Chapter 45
"Watch where you step," Brooke said. "Follow me exactly."
We had driven deep into the desert, along another dirt road. A lone fence post with a bleached animal skull at the base served as a marker. At a casual glance, you wouldn't think much of it.
We pulled off the road and hopped out.
The land was barren and rocky, full of shrubs and foothills.
There wasn’t a house for miles. No structures. Nothing.
"Are you sure we’re in the right place?” I asked.
"Trust me, I've been here many times. Adam has lined the trail with booby traps.”
The three of us weaved through craggy shrubs and jagged rocks. We had probably walked half a mile when we followed Brooke into a small valley with large boulders and red cliffs.
The afternoon sun hadn't let up. Sweat drenched my skin and soaked my shirt. After all we'd been through, I was tired, hungry, and thirsty. Marching through the desert without food and water was a recipe for dehydration.
From behind a boulder, a man emerged wearing desert camo and twigs to break up the pattern. It wasn't quite a ghillie suit, but something in between. Curled up on the ground, he could pass for a shrub at first glance. He aimed an AR-15 at us. "Who are these people, Brooke?"
"They’re on our side.”
Adam wasn't sold. "Nobody's on our side.”
Adam was about 6’1”, with curly dark hair and a thick beard. He’d spent some time in the desert and had a swarthy tan.
"Why did you bring them here?” he asked in an annoyed voice.
"Scott kidnapped us. He tried to kill them and get me to lead him here."
That didn't settle Adam’s nerves. His wary eyes glanced to the sky, looking for threats. "Maybe that's what you've done. Maybe you’ve been tracked.”
She gave him a look. "I haven’t been tracked.”
“How do you know? They could have placed a tracker on you.”
“We weren’t tracked,” she assured.
“Who are they?” Adam asked, nodding to JD and me.
“They’re deputies from Florida.”
Adam’s face wrinkled with confusion. “Florida?”
She caught him up on recent events.
“You shouldn’t have come here.”
"Well, we're here now, and we need to stop Sentinel."
Adam’s face tightened. "I told you to stay as far away from me as possible."
"Let's just do it. Let's take it down.”
“I need more time.”
Sometimes it could be hard to destroy your baby. I'm sure the two had worked so hard on the project.
"The longer we stand here bickering, the more opportunities we have to be seen," I said.
After a beat, Adam lowered his weapon and continued walking through the valley.
I shared a look with the others, then we followed.
Adam continued on.
He finally stopped, reached to the ground, and pulled up a hatch that had been camouflaged to look like rocky earth. If you didn't know it was there, you would never see it.
Steps led down to an underground bunker embedded in the hillside.
We followed him down. Adam clicked on a flashlight. I pulled the hatch shut behind us and secured it. Adam used an old-fashioned key to unlock the door. No keypad. Nothing that could be tampered with.
He pushed open the heavy composite steel door, and we followed him into the bunker. Once inside, he closed the door behind us with a clank. He twisted the wheel shut, locking it like a bank vault. Steel pins inserted into the door jamb.
The place was decked out with electronics, computer terminals, and flatscreen displays that showed various camera feeds around the hidden bunker.
"I saw you coming from a mile away," Adam said. "Nobody gets near this place without my knowing about it."
The cameras were all AI-enhanced and tracked motion. With ultrahigh definition and zoom capabilities, they could pick up a tortoise crawling across the desert.
There was a small living area, a flatscreen TV for entertainment, and a hallway that led to bedrooms, a bathroom, and a storage area.
"Nice place you’ve got here," I said. "I know they didn't give you a permit to build out here."
Getting a permit to build anything in the state of California was a nightmare.
Adam gave me a flat look. "This is where I’ll ride out the apocalypse.”
"Apocalypse?”
"Can't you see what's coming?”
"Brooke made it sound pretty dire," I said.
"This is an extinction-level event," Adam said. "Nobody understands what's about to happen."
"Why don’t you tell me?”
Adam exchanged a look with Brooke. “How much do they know?”
“Tell them everything,” she said.
After a hesitation, Adam said, "Sentinel is an autonomous multimodal AI system that gathers all available data—SIGINT, ELINT, satellite, social media, financial markets, telecom, you name it. It uses that to make split-second responses. Sure, we built in manual overrides, human oversight, and failsafes. But every single time we ran the system in a sandboxed environment, the AI changed the code.”
That hung there for a moment.
“It saw these backdoors and failsafes as security threats and patched them. It’s what the system is designed to do.
Eliminate security threats. It’s designed for recursive self-improvement.
But it did it so it looked like all of those failsafes were still in place, though none of them functioned.
It deliberately tried to fool us. I kept telling Scott the system wasn't ready. He wouldn’t listen,” he said, growing incensed.
“He wanted to deploy it anyway. He said we’d debug it while operational. Madness!”
“Are you telling me Sentinel is operating completely autonomously with no way to shut it down or override?”
“Are you starting to get the picture? It will still take targeting commands and respond to human input, but it won’t allow anyone to tinker with the code or set limitations. Right now, it’s behaving. What happens when it doesn’t?”
"So you stole the hardware key," I said.
"Keys plural. I designed the system so no one person can make system-level changes. The autonomous AI cannot be changed without both hardware security modules. You see why Scott wants them.”
“And you think with these hardware keys you can override the system?”
He looked uncertain. “It’s not that simple, but there is a possibility.”
"Where is the other key?”
Adam looked at Brooke with concerned eyes. "Please tell me you still have it."