Silicon Man (2 page)

One of the troopers appeared near the container where Cara stood in perfect silence. His combat helmet was equipped with a sophisticate HUD display and night-vision sensors – she would not be able to elude him in the dark.

Before he could reach her, Cara leapt from behind the crate. Her fist flashed out and made contact with the man’s helmet, atomizing the faceplate in an explosion of glass. As the trooper cried out, his distress was immediately picked up by the com inside the helmet and relayed to every other team member inside the cargo hold.
 

They now knew her position.
 

The dazed trooper dropped his assault rifle and Cara caught the weapon in mid-air. She whipped it around in a wide arc, cracking the solar plexus of another incoming trooper. She moved with superhuman speed, a whirlwind of destruction. Her leg swept out in a roundhouse kick and made its acquaintance with an incoming trooper’s chin. Sent flying, the man smashed into one of the steel containers and his helmet cracked under the force of impact. Another trooper caught her fist with his face.

Seconds later it was over, Cara surrounded by broken, moaning bodies. She returned to the small bundle resting safely on its out-of-the-way crate. For a moment, she felt a flicker of hope. Maybe she could defeat these men after all. She was about to scoop up the infant when approaching footsteps gave her pause.
 

Cara whirled.
 

Another trooper was closing in, but this one maintained a safe distance. Circling her like a lion tamer who had just stepped into the den of the beast. She couldn’t make out the features of the man inside his combat helmet, but she sensed he was studying her with a sense of cautious respect. This man — judging from the various markings on his armor, he must be the commander — knew what she was capable of, how dangerous she could be. She must be especially wary of him. The AI-TAC commander hadn’t bothered to draw his weapon yet. His quiet, controlled demeanor was unnerving. She decided to grow stock-still, her eyes never leaving him. The trooper spoke, his voice calm and direct, electronically amplified and given a growling, even menacing edge by the helmet’s speaker system. “Give yourself up! There's no escape.”
 

Cara eyed the infant Annie.
 

She wavered. “Can you promise to keep her safe?”

“We're not here to hurt her,” the trooper said.

“Can you keep her safe
from her mother
?”

The question hung in the air, unanswered.
 

Sadness crept into Cara’s eyes, soon replaced with a white-hot flash of anger. She lunged at him but the AI-TAC commander kept his cool and used Cara’s ferocious power and momentum against her. In one fluid Aikido maneuver, he sidestepped and flipped her to the deck. The trooper spun away, drew his handgun and aimed.

Recoil was followed by muzzle flash and a futuristic bullet erupted from the barrel. The projectile bee-lined toward Cara and buried itself in her chest. The micro-explosive charge in the bullet ignited. The explosion shredded Cara’s torso and catapulted her through the air, the world going topsy-turvy. She hit the cargo hold’s steel floor in a string-cut sprawl.
 

Cara peered down with dismay at the crater-sized hole the bullet had torn into her chest. It was smeared with blood but underneath the crimson liquid, a mass of shredded wires and steel were revealed. With a wild look of desperation, she tilted her head toward her approaching attacker. He resembled a faceless robot homing in for the kill. The irony was not lost on Cara. This human seemed more machine than herself. Cara, now a short-circuiting mess sprawled on the steel floor of the cargo hold, closed her eyes. Her past zipped through her consciousness as reality faded in and out with a furious crackle and hiss of static. Her damaged visual system was fritzing out. Her body was shattered, but her cybernetic brain remained undamaged. The information held within her CPU could not be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. Which left her one option…

What she was about to do was dictated once again by logic. She hated to leave Annie behind, but she had to protect the people who helped her get out of the country.

“I’m so sorry, honey,” she said, her voice a whisper. She eyed the approaching trooper, her eyes pleading.

“Take care of her.”

With these words, Cara initiated her self-destruct program. Once activated, the computer virus would corrupt her memory files and make any form of data retrieval impossible. She would be taking all her secrets with her.

