I Am Automaton: A Military Science Fiction Novel (12 page)

…and he was right in its path.

Carl took a split second to assess the unbelievable nature of the scenario unfolding before him, and realizing that the driver intended to drive right through the glass doors and into the mall, he backed up just in time as it flew past him.

It was a knee-jerk reaction for self-preservation, and he was in that instant unaware that his removal of himself from the car’s path opened another path into the mall entrance…

…right into his mother.

In the seconds that
passed, Carl registered that it was that jerk in the blue car. The car jumped the curb, slid through the entrance on its own momentum, and there was a great flash of light.

Suddenly Carl felt like he was punched in the face, he was upside down and his ears were ringing. His head was throbbing from the cacophonous blast and the car was sliding into the parking lot on its roof.

He felt the sting of broken glass and nitrogen from his deployed air bag, and he heard the muffled sounds of people screaming. After some undetermined period of time that felt like several minutes, some man had opened the door to his car, disengaged the seat belt, and pulled him out.

He got to his feet, and the man was shouting something to him, but he could not make out what it was. People were standing in the parking lot in the rain staring at a rather gaping hole in the front of the mall where the elegant glass entrance had once been.

Smoke was billowing out of the yawning gap, and the uneven concrete around the opening was black. It took Carl a moment to get his bearings, when he remembered his mother. He began to walk towards the smoking mall. A few other onlookers passed him, brushing his shoulders as they ran up to the scene.

Where was his mother? He thought back to before the blast. Was she standing by the glass doors when the blue car drove through? Did she get out of the way?

It was impossible to see through the gray smoke pouring out of the mall. There was a hysterical woman crying and tugging on his arm. She might have been shouting at him, or shouting at no one in particular and simply hysterical, but he did not hear her words.

He choked on the smoke and dust that filled the air as he strained to look for his mother. It appeared that only the entrance had been hit. The bulk of the mall appeared to be unaffected, and Carl foolishly hoped that his mother was somewhere in the recesses of the structure
, scared out of her wits.

He heard on-lookers calling various names into the smoke—husbands, wives, brothers, and sisters. However, at the moment, he only cared about one. So he joined the panicked chorus.

“Mom. MOOOOOM. MARLA. MAAAARLAAAA.”

Ash wafted in the air like snowflakes drowning out the rain all around them.

“MAAAARLAAAAA!”

His eyes welled up with hot tears as he choked back a horrible inevitability that he did not want to accept.

To add insult to injury, part of the roof collapsed, sending the onlookers reeling back towards the parking lot. Concrete and steel crashed down into the smoke and on top of the bodies of those whose names were being called out.

There was more screaming and sobbing as the smoke reflected flashing red and blue lights. The first responders had arrived. Police officers pulled people back away from the mall as firefighters rushed into the smoke and disappeared, consumed in clouds of gray and black.

A police officer, around his age, pulled Carl back. He was a man in his early twenties with a buzz cut and a frightened expression on his face. He was led into the arms of a paramedic who wrapped a blanked around him and led him over to an ambulance.

Carl gazed in horror as police officers set up a perimeter and firefighters fought the blaze. The interior of the mall was still obscured by smoke, dust, and debris.

A paramedic was talking to him, but to Carl it sounded like they were underwater. The man checked the cuts on his face from broken glass as more ambulances piled into the parking lot, which had become quite the scene. The press arrived only moments later. The whole scene had become some kind of circus.

A police officer came over. “Are you alright, sir?”

That was not why he came over. “Yes, I’m okay.”

“Did you see anything?”

Ah, there it was. “There was a man in a blue car.”

“A man in a blue car?”

Carl’s Mini-com was vibrating. It was his father. “Yes, a blue car. Hold on a moment…” He answered the phone. “Hello…hello?”

He couldn’t hear his father over the phone. The ringing in his ears was too loud. He passed the phone over to the officer.

The officer took it. “Yes…yes…hold on, sir…” He looked at Carl. “Are you Carl?”

Carl nodded. The officer spoke into the phone. “Yes…yes, sir…he’s okay…what
…who…” The officer put down the phone. “Where’s your mother?”

Carl pointed at the mall.

The officer turned his back on Carl and said something low into the phone. After a brief exchange, the officer hung up the phone and handed it back to Carl. “That was your father.”

“I know.”

“So you said you saw a blue car?”

Back to business. “Yeah. I pulled up to the front of the mall to pick up my mother when I heard a car gunning toward the mall. I backed out of the way as the blue car crashed right into the entrance and exploded.”

“And your mother was by the entrance?”

Carl nodded, choking back a sob, and he began to shake.

The officer knew when enough was enough. “Thank you, sir. If we find anything out about your mother, we’ll let you know.” The officer walked off into the mayhem.

Carl sat there in the back of the ambulance trying to process what had just happened, because none of it seemed real at the moment. Maybe it was his mind defending itself against the horror of the reality of what had just occurred.

It was a terrorist attack.

The news had been warning of communications intercepted by government agencies about possible attacks. The targets were supposedly “soft” targets—malls, restaurants,
and movie theaters. Apparently, the terrorists were no longer going for the large symbolic targets and the grand spectacles.

He
looked the bastard right in the eye.

Suddenly waves of guilt began to pound the shores of his rational mind. What if he hadn’t glanced at the army recruitment station? What if he hadn’t gotten into that argument with his mom? What if he didn’t use the damned restroom? They would have left sooner and missed the explosion, that’s what.

