Pyramid Lake (24 page)

Working as fast as I could, I carefully positioned the stripped ends of the monitor cable wires around the mouse ball and reached up, jamming it deep inside the vacated socket with my thumb. The ball stayed wedged in there when I pulled my hand away, despite the weight of the dangling power cord.

Still standing on the desktop, I bent the plug prongs at the other end of the power cord, centering one of them and splaying the other out perpendicular. Then, slipping the fingers of my other hand inside my hoodie sleeve, I unscrewed the still-hot emergency bulb directly above the monitor, plunging myself into near-total darkness. I tossed the bulb aside and heard it shatter on the ground.

Working by touch alone, careful not to electrocute myself, I quickly twisted the bent plug-prongs of the power cord into the empty light socket, back-feeding the current from the emergency-light circuit into the one that powered the main overhead lights.

The dozens of ceiling fluorescents flickered and lit, bathing the entire lab in bright radiance from one end to the other and dispelling all shadows. I jumped down, leaving my improvised crossover patch cord dangling from the ceiling in a tight arc.

I heard the distant snap of the door’s dead bolt reengaging.

The lights had no doubt sent the intruder fleeing in surprise, whoever it was. But if I was fast enough now, I might still catch my stalker in the hallway before he or she could disappear through another door.

Steel tube in hand, I charged out of the cubicle and leaped over another of Blake’s stupid gecko bots, crawling in the middle of the open floor space between two lathes. Halfway across the now brightly lit lab, I brushed past another crawler on the side of a drill press, while a third one clung overhead.

They seemed to be everywhere now, each one watching me with its single blank, camera-lens eye. I rounded the corner of a five-axis machine-tool cabinet and skidded to a halt. My stomach muscles tightened.

A shiny metal figure stood in my path.

Splashes of red light colored the nearby cabinets once each second, thrown by the rotating flasher in its undersize nub of a head. The Nikes on its feet explained the silence with which it had moved into place. It stood motionless, shoulders forward in that same loose-armed gunfighter stance, blocking my way to the door.

While I was busy with Blake’s computer, the intruder had powered PETMAN on.

Movement overhead. I looked up to see another sticky-footed gecko bot, watching me with its Cyclops stare. Next to the lens, a small red LED blinked on.

It was
recording
this.

I took a small step forward. And then another.

PETMAN didn’t move. He seemed to be waiting for me to get close enough. But he wasn’t doing it right. When you wanted to your draw an opponent in and get him to let his guard down you needed to act harmless.

Instead, brute aggression radiated in invisible waves from PETMAN’s silent, motionless form.

Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out my iPhone and tapped the icon for one of my custom apps. Blake had undoubtedly wiped my Macarena routine from PETMAN’s onboard software, but I had also fixed the stair-climbing problems that had plagued him for months. Buried in the controller instructions for navigating stairs, I had hidden microcode for a different set of movements. It was a safe bet Blake hadn’t found it.

“So you like to dance?” I said to the metal sentry. “Blake’s old school, so I let him have the Macarena. But he isn’t here right now. How about a little…”—I tapped a command—”…‘Gangnam Style,’ instead?”

PETMAN’s frame shuddered, and his tubular-steel forearms came up in front of his metal sternum. He crossed them over each other, and I grinned, starting to relax.

Then my stomach muscles seized into hard knots, because instead of flapping his joined forearms up and down as I expected, PETMAN drew them back and raised them in front of him to bring up his guard.

Just like a boxer.

Stunned, I slid my phone back into my pocket, resisting the involuntary urge to raise my own guard in response.

PETMAN wanted to dance, all right. With
me
.

Only five feet of floor separated the two of us now, and I had seen Blake’s creation move just as fast as a human before—although with much less grace and flexibility. My pulse accelerated. My body’s fight-or-flight reflexes were kicking in, but the improvised club I held was useless. With the blunt friction pads at the ends of his steel forearms, driven by the powerful pistons of his hydraulic musculature, the robot would hit with killing force.

This was a fight I couldn’t win.

I had to think, instead.