ZAAP!
Data furiously slashed her field of vision, consuming her reality until there was only darkness.

***

“Take care of her.”

There was a grave finality to the words that filled the AI-TAC commander with furious urgency. He quickly stepped to the downed mech and knelt before the sparking android, his guard up, body coiled, weapon ready. His faceplate slid open. The strong but weary eyes of a career soldier stood out as unmistakably human against the robotic armor covering every other inch of him.
 

Commander Cole Marsalis was born handsome but hardship had given his face a gaunt, drawn quality. At thirty-three years old, he looked about ten years older. A scar snaked its way down his battered face, a souvenir of a rogue X-3 with a penchant for knives. A child-model, it was the property of a woman who lost her own kid in a freak accident. For one second Cole had been distracted by surface appearances and forgot that he was dealing with a potentially lethal machine. The scar was a daily reminder to never let his guard down again, even when his target seemed innocuous.
 

Cole’s face remained masklike as he took in the tangle of glittering cybernetics spilling from the woman's shredded innards. The sight of her ruin sparked only a flicker of emotion in his eyes. On the surface, she might appear human but Cole never forgot what he was dealing with – a murderous machine. Looking at her, he knew he was too late. The defeated mech had initiated her self-destruct mechanism, her eyes dead marbles now. He pulled a cable from his wrist gauntlet and plugged it into a socket in the back of her head. A small screen on his wrist gauntlet popped to life as it scanned the contents of her cybernetic brain. A message flashed: DATA CORRUPTED.
 

Shit!

A second trooper appeared behind Cole. The faceplate opened, revealing feminine features imbued with an exotic sensuality.
 

Cole shot a look at Margo, one of the best troopers under his command. She shared his disappointment as she spoke. “So much for bringing her back intact.”
 

Cole nodded, voice oozing frustration. “She had other plans.”
 

Cole rifled through the android's pockets. He wasn’t quite sure what he was looking for. All vital intel had been stored on the CPU inside her head. Nevertheless, Cole checked her clothing for clues that might lead him to those who got her onto this boat.
 

His finger closed around an item tucked in her jacket pocket. He extricated a well-worn postcard of Tokyo, a series of cracks spider-webbing the image. Cole figured that she had been studying this picture with longing for quite awhile. It couldn’t have come cheap — paper was at a premium in a world where trees had become sparse.
 

Cole rose to his feet and handed the card to Margo. She glanced at the picture, then put the postcard in a small pouch around her waist. The mech’s most cherished possession reduced to just evidence for the lab.

Margo shook her head. “Tin lady really thought she could do a better job raising the baby than its parents. If you ask me, someone should have a chat with the engineer who coded her maternal instinct. They went way overboard.”
 

Cole thought the same could be said for most androids. Programmers were engaged in a mad race to make each successive generation of mechs more human than the one preceding it. As the machines grew more sophisticated, so did their problems. Mech malfunctions were at an all time high and it seemed the calls were coming in faster with each passing day. The situation was out of control, as far as Cole could tell but, instead of tackling the underlying disease, they spent their days fighting the symptoms.

Cole nodded at the troopers arriving on the scene. “Let's bag her.”
 

The baby's cries echoed through the cargo area. The cries stirred something deep within Cole and a memory threatened to surface. Cole pushed the thought aside, a raw nerve that needed to be severed. “Make sure she’s okay,” Cole told Margo.

Margo rolled her eyes. “So the only girl in the squad gets to play mommy?”

Cole paused, uncomfortable.
 

Margo grinned. “Just fucking with you, commander.” She walked toward the child. Cole managed a hint of a smile. Margo had sass.
 

He moved through the hold to check on the two downed troopers. The man with the destroyed helmet was bleeding from numerous cuts, but the damage was purely cosmetic, which was surprising. Cole realized the android had been pulling her punches. She could easily have driven her fist straight through the light metal into the man’s skull. Bone was no match for a titanium endoskeleton. Had her maternal coding prevented her from using full force, or was something else at work?

