Chapter 35 #2
What had everyone said about the major? That he wanted to push things.
He wanted to focus more on machine brains and less on machine brawn.
He’d thought, apparently, that elevating the bots’ minds would make them safer and more predictable.
He was an idealist, a techie hacking his own mind with nature’s chemicals.
Maybe he was also a fool, high on his own supply, so giddy about where he was headed that he didn’t realize it was right off a cliff.
Brodie felt tuned in now. He was looking up, and he could see the milky band of the galaxy’s edge streak across the sky.
He imagined what it was like all those years ago, the people of the high desert who knew nothing of astronomy or physics, and yet saw all this, this sky, a sky almost no one in the light-polluted modern world ever saw.
His mind was humming. He could see what he wanted.
He went down the elevator to the Vault. Fifty-nine tin men strapped in their holding bays.
One free. Bucky. It was sitting in a chair.
Roger Ames was across from it, talking. His was not the face of a corpse, with haunting white sclera without irises.
He was alive, he was young. He was questioning and questioning.
Probing a thing he thought he knew. And finding things he didn’t like.
He didn’t like them because they weren’t his.
Because they didn’t belong there. They were put there by someone else.
This thing was dangerous. Not because of its titanium arms but because of its silicon brain.
The major’s dream was coming true right in front of his eyes, and he saw it for the first time like a nightmare.
And then he’d trekked up here, with a lost and damaged Army private, trying to show him something good.
Maybe Roger Ames did save this kid. Ames had regretted helping to build the D-17s, which meant he regretted a major portion of his life’s work.
So maybe one of his last acts in this life was a shot at redemption—an act of generosity and salvation.
Now Brodie saw Caroline Dixon, alone in her lab. Looking at it. The code. Praetorian…
Her computer. It was on her computer. The code was on her computer. The source code.
It was poisoned at the roots.
It was in all of them, wasn’t it? Praetorian. Was it active? Or dormant by design? A held breath before the trumpet blast. An unrung bell.
It was in all of them.
He was back in the Vault, and now it was full of people.
The important people of Camp Hayden, the officers, standing in their monster lair, explaining so matter-of-factly why the monsters had to be manufactured.
We had to do it because our enemies are going to do it.
We need to beat them. We need to haunt their dreams before they can haunt ours.
He turned to tell Taylor what he was thinking, but she was gone. He was alone again. How much time had passed? Where was he?
He looked for the willow tree but could not see it in the dark, moonless night.
Well, how far afield could he really go? If he fell off the edge of the mountain, he’d know he’d gone too far.
He saw something ahead. Water. Was it real? It looked real. It was small, some pond formed from the rainfalls. A disc of still liquid like polished obsidian, reflecting the stars with the clarity of a mirror.
He walked toward it. And he saw something near the pond catch the starlight. Something thin and upright. He drew closer.
It was the wavy branch of a desert willow, stuck in the earth, as high as Brodie’s chest.
Was this real?
He got close enough to grab it. It felt real. He peered at the pond, which was no more than thirty feet across. He stepped toward it and caught his reflection. He looked older than he remembered.
You look beat-up, pal.
He leaned in. He touched the shallow crow’s-feet on the edges of his eyes, the creases on his forehead.
No, not beat-up. Just alive, and on the far side of forty. Living, aging. It was fine. It was good. Especially when you considered the alternative.
He’d considered the alternative his whole life.
At least as far back as his homecoming from Iraq.
He’d gone home to his parents’ in upstate New York.
He’d sat at the table in their country kitchen, beneath a hanging garland that smelled of fresh pine.
It was almost Christmas. Some plug-in electric Santa danced on the windowsill, glowing too brightly.
Its face looked vicious from a bad paint job at the factory in Taiwan.
His parents, two ex-hippies who hated the war their son had just risked his life in, seemed almost wary of him, like they weren’t sure who this was in their house.
Their boy had become a man, and then the man had become…
what? A warrior? A killer? They wanted to know, but they didn’t want to know.
