He crouched in front of Greer and grabbed the man’s jacket lapels. “Look at me.”
Greer looked up at him. Tears streaming down his face.
“We can end this. Do you understand? We can endthem. I need you to pull it together. What was Ames doing down in the Vault? What did he find?”
Greer looked into Brodie’s eyes and tried to calm himself. He exhaled deeply, then stood up. Brodie and Taylor rose as well. He said, “I need to move.”
They walked along the flat-topped mesa. Greer now began talking quickly. “The major suspected there was something going on with Bucky before that incident with me. He told me something weird happened during a load-out. That’s when they bring the tin men up and into the trucks to drive them to the training ground. It’s usually two load-outs, six units at a time. One day, Ames is there for it, they release twelve units, which includes Bucky. First squad goes up, the other squad waits for the elevator to return. And while they’re waiting, Ames notices Bucky looking around the room, looking at the other bots, looking at its own hand, bending its fingers. Then it sees Ames watching it, and it goes right back to standing still like the others.”He paused. “The major told me that it was almost like Bucky had… woken up. Like it was seeing things for the first time.”
The sun slipped beneath the horizon and the sky grew purple in the dusk. The night sounds of the desert began—sparse and sporadic at first, like an orchestra warm-up. A distant songbird. Crickets chirping. A coyote somewhere in the gathering dark, howling for its pack. The stars, too, were just beginning the show.
Brodie began to feel his surroundings in a different way. As if all his senses had been dialed up and he was somehow seeing and hearing what he never had before.
Like the thing had woken up.
Maybe that was Praetorian. A wake-up call buried in code. A bugle at dawn.Rise and shine, tin man.
He became newly aware of his body, and the scale of the world, and how small he was upon the land, loping across the flat mountain. He was high up in the high desert, and somewhere far to the west were the hills, then the houses, then the ocean.
He was in the Black Hawk. Rotors beating the air. The little houses and the pools and the palms. The carpets of green wilderness. The masses of millions settled on two sides of a mountain on the edge of the Western world.
He suddenly realized that he was alone.
He whipped his head and saw Bucky explode into hundreds of pieces beneath the high-noon sun.
Why don’t you resist?
The Army gave them numbers. The Rangers gave them baseball player names. But what about the D-17s themselves? What didtheycall each other?
Nothing. They were one. Linked in space and consciousness. Geolocating each other every half second. Responding like one organism, reactions to reactions to reactions. He saw the virtual red avatars swarm the village. He saw the pulsing yellow infrared hulks,pounding the earth, rattling off thousands of bullets without breaking their stride.
It was a wave, one wave, breaking against the concrete, a wave narrowing into rivers down the roadways, a wave cresting up the walls, onto the rooftops. Drowning the little blue men, snuffing them out, one by one.
Why don’t you resist?
He could see it now. Bucky didn’t care. Bucky didn’texist. Or maybe it was worse. If these things were as smart as he feared… It wasn’t that it didn’t care. Itwantedto be destroyed. That was why it had killed Kemp. Look what it had accomplished. Mayhem. Discord. Mutiny.
But why?
Because ofyou.
Their investigation. That was a threat. What about Roger Ames’s investigation? Maybe that was a threat too. Maybe that was why he was dead.
Bucky didn’t know everything. It didn’t know most things. But maybe it knew enough to act on some imperative…
Brodie was in the morgue, looking at the spongy mass of the major’s decimated brain.
A thing asks questions that it shouldn’t, a thing looks where it shouldn’t.Kill it.
But then more people come, from a place called CID. Bucky couldn’t know that. But then what? Kill them too? No. Then more would come. Instead… instead…
Make them destroy each other.
Do it. Do it. Do it.
The sky was fading into twilight. More stars shimmering. He now noticed that Taylor and Greer were a distance away, at the base of a desert willow. He walked to them.
Taylor looked up at him as he approached. She smiled and patted the ground next to her.
