Chapter 21 #2
The Ranger made it to the gun and blasted away into the village. He was unable to score a hit. Then Brodie noticed the remaining red triangles—seven of them—congregating on a road far away from the machine gun nest. They remained motionless, waiting. Brodie didn’t understand what was happening.
Taylor, who had situated herself on the opposite end of the table, said, “Look.”
Brodie walked over to where she was standing, and from that vantage saw a single red triangle scaling the tower toward the sole surviving Ranger as he blasted at the village below with the mounted gun.
The bot reached the top and the blue icon immediately vanished.
Shot in the back. He never saw it coming.
Then the red triangles all blipped out, and a floating scoreboard appeared in front of Brodie: BLUE TEAM: 4. RED TEAM: 36. VICTOR: RED TEAM.
The score faded away, and then SPC Christiansen Blair flicked off the blacklight and the model village grew dim.
Brodie and Taylor removed their headsets, a bit bleary-eyed and disoriented. For a moment no one said anything.
Captain Pickman, feeling the need to contextualize the Rangers’ performance, said, “Four kills is a good day. Not their best, but better than average.”
Brodie asked, “Do the Rangers have comm links?”
“Yes.”
“You wouldn’t know it by the way they were moving once the bots reached the village perimeter. Total chaos. Unprofessional, especially by the standard of Rangers, frankly.”
Pickman narrowed his eyes. “Do you have combat experience, Mr. Brodie?”
“I do. As does Ms. Taylor. I’ve been in battles like this, minus the robots, and I had the choice of either winning or dying. And if I had gotten killed, I’d have had the luxury of staying dead, not waking up and doing it all again tomorrow.”
Pickman eyed the model of the training grounds.
“It’s an issue of speed. The bots move and shoot faster than the Rangers can even communicate.
The Rangers can run the same exact play, day after day, to try to refine it, but the bots will react a little differently each time.
Not because they’re learning—they’re not—but because of random chance.
How the sun hits the buildings, wind kicking up a cloud of dust here or there.
And one slight change—a bot choosing to turn right instead of left—leads to a cascade of new actions and reactions, and within seconds the playbook’s in the toilet. But the men are working it out.”
“Actually, they’re losing their minds.”
The captain looked back at Brodie and clenched his sizable jaw. “We all have our duties here, Mr. Brodie. As I understand it, yours is to either find or rule out foul play. How is that going?”
“Fantastic,” replied Brodie. “Everyone’s a suspect.”
Pickman did not react to that.
Taylor, looking to change the trajectory of this conversation, turned her attention to Cousin May-bell. “Who has access to this room?”
The specialist replied, “All officers and NCOs. But camp regulation is that an individual trained on the system—in this case, myself—needs to be present to access and operate the computers and headsets.”
“Have members of the DEVCOM team viewed these playbacks?”
She nodded. “Yes, ma’am. One or two of them are always present at the after-action assessment following each exercise.”
“Have they come in independent of the after-action assessments?”
“Only Major Ames.”
“How often?”
“Oh, a lot.”
Brodie and Taylor shared a look.
Brodie asked her, “For what purpose?”
Christiansen Blair shrugged. “Above my pay grade, sir. But I’d say the major was a meticulous man.
He wanted to take more time with the recordings than was typically afforded in the after-action reports, which are basically a real-time playback as you just saw but live-narrated by Sergeant First Class Miller or one of his subordinate NCOs. ”
Taylor followed up: “Was this practice of his consistent throughout your time stationed here?”
The SPC thought a moment. “No, ma’am. More in the last couple of months. Like, March. Maybe late March.”
Brodie recalled that the first of Major Ames’s three nighttime visits to the Vault to visit with Bucky had occurred on April 3. Something had spurred that behavior. Something, maybe, that he’d seen in this room.
Brodie turned to the captain. “We’ll need a few minutes alone now with the specialist. Thank you, sir.”
The captain offered a creepy little smile and said, “If you need to interview May-bell in private, that can be done anywhere, Mr. Brodie. If you are interested in continued access to this system, an officer or NCO must be present.”
Taylor said, “Sir, we may or may not need Specialist Christiansen Blair to access the after-action review system. That will be determined by me and Mr. Brodie. In order for us to conduct a fair and thorough investigation, that determination is not, and cannot be, your business.”
That was the most tortured and long-winded “fuck off” Brodie had ever heard. He put a bow on it by adding, “Thank you for your time and attention, Captain Prickman.”
“It’s Pickman.”
“Isn’t that what I said?”
Pickman opened his mouth to reply, thought better of it, then just nodded sharply. “You know where to find me.” He said to Specialist Christiansen Blair, “Whatever they need, May-bell.”
“Of course, sir.”
Pickman looked at the agents one last time, then left the room and shut the door.
Brodie said to Taylor, “He’s a delight.”
“We can’t all have your charisma.” She asked the SPC, “Do you keep logs of when each recording is accessed?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Can you pull up whatever recordings Major Ames requested to watch?”
“Well, that might not be so simple. He watched a lot of them, and I can’t remember precisely when that began.
I have no logs that tie any individual playback to a given visitor either.
” She asked, “Is there something in particular you’re looking for, ma’am?
