Willful Machines (32 page)

“About a year ago he hacked my car's guidance system,”
Dr. Singh said. “Took me to a house deep in the woods, a secret lab down in the basement. Showed me the video.”

She paused to cough, and a fresh trickle of blood raced from the corner of her mouth. All the talking had weakened her, but she radiated a desperate urgency, and I started to understand why: she believed she was dying. She wanted to make her last confession.

“So he faked his own death,” I said. “And then he blackmailed you.”

She gave a nod. “He wanted my help to build a new 2B.”

“Nico.”

“Yes.”

“What for?”

“He told me he was working for your father, in secret. Staging acts of terror to show people the danger of 2Bs before the danger became real. He said if I helped, I'd be making up for what I'd done to Ruth.”

“You're telling me my
father's
behind all this?”

My voice sounded thin in my ears. I could barely move air into my lungs. The strange thing was, I'd noticed before how each of Charlotte's attacks had always come at just the right time to help Dad advance his career. The first one, when Waring supposedly died, got the Human Values Movement going in the first place. Three years later the tanker explosion made people clamor for Dad to join the race for the presidency. Then Charlotte's strike on the New York Subway happened
right when Dad's numbers were down—thanks to my stupid stunt on the bridge—and he needed a boost to win the election. The uproar following the Statue of Liberty attack got his Protection of Humanhood Amendment on the table. Now he needed something even more dramatic to help him push the Amendment through state legislatures. I sat back on my heels and stared at the bloody floor while I tried to breathe.

“Listen to me,” Dr. Singh said. “I believed Waring at first. Until I found out what he planned to do with Nico. I couldn't imagine your father would agree to something like that.” She coughed again. Blood spattered her chin. “Then something happened to confirm my suspicion. Sometimes I'd overhear Waring telling his puck to send a message to the Prime Mover. I'd always assumed the Prime Mover was your father. But about a week ago, Waring sent the Prime Mover a message
about
your father. And about something called the Not2B.”

I didn't like the sound of that. “So what's the Not2B? And who's the Prime Mover if it's not my dad? And what's their plan for Nico? Why are they doing all this?”

She didn't answer. Instead, her eyes shifted to a spot just behind me. “Oh no,” she murmured.

A
cat-shaped robot with sharp silver teeth stood in the doorway to the bedroom, about ten feet away from us. Mouthtrap. He tilted his feline head and peered at me with—I imagined—recognition. My body felt even colder, like I'd just plunged into the river again. Dr. Singh's arm knocked against a vodka bottle. Mouthtrap's eyes pivoted toward her.

“Don't move,” I whispered.

I eased to my feet. The Creature's eyes shifted back to me. He crouched, his head dipping toward the floor. I knew what that meant.

I bolted toward the far side of the room. My shoes skated across the puddle of Dr. Singh's blood, and I almost plowed into a pile of bottles and hamburger cartons. I grabbed a standing lamp and spun around. Mouthtrap, bounding after me, launched himself into the air. I swung the lamp like a baseball bat. A big gamble, considering my near-total athletic ineptitude. By some miracle, the blow connected. He
crashed into the wall and disappeared behind a pizza box.

Panting, I gripped the lamp. Mouthtrap had seen me. That meant Paul Waring, and whoever he was working with, now knew I was in the building. The Spiders would already be on their way. I had only seconds. I turned the switch on the lamp's base. It still worked. I crouched next to Dr. Singh.

“I have an idea, Dr. Singh,” I whispered, so Mouthtrap couldn't hear. “I'm going to draw Mouthtrap away. As soon as I'm gone, use this lamp to signal the soldiers outside for help.” I laid the lamp across her chest, with the top pointing toward the window, and wrapped her hands around the base. “Do you know Morse code or something?”

She let out a weak, croaking laugh. Her eyes had closed again.

“Maybe just flash it on and off,” I said. “They'll figure it out. Can you do that?”

