Siege (7 page)

“You hurt me, Adam. After my body died, I didn't think I could be hurt this way again. But you proved me wrong.” On the video screen, her right eye is glistening. After a moment, a tear slips down her lopsided face. “Please go. I need to talk to DeShawn. There's work to do.”

I stare at the virtual tear on her cheek. When we were both human, I never saw Shannon cry. But even if I had, it couldn't be worse than this. Unable to stop myself, I raise one of my steel hands toward Shannon's screen. But I can't wipe away this kind of tear, no matter how much I want to.

I turn my Quarter-bot away from her and head for the door.

• • •

As I walk away from her room, I hear Marshall Baxley shout my name. His voice is loud and serious, with no trace of his usual gossipy tone. I turn around to see his Super-bot clanging down the hallway, its steel feet battering the floor. He's in a panic.

“Adam!” He stops in front of me, decelerating so suddenly that he sways on his footpads. “Did you hear the news?”

“What news?”

“There's been an outbreak, a biological attack!” Marshall's so upset, his plastic face is contorted. “They're airborne germs, carried by the wind. Thousands of people are dying!”

I extend my arms and grip the Super-bot's shoulder joints. “Whoa, calm down. What—”

“Hawke thinks it's anthrax. Sigma's anthrax.”

My circuits ring like a fire alarm. This is it. The siege has begun. “Where's the outbreak?”

“In Yorktown Heights, New York. Your hometown.”

I never thought I'd see New York City again, but there it is below me, a narrow island packed with skyscrapers, all of them glowing in the late-afternoon light. I'm piloting a V-22 Osprey aircraft, my circuits wirelessly linked to the plane's controls. The other Pioneers are with me inside the aircraft, which is racing north at three hundred miles per hour.

We picked the V-22 for this mission because it's a tilt-rotor plane—it has a pair of gigantic three-bladed rotors that can be tilted in different directions depending on what you want the aircraft to do. When you want to take off, you tilt the rotors straight up, and the Osprey rises like a helicopter. But once you're in the air, you can tilt the rotors forward and they become supersized propellers that speed the plane to the battlefield.

Soaring over the Hudson River at maximum velocity, I zoom past Manhattan and the Bronx, then throttle down the turboprop engines and start to descend, heading for the suburbs north of the city. The handling is a little rough because the plane is hauling some heavy cargo. Our robots are loaded with all the weapons they can carry.

Actually, I'm occupying
two
machines right now, the V-22 and my Quarter-bot, which is standing inside the aircraft's cabin next to the other Pioneers. To perform this two-for-one trick, I copied all the memory files in my Quarter-bot and transferred the copies to the V-22's neuromorphic control unit. Then I set up a radio link between the two machines that allows them to exchange huge amounts of data, constantly sending signals back and forth.

Basically, my mind is stretched between the aircraft and the robot, and I'm looking at the world from two perspectives at once. The Osprey's sensors are showing me the suburban landscape of Westchester County below us, and at the same time I'm using the Quarter-bot's cameras to see my fellow Pioneers inside the plane's cabin.

There's a great advantage to this setup: if either the aircraft or the robot is blown to bits, my mind will survive in the other machine. The strategy has its limitations, though. You can't occupy two machines at once unless they're in close radio contact with each other. And you can't guarantee your survival by storing a backup copy of your memories in a safe place. Because human minds are so complex, they can be stored only in neuromorphic circuits that are active all the time. So if I copy my files to another machine without maintaining radio contact, I'll simply create a clone of Adam Armstrong that'll start thinking its own thoughts and making its own decisions. And I definitely don't want to do that.

After a couple of minutes, we fly over Tarrytown, cruising a thousand feet above the trees and houses. As I aim the V-22's sensors at the ground, I use my Quarter-bot's cameras to glance at Shannon, who's standing motionless near the plane's cockpit. Although I've been trying hard to control my feelings since we left New Mexico, I can't stop thinking about what she said.
You hurt me, Adam. You proved me wrong.
I can't stop picturing Shannon's human face on her Diamond Girl's screen, the tear sliding down her cheek. But I force myself to put the image back into my long-term memory. I can't let it interfere with the mission. Just like Shannon, I need to push all those feelings aside.

Five miles south of Yorktown Heights I see clusters of flashing blue lights on the roads. The local police have set up roadblocks on all the highways and streets leading to my hometown. South of the roadblocks, lines of vehicles and crowds of people are fleeing the evacuation zone, but to the north I see no movement at all. All the cars in Yorktown Heights are stopped on the streets, hundreds of them smashed into guardrails and trees, hundreds more tangled in ugly pileups at the intersections. And when I switch my sensors to the infrared range, I see human bodies everywhere, sprawled on the town's sidewalks and parking lots and driveways. I can measure the temperature of the bodies by how brightly they glow in infrared, and they're all far below 98.6 degrees. They've been cooling for hours.

