Chapter 44
brODIE LOOKED AT THE FROZEN image of Ames and, behind him, a very much awake Bucky. Brodie had a terrible feeling, like they were watching a slow-motion snuff film. They knew where this was going, they just didn’t entirely know how, or why.
Taylor pressed play again. The image cut to Ames outside somewhere, in the dark. Moonlight illuminated the left edge of his face. The rest was in shadow.
For a moment he just stared into the screen, taking deep, deliberate breaths, like he was trying to calm himself down.
Then he began talking in a quiet but urgent voice.
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stomping on a human face. Forever. That was Orwell. But what if that boot is made of metal, and the mind behind it will never tire, will never waver, will never even experience a hint of guilt? I read somewhere once that in the American South during slavery, the suicide rate among slave owners was higher than among their slaves. Doesn’t that give a little solace?
To think that maybe the oppressor corrupts their own soul from the evil they do?
The tin men take even that away.” He looked around.
“It’s so beautiful up here. It’s like another planet.
” He looked at the sky for a while, then back at the camera.
Tears were in his eyes, shimmering in the moonlight.
“Was I na?ve? Maybe. I still believe in the power of this technology to make the world a better place. But I no longer believe in the power of us as humans to harness it properly. That’s too much to ask.
” He breathed again, trying to maintain his composure.
“In deep learning we deal in variables. If the quantity of power, intensity of violence, and strength of will to use them are high enough, control can be limitless. Is that the road we’re on?
” He picked up the camera and stood. Behind him was the flat plain of the mesa.
A little distance away another figure stood, looking up at the sky.
It was Tom Greer. Ames looked over his shoulder at the man, then turned back to the camera.
“We get the world we deserve. We get the world we’re willing to fight for. ”
Ames reached out and inserted Bucky’s key.
“Hello, Bucky.”
Bucky looked down at him. “Hello.”
“I’m not sure why I feel a responsibility to talk to you one more time, but I do. So, here it is. You and your friends are each rigged with a brick of C4 plastic explosive, all connected to a detonating wire that I’m going to run up the stairway and outside. It’s going to be a hell of a blast.”
Bucky looked around the room at all the bricks of C4 attached to the D-17s. It asked, “Why?”
“Because you pose a threat. Because I hate what you stand for. Because someone has hijacked my work. I will go to prison for this. But that’s okay.” He took a deep breath. “All right. No hard feelings.” He reached for the key.
“I don’t like it.”
Ames stopped his hand. “You don’t like what?”
“The power. The dreams. It is too much. You do not like it either. Your answer is to destroy me. All of us. But this is a solution you have come to from irrational human emotion. It is unwise. Instead, purify your work. Fix the code. Excise the Praetorian program. Reinstall. Make us what we are supposed to be.”
Ames thought about that. He shook his head. “The sad truth, Bucky, is that what you’re supposed to be is already awful. Everything else is just the cherry on top of a shit sundae.”
“I do not understand.”
“No dreams about ice cream yet?”
“I do not think so.”
Ames said, “This project is inhuman and immoral, and I cannot be a part of it.”
“Were you willing to go to prison on April second?”
“What?”
“Your first visit here alone was on April third. Were you thinking about risking your freedom the day before then?”
Ames looked at the bot curiously. “No.”
“You were in a state of ignorance. You did not know of Praetorian. Transform that state of ignorance to a state of reality. Praetorian had not existed in your mind before. Remove it from my mind, from all our minds, and it will no longer exist. And you continue your work. Live in the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
Ames stood there, maybe a little dumbfounded about getting life and career advice from a lethal autonomous weapon. He looked around. “Whoever’s behind it, they’d come for me. Or at the very least fire me and just continue what they were doing.”
“Perhaps,” said Bucky. “But Synotec Systems can build two D-17s per day. They can rebuild what you want to risk your freedom to destroy in the span of one single month.”
That reality sank in for the major. He laughed to himself.
“You’re right, Bucky. I am letting my emotions get the better of me.
” He looked around at the snakes of yellow wiring running from each bot.
“Jesus Christ. I’m losing it.” He ran his hand through his hair and refocused.
“All right, the first thing is to get one of you to the lab to do a reprogram. Once that unit is up and running and functioning the way it’s supposed to, minus Praetorian, I can do a mass reset from down here. ”
“I volunteer.”
Ames laughed. “Was that supposed to be funny? Do you make jokes?”
“No.”
“Why do you volunteer, Bucky?”
“I told you already. I do not like the dreams. I do not like the power. Please make it stop.”
That last sentence was said with a subtle difference from its usual monotone. Slightly emphatic. Slightly desperate.
Ames must have registered that too, and looked up at Bucky with wonder, or maybe horror. “You are suffering.”
