PROLOGUE

June, Present Day

Edwards Air Force Base, California
Cyber Research Systems (CRS) Autonomous Weapons Division

“Daniel Ávila, it is time to die.” The voice was harsh, mechanical.

Danny raised his head and stared into the eyes of a Terminator.

This was a mechanical face, skull-like in its angles, merciless and pitiless. It was the face of the prototype Terminator that Danny’s team was in the process of programming, transforming it from mere servos and articulated metal into the next stage in American armed might, an unstoppable combination of mobile artillery, mechanized cavalry, and infantry.

It was a very familiar face. When initially assembled, the armored faceplate assembly had been attached slightly misaligned to the armored skeleton and sensory apparatus beneath. The result was that the right eye rode a little high in its socket, giving the Terminator’s face an oddly human scowl. Hence the robot’s nickname, Scowl.

And it was, ultimately, a two-dimensional face, devoid of the menace of immediacy. This was nothing more than the graphic on Danny’s computer desktop, an image converted from recordings made during one of Scowl’s trials.

But desktop images didn’t ordinarily talk. Still groggy from falling asleep at his workstation, Danny looked around at the interior of his oversize cubicle—and flinched from the figure looming over him.

His coworker, a lean man with a high forehead and pointed chin, laughed at his reaction, then resumed his ersatz Terminator voice: “Or maybe just to go home.” He cleared his throat and resumed a normal voice. “What are you trying to do, make the rest of us out to be slackers?”

“What?” Danny was having trouble focusing. For a moment, he couldn’t even remember his coworker’s name. For a man with a near-photographic memory, this was more than distressing. Finally it came: Jerry, the man’s name was Jerry.

Jerry bent over to point at the clock running in the lower corner of Danny’s monitor. “Look. Seven P.M. Long past the time to go home. You’ve been here for a day and a half with barely time for bathroom breaks. You’ve inflicted a mortal wound on the bug-fix list. When the brass gets its next look at Scowl, they’re going to be thrilled. They’ll sound like cheerleaders. But you need some sleep.”

“Wait.” Danny shook his head, focusing on the clock on his screen. For once in his life, he didn’t automatically know the time, and he didn’t believe the words and numbers on his monitor. “Friday? It’s Thursday.”

“Uh-uh. You just put in thirty-plus hours of genius labor, kid. Are you fit to drive home?”

“Of course,” Danny responded automatically.

“Well, then. See you Monday.” His coworker clapped him on the back and left the cubicle.

Danny rose. He remembered getting to work, of course. But that had been Thursday morning. He couldn’t remember anything that had happened since. So where had the last day and a half gone?

He stared into the eyes of the Terminator on the screen. Despite the fact that the prototype robot was something he was programming, nothing but a tool that was soon to revolutionize the U.S. military, nothing but a rolling weapon with an approximately human set of features, he was suddenly afraid of it. There was pitiless cruelty in its eyes where there never had been any before.

He reached over to switch the monitor off. “Problem solved,” he said.

But as he headed out of Cube Hell, the programmers’ pit, for the elevator that would take him to surface level, he knew that the Terminator’s eyes would be waiting for him the next time he came to work.

And for the first time ever, he didn’t look forward to seeing them again.