They searched his eyes to see if there was something behind them that they could no longer recognize. Something to fear.
You hate the war? How the hell do you think I feel?
There were days he thought he was dead. A phantom stumbling through purgatory, which was really just a faded copy of a former life.
As the colors bled back, as the war receded into the past, he understood what was true.
He was alive, and maybe he didn’t deserve to be.
And the ones who’d died, they didn’t deserve that either.
Their stories had ended before they really got going, crushed in the gutter of a history book as the pages kept turning.
Brodie realized he was still gripping the willow branch. He rocked it back and forth. It was deep in the sand.
Someone had put this here. He looked again at the placid water.
The branch brought forth the water.
And then he had another thought:
Roger Ames liked to bury things.
He yanked the willow branch out of the ground and started digging in the dense earth, flinging aside the sand and dirt. He felt ridiculous. There couldn’t really—
His fingertips pressed against something hard. A rock? He dug around it. No. It was a rectangle, with rounded corners. It was metal. He kept digging until he revealed enough of it to grab it and pull it out.
It was a green metal canister a little bigger than a deck of cards. It looked vintage, like what soldiers once used to carry cigarettes or medic supplies. He popped the metal clasp and flipped it open, then dug out a plastic ziplock bag.
He opened the bag and retrieved something man-made and rectangular.
He held it up. There wasn’t much ambient light anymore, but he could make out a square metallic protrusion. The rest was plastic. It was a USB thumb drive.
What the hell…?
Roger Ames was prepping for something. Making multiple covert trips to the Vault to interrogate Bucky. Burying an arsenal in his backyard. And this…
Whatever this was, Ames felt it so important that he couldn’t risk it being discovered even if his entire house was torn down to the studs.
Or maybe he’d made a bunch of copies and secreted them in multiple places.
One of them being here, a special place to him, a place where he came to see the world anew.
Brodie stared at the little plastic drive. Such a tiny thing, so out of place. An artifact from that other world.
He returned it to the bag, which he put in his inside jacket pocket, and dropped the empty metal container into the hole he’d dug. Then he took one of his water bottles and drank. He was parched and had barely noticed.
The stars twinkled like jewels, and the hazy white band of the galaxy arced across the southern sky. Billions of stars and clouds of gas and dust hanging in the void at distances impossible for the human mind to comprehend.
Holy shit.
He sat where he was. It was all he could do. He felt like he could sit there and watch this forever.
Orion the Hunter. He looked at the three bright stars that made up the hunter’s belt.
He wondered about the planets around them.
What if there was life there right now, looking out?
The creatures there, drawing their own constellations, the Sun a single pinpoint in the line-drawn shapes of animals and objects that no human had ever seen, would ever see.
He ran his right hand along the rough earth. He grabbed a stone and held it. He breathed.
At some point he ended up on his side. Ahead was flat earth, broken by scattered pebbles and rocks, and a squat thorny cactus. In the distance was the horizon line of the mesa, and the starry sky.
He saw the rocks as quartz mountains, the cactus some impossible alien giant, and along the ground something moved. Something black. Some great treaded war machine.
It was a black beetle, picking its way through the sand. He saw it. He knew. But he could see the other thing too, and now there was something else, dozens of things marching in ranks among the rocks, their metal bodies dull and dim in the starlight.
The tin men. Many more than sixty. He saw dozens and dozens of platoons in formation, whole mechanized battalions. He saw riflemen and gunners atop armored vehicles and autonomous tanks and high above them thick swarms of armed drones like a plague. Dead metal upon metal, hunting the living.
His mind flashed to the buried guns, and the RPGs, the grenades. He wanted them. He wanted to blow the hell out of those things.
A plan beneath the plan.
They weren’t the real problem. No. They were weapons.
Who held the weapon? Who pulled the trigger?
Bucky might have been an impostor, walking around pretending to be dumber than it was.
But there was another impostor, a human one.
His instinct told him it was someone he’d already met, someone on base, who had looked him in the eyes and lied, who had their hand on the lever of the plan beneath the plan.
He had to find them, and soon.