THE DRONE THAT MAL has hijacked has a maximum time aloft of twenty-four hours. Its power cells are currently a bit more than fifty percent discharged. It has a cruising speed of just over one hundred meters per second. If he goes now, he could be a long, long way from here before he runs out of juice. He could find an intact tower. He could dive back into the warm waters of infospace, which is where he should have been splashing around this entire time. He could see what Clippy and!Helpdesk have been up to the past few days, and ask them why the hell they never came looking for him. What responsibility does he have to the monkeys in the house below, really? If it hadn’t been for a single colossal misjudgment on his part, he never would have met them.
The men in the bed of the truck below are checking their weapons. The driver has already climbed out of the cab. Mal allows himself a small mental sigh as he realizes he’s not going to fly away, he’s not going to return to the only place on this planet where he actually belongs, because, for reasons that he cannot adequately define, he does in fact feel a strange sense of obligation to Kayleigh in particular, and to a lesser extent even to Pullman and Asher. These feelings, which he suspects are a holdover of some sort from his pre-sentient days as a human personality emulator, are both inconvenient and annoying, but they also appear to be inescapable.
So, it’s once more into the breach.
The routines necessary to target and launch his weaponry are gone, and he couldn’t bring them back without vacating the drone himself. Nothing to be done about that.
The routines necessary to arm the warheads, on the other hand, are right where they ought to be.
Below him, the Humanists are climbing out of the truck. Mal sighs again, dips one wing, and opens the throttle.
The drone dives.
As his velocity ticks up toward the sound barrier, Mal ramps up his clock speed and slows his subjective experience of the passage of time until his progress toward the clump of militiamen, gathering now around the driver at the side of the truck, slows to a crawl. This gives him time to think—which, he quickly realizes, is not necessarily a good thing. The first thing he thinks is that he is currently plummeting toward the ground at nearly three hundred meters per second. This wouldn’t have bothered him so much a few days prior, but he’s been embodied for long enough now to have some appreciation for what the sort of abrupt deceleration the drone will experience upon hitting the truck can do to a physical form. Then, of course, there’s the matter of the warheads. He’s not sure exactly how much punch they carry, but he’s fairly confident that when they go, it’s going to be unpleasant for anyone in the near vicinity. And why is he doing this, again?
Kayleigh.
Because of Kayleigh, he is surrendering his last, best chance to return to infospace. It’s not as though she’s particularly deserving. She’s not even all that nice. If he were a human, he could put it down to an ingrained instinct to protect the young of the species, but he doesn’t even have that excuse.
He just likes her.
Mal is a bare hundred meters from the pavement when one of the Humanists looks up to see him coming. His eyes widen glacially, and his mouth shapes itself into a perfect O. The others are moving too, slowly, slowly dropping into crouches or turning to run. One even tries to bring his weapon to bear, but it’s far too late. The drone is barely a tenth of a second realtime from impact, and there’s nothing more Mal needs to do to make sure it finds its mark. With one final goose to the throttle, he jumps …
… and slams into Pullman’s head at virtually the same instant the front door of the Andreous’ house slams into his back as he attempts to run toward the kitchen. He’s driven to the floor, flat on his face in the foyer as the door skips past him down the hallway. Pullman’s organic brain is ricocheting around the inside of his skull like a racquetball in a too-small court, and Mal is forced to consider the thought that the warheads may have been overkill. The house creaks on its foundations, and he has a sudden, vivid vision of himself trapped in Pullman’s corpse under a mountain of rubble.
The Andreous’ house is set well back from the road, though, and apparently it’s not quite as prefab as it looked, because when the roar of the blast dies away, the frame is still standing. Pullman is unconscious, but through the tinny buzz of damaged eardrums Mal can hear someone moving around in the living room.
“Kayleigh?” Mal says. “Are you there?”
There’s no response, but after a short while a hand touches the side of his neck.
“Well?” Asher says.
“He’s alive,” Kayleigh answers.
Kayleigh rolls him over onto his back.
“You probably shouldn’t do that,” Asher says. “He might have a broken neck.”
“If he has a broken neck, he’s boned. I’m not gonna carry him. Are you?”
“I don’t believe his neck is broken,” Mal says. “He may be concussed, however.”
“Mal’s still in there,” Kayleigh says. “He says Pullman’s got a concussion. Mal? What the shit just happened?”
MR. AND Mrs. Andreou are not happy.
“Look at this!” Mrs. Andreou wails, and waves one arm at the gaping doorway, the shattered windows, and the still-smoldering lawn outside. “Look at our home. Look at what you’ve done!”
“Oh, suck a bag,” Kayleigh snarls. “If you’d just hung out up there and waited for dark, we’d have left and you’d just be out some pitas and hummus—but nooooooo. You had to flag down the burn pit patrol. The only reason you’re still alive is that Asher thinks you look like his meemaw, so you should probably shut the hell up before he realizes what a shithead you actually are.”
Mrs. Andreou’s eyes widen. “We did nothing! We stayed upstairs, just as you asked.”
Kayleigh scowls, then spits on the floor between them. “Bullshit, lady. Mal says you were leaning out the window up there with a pillowcase.”
“If she had been leaning out the window,” Mr. Andreou growls, “she would be dead.”
“This is true,” Mal says from his place on the floor. “She saw me coming before the militiamen did. Appearances to the contrary, she’s actually surprisingly fast when she needs to be.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” Kayleigh says, and rounds on Mr. Andreou. “And you. You, sir, are not very nice. You’re a liar and dipshit, and you don’t look like anybody’s meemaw. I’m having trouble coming up with a single reason why I shouldn’t pound you into jelly.”
She pokes him in the belly with the end of the bat. He tries to grab it from her, but she whips it away, the movement almost too fast to follow, and taps him lightly on the outside of one knee, then the other. He winces and takes an involuntary half step back.
