Todd’s eyes cut to me. He swipes the phone off the desk before I can make a move for it, then points his gun back at me as he sidesteps towards Fred. “Then do it. Right now. Show me.”
Fred’s head bobs up and down, an immediate promise. “I’ll show you, and you shoot the bitch, yeah?”
“Okay, deal,” Todd agrees, sending me a cold look.
I know the phone is still unlocked, so Todd can just hold it up in front of Fred’s face and let him direct him through the screen to get to what he needs. “You go into that app,” Fred coaches, eyes darting up towards me and the other girls to make sure no one is making a move while they’re distracted. But we’re all rooted in place, hands up in the air in surrender to the weapon, terrified expressions on our faces. “Go into the messages… yeah, it needs my thumbprint again. Okay, look for your name—that one. Pull that one up. Okay, now reply to it with this exact phrase: Signing key 11 rejected.”
Todd eyes him suspiciously. “Simple as that?”
Fred nods. “You’ll get a confirmation in a second—it confirms that the hit won’t be carried out. You can look back in my sent box if you want, see that it’s worked before. It’s synced to my phone and my identity.”
“A signing key?” I repeat as it all clicks into place.
I fucking knew it. IknewSmarTech never would have released something like this without a failsafe. I grin, throwing Todd a look as I sit back and let my arms fall. “Makes sense. Every monster needs a leash.”
With a similar confident grin, Todd tosses me the phone, and I flick through the app.
Fred glances between the two of us, confused at the abrupt change in the temperature of the room. His eyes are wide as he glances around, watching Eleanor and Nicole relax, too. “What… what’s going on?”
Iread the messages he exchanged with the AI, assessing the content. “Looks like the program has a command-and-control function. That’s the failsafe. The AI is autonomous, but it checks in with the parent program for every hit. If anyone enters their signing key, the hit is negated. It’s how they’re protecting themselves. I fucking knew there was no way they’d just let that program out into the world with no guardrails.”
“Everyone involved in the project probably has a key,” Wesley remarks, entering the room. Dimitri is hot on his heels. “If no one responds, it moves forward with the hit. If the connection is severed, it becomes fully autonomous, and no one is safe. It’s SmarTech’s self-destruct option. If they go down, they take everyone down.”
Our eyes meet from across the room, and I know he feels the same swell of relief.
“You were right,” he breathes.
“We can stop it,” I say, nodding. “We have his key, so we can keep every hit from happening until we can find and destroy every copy of the program that got out.”
“I don’t know what that means, but it sounds like we won,” Mac declares from the doorway, the last to join the party.
“What the fuck? Who the fuck are you? Who the fuck are you people?!” Fred interjects, raging against his bonds. “You… you… No!” he roars.
Todd steps up to him, winds up and punches him squarely in the nose. Fred’s head jerks back, bone crunching and blood pouring out as his momentum shifts forward again, and he flops against the tape, unconscious.
“That’s for trying to fucking kill me, you fucker,” he yells at Fred, shaking out his hand.
Eleanor lets out a giggle that’s as much a noise of relief as amusement.
Wesley crosses the room, holding out his hand, and Todd offers him a half smile before slapping it with his own in a high five. Wesley frowns. “I’m not fucking high fiving you, you twat. Give me the gun.”
“Oh,” Todd makes a sheepish face, handing it over.
Wesley checks the chamber, then lets out a long breath. I think if Todd had been pointing a loaded gun at me, Wesley would have killed him, regardless of how much he just saved our asses. “Thank you, Todd. For… that. Thank you.”
Todd’s chest puffs out, and I nearly roll my eyes, but even I have to admit that was well done. “Yeah, thanks,” I say. “You acted the shit out of that. Fred really thought you were going to help him.”
It was a big risk—the biggest of the night by far. But I knew that Fred would never give up any critical information willingly. Dimitri might’ve been able to torture it out of him, but I argued this was quicker—and at the time we thought we were up against a time crunch to stop it from getting out.
Todd wasn’t initially really open to anything I had to say—still kind of butt-hurt about being duct-taped and threatened with a gun—but once I showed him the proof, he turned out to be pretty reasonable.
We also offered him a bunch of money in exchange for his help. Like, alotof money. We had to make sure to preemptively outbid Fred if he tried to bribe Todd to switch sides.
“Fuck yeah, I did.” He grins, then reaches his hand out to me. I do roll my eyes this time, but I give him that high five he’s after. “Sorry about the Taco Bell joke, too. I was… uh, going for authenticity. Fred laughed at that one earlier this week—I wanted to make him think I was on his side.”
“Authentic, huh?” I repeat, unimpressed. Authentically apendejo, through and through. At least he apologized for it, I guess.
“So I’m safe now, right?” Todd asks, glancing back at Fred like he’d really like to land another punch.