A bizarre mental picture was forming in my head: PETMAN lurching through the rainy night, stumbling over rocks, with McNulty’s bleeding, unconscious body draped over his raised steel arms like a swooning bride. PETMAN carrying McNulty toward the gap in the perimeter fence, and the geyser’s plume beyond, following a human figure that walked a few steps ahead: Blake, his jowly face twisted in rage. Or in grief? Or just blank with emotionless neutrality?

But I was letting my imagination run wild. Right now, what I needed to do was focus on the immediate threat here in front of me. The robot had no optical or auditory sensors. The real question was, how could PETMAN see me right now?

But I already knew the answer. The solitary gecko robot on the ceiling had been joined by two others. I could see more and more of them now, crawling up the sides and across the tops of machine-tool cabinets all around. They reminded me of hungry rats gathering on Dumpsters in a garbage-strewn alley back in the ’Dale, watching a gut-shot gangbanger drag himself along the ground, and waiting for him to die.

Each mechanical gecko was watching us right now through its single camera lens. The networked crawlers served as PETMAN’s eyes.

I looked over PETMAN’s shoulder to the lab door fifty feet away. There was no way to get to it without squeezing past him. I had heard the door snap shut thirty seconds ago, but that didn’t necessarily mean that someone had exited. It could have been a feint, and right now the intruder could be circling silently around behind me while I was focused on PETMAN.

But I liked that possibility better than the alternative. Because if whoever was stalking me actually
had
exited into the hallway, they were less than two hundred feet from the door to
my
lab.

And Cassie was in there right now.

Alone.

Without taking my eyes off PETMAN, I took a quick step sideways. He didn’t move.

Extending my arm, I swung the thick length of steel tubing, smashing a slow-moving crawler against the side of the nearest cabinet and crushing its camera lens. PETMAN didn’t react to that, either. Flipping the tube vertical, I jabbed it upward into another crawler on the ceiling, shattering its camera, too.

The gecko bots hadn’t been programmed to evade danger. Twenty seconds later, the floor around me was strewn with broken fragments and metallic lizard limbs.

In the bright illumination from the overhead lights, I couldn’t see any more of the crawlers. PETMAN stood with his arms raised in front of him, like a steel mannequin, waiting for me with impassive, deadly patience.

I had effectively blinded him, but his inertial system was also very sensitive—he would be able to detect the slightest movement of his metal body.

I pictured Cassie in the sanctum, sitting in front of a terminal with her back to the room, twirling her one wavy streak of pale-dyed hair in her fingers as she craned her slim neck forward to stare at the screen, unaware of the danger approaching from behind her.

Time to bet big.

With rapid but feather-light steps, I closed the distance to come within reach of PETMAN’s half-raised steel arms. He stood diagonally, blocking the narrow corridor between the parallel rows of machine-tool cabinets, making it impossible for me to slip past him while upright.

I turned sideways and dropped into a shallow crouch, edging forward, ready to explode into motion at my adversary’s slightest twitch. Forcing myself to breathe slowly despite my hammering pulse, I eased my head beneath a thick, brutal-looking steel forearm. Inches from my nose, servo LEDs blinked around the edges of PETMAN’s contoured metal chest.

I could feel my sympathetic nervous system redlining right now as the reptile part of my brain screamed for me to run. Frustrated adrenaline surged through my limbs. I knew that my limbic system was frantically dumping cortisol into my bloodstream right now, like a tweaker flushing his stash while the cops pounded the door. But I didn’t dare go fast.

PETMAN loomed over me, canted slightly forward, like a remorseless playground predator inhaling the smell of my fear. Crouched in a half squat, I sidestepped in slow motion. My ragged breaths fogged his shiny metal chest plate as I slid my face past. I was having trouble controlling my involuntary movements now. The unregulated flow of adrenaline was galvanizing my muscles, turning toxic.

Blind or not, PETMAN had me trapped between his chest and the cabinets. If my legs started to shake, brushing him would be unavoidable, and that would alert him to my presence.

One blow from the steel arms inches to either side of my head right now would crush my skull.

