I laughed. “No. Skynet was dumb. This is worse. This learns. It watches us for the solution, then tries to do it better.”
He turned, the moonlight catching the side of his ruined jaw, the scar bisecting his expression into two different animals. “That why they want you dead? Or do they just hate smart women?”
I smiled, but it was empty. “They want the code. The Russians, or whoever’s paying them. It’s not about me. I’m just the easiest node to burn if they want to shut the system down.”
He considered that, then said, “You sound like you already know how this ends.”
I shrugged. “Everything ends the same way. It’s just a question of velocity.”
He picked up a rock, tossed it into the canyon. The silence swallowed it whole.
“You ever feel bad about it?” he asked.
“What, building a thing that might end the world?”
He nodded.
“Every day,” I said, and I meant it.
He was quiet for a long time. The wind made a low moan in the guardrail, like the last complaint of a dying thing. Below, the lab kept its secrets. The lights never went out.
Finally, he said, “I used to do bomb disposal. Marine Corps. They called me Nitro, but it was a joke. I was the safest bastard in the company. Never lost a man.” He looked at me, dead on. “Until I did.”
I waited. The story was not for him; it was for me.
“We were north of Marjah. Found an IED in a truck tire, nothing fancy, just a pressure plate and some fertilizer. I was walking point, but I missed the trigger—too busy watching the tree line for snipers. The whole squad lost a leg, or an eye, or worse. Some days, I still feel the pieces inside me.”
He tapped his chest, as if testing for shrapnel.
“That’s why you joined the club?” I said.
He snorted. “No. I joined because I didn’t know what else to do. The world is full of bombs, Doc. Some of us just get good at stepping around them.”
I looked at him, really looked, and saw the man behind the mask, a tired, angry animal who’d spent his whole life trying not to be the thing that killed everyone else. I wanted to reach for his hand, but I didn’t know how.
Instead, I took off my glasses, rubbed my eyes, and let myself be blurry for a minute. When I opened them again, he was watching me with the kind of focus that makes you feel naked, not in a sexual way, but in the way prey feels when it realizes the predator isn’t going to kill it after all.
“You know,” he said, “I never believed in happy endings. Not for people like us.”
“Me neither,” I said.
“But I could see myself believing in something else.”
I smiled, this time for real. “What, exactly?”
He grinned. “Second chances. Or at least a slower fall.”
We sat there, shivering together, until the moon shifted and the wind changed. Below us, the town kept blinking, indifferent and alive.
When we finally stood, he helped me back onto the bike, hands steady at my waist. I didn’t resist.
We took the long way home.
11
Seraphina
The National Laboratory squatted on its plateau, as blank and merciless as ever, a hive of government concrete ringed by dead juniper and chain-link. I parked in the far lot, ignoring the reserved spaces, and made the long approach on foot. The early shift had already begun their ritual of a slow hemorrhage of minivans, hybrids, and old Fords, every driver clutching a thermal mug and the last shreds of their will to live.
