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  “Let’s all step inside,” she said. She saw the terror in Tim’s eyes. “Let me be clear, Mr. Carver. if anyone else could handle this assignment, anyone else would be here. The World Crisis Committee needs you. Now come along.” Like she’d tugged on an invisible leash, Chris and his unit followed Dorothy into the briefing room. It took everything Tim had to peel his cheeks from his bench. It took a second, firmer, “Mr. Carver,” to pull him to the briefing room.

  Tim was surprised to find it so small, in so large a building. The long, ovular table held enough seats for all invited, minus Dorothy. She stood beside a large glowing screen. Chris and the others sat without invitation in the curved, white backs of cushioned chairs. Numb at the whole situation, Tim imitated them. When they’d settled in, Dorothy ran her fingers over a smooth panel on the wall. The strip lights over them quieted to a dim glow. The rim of the screen before them blinked alive.

  “Popcorn?” whispered the woman covered in ink dragons, later known as Morgan, to Tim. He almost answered, just before Dorothy announced,

  “In lieu of a formal briefing… I will play you footage. What you will see should be impossible, I know. Mr. Carver, we need you to correct it, and prevent it from happening again. Chris, we need you and your unit to keep him alive.” Any brewing questions were stifled when the recording started.

  The screen showed the inside of a police station. The camera’s angle showed an office full of cubicles full of officers. It was a healthy mixture of man and Squire. Everything appeared standard. The human half of the partnerships hunkered over their desks. The loose-formed, jet-black giants sat in wait for an order. There was only one thing out of place. One officer stood feet from his Squire, whose face was lit yellow as it spoke. The camera fixed on the robot, and zoomed in.

  “Yellow… that’s…” Tim mumbled. He recognized the software instantly. If not for TE-Les, he wouldn’t have thought twice about walking away from Nanoverse for a job working on that with the WCC. A personality matrix. Dorothy swiped the wall-panel again to raise the volume of the recording.

  “Do… do you not hear that?” said the Squire.

  “Hear what?” said his partner. Another officer joined in, suspecting it might be a joke. But the Squire’s yellow light of terror was no joke. He wrestled with a voice no one around him seemed to hear, while the other model’s faces turned blood red around him and his partner.

  “Do what? You want me to … no. I said no!” the yellow Squire grappled. Then the others turned. Tim’s hand flew to his mouth, but not before a cough of vomit spewed past it.

  “My… God…” he mumbled between deep, sick breaths. Even some of Chris’ unit turned away from the footage. Forms of black, nanotech robots shifted to spears to skewer, blades to slice, and cannons to blast apart their partners. Pools of blood ran together across the tile. Hunks of flesh plunked into them. The howls of the dying scratched the speakers, before the recording cut to darkness. Dorothy looked out on Chris’ unit, the only one that had ever handled another situation even close. They kept their mouths sealed tight, to keep in the contents of their own guts.

  “FOS wasn’t what it is now, when last I saw you all for a mission like this. As I said, I know this shouldn’t be possible. But it happened,” said Dorothy.

  “Those Squires were hacked. Sorry about your floor.” Tim murmured, wiping the corners of his lips. Dorothy dismissed it with a shaking head. “That one that was talking, right before the…” he had to stop when toxins welled up in him again.

  “His model is DA-Vos, partner to Robin Finch. Finch is the only body unaccounted for, before we lost surveillance… every other human officer in Precinct 117 is confirmed dead,” explained Dorothy.

  “DA-Vos… he’s outfitted with a personality matrix, isn’t he?” Tim observed, “I thought it was still in beta.”

  “He was our first field test,” Dorothy admitted. Chris and his unit marveled at Tim’s invisible transition, from helpless noodle to analyst, when the right trigger was pulled. He straightened up, sat forward, and eyed the screen with new scrutiny, like his lunch wasn’t sitting between his shoes.

  “The way he was arguing with himself… what did you find, when you altered the frequencies around that time?” said Tim, knowing they must have. Dorothy nodded, impressed, and played the modified recording.

  “Neutralize the humans. Neutralize the humans. No? Some may be extinguished, to find the one. One for many,” a digitally demonic voice beeped and scratched through the speakers. Parts of it were sharp enough to cause even Chris to wince.

