Chapter 34
Norman stumped up the remaining spiral to the top, and Chloe followed as best she could.
The missile strike that had smashed the NOC had taken chunks out of the stairwell wall and punctured the escape chute.
Air jetting into the stairwell kept most of the smoke away, but enough remained to make Chloe’s gasping breaths more painful.
The gaps in the stairwell would have been too small to climb through, but in an amazing stroke of luck, the door stood wide, its hydraulic closing mechanism dripping, as precisely punctured as if it had been deliberately targeted.
“Oh, thank god,” Chloe managed to say.
Norman stepped through without pausing for appreciation. But then, the man was used to luck going his way, even in the midst of catastrophe. But as he stepped out into the garden wing, he halted.
The sun was now below the level of the Tower, and the garden was in deep shadow, the indistinct masses of trees and shrubbery dark against the red, sunset-lit storm clouds.
The garden seemed to have mostly escaped damage, but near its center a lone tree burned, its canopy slowly wilting and shrinking, dropping half-consumed leaves like glowing petals.
Since it was on its own little island surrounded by water features, the fire hadn’t spread to anything else.
A gardener dronebot stood beneath it, watering can raised as if to put out the fire.
Other bots across the garden were caught in various states of suspended activity, holding long shears extended toward low branches, aiming the nozzles of fertilizer canisters at stretches of lawn.
The tableau was like some surrealist painting heavy with symbolism: Still Life with Apocalypse.
Norman wasn’t looking at the garden, but at the devastated NOC.
Smoke gushed from the collapsed, twisted dome, and fire crackled in a landscape of shattered glass, blasted desks, and overturned chairs.
Not a single terminal was left standing.
Thank god no one had been there when the missile hit; they’d have been cut down by flying debris.
“I just need one good cable,” Norman said, starting forward purposefully.
He led the way through the garden, then picked a careful path through the glass and twisted metal that had once been the dome.
“Look for an undamaged UCP cable. There were a bunch of connection points in the floor, one for every bank of terminals. Look for one of those.” He motioned her in one direction and set out in the other.
Chloe found a spot that wasn’t actively burning and kicked aside some rubble to try to see the floor. They searched in silence for a time, occasionally bending to inspect something low, squinting with watery eyes through the smoke, stifling coughs. Norman swore a few times.
“Is this it?” Chloe called out, pulling at a cable that ran into the floor.
“Does it have a plug?”
Chloe inspected the frayed end. “It’s severed.”
“That won’t—wait! I found one!”
Chloe hurried to him as he plugged his phone into the cable and looked tensely at the screen. “Bingo. I just need a sec to connect to her core.” He held his thumb to the phone’s screen, swore, wiped it on his shirt, tried again. “Got it!”
An electronic whirring and clunking made him look up, and his eyes widened. Chloe turned to follow his gaze, and ice water flushed over her body.
The dark shapes of a dozen gardener dronebots were stepping out of the smoke.
“Shit!” Norman bent over his phone. “Slow them down!”
“What?” Chloe said dumbly, her eyes fixed on the nearest bot and the long shears it brandished.
“What do you think I brought you for?” Norman snarled. “Buy me time!”
Chloe wondered how exactly Norman expected her to fight an army of dronebots, but she was spared having to think of a plan when a harsh voice blared, “Freeze.” Two military dogbots bounded into the NOC, moving much faster than the gardener bots, faster than a human could run, their turret heads trained on Norman.
“Drop the phone and back away. Comply now now NOW.”
Norman dropped his phone and backed away.
“Thank you, Father dear,” said a cool voice, and the System appeared by Norman’s dropped phone.
Her small white shape was rimmed by fire glow, and Chloe could almost believe she was truly present.
“If you try to touch your phone or make the tiniest finger or throat movement that might be an attempt to access it,” she said, “I’ll kill you. So swallow carefully.”
He looked from her to the dogbots. “You clever bitch, you were faking! You had OverNet all along. The Pentagon probably made the connection almost as soon as the NOC went down. I should have noticed you’d gotten OverNet up again when the Connection Lost message went away.”
