Brodie noted that the major’s hazel eyes were a little close together, his ears were a bit oversize, and he had a noticeable gap in his teeth. Altogether it gave him a vaguely Alfred E. Neuman–like appearance. Except there was a sharpness in his eyes, and despite his slightly dopey appearance Brodie had a feeling this guy didn’t miss much.
Brodie asked, “Did you agree with Colonel Howe’s actions this afternoon?”
“It would be insubordinate of me to tell you I didn’t.”
“When speaking to a CID agent, your loyalty is to the truth.”
Klasky nodded. “Well said. So, here’s the truth. Brigadier General Morgan should have never been placed in command of Camp Hayden, and Colonel Howe waited too long to do what she did.”
“Why was he placed in command?”
“You’ll have to ask Major General Ramsay.”
“I’m asking you.”
Klasky thought a moment. “Morgan is a smart and capable officer. He’s headstrong, obviously, but that’s not a problem. The problem is he came in here with an agenda, and it was a different agenda than the Army’s, and they should have seen that from a mile off.”
“He wanted to kill the program,” said Brodie.
Klasky looked in his eyes, weighing his words. “He wanted the Rangers to kick some ass, lay waste to the tin men, and embarrass Futures Command, because he hated this whole program. But he underestimated what DARPA and DEVCOM had designed. And by the time he realized what he was really up against, he was dug in, so he’s been pushing the men beyond the breaking point to bend reality back to what he thinks it should be.”
That tracked. General Morgan had been losing control, even before one of the bots killed two people. And then once Bucky went loco, the only supposed safeguard against these things—their predictability—was out the window, and Morgan’s back was against the wall. Given all that, it wasn’t too surprising that he’d done what he did. The tin men were a threat—to his soldiers and to his pride.
Taylor came out the door. It looked like she actually had used the bathroom, at least to wash all the sand off her hands and arms. “Hello, Major.”
Klasky repeated their two-part itinerary to her, then led them toward the administrative building.
As they walked down a dirt road running along the northern edgeof camp, Brodie asked, “Were you with Futures Command before this assignment?”
“No,” the man replied. “I rotated in. The command is new, so that’s common.”
“Where were you before?”
“Fort Carson,” replied Klasky, without elaborating.
Taylor asked, “What was your impression of Major Ames?”
Klasky thought a moment. “Smart. Eccentric. Stubborn. He often came to me to give feedback and complain about the training exercises. He could have gone straight to Colonel Howe, but probably because we shared rank, he thought I was more approachable.”
“What were his issues?” asked Brodie.
“He wanted to push things. Give the D-17s more complex parameters for target acquisition, use unarmed Rangers as civilian stand-ins, see if we could get the bots to mount a simulated hostage rescue. Things that would have required massive code rewrites and led to unpredictable outcomes.” He looked at Brodie and Taylor. “So, as you might imagine, when Dixon reported finding some secret program in the code, my first thought was that it was Ames’s handiwork. It would fit his character and his motives.”
This was the third individual with the same theory that Ames himself was tinkering with the D-17s. That didn’t make it true. But it couldn’t be dismissed either.
“And if itwashis doing,” continued Klasky, “I’m not surprised he was able to cover his tracks so well. He was brilliant.”
“Reckless too,” said Taylor, “if your theory is correct.”
Klasky thought about that. “I’d use the word ‘naïve,’ Ms. Taylor. He thought the more we could make the machines like us, the less dangerous they’d become. I figured the opposite was true. I’m out of my depth when it comes to understanding the tech inside the tin men, but I do know people.”
Right. And part of what made people dangerous was their tendencytoward irrational behavior—often to their own detriment. General Morgan’s pride and vengefulness had cost him his command, at least temporarily. Major Ames’s idealism—and perhaps arrogance—had cost him his life. Even the MP, Specialist Kemp, would still have been alive had he put in the minor effort to procure a vehicle rather than take the major risk of activating Number 20 while alone with it in a confined space.
And that raised a larger question: Were Bucky’s actions the product of some internal logic? Or had some element of chaos, of humanlike irrationality, been introduced into its central processor that caused it—like General Morgan, Major Ames, and Specialist Kemp—to take actions that led to its own destruction?
Why don’t you resist?
Morgan’s question again, which Brodie could not get out of his mind. He said to Major Klasky, “General Morgan conducted a live-fire test on a piece of military hardware. This equipment had the capacity to avoid, or at least attempt to avoid, being destroyed, yet it didn’t. That is an interesting insight.”