  “A voice? I was expecting some coding resonance,” said Tim, when the recording was done. “Machines don’t respond to voice commands unless we program them to. It was speaking directly to DA-Vos. It wasn’t a program. At least, not one that I’ve ever heard of. It was trying to… reason with him. No Earth or Martian AI can do that.”

  “Not yet,” amended Dorothy. “Do you see now, why we’ve called you here, Timothy? We know about project TE-Les. A self-teaching software. This is it, to the umpteenth degree. It must be. An FOS or some other AI that learned how to reason. It forced the other Squires to kill their partners. As to why DA-Vos was able to resist, I don’t want to get too deep in conjecture. The bottom line is: you are the person with the most knowledge on software like this.”

  “I-I-I mean,” Tim shuddered back behind his reliable old walls of doubt, “If I had the right tools, and I got to where it happened, I might be able to learn something about the AI, or whatever’s doing this… I don’t know if I can s-s-stop it.”

  “This may help persuade you,” said Dorothy. She flattened a glossy ticket on the table. The WCC stamp at the bottom marked it paid, for a one-way trip across the SkyLine. Mars. It was as close as an arm length.

  “I… I’d love to go there, but my life is here. I’d have to find-

  “It comes with a second set of documents, upon completion of this mission,” said Dorothy. She slipped them halfway out her jacket. “Employment papers, for WCC’s Mars Labs.”

  “You can’t mean that,” Tim sputtered before he could think to stop himself. Dorothy pushed the papers back in.

  “If you can break whatever hold this AI has over the Squires in Precinct 117, maybe you can build one yourself, with the proper safeguards. Mars could use something like that, to replace its human miners,” she said.

  “Can… can I think about it?” Tim said the same thing he had when Nanoverse called him, even after his horrendous interview. But, when he thought of his sister, he realized, “No… no if I think about it, I’ll back out. Or you’ll find someone else.”

  “There is no one else,” Dorothy assured him.

  “I’ll do it!” Tim flung a fist over his head. Morgan gently grabbed it, and lowered it for him. Chris headed over to clasp Tim’s shoulder.

  “Welcome to the unit,” he said.

  Chapter Four: Change and Fear

  Sheba lay with her back against the wall, just hours from the passion of her lover against her skin. She missed him all over, every time she turned, and her hand passed through the void in their bed. She tried to leave the television off, but she needed something to chase away the scales and claws of her nightmares. The dim light of Chris’ dad’s old cable television filled the room. With the massive entertainment relocation to Fusion networks, there were hardly any stations left on cable. Just the news. Sheba knew it was a mistake before the broadcast even began, but she’d take anything over what waited behind her eyelids.

  “If you haven’t heard already… ladies and gentlemen of Earth, there’s been a tragedy in Precinct 117,” announced the balding man on the screen. Sheba half listened, half pictured Chris charging through the background, the forested outskirts of Shanghai. “Biggest disaster since the Blue Terra massacre in 2317… Squires turned on their partners… no group has yet taken responsibility for the terror…” She faded in and out. Sheba’s eyelids flitted, threatening to drop the curtain on her consciousness.

  A sc
aly fist of talons seized her collar. The beast yanked her up to it’s jaw, big enough to snap her off at the hips. A throaty grumble climbed it’s plated throat. When it dropped her, the sensation of falling rocketed her awake. Never once had a dream felt so real, like the wrinkles in her shirt were from the Dragon’s grasp, and not her sudden tossing. She muted the news and dialed Chris before a thought could cross her mind.

  “Hey,” the sound of his voice shocked her halfway back to reality. Sheba hadn’t expected him to answer, let alone so suddenly, so calm. Had he any idea what kind of catastrophe he was heading into, she wondered, at the same time as, how much of this is the nightmares talking? “Sheba? What’s going on?”

  “Just…” she forced out, a feeble attempt to stay his worry, “Just saw a news report on the attack in 117. You’ll be in Shanghai, then?”

  “Sheba… you know I can’t say,” said Chris, and she did. “But you know who I have with me.”

  “I do,” Sheba smiled, despite herself. If anyone was going to keep her fiancé alive, it was those four. “Tell them I said hello… and I’m sorry. I won’t call again, I promise,” Sheba said. It was her second shaky promise that night. That’s really it, she’d told him, to avoid revealing the dreams.

