AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I have lots of bodyguards now, Zack. More by the minute.” Turning to the robot against the wall, he said, “Max. Facility threat update.”
One of the two machines turned to Anton; its voice was somewhat robotic, the cadence slightly off, but obviously sampled from a real person. “Sixteen Safe Sentry platforms online report nominal activity. Twenty-two Greyhound and eight Sentry Two platforms are in the Assembly Room, fabrication complete and waiting for weapon and ammunition loadouts.”
“Thank you, Max.”
“You are welcome, Anton.”
“Hey, Max,” Zack said from his seat. The robot turned its face to him now but said nothing. “I’m going to rip your ass in two.”
“I do not understand.”
“I’m going to kill you.”
“I do not understand.”
Zack sniffed, looked away. “You’ll figure it out.”
Hinton laughed now. “Threatening an autonomous weapon with death when it isn’t even alive. I don’t imagine I could think of a bigger waste of time.” He added, “The CIA hires some nutters, don’t they?”
“Nutters get the job done.”
“Not like bots do.”
Wren said, “Zack, old boy, I brought you into this for two reasons. One…you were always a little thick. You executed your nation’s orders like a dog handed a bone he wouldn’t give up, and that’s why you made it as far as you did in life, but you weren’t going to be intelligent enough to understand what was going on around you here, and that was key. We would keep you away from Cyrus, from our conversations about what Cyrus was doing, but it was inevitable that you would be here now, at this late stage just before exfiltration, to communicate to the Agency what wasn’t going on around Anton.”
“What is exfiltration?”
Hinton fielded this one. “Right now, the complete code for Cyrus resides right down this passage, then one floor up on level U2 of the Lourdes HQ building. On its own it determined who would be able to identify and perhaps even stop it once it was exposed with full deployment; it trained itself to be discreet, to hire human assets from dark web portals, to buy aircraft and other equipment, to ship weapons around the world.
“But this is just the tip of the iceberg. Once it goes into wide release, very soon, it will integrate into thousands of systems, and it will cognitize them, hive them, take autonomous control over them. It has rules of engagement, of course, but it will render any attempt to stop it absolutely futile.”
“How do you unleash it?”
Anton smiled. “We upload it to China. We wanted a few more weeks to work out some kinks, but since the CIA is here and the president is talking about a bloody invasion in a few days, we’ve decided to begin the upload within a couple of days.”
Zack sniffed out an angry laugh. “So…you work for China?”
“A marriage of convenience, soon to be annulled. Soon, the Chinese will have it. It will take Cyrus a few days to be fully online throughout their military systems, a week at most, but once it leaves our Cluster Room mainframes, it will already be too late for anyone to stop it.”
Zack said, “Now that Cyrus has killed anyone in the West who could.”
He nodded, but ruefully. “Anyone who could stop it in a week, anyone who could identify the code as coming from my lab, anyone who had worked on portions of the code and would recognize it as my creation. Our initial list was six people; Cyrus expanded it to many more.”
He shrugged. “It’s sad, but Cyrus was right. I was just being sentimental. I only chose targets I could bear to lose; I didn’t want to see all my old friends die.” With a sigh he said, “It’s been a horrible time for me.”
“Yeah, you look completely broken up about it.”
Hinton spoke with defiance now. “I understand that sacrifice is necessary. The neural networks in Cyrus are growing, deepening, strengthening. My engineers report that the machine is learning more and more every day, and optimizing itself to complete its mission set.”
“Why did it add Court Gentry to the list?”
“Who?”
“Down in Guatemala. He and a Russian woman were targeted.”
Anton pondered this a moment, surprising Zack. Eventually he sat down on a bench by the door. Wren remained standing next to him.
To Hightower’s surprise, Hinton’s ultraconfident expression faltered a moment. Finally, he said, “Anomalies are inevitable in any real-world application of AI. A certain amount of natural evolution is inevitable. Cyrus has made some decisions that are perplexing, to be sure, but we trust it to—”
