korea, and I want to give you an update. We just finished examining the Snake-bots and found no traces of radiological, chemical, or microbial agents on their armor. It's still possible that the North Korean factories are manufacturing weapons of mass destruction, but we have no evidence yet. In particular, we saw no signs of the anthrax bacteria that we believe are in Sigma's possession. Needless to say, we're very concerned about what the AI may be doing with the microbes.”
I'm concerned too. The anthrax was one of the loose ends from our first battle with Sigma. When the AI took over the nuclear missile base in Russia, it also acquired a huge supply of the lethal bacteria, which had been made even deadlier by the researchers at a Russian bioweapons lab. But after the Pioneers forced Sigma to flee the base and escape into the fiber-optic lines of the Internet, the anthrax was nowhere to be found.
Hawke believes the AI arranged for the germs to be shipped elsewhere so it could use them for future attacks. Anthrax is a perfect weapon for Sigma because it can kill billions of people without destroying their infrastructureâthat is, all the supercomputers and factories and communications lines that the AI would like to inherit after it exterminates humanity.
Anxious, I shift the weight of my Quarter-bot from footpad to footpad. Marshall, I notice, is doing the same. But Hawke seems calm. He's breathing slower now and the sweat on his forehead is drying. “Our surveillance satellites continue to monitor the North Korean base, observing the soldiers as they repair the damage you all caused. But in the meantime, there's an important lesson you should all take away from this mission. Sigma could launch its next attack at any time, so we need to improve our readiness.”
Hawke gestures at the arena and the obstacle course. “I'm glad to see that you're taking advantage of our training facilities. In addition, I've asked my superiors in the Pentagon for more funding, and they just gave me some good news. They've approved a budget increase that will allow us to strengthen our team.”
That really
is
good news. Although Dad's laboratory is well-stocked with motors and sensors and neuromorphic circuits, it doesn't have all the equipment we need to build more advanced machines. DeShawn and I have talked about adding new kinds of weapons to our robots, but we've run into a problem: the most powerful weapons, such as fiber-optic lasers, are simply too heavy. We have to miniaturize the laser's power source, and that's going to take some serious work. But maybe the additional money from the Pentagon will help speed things up.
I raise one of my Quarter-bot's hands. “Sir, will any of the funding go to the laboratory? We're trying to develop a new weapons technology, and we could really use some testing equipment.”
Hawke narrows his eyes. He doesn't like it when I ask questions. “Unfortunately, we can't have everything, Armstrong. This funding has already been allocated to another effort, a project I've been working on for the past few months. My goal is to restore the Pioneers to their original number.”