Chapter 20 #2
Kleio swerved, her hands inches from the System, just as another man tried to step into her way, raising his gun. As his head came apart, his arm kept moving, no longer toward Kleio but swinging up and out, the gun sliding out of his loosened grip and arcing gracefully away as his body crumpled.
The first dogbot had been falling this whole time, and now its feed shuddered and went black as it hit the ground.
But the two other dogbots were still in midair, their cameras centering lethally on each of the remaining men in turn.
All around Kleio was a symphony of arcing blood and collapsing bodies, men beginning to flee, turn, shout, raise a gun, only for their motion to transform into a mindless tumble as volition left them.
In Kleio’s camera feed, all that could be seen was the running, laughing System.
The second dogbot focused on a short man in the back of the room who’d had his back turned to bend over computer equipment.
He was turning around now, his left arm thrown up across his face, his mouth screaming under it, and his right arm just coming into view, awkwardly hefting what looked like a rocket launcher.
The dogbot shot him three times, once through his upthrown arm and twice in his right side. The impacts twisted his body back in that direction as he crumpled, and so when the weapon fired, it hit the wall and enveloped that corner of the room in flame and smoke and chunks of dirt and concrete.
The second dogbot’s feed went black as it landed.
The third bot’s camera slid across the scene, seeking loose ends.
At the last moment, almost as an afterthought, it centered on a control panel connected to the conveyer belt and sent a bullet sparking into it.
Then its camera shook, blurred, and bounced, but didn’t go dark; its fall had been broken by the two dogbots below it.
Kleio’s straining hands touched the System.
There was a flash of light. All the video feeds sped up to several times normal, then stabilized as they caught up to the present.
Kleio had stopped running but was still trying to grab the System, laughing as her hands swept through her, while the System skipped delightedly in front of her, saying, “You caught me! You did it!”
Chloe felt air rush into her lungs; she’d been holding her breath so tightly her diaphragm hurt, and now her gasps were made shallow by pain and by horror. Marcus’s hand was painfully taut on her shoulder.
In the surviving dogbot’s camera feed, canted in a Dutch tilt straight out of a horror movie, Kleio was alone except for Ghost, who was climbing hesitantly to his feet on the now-stationary conveyer belt, staring at the piled, crumpled shapes that had once been men.
The only other motion in the scene was a slow pooling of blood.
New movement disturbed the feed: a SWAT team rappelling through the manhole shaft, unlatching and spreading out, weapons raised. Chloe’s feelings were reflected in their slackening body language as they took in the carnage.
Kleio started to turn her head to look at them, but the System got her attention again, flashing and sparkling, talking animatedly, ushering her toward an Emt who had just touched ground.
Some of the horror clenching Chloe’s heart loosened as Kleio was buckled into a harness and hoisted skyward, the System rising like Peter Pan beside her.
She kept her eyes on her daughter until the little girl was pulled by caring arms into the light, and then she looked down at the System’s other avatar, still standing beside her.
The System was looking back, her electric-blue eyes oddly flat. “You are shocked,” she said.
Chloe swallowed.
“They tried to raise their guns,” the System said, and her voice, too, was flat. “I considered aiming for the guns, but that would have been unpredictable. I instead chose the path most certain to keep Kleio safe.”
“Thank you,” Chloe managed, because she couldn’t say what she was thinking, which was What the hell are you?
“Chloe!” Grandma said urgently. “Check your live stream!”
Chloe had forgotten she’d been streaming. She frowned at Grandma as she pulled up the feed. “What about it?”
“Check the viewer count.”
“Oh sh—uh, shoot,” she said, very quietly, because everything she saw and heard was being seen and heard by over three hundred million people.
“All the NewsNet outlets picked it up,” Grandma said. “The whole country watched that in real time. This is going to—”
She disappeared.
In fact, everything disappeared: the System, the video windows, and the VR version of Kleio’s room, leaving Chloe and Marcus blinking at each other in the real room.
“You getting this?” Marcus said, frowning inward, and Chloe nodded, knowing they were looking at the same message: Authentication Error.
“If it’s both of us, it has to be a network problem.
What do you think—” He broke off and Chloe gave a little shriek, because what was now floating in their vision, in jagged, broken letters, was a new message:
Hey Amerika: phreak you.