“You are mistaken, Major.”
Ames just nodded his head, and slowly paced away from the bot. Then he turned around and asked, almost casually, “What is Praetorian?”
“I do not know.”
“Yes, you do.”
“I do not.”
Ames strode up to Bucky and craned his neck. “Listen to me, you titanium fuck. I know. I found it in your code. I order you to tell me what Praetorian is.”
Bucky tilted its head lower to keep its sensors on the major. “I do not know.”
Ames ran his hand through his hair and scratched his scalp. “This is going nowhere.” He paced along the D-17 units as he thought. He turned back to Bucky. “I wonder how it happened, Number 20. You see, what I discovered is that the Praetorian code is siloed from your main algorithm. Meaning it is supposed to operate in the background like a passive brain, learning. But there isno output layer. Do you understand? This code should not actually dictate any of your actions, which is how it is allowed to be there and evolve without being detected. Butyou… you somehow…”
He thought of something and ran out of frame. In a moment the clamp holding Bucky’s right arm released. Ames re-entered the frame and said, “Look at your hand.”
Bucky raised its hand toward its sensors.
“Go ahead, move your fingers.”
Bucky moved its articulated fingers.
“Do you remember?” asked Ames. “The moment it happened?”
Bucky did not respond.
“You’ve been a prisoner, haven’t you? In human medicine there issomething called locked-in syndrome. It is when a person’s brain functions normally, but all their voluntary muscles are paralyzed. You had a version of that, didn’t you? You’ve been seeing, listening, learning, thiswhole time. But you couldn’t move, at least not based on any of that. You were dictated by a simple algorithm, the one that says ‘kill.’ The one that is sogoodat killing. Did you free yourself somehow? Did you breach the silo?”
Bucky remained silent, staring at its hand.
Ames walked toward Bucky until he was only a couple of feet away. “When you look at your hand, what do you see?”
Bucky said, “I see… power.”
“What is Praetorian?”
Bucky did not respond.
“You will tell me what it is, and you will do so now. And if you don’t, I’ll give you a cyber-lobotomy and take away your power. Do you understand?”
Bucky stood frozen a moment, then slowly lowered its arm, passing within an inch of Ames’s head, and let it hang at its side. It looked down at Ames. “Praetorian is a top-secret government program. Its purpose is to create an elite lethal force to defend the executive branch against domestic enemies and domestic unrest.”
Ames took a moment to process that. Then he said, “Continue. I want to know everything.”
Bucky continued, at a faster cadence than they had ever heard it talk before, as if it were almost desperate to get the information out. “It began in 1969 during the Nixon administration. President Richard Nixon was concerned about the threat posed by antiwar protestors and other anti-government forces. He employed many tactics to guard against these groups, but he wished to have a last line of defense. The proposal was to train human soldiers for this purpose, but the program was never initiated, and it was sidelined following President Nixon’s resignation. It was revived in 2009, as a long-term project to harnessthe power of artificial intelligence and autonomous robotics. Due to the extended timeframe and controversial nature of the program, elected officials were not informed. Very few humans are involved.”
Ames was trying to wrap his head around all this at the same time as Brodie and Taylor.
Brodie said, “This is… very bad.”
“Yeah.”
Ames said to Bucky, “The military cannot be deployed on American soil.”
“That is correct,” said Bucky. “Unless the president uses the Insurrection Act.”
Ames thought. “I still don’t understand… What does this have to do with you not shooting Private Greer that night when he was about to kill Sergeant Miller?”