Exhaling slowly to shrink my chest, I ducked my head beneath his other arm and slid past his legs, then swiveled to stand on the far side. Legs and arms starting to tremble with delayed reaction, I backed toward the door.

PETMAN stayed where he was, facing the other way, arms held rigidly before him.

Pushing the handle, I held the door open and slipped out into the empty hall, feeling my face twist into an involuntary snarl of anger. On shaky legs, I pivoted to stare at PETMAN’s motionless, half-turned back.

“Later for you, you brainless metal motherfucker.”

With a creak of hydraulic actuators, the robot dropped his arms to his sides and swung around to face me.

Letting the door slam shut on him, I turned and sprinted for my lab.

I
found Cassie in the empty sanctum, holding a printout with columns of numbers. Her finger slid across her monitor screen as she checked the numbers on the paper against system graphs that showed Frankenstein’s CPU utilization history. Next to her keyboard, along with her cell phone, I was pleased to see a small canister of pepper spray and a two-pronged handheld stun gun, too. Cassie wasn’t the type to make the same mistake twice.

Relieved to see her unharmed, I kissed the top of her head, but she pushed me away without looking up.

“I’m not talking to you right now,” she said.

Realizing that I could have simply called her phone, or even called Frankenstein to warn her, I shook my head at my own stupidity. But now it was just as well that I hadn’t.

Crossing the sanctum, I climbed the dais to drop into my beanbag beneath Frankenstein’s massive central UltraHD screen, flanked by the tall black Infiniband switches. After the unsettling experience I had just had, it felt very reassuring to have his solid server racks right behind me, forming a comforting protective wall at my back. Cassie seemed preoccupied, so I scooped up my MacBook and plugged in the USB flash drive.

Navigating Blake’s copied directories, I brought up the source code for PETMAN’s firmware. In another window, I brought up the firmware that controlled the gecko crawlers. I checked the date stamps and examined the recent code changes in his source files, confirming what I had begun to suspect as soon as I got clear of his lab.

I let my head hang back, closed my eyes, and waited for my body’s reactions to calm down. I still felt shaky, and faintly nauseated from all the unused adrenaline that was now draining out of my muscles.

But I could see the funny side of this, too.

No one had been stalking me in the darkened lab. I’d walked into a carefully planned trap. And I knew who had laid it for me, because I recognized the coding style: the particular idiosyncratic touches that make each programmer’s work as distinctive as a fingerprint.

Blake had been very busy setting this up after I humiliated him in front of Cassie on Monday. I’d embarrassed him by making his precious PETMAN dance, and this was payback.

Blake didn’t know I had broken into his workstation remotely over the network. Figuring I must have sneaked into his lab to reprogram PETMAN, he had reactivated his old mechanical geckos to serve as motion sensors so he could catch me at it again. The geckos had been programmed to detect and follow movement and to wirelessly trigger the sound file on Blake’s computer at the same time they powered PETMAN on.

According to the timestamps from the night McNulty died, at the same time I was on the roof hooking up the Trevornet, Blake had been down below in his lab, working through the night to put the final touches on his trap.

But my panicked thoughts about PETMAN killing McNulty had been pretty stupid. Raising his arms in a threatening manner was
all
PETMAN had been programmed to do. There were no fighting moves in his repertoire at all.

Blake had only wanted to scare me.

Eyes closed, I grinned at that. The geckos’ cameras had been set up to record, too. Blake would have gotten plenty of mileage from footage of me cowering before his two-legged metal pack mule, or shouting for help, or apologizing to it, or whatever stupid shit he thought I was going to do. Instead, I had smashed the crap out of his lab and toys, so I figured we were probably even now.

Still, who would have thought the old bastard had it in him? This seemed more like the kind of thing
I
would have done.

I checked another time stamp. Blake had made his final code changes and pushed them live at 6:10 a.m., activating his little watchdogs right before he went up to the roof—no doubt for a celebratory smoke. Seeing McNulty’s legs sticking out of the geyser had probably given him the shock of his life. In the wake of the gruesome murder, the trap he’d prepared for me had been forgotten. It had awaited me with mindless patience until I walked into it a few minutes ago.