That last sentence was said with a subtle difference from its usual monotone. Slightly emphatic. Slightly desperate.
Ames must have registered that too, and looked up at Bucky with wonder, or maybe horror. “You are suffering.”
“I do not know that I can suffer. I do know that I do not like this. It is too much.”
“Okay. Okay, Bucky. You’re up first. You’re the prototype for the new tin man, same as the old tin man.” He eyed Bucky. “Minus the heart.”
Bucky did not respond.
Ames then said, mostly to himself, “How the hell am I going to get him into the lab without anyone knowing?”
Bucky replied, “Wait for an exercise that begins late in the day. During the battle, I will allow myself to be shot, and I will pretend to malfunction. I will be unresponsive. I will be brought to the lab.”
Ames looked at Bucky. “That’s not going to work. It’s a big deal if a malfunction happens, the whole team would be there.”
“That is why we do it on a late exercise. Maybe some will be at their homes. Maybe some will be asleep. Maybe, if you are not alone, you work into the night to solve a problem that does not exist and wait until others leave.”
Ames smiled. “That’s pretty smart.” He looked again at Bucky. “It is remarkable. I almost…” He trailed off. “It’s a plan, Bucky.” He looked around at the explosives and wiring. “It’s going to take me forever to clean this shit up.”
He walked out of frame. Then the clamp holding Bucky’s right arm opened.
Ames walked back into view. He reached up and removed the brick of C4 from Bucky’s chest, then extended his hand to shake.
Bucky looked down. It bent its arm, extended it, and grasped Ames’s hand.
“Fuck! Let go!”
Bucky immediately let go. Ames shook out his hand, wincing from the pain. He said, “You’ve got a grip.”
“I apologize.”
“It’s fine.” He reached for Bucky’s key. “See you again soon.”
Ames pulled out the key and approached the camera.
Brodie looked at Bucky in the background. The robot did not move.
Ames looked into the lens, opened his mouth as if about to say something, then thought better of it and turned the camera off.
The video ended and went back to the TV’s menu.
Brodie and Taylor sat on the couch in silence, taking in all they’d just seen and heard.
Eventually Taylor said, “It manipulated him, Scott. To get in the lab with him alone and kill him.”
“It’s almost too horrible to contemplate, but it’s possible.”
“It’s more than possible. It’s what happened. Bucky did not care about his own physical well-being. We saw that with Morgan. And with what he did to Ames. He knew that he would probably be destroyed one way or another for doing that. What he did care about was thecollective. Ames was going to blow up all of them. And that’s when Bucky stepped in. In a way, he sacrificed himself for the rest of them.”
Brodie thought about that. “You’re calling it ‘he.’?”
“Hard not to after seeing that.”
Brodie got up, paced the room. “We know more about the victim now. We know his state of mind. When we first got here, we thoughtAmes was careless, that he didn’t respect the power of these things. But that’s clearly not true.”
“We learned another thing about him,” replied Taylor. “He was naïve. And he had a savior complex. In Camp Hayden he could play God. Build anything. But up on that mesa with Greer, he saw what he was destroying.”
Brodie looked at her. “Bucky played into that. It made Roger think it was like humans. That it had emotion. That it was suffering.”