She murmured something, but it didn't sound like a yes. It didn't sound like a word at all. She'd started sinking toward sleep again.

The pizza box rustled. Mouthtrap reappeared. He crouched again. I thought of the bomb in my watch, but if I set it off now, I'd have nothing to use against the Spiders.

“Please, Dr. Singh. You have to try. You can't just give up. Do you understand what you need to do?”

Another inarticulate murmur.

Mouthtrap pelted toward us. I exploded to my feet. I threw a vodka bottle at him—missing by a mile this time—and raced
out through the bedroom door. Then I wheeled around just in time to glimpse the Creature flinging himself into the air. He landed on my chest. Gripped my blazer with his claws. Sank his teeth through my clothes and skin into the meat of my shoulder. I stumbled back, pain lancing through me, and tried to remember why I'd thought it was a good idea to give my nonlethal pest catcher razor-sharp teeth. I ripped him off me and lobbed him across the living room. Then I yanked the bedroom door shut, grabbed a heavy metal ashtray from a table, and bashed off the doorknob. That wouldn't stop the Spiders from getting in, but it might buy Dr. Singh some time.

Across the room, Mouthtrap was back on his feet. One of his forelegs had broken off, but that wouldn't slow him down much. I bolted through the apartment's front door and down the corridor. He galloped after me. I bounded down the main staircase. Outside, lightning flared again. Rain lashed the windows. I'd just made it past the third floor when long silver legs appeared on the landing below me. Thinking fast, I swung my legs over the banister and jumped down to the flight below—just like action heroes always did in movies, except in my case my legs gave out as I landed and I toppled down the stairs, landing in a heap on the second floor.

Above me, the Spider had already done an about-face. It flowed down the steps, with Mouthtrap close behind. I sprang to my feet and hurried down to the first floor.

A second Spider waited at the base of the stairs. Again I
veered to the side and jumped over the banister to the main hall's flagstone floor. I stuck the landing this time and kept on running. I swerved into the library, with a vague idea of losing my pursuers in the maze of bookcases and escaping through the smaller side exit. The room's musty smell enclosed me. Its massive chandelier coated everything in a yellowish glow. I knew this place well. Maybe I'd make it out of the building yet. Dodging into an aisle, I threaded my way across the main floor until I reached the spiral staircase leading up to the mezzanine. My shoes clanged on the iron steps all the way to the top.

I glanced behind me. Mouthtrap had pulled into the lead. He launched himself at me again. I dodged to the side. He sailed clear over the mezzanine railing and crashed into the chandelier. The light swayed. Its bulbs shattered and popped. Sparks and broken crystals showered the floor below. Mouthtrap toppled and smashed somewhere among the bookcases.

Meanwhile, the Spiders had almost caught up with me. I clambered onto an old-fashioned rolling ladder and kicked off with every bit of my strength. The ladder sailed along the wall, books blurring past me. I stumbled off on the opposite side of the mezzanine. Now I just had to pound back down the staircase on this side, slip out the library's side exit, and make my escape.

I screeched to a stop. A swarm of floating lights melted out from among the bookcases in front of me: the hijacked pucks. The Spiders appeared on either side, flanking them, flanking
me. I stood with my back to the mezzanine railing, scraping air into my lungs. No doubt in my mind now: the time had come. I jammed down the buttons on my watch and counted the seconds in my head.

Again, I only made it to two. Something yanked my arms tight to my sides. I lost my grip on the watch. A thin cord had wrapped around my legs and arms and torso, and a puck was making spirals around my body, trailing the end of the cord behind it. When it reached my shoulders, it made a bigger circle and dove through the loop to form a knot.

From behind me came a skittering sound. I glanced over my shoulder. Rapunzel's Barbie doll head grinned back at me from the mezzanine railing. She leaped onto the broken chandelier, the cord unspooling from her side. Her legs intertwined with the light fixture's golden arms. My chest heaving against the tight cord, I whirled around again. The pucks surged forward. I stumbled back, tripping over my own tied-together feet. My back slammed against the railing. I pitched over the side.