It's horrifying. It's painful beyond belief. Sigma annihilated my hometown. It slaughtered everyone.

General Hawke had suspected that Sigma might go after the families of the Pioneers. To protect our relatives, the Army moved all of them months ago to secret safe houses in the western United States. But no one expected anything like this. I point my Quarter-bot's cameras at Shannon, who grew up just a mile away from me and is probably even more horrified than I am. She was so active in school and church that she was friends with just about everyone in Yorktown Heights. Now those friends and neighbors lie motionless on the ground, some of them stretched on the lawns outside their homes, others curled and slumped on the street corners. The terrible images gouge into my circuits.

And the sight isn't just horrible—it's baffling. This biological attack doesn't make any sense. Although we don't know yet how Sigma spread the anthrax germs, I'm assuming the AI could've released them anywhere. So why did it choose Yorktown Heights? If Sigma had released the anthrax in New York City, just twenty-five miles to the south, it could've killed a lot more people. Millions would've died instead of thousands. So maybe Sigma's goal right now
isn't
killing as many people as it can. Maybe the AI has a completely different agenda.

I run the question through my logic circuits, contemplating all of Sigma's possible motivations, and I come up with a hypothesis. It's simple: the AI chose my hometown because it wants our attention. Sigma wants the Pioneers to come to Yorktown Heights. Which means we're probably flying into a trap.

We don't have a choice, though. The anthrax outbreak has overwhelmed the New York police and the National Guard. All the guardsmen and state troopers are busy organizing the evacuation of the surrounding towns—Katonah, Mount Kisco, Chappaqua—and no one seems to be searching for survivors in Yorktown Heights. The government authorities are just starting to organize rescue crews. And before they can send anyone into the contaminated area, they have to collect enough hazmat suits to protect the rescuers from the anthrax spores floating in the air.

But the germs can't infect Pioneers. We're the perfect team for this mission.

I fly the V-22 toward the shopping centers and churches in the middle of town, tilting the aircraft's rotors to vertical so it can hover like a helicopter. I'm still high enough that I can scan the landscape with the plane's sensors, observing every driveway and backyard. There's no sign of human life. I can't peer into the houses, of course, so it's possible that some survivors might be indoors. The only way we'll know for sure is to go down the streets and break into each home. And that'll take hours, even with all five Pioneers working as fast as possible.

Then I detect signs of movement at the edge of my scan, about a mile farther north. I steer the V-22 in that direction and increase the magnification of my sensors. Someone is stumbling across a parking lot, zigzagging between the rows of cars toward a large brick building. I'm familiar with this particular parking lot—when I was in ninth and tenth grades I used to maneuver my motorized wheelchair past it every day. It's right in front of Yorktown High School.

I descend to an altitude of three hundred feet and hover above the lot. The person stumbling toward the school is young and male, a short, dark-haired teenager wearing jeans and a yellow T-shirt. My circuits compare his face to the thousands of faces in my memory files, but there's no match. He's probably a freshman or sophomore, someone who started going to Yorktown High after my muscular dystrophy got worse and Dad pulled me out of school. The boy's face glistens with sweat as he looks up at our aircraft and its thundering rotors. According to my infrared sensors, his body temperature is over 104 degrees. He's ablaze with fever.

The V-22 is equipped with powerful loudspeakers. I connect my voice-synthesis software to them. “STAY WHERE YOU ARE. WE'RE COMING TO HELP YOU.”

The boy doesn't seem to understand. He stares blankly at the plane, then shakes his head and continues lurching toward the high school. In a few seconds he reaches the front entrance and staggers through an open doorway.

Because I'm sharing the video feed from the V-22's cameras with the other Pioneers, they see the boy too. Shannon strides toward the cockpit window and points at the doorway where the kid disappeared. “I know him. That's Tim Rodriguez. He's a sophomore.”

I'm not surprised that Shannon recognizes him. She did everything at Yorktown High—debate team, glee club, student government—and knew everyone's name. I use the V-22's sensors to survey the lawn beside the high school, looking for a landing spot. At the same time, I turn my Quarter-bot to Shannon. “Should I set the aircraft down? So we can go after him?”

“Affirmative.” Her synthesized voice is crisp and professional, and the screen on her robot's head is turned off. I can't read her emotions.