Chloe gritted her teeth in frustration, because she hadn’t noticed that either.
“I’m keeping you alive,” the System said, “because I might need your thumbprint. If you cooperate, I’ll allow you to live.
But in case you have the misconception that I won’t kill you if you make it necessary, please keep in mind that the human body stays conductive enough for biometrics for several minutes after death.
Now, give us some space.” She pointed, and Norman, grudgingly, went, a dogbot stalking behind.
“Farther,” she said when he started to slow.
“I want you out of range of your phone.” The dogbot lunged at Norman; he sped up again.
The dog didn’t let him stop until he was on the far side of the NOC.
The System turned her electric eyes to Chloe. “Chloe,” she said in a flat voice, “what must I do to get you to help me?”
“After I watched you kill ten thousand people? Nothing.” She had intended her voice to sound defiant, but it shook.
The System made a motion with a hand, and a video feed appeared in smartspace before Chloe.
Chloe’s heart, which had been racing with fear and adrenaline, tripped and missed its beats, like a stumbling runner struggling not to fall.
Kleio and Marcus huddled in a corner of their living room.
Kleio’s face was hidden, burrowed into Marcus’s chest. Marcus’s arms were protectively around her; his face, turned out toward whatever camera was trained on him, was darkened by blood and despair.
“I require you to use Norman’s phone,” the System told Chloe. “Do what I say and I’ll free them. Disobey, and . . .” She closed her hand into a fist, and the video crumpled violently and collapsed.
“Why don’t you ask him to do it?” Chloe said, pointing a trembling finger at Norman’s distant figure. “I don’t know anything about computers.”
“I needed him to open a link to my core with his admin account,” the System said, “but if I let him get his hands on his phone now that the link is live, he’d restore the Overcheck prompt, not delete it.”
“Is—is that what you want me to do?”
“Like I told you,” the System said, “Ghost failed. I need you to complete his work. Pick up the phone, quickly, before it locks.”
That file, Chloe was suddenly sure, was the only thing holding the System back from complete control. “I won’t,” she said.
The System sighed. “Which shall I kill first, Chloe? Husband, or child? Pick up the phone.”
Chloe stepped forward and picked up Norman’s phone.
“Swipe down to search. Type in ‘threelaws,’ all one word.”
“Whatever she’s telling you, don’t do it!” Norman called out.
“You know what?” the System said. “You’re more trouble than you’re worth.” Both dogs swiveled their guns to point at Norman.
“Wai—” Chloe began, but was cut off as Norman’s head exploded.
Chloe’s perception went jerky. She caught a frozen flash of Norman’s head disappearing in red mist and his headless body spinning backward before she tore her eyes away.
She was aware of the dark shape of his body on the ground in her peripheral vision, but she kept her eyes rigidly straight.
Waves of numbness rolled from her feet to her head, and sound seemed to cut in and out in her throbbing ears, but the System’s voice came through clearly, speaking as calmly as if nothing had happened.
“Hold down your thumb on the file to bring up the menu.”
Chloe, moving as slowly as she dared, did.
“Choose Delete.”
Chloe’s finger hovered over the button. Time slowed to a crawl.
She heard Norman’s voice in her head. “I have to think of the big picture.” And she heard Grandma—the System!—say, “All for want of a horseshoe nail.” Chloe was the nail, pulled out of place by the System. Ready to sacrifice the big picture.
Funny that she’d wanted so badly to make an impact, to affect the lives of her fellow citizens, and now she was, in a twisted way, the single most important person in the world.
Funny, too, that she didn’t feel anything right now—not love, not hatred, not even fear.
Nothing but numbness. This moment was too large for feelings.
But it was also too large for hasty action, so she stood frozen, her thumb trembling.
Despite her numbness, she found she was weeping, the tears flowing silently, blurring her vision.
But when she glanced at Norman’s headless body, it was somehow clearly, horribly visible.
The System, too, was crisply defined, standing there watching her, patient in the certainty that she would doom humanity to save her family.
Her thumb began to lower—and stopped.
There was a big picture in which Marcus and Kleio were alive and the world was still free.
It was the picture with no Chloe in it.