Chapter 35
TAYLOR WORKED ON CALMING THE man down. She rubbed his back and made him drink water.
Do it.
Brodie heard it in his head, rattling around. Couldn’t get it out. Never would get it out.
He crouched in front of Greer and grabbed the man’s jacket lapels. “Look at me.”
Greer looked up at him. Tears streaming down his face.
“We can end this. Do you understand? We can end them. I need you to pull it together. What was Ames doing down in the Vault? What did he find?”
Greer looked into Brodie’s eyes and tried to calm himself. He exhaled deeply, then stood up. Brodie and Taylor rose as well. He said, “I need to move.”
They walked along the flat-topped mesa. Greer now began talking quickly.
“The major suspected there was something going on with Bucky before that incident with me. He told me something weird happened during a load-out. That’s when they bring the tin men up and into the trucks to drive them to the training ground.
It’s usually two load-outs, six units at a time.
One day, Ames is there for it, they release twelve units, which includes Bucky.
First squad goes up, the other squad waits for the elevator to return.
And while they’re waiting, Ames notices Bucky looking around the room, looking at the other bots, looking at its own hand, bending its fingers.
Then it sees Ames watching it, and it goes right back to standing still like the others.
” He paused. “The major told me that it was almost like Bucky had… woken up. Like it was seeing things for the first time.”
The sun slipped beneath the horizon and the sky grew purple in the dusk.
The night sounds of the desert began—sparse and sporadic at first, like an orchestra warm-up.
A distant songbird. Crickets chirping. A coyote somewhere in the gathering dark, howling for its pack.
The stars, too, were just beginning the show.
Brodie began to feel his surroundings in a different way. As if all his senses had been dialed up and he was somehow seeing and hearing what he never had before.
Like the thing had woken up.
Maybe that was Praetorian. A wake-up call buried in code. A bugle at dawn. Rise and shine, tin man.
He became newly aware of his body, and the scale of the world, and how small he was upon the land, loping across the flat mountain. He was high up in the high desert, and somewhere far to the west were the hills, then the houses, then the ocean.
He was in the Black Hawk. Rotors beating the air. The little houses and the pools and the palms. The carpets of green wilderness. The masses of millions settled on two sides of a mountain on the edge of the Western world.
He suddenly realized that he was alone.
He whipped his head and saw Bucky explode into hundreds of pieces beneath the high-noon sun.
Why don’t you resist?
The Army gave them numbers. The Rangers gave them baseball player names. But what about the D-17s themselves? What did they call each other?
Nothing. They were one. Linked in space and consciousness.
Geolocating each other every half second.
Responding like one organism, reactions to reactions to reactions.
He saw the virtual red avatars swarm the village.
He saw the pulsing yellow infrared hulks, pounding the earth, rattling off thousands of bullets without breaking their stride.
It was a wave, one wave, breaking against the concrete, a wave narrowing into rivers down the roadways, a wave cresting up the walls, onto the rooftops. Drowning the little blue men, snuffing them out, one by one.
Why don’t you resist?
He could see it now. Bucky didn’t care. Bucky didn’t exist. Or maybe it was worse. If these things were as smart as he feared… It wasn’t that it didn’t care. It wanted to be destroyed. That was why it had killed Kemp. Look what it had accomplished. Mayhem. Discord. Mutiny.
But why?
Because of you.
Their investigation. That was a threat. What about Roger Ames’s investigation? Maybe that was a threat too. Maybe that was why he was dead.
Bucky didn’t know everything. It didn’t know most things. But maybe it knew enough to act on some imperative…
Brodie was in the morgue, looking at the spongy mass of the major’s decimated brain.
A thing asks questions that it shouldn’t, a thing looks where it shouldn’t. Kill it.
But then more people come, from a place called CID. Bucky couldn’t know that. But then what? Kill them too? No. Then more would come. Instead… instead…
Make them destroy each other.
Do it. Do it. Do it.
The sky was fading into twilight. More stars shimmering. He now noticed that Taylor and Greer were a distance away, at the base of a desert willow. He walked to them.
Taylor looked up at him as he approached. She smiled and patted the ground next to her.
Brodie sat down. He felt happy, suddenly. He felt young. He felt like the world was new.
