Brodie asked Captain Spencer, “Where did you find the major’s body?”
Spencer approached a nearby desk and pointed to the floor behind it. “He was lying here.”
Sergeant Mendez added, “There was blood spatter as well as skull fragments and brain matter found on the desk, and on the floor on the other side of it.”
Brodie stepped to the spot where the body had been. “And Bucky?”
Spencer walked around to the side of the desk. “About here. Facing Major Ames.”
Brodie asked, “What was it doing?”
“Nothing. Just standing there, motionless. Both of its hands were at its sides, covered in blood.”
Brodie and Captain Spencer stood less than five feet from each other. Brodie imagined Roger Ames’s view in the last moments of his life, looking up at one of those seven-foot-tall machines as it stretched its titanium arms toward him…
Taylor said, “Captain, you told us that Number 20 malfunctioned in the field, which was why it was brought into the lab. What exactly happened?”
Spencer replied, “During training exercises, the Rangers and the bots wear multiple sensors on their bodies as part of the SIMRES system. When a sensor registers a hit, it emits a sound, which indicates to the trainee or the bot that they are out of the fight. At that point they are supposed to stay where they are and sit down for the duration of the exercise. Number 20 was hit while approaching a building and sat in the sand. When the fight was over, it would not get up. Completely unresponsive. So we loaded it in a vehicle and brought it here. Ran some tests, diagnostics. We could find nothing wrong. Then we did a system reset. Still nothing. It was late, I wanted to get some rest and tackle it again in the morning. The major… he didn’t want to leave.He was a driven individual. Once he started on something he couldn’t stop.”
Caroline Dixon added, “Roger was a perfectionist, which I appreciated. He put all of himself into his work. If something went wrong, he saw it as a personal failing that he had to remedy.”
Brodie asked her, “Were you here that night?”
“I was not.”
“Why?”
“Because I had gone home for the day.” She looked at Spencer. “And no one contacted me to alert me about a problem.”
Spencer did not respond.
Taylor asked, “What if he was playing possum?”
Everyone turned to Taylor. She continued, “Bucky. You said there was nothing wrong with him, he was just unresponsive. Maybe he did that on purpose, to get into the lab. To get Major Ames alone.”
For a moment no one responded. Then Dixon asked her, “If a self-driving car runs a man over, is your first thought that the car wanted the guy dead?”
Taylor did not respond.
Dixon grabbed the detached robotic arm off the table, then approached Taylor and placed the robot’s hand on her shoulder. “How does this make you feel, Ms. Taylor?”
Taylor met her gaze. “Slightly unsettled.”
Dixon smiled. “They creep me out too. There’s no way around it. My decade of experience and PhD from Caltech don’t stand a chance against millions of years of human evolution that have primed us to recognize threats.” She withdrew the arm and set it on the table. “It’s just metal and wiring, though. We understand that intellectually. But theform, it’s hard to get past the form.” She tapped her own temple. “But they are nothing like us where it counts. They are self-driving cars on two legs with automatic rifles.”
Well, so far they were getting told over and over that these killerrobots only killed in certain ways, and in certain places, and that they were as dumb as a Tesla. But one of these things had gone off script, and there had to be a reason. Maybe everyone in this isolated desert outpost, except him and Maggie Taylor, had completely lost perspective on what was really going on here.
Brodie asked Captain Spencer, “What is your security protocol in this lab? Must the bots be restrained when they are powered on?”
“No.”
“Is someone on hand with an EMP-equipped weapon?”
Spencer hesitated, then responded, “No.”
“Outside of this lab, is there any other location where the bots are powered on and unrestrained without there being someone equipped with an EMP weapon?”
Spencer thought a moment. “Not that I’m aware of.”
