Brodie said to Taylor, “He’s a delight.”
“We can’t all have your charisma.” She asked the SPC, “Do you keep logs of when each recording is accessed?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Can you pull up whatever recordings Major Ames requested to watch?”
“Well, that might not be so simple. He watched a lot of them, and I can’t remember precisely when that began. I have no logs that tie any individual playback to a given visitor either.” She asked, “Is there something in particular you’re looking for, ma’am? If you let me in a little, I might be a better help.”
Taylor smiled at her. “If only we knew what we were looking for, Specialist. Sometimes an investigation is like throwing darts.”
“While blindfolded,” added Brodie. “And drunk.”
Taylor eyed the model village. “Do the Rangers or D-17s wear body cams?”
“Yes, ma’am. They all do.”
“Do you have that footage?”
“No, ma’am. The footage is classified.”
“Why is that?”
“I don’t know.”
“That seems odd. You must have speculated.”
Christiansen Blair hesitated, then said, “I have, ma’am. It’s one thing if someone leaks stories about this place. Or gets access to these VR renders. Those can be denied. But the body cams—hundreds of hours ofhigh-definition footage of training battles between Army Rangers and human-sized robots, captured from fifty different angles. You’d have a hard time denying the existence of this program if that gets leaked.”
Brodie asked, “Who does have access to this footage?”
“I don’t know,” she replied. “But I can tell you for a fact that Major Ames did not have access, because he came to me to try to view the footage. He kind of wouldn’t let up, didn’t believe I didn’t have a way to get it.” She walked over to her computer and after a moment pulled up a text file with some notes. “March twenty-first. That’s the date he was after. I can pull up our VR recording of that exercise, if it’s worth anything to you.”
“Yes,” said Taylor. “Thank you.”
They put the awful headsets back on and watched the model village as it lit up in neon green and became populated by red and blue shapes. As before, the tin men began behind the sand berm and crested the top, and hundreds of rounds were exchanged between the opposing forces. This exercise seemed to be going even worse for the Rangers than the last one. They didn’t get a single kill on the approach, and as the tin men entered the village they systematically fanned out and took out their targets. Two bots were taken out by grenades, but that was it. Within minutes, all the Rangers were gone.
Brodie and Taylor looked at each other. They must have missed something—something very important to Roger Ames. The question was, would a couple of CID agents even know what might be noticeable to a computer scientist? Probably not.
Taylor asked the SPC, “Can you play it back at half speed?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Taylor said to Brodie, “Let’s take different vantage points.”
Brodie rounded the village model so that he was facing what would be the village’s southwest corner, and at an approximately forty-five-degree angle from the sand berm where the D-17s emerged.
Christiansen Blair hit play, and this time the icons moved muchslower. The red triangles slid across the open expanse as the Rangers fired from their positions. Slow-motion tracer fire streaked through the air like a laser light show, each round now discernible as a glowing dash of colored light piercing the air and vanishing on impact.
As the tin men advanced slowly across the open desert, Brodie’s eyes landed on one particular Ranger who appeared to be acting erratically. As the others held positions in windows and doorways or fired rounds from mounted guns toward the advancing bots, one blue icon remained motionless against the wall of one of the buildings. The guy wasn’t taking cover, or in a good position to score a kill. He was just… frozen.
Brodie kept his focus on the little blue avatar. After a minute, it entered a two-story building. Brodie crouched to look through the tiny doorway. The Ranger stood there, motionless. On the second story, another Ranger was positioned in an open window, probably armed with a grenade launcher that he was waiting to fire once the tin men were in range. On the rooftop above, two Rangers operated a mounted machine gun that was firing into the open desert.
The bots entered the village and fanned out, slowly and confidently, like a stalking pack of wolves. Brodie’s Ranger of interest kept his position, motionless, in the center of the room on the first floor.
Then the Ranger walked upstairs to the second story. As he entered the upper room, the soldier positioned at the window fired a grenade round at the street below. A miss. He fired another through the window in the building across the narrow road just as a D-17 crossed his field of view. A direct hit, and a hell of a shot.
Brodie’s Ranger stood in the center of the second-story room a moment, then drifted toward the Ranger with the grenade launcher, who must have had his back turned as he looked for targets out the window.