If you let me in a little, I might be a better help. ”
Taylor smiled at her. “If only we knew what we were looking for, Specialist. Sometimes an investigation is like throwing darts.”
“While blindfolded,” added Brodie. “And drunk.”
Taylor eyed the model village. “Do the Rangers or D-17s wear body cams?”
“Yes, ma’am. They all do.”
“Do you have that footage?”
“No, ma’am. The footage is classified.”
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know.”
“That seems odd. You must have speculated.”
Christiansen Blair hesitated, then said, “I have, ma’am.
It’s one thing if someone leaks stories about this place.
Or gets access to these VR renders. Those can be denied.
But the body cams—hundreds of hours of high-definition footage of training battles between Army Rangers and human-sized robots, captured from fifty different angles.
You’d have a hard time denying the existence of this program if that gets leaked. ”
Brodie asked, “Who does have access to this footage?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. “But I can tell you for a fact that Major Ames did not have access, because he came to me to try to view the footage. He kind of wouldn’t let up, didn’t believe I didn’t have a way to get it.
” She walked over to her computer and after a moment pulled up a text file with some notes.
“March twenty-first. That’s the date he was after.
I can pull up our VR recording of that exercise, if it’s worth anything to you. ”
“Yes,” said Taylor. “Thank you.”
They put the awful headsets back on and watched the model village as it lit up in neon green and became populated by red and blue shapes.
As before, the tin men began behind the sand berm and crested the top, and hundreds of rounds were exchanged between the opposing forces.
This exercise seemed to be going even worse for the Rangers than the last one.
They didn’t get a single kill on the approach, and as the tin men entered the village they systematically fanned out and took out their targets.
Two bots were taken out by grenades, but that was it.
Within minutes, all the Rangers were gone.
Brodie and Taylor looked at each other. They must have missed something—something very important to Roger Ames. The question was, would a couple of CID agents even know what might be noticeable to a computer scientist? Probably not.
Taylor asked the SPC, “Can you play it back at half speed?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Taylor said to Brodie, “Let’s take different vantage points.”
Brodie rounded the village model so that he was facing what would be the village’s southwest corner, and at an approximately forty-five-degree angle from the sand berm where the D-17s emerged.
Christiansen Blair hit play, and this time the icons moved much slower.
The red triangles slid across the open expanse as the Rangers fired from their positions.
Slow-motion tracer fire streaked through the air like a laser light show, each round now discernible as a glowing dash of colored light piercing the air and vanishing on impact.
As the tin men advanced slowly across the open desert, Brodie’s eyes landed on one particular Ranger who appeared to be acting erratically.
As the others held positions in windows and doorways or fired rounds from mounted guns toward the advancing bots, one blue icon remained motionless against the wall of one of the buildings.
The guy wasn’t taking cover, or in a good position to score a kill. He was just… frozen.
Brodie kept his focus on the little blue avatar.
After a minute, it entered a two-story building.
Brodie crouched to look through the tiny doorway.
The Ranger stood there, motionless. On the second story, another Ranger was positioned in an open window, probably armed with a grenade launcher that he was waiting to fire once the tin men were in range.
On the rooftop above, two Rangers operated a mounted machine gun that was firing into the open desert.
The bots entered the village and fanned out, slowly and confidently, like a stalking pack of wolves. Brodie’s Ranger of interest kept his position, motionless, in the center of the room on the first floor.
Then the Ranger walked upstairs to the second story.
As he entered the upper room, the soldier positioned at the window fired a grenade round at the street below.
A miss. He fired another through the window in the building across the narrow road just as a D-17 crossed his field of view. A direct hit, and a hell of a shot.
Brodie’s Ranger stood in the center of the second-story room a moment, then drifted toward the Ranger with the grenade launcher, who must have had his back turned as he looked for targets out the window.
The Ranger stopped again, maybe eight feet from the Ranger in the window.
Below, a red triangle had entered the building and was quickly moving toward the stairway and up to the second floor.
Brodie stepped closer and peered into the little model building as the D-17 walked into the second-story room.
He expected a sudden burst of gunfire to follow, but the tin man did nothing.
It watched a moment, as the odd Ranger stood motionless, and the one by the window fired another grenade round into the road.
Then the tin man continued up the stairs to the rooftop and quickly dispatched the two gunners up there.
Brodie said, “Pause it, please.”
The scene froze.
“Back it up a couple of seconds.”
“Yes, sir.”
The red triangle descended back to the second floor. A grenade round arced back into the window where the Ranger was positioned. Brodie’s Ranger of interest stood frozen.
“There. Pause.”
The images paused. By now, Taylor had rounded the table to see Brodie’s vantage point. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know. Something with these three. The Ranger in the middle has been moving erratically. And the bot in the room here doesn’t notice the Rangers or decides to let them be. It bypasses them entirely and goes to the roof.”
Taylor stared at the three little shapes. She asked the specialist, “Is there a way to see who these three are?”
“Yes, ma’am. It’s a display mode I can call up. One moment.”
Three pieces of text blinked on above the shapes. The Ranger in the window was Sergeant First Class Mike Miller. The other Ranger who had been acting so strangely was PFC Tom Greer.
And Brodie knew before he even looked that the red triangle, the tin man that was acting so inexplicably, was Number 20. Bucky.