Dixon turned to him. “This is serious.”
“Is it the real deal?”
Dixon slowly scrolled through it. “Well, it’s a neural network.” She continued scrolling. Eventually she said, “There’s no output layer.”
Ames had said the same thing in his video. Brodie asked, against his better judgment, “What does that mean?”
“Neural networks have an input, and then a certain number of hidden layers that each contain nodes—digital neurons—to process different types of information. And at the end of all that is an output layer. Without it, the network is sucking up data, processing it, learning from it, but doing nothing with the product of its labors. Which makes sense, since this is siloed from the main D-17 algorithm. Nearly indetectable and processing information without influencing the bots’ behavior.”
That seemed to track with how Ames had characterized Praetorian—a passive brain running in the background. He said, “Somehow Bucky breached the wall between these two programs and gained access to its neural network. Ever since then, it had been playacting to look simpler and less aware than it was.”
Dixon narrowed her eyes. “Who told you that?”
“A dead man,” said Taylor. She reached over and opened the video file.
Dixon stared at the face of Roger Ames. She said, as if to herself, “Of course he recorded it…”
Brodie gave her a brief rundown of the video, as well as their unpleasant encounters with Major Klasky and Lenny the one-legged tin man, and Klasky’s violent end.
Dixon sat in quiet shock as she absorbed all of that. “I can’t believe it…” She turned to the agents. “Klasky… I mean, why would anyone get themselves involved in something so awful?”
Taylor said, “Everyone’s the hero of their own story.”
Brodie added, “And some people’s stories suck. What’s relevant now is that Klasky said there’s someone else involved with Praetorian here on base, and he didn’t know their identity. My thought is it must be a scientist.”
Dixon shook her head. “I wouldn’t be so sure. For all we know, Praetorian was burrowed into the code before we ever got here. If Klasky had a co-conspirator—and he wasn’t just messing with you—they could be another member of military command. Hell, they could be a Ranger. Someone who got compromised along the way.”
Well, that was bad news and increased the suspect list exponentially. It was also the kind of thing you’d say if you were guilty and wanted to divert attention from yourself. But something told him to trust Dixon. Taylor would say he was thinking with the wrong head, but really, he was thinking with his gut.
Brodie looked at the on-screen image of the dormant tin men intheir storage bays. “I recall Spencer saying they’re not completely shut down when stored in the Vault.”
Dixon nodded. “They’re in low-power mode. Extends the life of their lithium-ion batteries and contributes to the stability of the whole system in ways it’s not worth getting into.”
Taylor said, “Do you see something in the code that says ‘eyes open’? Probably written as one word.”
Dixon ran a text search in the code. “Here. It’s a script.”
“What does it do?” asked Taylor.
Dixon read through it for a minute. Then she said, “It looks like it routes to the output layer of the main algorithm.” She looked at Taylor. “That’s where the silo is breached. How did you know to point me to this?”
“Klasky ran that script before he locked us in the lab. It’s what got Lenny to attack us.” She asked, “So, it’s not like a kill command?”
Dixon shook her head. “All it does is allow the neural network to access the bot’s main algorithm and physical controls.” She looked at Taylor. “Which means, the whole time Lenny was lying there, and who knows for how long beforehand, its mind was bent on killing you. It just needed this script to act on it.”
They all sat with that cheery thought for a moment. Then Brodie said, “You pulled Lenny out of the Vault at random.”
“That’s right. So we must assume that Praetorian is in all of them, and the only thing keeping them from carrying out the imperatives being fed to them by their neural networks is this single script.”
Taylor shook her head. “But why would they want to kill us? If the goal of these things is to lay waste to anything in their path, who needs a complex neural network for that?”
Dixon replied, “You don’t understand. Bucky must have been feeding everything he learned about Ames into all his tin men buddies via the data links in the storage bays. Meaning, they knew Praetorian had been discovered.”
“And then Bucky killed Ames,” said Brodie. “End of threat, end of story. And from that point onward, Bucky was never put back in the Vault bays anyway, so how could it pass on any additional information?”
“It couldn’t,” said Dixon. “So either the tin men’s logic dictated they have to kill everyone to minimize risk, or…” She turned pale. “Oh, shit.”
“What?” asked Brodie.