Cole killed his train of thought. He was wasting time with wild speculation. His job wasn’t quite done yet.
 

Reassured that his men were okay, he eased his way into the darker recesses of the cargo hold, gun up. As his visor snapped shut again, he switched to night-vision and watched the area light up in spectral shades of green.
 

He entered a dizzying maze of ten-foot high crates. According to his HUD, the only life signs belonged to him and his team members but Cole knew from experience that tech could be manipulated. He sensed the enemy was near. Ten minutes later, he came across a small space that had been cleared. Five figures sat reclined on the floor, males and females. They were perfectly still, reminding Cole of Buddhist monks engaged in meditation.
 

The laser-light of Cole’s pulse weapon flitted over the small congregation, dancing from one face to the other. By law, synthetics had to be recognizable as such and were manufactured with a set of glittering power bars embedded in their necks but black-tech mech modifications had disguised this group well. An additional layer of skin hid the electronics. On the surface, they looked perfectly human.
 

Suddenly the five figures raised their heads in perfect unison. Cole’s HUD indicated that he was looking at five human beings, but a barking German Shepherd suggested otherwise. The androids had found a way to hack the sensors… The five mechs spoke at once in a synchronized chorus. “We think... therefore we are.”
 

Cole knew that no matter how fast he moved, he wouldn’t be able to stop what was about to happen. As soon as the words left their lips, their heads slumped forward and their eyes became white crescents.
 

Cole clenched his fists with frustration. They had followed the female AI’s example and opted for extinction over captivity.

We think… therefore we are.

They had chosen to be no more.

C
HAPTER
T
WO

LOS ANGELES, 2054

Cole’s team was hunkered down inside the steel belly of the hovership. He eyed the men and women under his command. His unit consisted of the elite members of all law enforcement branches who had volunteered to become members of the Artificial Intelligence Tactical Unit, AI-TAC for short. Their job was simple — take down rogue androids.
 

For most of the team, joining AI-TAC was a way to raise their status and their pay grade. Cole was different. Transferring from SWAT to AI-TAC ten months earlier had been a calling. He had witnessed firsthand how dangerous AIs could be and swore to keep the world safe from malfunctioning units.

The military hovercraft banked sharply and zeroed in on an imposing complex. It was the corporate center of Synthetika, the company that had introduced AIs into the labor force twenty-five years earlier. Since those first primitive models hit the market, the demand for mechs had skyrocketed and made Synthetika the biggest company in the world. Now one in five workers in America was an AI and they accounted for twenty percent of the adult population.
 

Resembling a sprawling university campus, Synthetika encompassed two hundred acres and housed the corporate headquarters as well as research and development facilities. The various structures were connected by a series of monorails and shuttles, crisscrossing steel filaments forming what looked like a spider web from the air.
 

Synthetika was also the home base for AI-TAC. The company’s decision to house the quasi-military unit on their campus sent a clear signal to the stock markets of the world.
Synthetika was responsible for its own products.
If something went wrong — if androids thought they’d outgrown their programming — Synthetika would dispatch a first-response team and eliminate the problem.
 

The hovership approached the vast AI-TAC headquarters and closed in on one of the two landing pads on the roof. Seconds later, the craft touched down and a hatch popped open. AI-TAC soldiers began to file out of the craft. Helmets were unstrapped, body armor loosened. Everyone could let their guard down now.

Cole joined his team in one of the large elevators and, moments later, he was making his way through the bustling command center, combat helmet clutched under his arm. Everywhere he looked, AIs were assisting various officers. AI-TAC hunted rogue mechs, but that didn’t mean they shied away from using synthetics as part of their support force. A quarter of AI-TAC’s staff were synthetics, an example of man and machine working together as a harmonious unit. Their patrons were selling a vision of the future, and AI-TAC was compelled to buy into it.