Taylor said, “Tom is telling me how Roger was getting into the history of the area. Studying the Mojave tribe.”
“I’m glad he had so much free time,” said Brodie.
“Don’t be an asshole.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“I’ve seen your best, and it ain’t enough.” She smiled to let him know she was joking. She didn’t normally do that.
Greer was on his back, staring up at the stars, talking in a soft, calm voice.
“The Mojave lived along the Colorado River. Their lives were centered on it. Transportation, irrigation, fishing, hunting. It was all about the river. They believed that at the dawn of time one of the gods drove a willow branch into the earth.” He pointed up and Brodie looked.
A cluster of wavy branches spread against the sky, lined with blooming flowers that looked black against the starlight.
“The branch brought forth the water. It sprang up and created the river. The river created life.”
The river created life.
Sergeant Brodie was by the Euphrates outside Baghdad. The riverbanks were lined with trash and bloated corpses.
Can you believe it? That civilization started in this shithole?
His platoon leader had said that. A first lieutenant. Went to an Ivy League school. Died the next week.
He looked at the sky. All hint of sunlight was gone in the west, and more stars revealed themselves. The temperature was growing cool. Brodie asked, “Tom, why did Roger bring you here?”
“To help me.”
“He didn’t even know you.”
Greer was silent for a minute. Then he said, “He felt responsible for the tin men. He regretted helping make them.”
Brodie looked over at the young private, lying on his back in the rocky sand. His limbs were splayed out, like a child making a snow angel.
Greer continued, “He said that he saw me going the way of Justin Beal.” The man shuddered as he stared up at the stars. “He told me I did not have to die. And I believed him. And he was right.”
Instead, Roger Ames had to die. And maybe all that was left of his knowledge was in the mind of this twenty-year-old Army private.
“What else did he tell you?”
“About Bucky, not much. But he knew there was more going on with it than he’d realized. And he was worried that his research and my platoon’s training at Camp Hayden were not what they seemed. That there was a plan beneath the plan. That’s how he put it.”
“What plan?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did he sense his life was in danger?”
“Not that I could tell. It seemed he was more worried about us Rangers. That the tin men… or at least, one of the tin men, would do something it wasn’t supposed to.”
Brodie asked, “Did you help him procure weapons from the armory?”
“Yeah,” said Greer. “That wasn’t too hard. All I had to do was volunteer to run inventory, take a little at a time. He told me he was hiding it all, in case a time came he had to act fast. Made me think of my crazy uncle who’s got an arsenal in vacuum-sealed PVC pipes buried all around his farm.”
Taylor asked, “What was Ames doing in the Vault?”
“Talking to it,” said Greer. “He said it was like talking to a wall, at first. And then he came to realize… it was like talking to something pretending to be a wall. Roger said that the thing knew a lot. It knew our history. Our wars, our presidents. World history too.”
“Those are just facts,” said Taylor. “That’s not intellect.”
“Yeah,” said Greer. “I don’t know. The major made it sound like it was more than that, but…” He trailed off. “I couldn’t always follow what he was talking about. I’m sorry. I’m trying to help.”
“You are helping,” said Taylor. “More than you know. You and your platoonmates have been abused. It’s not right. I’m sorry, Tom.”
Greer stared up at the night sky as it continued to reveal itself in the growing dark. “It’s over now, I think. Right? No way they expect us to go back to training with those fucking things.”
“Not if we have anything to say about it,” said Taylor.
Brodie, wanting to say something more definitive, added, “Operations at Camp Hayden are over.”
He looked at Greer, who didn’t necessarily look reassured. Actually, it was kind of hard to tell how he was feeling. His big eyes were open wide to the night, taking in stars. He was somewhere else. Somewhere better, maybe.
Why should they have expected more than this from him?
Tom Greer wasn’t a computer scientist. The kid didn’t even have a college degree.
Ames hadn’t brought him up here to tell all he knew about what was really going on at Camp Hayden and inside Bucky’s CPU.
He’d brought him here to talk about the history of the Mojave tribe and to look for lizards and to listen for birds, for Tom Greer to be doing exactly what he was doing now—taking in the beauty of the world with eyes wide open, with senses tuned to everything, being plunged into his own humanity instead of the machine world, where he could only fail, over and over, until his mind and body broke.