Chapter 29
KLASKY LED brODIE AND TAYLOR into the AARS room, with its miniature of the training village and an assortment of computers and display monitors, then showed them to a desk with a large monitor and two chairs.
The monitor screen showed a grid of four dozen windows displaying frozen video feeds.
Each window had a number in the upper left, one through forty-eight, along with a text designation—a unit number for the bots, or a name and rank for the Rangers.
The major said, “We’re cued up to the beginning of the exercise. You can press the space bar to play all the feeds at once, and type in a number followed by the enter key to make a particular camera full-screen. Press escape to get back to the grid.”
“Thank you,” said Taylor.
Brodie and Taylor sat down, with Taylor at the keyboard. Brodie moved the mouse over the upper left corner of the window and closed it.
“What are you doing?” asked Klasky.
“The date is wrong.”
“You told me March twelfth.”
“I meant the twenty-first. I’m dyslexic.” When he tried to open the file browser, a window popped up asking for a password.
Klasky gave an exasperated sigh as he leaned in and entered the password. He opened the file browser and selected the footage for March 21.
Brodie looked at the new grid of body cams. All the bots’ screens showed black-and-purple pixelated images that were impossible to make out.
Some of the Rangers’ screens were dark as well, while other Rangers’ cameras picked up their fellow teammates as ghostly orange and yellow shapes against hazy purple backgrounds.
Major Klasky explained, “This was a nighttime exercise. All participants were equipped with thermal-imaging body cams. The Rangers also had night vision goggles. The D-17s can see infrared without additional hardware.”
The Rangers were already getting their asses kicked in broad daylight, and apparently they were being made to fight these things at night too. Camp Hayden was a sadistic place.
Brodie looked over his shoulder at Major Klasky. “Thank you, Major. We’re good here.”
Klasky didn’t move. “I must remain. Camp protocol. This is classified material.”
“Believe it or not,” said Brodie, “I’ve reviewed classified material without an officer breathing down my neck.”
“Pretend I’m not here.”
“My imagination’s not that good.”
Taylor added, “Sir, we are reviewing this footage for potential evidence of misconduct, which may or may not point us toward a person of interest in our case. It would be against our protocol for you to be present for that.”
Major Klasky appeared unhappy with being told what to do by warrant officers. But, to his credit, he said, “You’re right, Ms. Taylor. I’ll leave you to it, and I’ll be in my office. Let me know when you’re done.”
Taylor said, “Thank you, sir.”
Klasky left the room and closed the door behind him.
Brodie refocused on the screen and read through the names on each of the camera feeds. He found the windows for the cameras on Sergeant Miller, PFC Greer, and Number 20—a.k.a. Bucky.
Taylor pressed the space bar.
They watched the dozens of video feeds play simultaneously.
Brodie focused on the Ranger cams. One Ranger’s POV was from behind a machine gun nest in the road.
Another aimed a grenade launcher out of a window.
A third, perched on a high rooftop, looked out at the blank desert, which resembled a flickering purple sea.
Brodie watched Sergeant Miller’s camera. He was standing in front of another Ranger, gesturing. There was no audio. Then the other Ranger headed for the stairs and up to the rooftop of the building. Miller took his position in the second-floor window and watched the narrow road below.
Brodie checked Greer’s camera. He wasn’t moving, and his body cam showed a formless black-and-purple mass. He recalled from the earlier VR playback that Greer had lingered next to a wall in the opening moments of the battle.
All at once, the tin men’s body cams began to move, quickly cresting the sand berm and sprinting toward the village, their M4 rifles raised and firing at full auto toward the defending Rangers.
Through Bucky’s body cam, Brodie caught pieces of the other charging bots as they all raced toward the village.
A few of the tin men fanned out and Brodie saw full-body images of them.
The thermal imagery rendered them as reddish-orange man-shaped hulks running at impossible speeds, their legs a blur as their feet pounded against the sand, their upper bodies almost motionless in an unnatural and inhuman way, rifles raised, spitting out hundreds of yellow shell casings from their M4s’ ejectors.
Brodie’s eyes bounced among the forty-something viewpoints. A Ranger on a rooftop was hit. He sat and slumped against his firing nest as he removed his helmet—his resignation visible even in the distant thermal image. The Ranger’s feed went dark.