It was his fault. Now here he sat in the back of an ambulance while his poor mother…

Why a freaking mall? Of all the places. In Texas no less. It was
as if they were attacking the last semblance of capitalism. Americans were agoraphobic as is. Now they really wouldn’t leave the house.

The terrorists had tried to attack the internet, as it had become the last bastion of the free market.
However, what prevented the government from regulating it had also prevented the terrorists from attacking it.

The internet was not just some collection of servers. It was something much bigger than that. The total had become much greater than the sum of its parts. The internet was arguably one of the great wonders of the world. It was intangible. It was a construct, an idea. It was the Wild West in digital form. One could knock out servers and nodes, but others would spring up.

It couldn’t be destroyed. It had become too damned big, too complex. It took on a life of its own, and its life consisted of millions of users around the globe. It
was
the free world.

So all that was left was to attack malls. They were some of the last public gathering places left in American society.
The fact that they attacked one in a Texas suburb meant that no place was safe.

Homeland Security now couldn’t just focus on New York, Chicago, and the big cities, the obvious targets. There was no way they could protect every city and every little town across America.

Those bastards had learned to do what they did in their own back yards. In Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan, it was not unusual for some suicide bomber to wander into a public place and blow himself up.

However,
Carl never thought that one of them would come all the way to the United States to blow his poor mother up.

***

First Lieutenant Peter Birdsall stood at the ready with a platoon in reverse Vee formation, awaiting the release of the ID into the hangar. After a few rudimentary exercises, they had progressed to funneling the ID towards and into the Labyrinth, which was supposed to simulate a cave system.

The targets were three pigs at the end. Peter was glad that he did not
actually have to enter the Labyrinth with them. No, this time he would remain outside.

They were using live rounds, and two field techs would sweep the building with the MR.UD’s to confirm that the targets had been neutralized. Peter had his finger on the Amygdala Inhibitor master switch, and they would lure the ID back out with more pigs and the retrieval frequency to funnel them back into their container.

Peter nodded to Sergeant Lorenzo, who in turn ordered the release of the ID. Electric nodes from the back of the container prompted the lethargic ID to leave, and they came stumbling out looking for food.

They passed the soldiers in the widened entrance of the Vee without incident, the suits doing their jobs in masking the soldiers’ presence to the ID. The ID funneled down and the flanks moved with them, their guns trained for headshots. Those at the widest ends of the Vee kept watch for insurgents, covering the rest of the platoon. The narrowed front covered the target structure, suppressing enemy fire. This was Peter’s design.

There were forty ID in this exercise, and all appeared to be running smoothly as they approached the Labyrinth.

But suddenly, at the mouth of the Vee, several ID turned on each other and began piling up. Within minutes, there was a heap of Insidious Drones humping each other as the rest of the mass stumbled around them.

Sergeant Lorenzo looked to Peter, who signaled for them to continue their advance. Lorenzo nodded and passed along Peter’s orders to continue.

This phenomenon was a regular nuisance in these exercises, but it was better than the ID turning on the men. That hadn’t happened in several exercises, and Peter kept his fingers nervously crossed over the AI kill switch.

The mass of ID that were not engaged in the humping suddenly came alive—so to speak—as they must have picked up the scent of the three pigs at the end of the Labyrinth.
One soldier at the front of the formation breached the door and quickly got out of the way, as dozens of eager ID funneled into the front door.

The formation had accommodated the ancillary mass of humpers by flanking them and stopping the right flank at the location of the orgy. The left flank had advanced a bit further, skewing the
Vee, but the formation was effectively maintained.

As the last of the ID filtered into the Labyrinth, Peter signaled to Lorenzo, who signaled to the two SWEEPERS to mobilize. They made their way down the reverse
Vee and began to sweep the sides of the building under the cover of two separate squads.

Peter checked his watch and waited patiently. The two SWEEPERS were following the meandering mass of red ID from the sides of the building as the covering squads cleared the windows and flanks.

The ID were still minutes away from reaching the targets, which still registered as blue on the MR.UD’s. The pigs began to squeal and pace nervously in their back room, as if they knew what was coming for them.

The SWEEPERS saw the ID close the gap on their monitors, and dozens of red ID flooded the room as the pigs squealed in terror. The squeals turned into what one could only call screams
, as their blue indicators faded out and vanished from the MR.UD monitors.

The SWEEPERS then radioed to Lorenzo
, who in turn signaled to Peter that the neutralization of the targets had been confirmed. Peter then hit the AI kill switch, and the dozens of ID roaming the rooms of the Labyrinth, as well as the heap of amorous ID, became immobilized.

Normally they would set up more pigs and lure them out of the building, but the heaping pile of humpers would be behind the pigs, and they would have ID coming from two directions.

Peter needed to figure out a way to deal with the humpers before luring the other ID out of the building. “Lorenzo, how many humpers?”

Lorenzo ran up to the immobilized pile and began to count. He signaled ten.

This was a decision point. Peter could designate a few men to pull the heap apart, one-by-one, and drag them back to the container. However, this would cost them time and weaken the flanks. He had to account for an insurgent attack at any moment.

He could use one of the pigs to lure the humpers
, while using the other two to lure the rest out of the Labyrinth in a kind of staggered extraction. But that would mean that the platoon would have to account for two groups of ID instead of one, and in this game, complexity equaled accidents.