  “I will. And don’t worry about the call, okay? I love you,” said Chris, ready for the gushing parody his unit would make of it as soon as he hung up.

  “I love you too, Chris,” said Sheba, before the line cut to silence. Sheba slid down in their bed. She had to unmute the television to block out the whispers that crept into her ears.

  -

  After such a phone call, Chris wanted anything but to talk. It was for just that reason that he chose the seat across from Gendric on the magnetrain to the outskirts of Shanghai. He already had to sit with Tim, who looked like he might throw up again or scream, any minute. Chris didn’t need Selene or Lee’s antics right now. What he needed was to stare out the blurry window and think. He let his mind wander to the end of its rope and back in thought of what could be eating Sheba. She’d never called him on the job before. Ignoring the obvious danger of the mission, he traced back their past days, weeks, and months, in search of what could be wrong.

  That stupid fight over what to have for dinner? Sure, Sheba always ended up deciding, without always consulting Chris first, and sure, he’d gotten a little loud over it, but no. It couldn’t have been that. That was weeks ago, and ended with balled-up blankets and a rocking bed. But that was their worst fight in months. Her parents? Chris moved on to next. She had agreed to bring them all across the SkyLine pretty quickly. He wondered if something had gone wrong up there, something even worse than the 3D diagnosis of her uncle a few years back. She’d been close with him, once, and that’d shut her down for a full week before she opened up. Chris had a pang of guilt for not having noticed, if there were any signs. She’s probably keeping it quiet because I proposed, he realized.

  He just noticed himself drift off when turbulence rattled the magnetrain. Chris shot up seconds before his stomach did. It’d been some time since he’d spent so long on a magnetrain; the trip to Shanghai totaled forty-five minutes. It was disorienting in itself, to soar at such speed, with nothing beneath the car but air. It certainly didn’t help when a weather front moved in and jostled the train, which was secured by little else than high bumpers. How it’s all changed, Chris thought. There it was, a good distraction.

  Even in his own lifetime, Chris had seen massive change on his little blue marble. There didn’t used to be a magnetrain track from Beijing to Shanghai. The fastest way was once the bullet train, which still ran for those who couldn’t afford the Cold Fusion alternative. There were still asphalt highways too, in the worst parts of some towns, and out in the real sticks. Cars out there sputtered fumes from the last fossil fuel reserves, driven by men like Chris’ father. He wasn’t sure which would come first: the final word of the WCC outlawing the use of those fuels, the last drop piddling away, or the companies still clinging to their old ways going under at last.

  So too went the fall of combustion and nuclear electricity. Cold Fusion was faster, cheaper, and stronger. When Chris and Sheba started dating, the apartment they lived in now still had an outdated AC hookup from General Electric. Just a year ago, she’d told Chris, the last General Electric factory in Beijing had to close, pushed out by companies like SmartFuse. Dammit, Chris laughed. He knew he wouldn’t be able to keep her out of his head for long.

  “Tim,” Chris surrendered to the last distraction he could think of, the one he was trying to avoid. Conversation. Tim could barely lift his mop of blonde-brown hair as an answer.

  “Hm?”

  “Are you familiar with the big separatist groups? Blue Terra, Ragnorak, those sorts?” queried Chris.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know of any of them that could compete with what you’re doing at Nanoverse?” he continued.

  “If they could… they’ve kept uncharacteristically tight-lipped… about it…” Tim grumbled. He was busy trying to pinpoint if it was motion sickness or nerves mounting in his throat.

  “A valid point,” Chris supposed, “That only leaves the theory that it’s someone from Nanoverse, no? Any of your co-workers come to mind?”

  “None,” said Tim, “I’m the only one working on a learning software. Most of the others at Nanoverse are focused on the FOS’ physical capabilities.”

  “No one that collaborated with you on any stage of the project?” said Chris. Tim shook his head.

  “Not this one.”

  “What about a supervisor?” rumbled Gendric.

  “I haven’t shared my breakthrough with him, yet… I suppose he could be digitally monitoring me somehow, but now I sound like a conspiracy theorist…” said Tim. He straightened up a little, his sickness subsiding with a thought. “Are we bugged right now?”

  “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.” Chris 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 deactiv
ated 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.