The tin men were quickly closing the distance. Some of the Rangers held their positions, waiting until they had a clean shot. Others fired from the roads, trying to get a kill before the enemy breached the village boundary.
Brodie watched the camera of a rooftop gunner who was trying to rake the wave of red figures bounding across the desert.
He tried to lead them, but the tin men varied their speed and their angle of approach.
One spun away from an incoming barrage and then changed direction on a dime, like a skilled running back dodging a tackle—an insane quick-reaction maneuver impossible for any living thing on earth.
Bucky was toward the center of the charging line, and within a second he was running down a street in the village.
Brodie and Taylor were now both focused on PFC Greer’s camera. He hadn’t moved. On all the other feeds, the battle had intensified. Two tin men scaled the wall of a building. Another took out a Ranger who had popped out a window to get a shot. One by one the Rangers’ feeds blinked dark.
Sergeant Miller was lobbing grenades into the road below.
The underbarrel launcher only held one round at a time and he would quickly take cover and reload between shots.
The inert grenade cartridge thudded into the road, with the advanced GPS-based system presumably registering it as a simulated detonation.
A tin man near one of the grenade impacts froze in place and sat down in the road, apparently within the virtual blast radius.
Greer remained where he was, against a wall and away from the action.
Taylor said, “He’s panicked. Or having another psychotic episode.”
Then Greer began to move. He ran around a building, then spun into a doorway and bolted up a narrow set of stairs.
He entered a small room. Directly ahead of him was another Ranger, firing grenades out the window. It was Sergeant Miller.
Greer slowly walked toward him. Then he pointed something at the sergeant. It was a pistol.
“Holy shit,” said Brodie.
Brodie looked at Bucky’s body cam as the bot ran into a building and up the stairs. It entered a room, and its camera picked up a full-body image of PFC Greer standing in the middle of the room, aiming his pistol at his platoon sergeant’s back.
Bucky lowered its rifle. Waited a moment. Then ran up the next flight of stairs to take out the Rangers on the rooftop.
Greer took a step toward Miller, pistol still raised.
Miller must have been hit through the window. Through Greer’s camera, they saw the man set down his M4 rifle and remove his helmet, then turn and sit on the floor. For a moment, Miller’s body cam caught the image of Greer standing over him, pistol raised. Then Miller’s camera blinked out.
In Greer’s camera, they watched the orange-yellow mass of Sergeant Miller sitting on the ground, staring down the barrel of Private Greer’s pistol. He barely moved.
Greer took another step forward. Even in the thermal image, it was clear that the sergeant was remaining calm, trying to talk his soldier off a ledge.
A moment later Greer dropped the pistol, and then crouched. His body cam began to subtly shake up and down. He was crying. Miller stood and walked to him.
Another D-17 entered the room and shot PFC Greer in the back, then moved through the room and up the stairs. Greer’s body cam cut out.
The two agents sat in silence as they watched the remaining couple of minutes of the battle play out across the patchwork of images. When the last of the Rangers’ cameras went dark, ten tin men remained standing. Another grim defeat.
Brodie and Taylor looked at each other. Then Taylor said, “Bucky knew. It fucking knew, Scott. It saw that one of the Rangers was going to kill another, and it just moved on.”
Brodie now understood why Major Ames was so interested in this incident. It showed a level of cognition—maybe even malice—that these things were not supposed to possess. And in the real-time VR playback of the after-action review, Ames was probably the only one who had noticed it happen.
There’s a ghost in the machine.
Praetorian. They had to figure out what it was, and who put it there, and why.
Taylor said, “Blackmail.”
Brodie looked at her. “What?”
“Why did Private Greer allow Ames to access the Vault alone on three separate occasions by giving him his code, a major violation of protocol? One time, I can understand maybe. He got pressured by a commissioned officer. But Ames was aware of Greer’s schedule, and at what times the private was alone, and exploited that.
Greer understood that he was helping Ames do something that the major did not want anyone else knowing about.
Why would he do that? Because Ames knew Greer had almost fragged his platoon sergeant.
And he was the only one who knew other than Miller.
And I’m sure he promised Greer he’d keep it that way. ”
Brodie nodded. “So long as Greer returned the favor regarding the major’s late nights in the Vault. These two interacted much more than the private let on. So what else is this guy hiding from us?”
Taylor stood. “Let’s find out.”