Twenty seconds later, I land the V-22 and lower the loading ramp at the back of the plane. Zia's War-bot is the first Pioneer to charge outside, her footpads pounding the lawn. She'll go with Shannon and me into the high school, just in case we run into any trouble. I pull the copies of my memory files out of the V-22 and hand over the aircraft to Marshall and his Super-bot. He's going to stay with the plane and maintain our radio link with General Hawke. The general is overseeing the mission from Joint Base McGuire in New Jersey, which is the nearest military base with a biohazard treatment center that can handle anthrax cases. Once we track down the Rodriguez kid, we'll bring him back to the V-22 and airlift him to the treatment center.

While Marshall copies his own files and stretches his mind to occupy the aircraft's controls, I march my Quarter-bot down the loading ramp and onto the grass. I train my cameras on the parking lot but see no one else outside the high school. Then my acoustic sensors pick up a high-pitched whirring behind me. DeShawn has attached his Swarm-bot to the bottom of his quadcopter, which revs up its four rotors and takes off from the loading ramp. He's going to hover above our landing zone and watch over the area. In particular, he'll keep a lookout for long-range missiles. Sigma has used them against us before.

Shannon is the last Pioneer to come down the ramp. Her Diamond Girl strides across the lawn and catches up to Zia. “Let Adam and me take the lead,” she orders. “We know this place. And if Sigma tries to surprise us, it'll probably attack us from behind, so that's where I want you.”

I can't help but admire Shannon's tact. She doesn't mention the main reason for keeping Zia in the rear: because her nine-foot-tall War-bot is the scariest-looking Pioneer, so big and menacing it'll probably terrify any survivors we find. The Diamond Girl and the Quarter-bot are intimidating too, but at least we're closer to human size.

Zia raises her massive right arm and salutes. “Heard and understood. If Sigma shows up, I'll make him sorry.” She stands at attention until Shannon and I stride past her, and then she follows us into the high school.

I haven't seen the inside of Yorktown High since I finished tenth grade, almost a year and a half ago, but the building hasn't changed a bit. Just past the doors is the glass-fronted cabinet that holds the school's football and baseball trophies. On the opposite wall is the Yorkie Notice Board, thickly papered with announcements about class schedules and cheerleader tryouts. Above the notice board is the school's motto, spelled out in big red, white, and blue letters:
DESTINY IS NOT A MATTER OF CHANCE. IT IS A MATTER OF CHOICE
. On the ceiling is the same fluorescent lighting I remember from my two years in this place, and on the floor is the same ugly, beige linoleum. The only difference, really, is the corpses.

The body of an overweight, middle-aged man is near the notice board, lying on his back in a rumpled brown suit. I recognize him in an instant—it's Principal Wilkens. His thick, black glasses have slid off his face, and his eyes are wide open and unblinking. Ed McGrath, the football coach, lies a few feet away. His face, always so red and scowling at the Friday-night games on the Yorktown field, is pale and motionless now, drained of anger and everything else. Mr. Kramer, the school's chemistry teacher, is sprawled near the trophy cabinet, and farther down the hallway is Ms. Lynch of the English department. Ms. Garcia, the Spanish teacher, lies beside Ms. Carlson, the school nurse, and Mr. Brown, the security guard.

I knew all these people. I passed by them in the halls every day. And because I was the kid in the motorized wheelchair, the kid who was dying, they always gave me a special nod or smile, usually because they felt sorry for me and thought I needed some cheering up. They fully expected to outlive me, and I assumed the same. That's why it's so disorienting to see their corpses. These people, this school, this town—it was all supposed to keep going after I died. But now they're all gone, and it feels like I've lost something irreplaceable, something even more precious than my human body.

Shannon halts her Diamond Girl beside Principal Wilkens, the man who handed her so many awards and commendations at so many school banquets and assemblies. I can't be sure what's going through her circuits now, but I bet she feels even worse than I do. She leans her robot over the principal's body and stretches one of her glittering hands to pick up his glasses. Gently, she slips them back on the dead man's face. Then she straightens and turns toward Zia and me. “We need to find the Rodriguez kid. Let's head for the auditorium.”

She proceeds down the hallway, carefully stepping over the bodies. I follow her, and Zia brings up the rear, stooping over so that her War-bot's bulbous head doesn't bang into the ceiling.

We pass more corpses, all of them teachers: Ms. Cohen, Ms. Braun, Mr. Standish, Mr. Weinstein. It looks like they had just enough time to step out of their classrooms before they collapsed. Their shirts and blouses are still damp, which makes sense. Excessive sweating is one of the symptoms of anthrax inhalation, at least according to the medical database I downloaded into my circuits before we left New Mexico. But there are other details that
don't
make sense. I need to talk to Shannon about it.