The cord pulled taut, yanking me to a stop, cinching my lungs, leaving me swinging upside down three feet above the bookcases. The chandelier shivered nervously. Broken crystals rained down on all sides. My head throbbed as all the blood in my body crammed itself into my skull. At first I squirmed inside my cocoon, but that only made the cord tighter, so I just focused on dragging air into my compressed, starving lungs.

Then I coughed. Something was burning. I craned my neck. Below me, licks of flame appeared here and there, flashing among the bookshelves. The sparks from the chandelier must've kindled the books.

One of the Spiders, taking no notice, leaped down from the mezzanine to land on top of the bookcases. Straddling two, it raised its foreleg level with my stomach, a flashing butcher's knife fixed to the end. Around us, the fire had already spread. My eyes stung. Waves of heat seared my skin and made the air shimmer. I pictured the Spider slicing open my belly just like it had Dr. Singh's. I writhed and twisted some more, squeezing more and more blood downward, until I thought my head might explode.

BOOM.
Not my head. The library window, smashing inward. Twinkling shards of glass and blown-in raindrops filled the room like stars. In the middle of it all, Nico charged toward me, straight through the blaze, bounding from bookcase to bookcase. His shock of curly hair caught fire and went up like a torch. Without even seeming to notice, he slung me over his shoulder and leaped. He grabbed the cord trailing behind me, jerking it hard. The chandelier fell, its crystals chorusing the whole way down. It crashed on top of the Spider.

We landed. Nico took a half second to unwind the cord from around my body and swat the fire out of his hair before scooping me up again. Behind us, the second Spider leaped down from the mezzanine. The library had turned into an
inferno—all those books my grandfather hadn't wanted to part with, now nothing but kindling—but the Spider didn't mind the fire any more than Nico had. It locked its eye on us and hurtled forward.

Nico raced through the side exit into the hallway. The fire had already beaten us there. Support beams were crashing to the floor. Curtains of flame blocked our way in both directions. But the old-fashioned elevator stood across from us, its doors wide open. We tumbled in. Nico pushed the button for the fourth floor. The accordion doors folded shut. He set me down, slumped against the wall, and pressed his palm to his forehead.

“What is it?” I said.

“Charlotte.” He pressed himself upright. “But I'm holding her off.”

“Is this thing safe?”

“I think so. It's not networked, so Charlotte can't control it. Listen, here's what's going to happen. We'll go up to where the fire hasn't caught yet and then climb out through a window.”

“We have to stop at Dr. Singh's rooms first. She's probably still there. We have to make sure she gets out too.”

The elevator ground its way upward, maddeningly slow. Since the last time I'd seen him, Nico had taken off his bloody shirt and torn away the loose flesh from his chest, leaving his synthetic pectoral muscles and the crimson glow of his power supply fully exposed. Above that, his wild hair
had mostly burned, exposing a scorched scalp, and much of his face had ripped away, shredded by his jump through the window, leaving visible his metal jaw and the rubbery ropes of muscle suspended from his cheek. But his brown eyes—those I still recognized.

“How did you find me?” I said.

“Trade secret.” He touched my shoulder. “You're hurt.”

“It's nothing.” I glanced at the floor indicator. We'd just reached the third story. I knocked my fist against the wood paneling. “Can't this stupid thing go any faster? That Spider must know exactly where we are now that you're networked again. What if it's outside waiting for us when the doors open?”

“Don't worry. I've got a plan. We'll be okay, Lee.”

I punched the fourth floor button a few more times, just in case.

“So you found Dr. Singh,” he said. “Did she tell you anything?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but then I glanced into Nico's eyes again. Paul Waring was probably watching me through them at that very moment. And not only that. How was Nico going to feel when he found out the Charlotte he knew had never even existed? I knew how. Like he'd lost a mother. I shook my head. “There wasn't time.”