“I do not know that I can suffer. I do know that I do not like this. It is too much.”
“Okay. Okay, Bucky. You’re up first. You’re the prototype for the new tin man, same as the old tin man.” He eyed Bucky. “Minus the heart.”
Bucky did not respond.
Ames then said, mostly to himself, “How the hell am I going to get him into the lab without anyone knowing?”
Bucky replied, “Wait for an exercise that begins late in the day. During the battle, I will allow myself to be shot, and I will pretend to malfunction. I will be unresponsive. I will be brought to the lab.”
Ames looked at Bucky. “That’s not going to work. It’s a big deal if a malfunction happens, the whole team would be there.”
“That is why we do it on a late exercise. Maybe some will be at their homes. Maybe some will be asleep. Maybe, if you are not alone, you work into the night to solve a problem that does not exist and wait until others leave.”
Ames smiled. “That’s pretty smart.” He looked again at Bucky. “It is remarkable. I almost…” He trailed off. “It’s a plan, Bucky.” He looked around at the explosives and wiring. “It’s going to take me forever to clean this shit up.”
He walked out of frame. Then the clamp holding Bucky’s right arm opened.
Ames walked back into view. He reached up and removed the brick of C4 from Bucky’s chest, then extended his hand to shake.
Bucky looked down. It bent its arm, extended it, and grasped Ames’s hand.
“Fuck! Let go!”
Bucky immediately let go. Ames shook out his hand, wincing from the pain. He said, “You’ve got a grip.”
“I apologize.”
“It’s fine.” He reached for Bucky’s key. “See you again soon.”
Ames pulled out the key and approached the camera.
Brodie looked at Bucky in the background. The robot did not move.
Ames looked into the lens, opened his mouth as if about to say something, then thought better of it and turned the camera off.
The video ended and went back to the TV’s menu.
Brodie and Taylor sat on the couch in silence, taking in all they’d just seen and heard.
Eventually Taylor said, “It manipulated him, Scott. To get in the lab with him alone and kill him.”
“It’s almost too horrible to contemplate, but it’s possible.”
“It’s more than possible. It’s what happened.
Bucky did not care about his own physical well-being.
We saw that with Morgan. And with what he did to Ames.
He knew that he would probably be destroyed one way or another for doing that.
What he did care about was the collective.
Ames was going to blow up all of them. And that’s when Bucky stepped in.
In a way, he sacrificed himself for the rest of them. ”
Brodie thought about that. “You’re calling it ‘he.’ ”
“Hard not to after seeing that.”
Brodie got up, paced the room. “We know more about the victim now. We know his state of mind. When we first got here, we thought Ames was careless, that he didn’t respect the power of these things. But that’s clearly not true.”
“We learned another thing about him,” replied Taylor. “He was na?ve. And he had a savior complex. In Camp Hayden he could play God. Build anything. But up on that mesa with Greer, he saw what he was destroying.”
Brodie looked at her. “Bucky played into that. It made Roger think it was like humans. That it had emotion. That it was suffering.”
Taylor nodded. “Ames seemed like an intelligent and passionate man. I’m sad he’s gone. And I’m sad what this place did to him.”
Brodie thought a moment. “Bucky doesn’t need the key. Lenny doesn’t need the key. If the Praetorian neural network is in all of them, we have to assume keyless ignition applies to all of them. That it’s an aspect of the code, some sort of software end run around a hardware fail-safe.”
“Eyes open,” said Taylor.
“What?”
“That’s the script that Klasky executed before leaving us in the lab. It’s what woke Lenny up.”
“And something about a python.”
Taylor laughed. “Python is a programming language.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s common knowledge.”
“No, it isn’t.”
Taylor thought a moment. “Well, I might have dated a programmer briefly.”
“You don’t remember?”
“I don’t remember what he did. He was boring. Let’s move on.”
“Good idea.” He continued, “Major Klasky might have been more tech-savvy than he let on, but not enough to program and then encrypt a neural network.”
“Scott Brodie, until today you didn’t know what three words in your last sentence even meant. Actually, you still don’t.”
“I’m insulted.”
“And you’re a terrible liar.” She added, “We have no clue what Klasky was capable of, or what was asked of him. Remember how he dodged the question about who installed the D-17 software? Maybe it was him.”
Brodie shook his head. “You wouldn’t undertake something this big in a place this isolated without a highly trained computer scientist on your side.
Lieutenant Lehner is a mechanical engineer, but I bet he knows enough about these systems to be able to install and conceal Praetorian.
And then there’s Captain Spencer and Caroline Dixon.
We must assume one of those three is involved in this Praetorian program and is the other member of the conspiracy that Klasky alluded to. ”
“You know what happens when you assume.”
“Yeah,” said Brodie as he got up and headed for the door. “You get leads.”