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“The Cubans, then. We get a platoon of army down here and—”
“No!”
“Listen to me!” Wren shouted so loud that Kimmie recoiled and turned to him. “We have to allow the Cubans in now. I’ll call Captain Sarzo, tell him to engage any opposition inside the building.”
“Upload has begun,” Heinrich announced. “Fifteen minutes till completion.”
Wren pointed in Anton’s face. “That’s a bleedin’ lifetime that we don’t have!”
Anton thought it over. “No.”
“Why?”
“I have reasons, Gareth!”
Kimmie looked to her boss now. “We need support in here with us.”
Anton spoke into his mic. “Cyrus, override code Angels, override code Angels. Direct one team of platforms each to north and south stairwells outside of Cluster Room. ROEs unaltered. You are ordered to remain outside of Cluster Room.”
He listened for the confirmation; it came in the form of the synthetic American voice Hinton had chosen himself to throw off anyone who might have received orders or requests from Cyrus over the phone during the preparatory phase of the operation.
To Wren, he said, “Cyrus will protect us. It’s time we put our trust in our work.”
Two Cuban security officers ran into the cage now. They both carried MP5s and appeared exhausted and frazzled.
Wren said, “Report. Where did you come from?”
“I just spoke to you. The security office on the main floor here.”
“Tell me about the enemy.”
“I saw them. Americans. Carrying machine guns.”
“How many?”
“Maybe fifteen, I don’t know, but there are no bots between them and us right now. We’re also hearing on the radio that our men are being overrun in the tunnel to La Finca. The platforms that were sent there have been destroyed.”
Wren said, “The upgraded Super Sentry has a rifle and better armor. We need half the platforms in here, in this room, and another half in the stairwells.”
“No one comes in here but us!” Hinton shouted it now, stunning even Gareth Wren with his tone.
•••
Anton had no intention of telling Gareth and Kimmie, but he knew something they did not. He couldn’t bring the Cubans into the Cluster Room, not because he was worried about them damaging the machines but because he worried Cyrus would see the armed forces entering and read it as a danger to itself. If this were the case, from all Hinton had witnessed about the incredible exponential growth of Cyrus in the past week, he feared it would simply rewrite its own code, deem the Cuban army aggressors because their weapons were a threat to its existence, and then send in wave after wave of platforms to kill them. If that happened, it would be a disaster. The Cuban military would realize Hinton’s own creation had turned on it, but more importantly, Cyrus could then deem anyone with the potential to wield a weapon as a threat and ultimately rewrite its code again and classify all humans as a danger.
Every evolving organism was built to find a way to survive; Anton knew this from biology, from his work on artificial intelligence, and from his readings of scripture and history.
Cyrus had grown too strong, too fast, and Hinton feared that if its code changed even more before it was uploaded to China, a widespread issue of Cyrus, tied to every military platform with a computer, could threaten every human on Earth.
•••
Gareth Wren turned to one of the Cubans now, a young man with short hair and a mustache, his MP5 at the ready. “You. You have a backup pistol?”
The man pulled a Jericho from under his guayabera and offered it to Wren, but instead the older Brit took the man’s submachine gun out of his hand, leaving the guard with the handgun. “You’re with me,” he announced, and the two men began running off.
Anton called after him. “Where are you going?”
“To stop the Americans before they make it here!”
