“You mean by Dorothy?” said Chris. Tim nodded. “No. They trust us. No bugs.” Tim still looked both ways before starting.
“What about the WCC? Their personality matrix project… I don’t get it. How does a machine feel? Is it just a simulation? I mean, the point of it is for the Squires and other models to interact with us. At what point is it considered thinking, not just a repertoire of imitations? And don’t even get me started on the programming issues,” Tim groaned.
“I didn’t,” Chris chuckled. It seemed he’d had finally shaken the bottle enough. Tim had to let it all out.
“There’s an incredible degree of self-development involved in what they want these machines to do. Feeling is more than learning rote facts. It’s paying attention. It’s implication. It’s knowing what’s appropriate, and deciding whether or not to act that way. If they could design a machine that could do that… it wouldn’t be too hard for that machine to manipulate other, less complex FOS’s.” Chri
s and Gendric shared a quiet glance. The idea had mortifying merit.
“You’d best keep that to yourself, until we get a better look at the situation in Shanghai,” warned Chris. “I don’t know where I stand on this whole thinking, feeling machine dilemma. It could be a programming glitch, or a hack.”
It was all he could think of to justify it, like Dorothy told him four years ago. A horrendous hack on a single Squire. Even if the WCC had covered it up from the rest of the world, Chris and the others could never forget what one bug in a system could do. His unit had only survived because of Major General Grendal Feyne, may he rest in peace. With three holes burnt in his chest, he charged the Squire, so Chris and the others could live. The screech the Squire made when Grendal’s rifle burnt a hole straight through to the blackbox, the seat of the AI, would never leave them. Neither would the parting words the corrupted Squire left them with.
You cannot shoot a thought!
The next second was gone quicker than it could become a memory, yet none who saw would be the same. The Squire melted a hole through Grendal’s heart, and in the process triggered the EMP charge he had in his vest. It should have deactivated the Squire, too, but it didn’t; another anomaly the WCC couldn’t explain. Every last piece of the unit’s Fusion tech was useless. With his friends’ lives on the other end of a surging barrel, Chris took up his dad’s revolver. It was little more than a gag luck charm, but he had to do something. He put a bullet through the Squire’s blackbox just before it could self-repair. Christopher Droan walked away from that day with a new military title, a tribute to his ingenuity, and a new understanding of his father’s distrust. How anyone had hacked the Squire in the first place, why they made it say what it said, and why it was immune to the EMP were still under WCC investigation.
“No,” Tim yanked Chris back to the present. “There’s no such thing as a glitch. There’s only bad programming. Machines are like… like children- at least right now they are. They can only do what we teach them to do,” said Tim, despite how even he shrunk back from TE-Les when her words surprised her. Chris went silent. He weighed Tim’s words on the scale of his own logic.
If what he said was true… someone had turned an entire nursery of metal children into killers, and set them lose.
Chapter Five: Suzy’s Borderline B&B
“Feeling better?” said Selene, offering Tim a hand to help him down from the train. He took it without shame. Morgan and Lee couldn’t hold back the laughter when Tim’s wobbling almost took them both down.
“Believe it or not, I am. Sorry… I don’t usually travel by magnetrain,” said Tim. He fell into Selene’s surprisingly gentle arms from the bottom step. She batted her eyelids at him from a couple inches away, then cracked into laughter.
“Sorry, I’m not the prince charming type, Timmy. Try Gendric,” Selene smiled, and handed Tim off to the massive mostly-bald man.
“I can hold you up for hours on end,” rumbled Gendric, which roused laughter from everyone. They enjoyed the moment of lightness before they had to let it go.
Chris led his contingent, plus Tim, through the twisted trees on the fringe of Shanghai. Gendric only had to help Tim walk for about ten minutes before he found his legs again. From there, Chris was surprised to see him keep pace without an issue, through the tiny fields just outside the city. They made their way to the motel from the assignment papers Dorothy had given them, to check into base camp. The view from the front was of tall, glowing towers. From the back, there were only fields of straw and vegetables.
“I tell you, I’m scared. I know we’re outside the safety perimeter, but I never would have stayed after the evacuation until that nice lady Dorothy called,” said the owner.
“Nice?” Lee murmured.
“I can’t believe I’m hosting a real WCC task force,” chattered the owner, presumably Suzy of ‘Suzy’s Borderline B&B’. “Here are your room keys. Three two-bed rooms.” said she, who handed the cards to Chris.
“Thank you, ma’am. It’s appreciated,” Chris gave her a little bow. She did the same, before the six headed back out to the half-dark of a city border. Tim moved for the uniform rows of doors, while his five protectors made for the parking lot. Selene winked back at him.
“Like we’d miss this chance to cut down on work! We need to set a perimeter, and these take two to work.” she said, holding up a pair of tiny silver pods.
“What are those?” Tim groaned. His legs threatened to fold beneath him while they dragged all the way to the back of the unit.
“FOS jammers,” rumbled Gendric. Tim shuddered. A single pulse from one of those could undo all the work he’d put in with TE-Les. He’d never seen ones just like those, though. They were bigger, and had slits down the middle of one flat face. Selene demonstrated by holding her two jammers inches apart, and clicking the buttons on their backsides. A translucent sheet of blue light swam between the two pods.
“Anything running on an AI will fry if they pass through it,” said Morgan, who took Tim’s sudden quietness as confusion.
“I know,” he said, sick as he took one. After all that talk on the train about thinking and feeling.
“Form up to set the perimeter. None of those Squires are getting further than Shanghai,” said Chris, a sudden authority in his voice.
“I’ll take the big guy. We’ll handle the east,” Selene volunteered with a wink. Tim jumped when she put her hand on his arm, of all the taut-muscled giants in their group. He’d appreciate later that she claimed the closest side of Beijing for them. Tim went with her, reluctant, while Chris and Morgan went off to the north. That left Gendric and Lee to the west.
“Regroup here to set the southern boundary in an hour,” Chris issued, just before they split ways. When the unit returned to Suzy’s, two miles in every direction around Shanghai’s Precinct 117 was trapped inside a shimmering box, and even Major General Christohper Droan was exhausted.
Tim hadn’t slept so well in years. Those five hours seemed like twelve. Neither had he woken so sharply, without temptation of a snooze button. His alarm this day was no cell phone or Fusion clock, though. It was a shriek. The horrible, throat-scratching shriek of someone truly afraid for her life. Though he’d never heard it before, Tim knew the sound in his bones and blood. His first instinct was: help. It was a reflex he shared with Chris and his unit, who had already geared up and charged outside. Tim pulled his own Fusion-armor jacket on just as the door swung shut behind Lee. He followed in his roommate’s shadow.