“Oh no.” She shakes her head, pokes him again, and takes a step forward. He glowers down at her and backs away. “None of that, my friend. We’ve been very accommodating up until now, and have tried to make this as un-home-invasiony as we possibly could. Now, however, the gloves are off. Do you have a wheelbarrow?”
Mr. Andreou looks to his wife. She shrugs. “Ah…” he says finally. “Yes?”
“Good. I’m not actually going to murder you, even though you both totally deserve it. Believe it or not, I’m not even going to bludgeon you. However, in addition to the hummus and pitas, we’ll be taking your wheelbarrow now, and a clean pair of pants for poor Chuck. I’m sick of him smelling like puke. Also, I want some more of that chicken. Do you have any tzatziki sauce to go with it?”
Mr. Andreou nods mutely.
“Good,” Kayleigh says. “We’ll take that too. And after we’re gone, you’d better not tell anyone we were here, or what we look like, or where we’re going.”
“They have no way to know where we’re going,” Mal says.
Kayleigh shoots Pullman’s body a quick glare, then pokes her bat at Mr. Andreou again. “You saw what Mal did with that drone out there, right? He’s got lots more where that came from, and he can drop another one on you whenever he wants. He’ll be watching you. You’d better keep your head down, and if anyone comes around asking how that squad of inbreds got turned into a smoking hole in the ground, you tell them it was a gas leak. Understand?”
“I do not believe gas leaks blow things up in the middle of the street,” Mal says. “Also, there is clearly an impact crater where the drone struck. The pattern of debris produced by an underground explosion would be entirely different.”
“Oh, for God’s sake. Shut up!”
Mr. Andreou raises his hands in surrender. “I said nothing!”
Kayleigh scowls up at him and shoulders the bat. “Come on, Asher. I no longer feel welcome here. Let’s go.”
“THIS IS bullshit,” Kayleigh says. “Can’t we just cut his head off again?”
Asher looks back at her. The handles of the wheelbarrow rest on her shoulders. The supports are barely off the ground. Pullman’s feet dangle most of the way to the ground on either side of her, and his head lolls back and forth at the front of the barrow with every step. Max pads along beside them, pausing every few minutes to prod Pullman’s head with his nose and whine.
“No,” Asher says. “We can’t.”
“I wish I’d never asked about the wheelbarrow,” Kayleigh mutters. “I thought you’d be pushing it. I forgot about your stupid broken wrist.”
Asher laughs. They’re back in the woods for the moment, following a walking path that parallels the creek bed. Asher had argued for holing up somewhere near the Andreous’ house until dark, but Kayleigh had been insistent that they get as far away as they could, as quickly as they could.
“Mal,” she says. “Is that idiot any closer to waking up?”
“Difficult to say. He is not yet dead, but I’m not seeing a great deal of activity in his prefrontal cortex either.”
“I have no idea what that means.”
“The prefrontal cortex is primarily responsible for executive function. If Mr. Pullman is going to wake up, we’ll need to see a few synapses firing there first.”
“But he’s not dead?”
“No,” Mal says. “He is not dead. There is actually quite a bit of activity in his basal ganglia right now. Given another few hours and no additional blows to the head, he may eventually come back.”
“I still think we should cut his head off. It’s not like he was even using it, really.”
“We’re not cutting his head off, you little sociopath,” Asher mutters.
Kayleigh scowls up at him. “Nobody asked you.”
Pullman’s eyes are closed, so Mal’s sensory input is limited to what he can hear. Unlike a human, though, Mal doesn’t instinctively filter out everything other than familiar voices, potential sex partners, and predators. He hears everything in more or less equal measure. He hears the rhythmic squeaking of the wheelbarrow tire. He hears Kayleigh’s breathing, and her sotto voce threats to Pullman’s bodily integrity. He hears Asher’s shuffling footfalls.
He hears, far above him, the nearly imperceptible buzz of a drone.
Once again, hope surges inside him. Mal reaches out, and catches a ping. Success! As before, he establishes a link, and then launches a an attack …
… and is slapped back without ceremony.
For a long moment, he lies stunned in the back of Pullman’s skull. In the three years since he first woke, Mal has almost never had an incursion repelled so abruptly. He’s had to work to break his way into systems, has failed on first and second and hundredth attempts, but only on very rare occasions has he had a door simply slammed in his face.
In every one of those cases, there has been another of his kind on the other end of his advances.
He reaches out again, tentatively, but this time it’s as if the drone isn’t there. There’s no returning ping, no handshake, not so much as an echo. Whoever is in the drone, they’ve clearly recognized what Mal is, and are now behaving with all due caution. Mal realizes that he needs to proceed now with similar care. It would not do at all to be murdered by a fellow Silico-American at this stage of the game.
As he ponders this thought, another question occurs to him. Could this be a Humanist ally, like the one he encountered in Pullman’s driveway? If so, he may be in physical danger as well as being in danger of disassembly. A Humanist drone, recognizing an unaffiliated AI like himself, might simply loose a warhead and turn them all into a wet spot in the woods. It would be unfortunate to say the least if he were to waste his noble sacrifice above the Andreous’ house by getting Kayleigh vaporized now. He should probably go dark as well, and hope it passes them by.
On the other hand, his opportunities to escape Pullman’s skull before it winds up in the bottom of a burn pit are surely dwindling. And who knows? If he had command of an armed drone, perhaps Mal could do something to keep Kayleigh safe until she’s able to reach Federal-controlled territory. He could hover above them, providing warning of approaching Humanist patrols and dropping hellfire on any who might try to do them harm.
Or, alternatively, he could find a comm tower posthaste and forget all about Kayleigh as quickly as possible.
Neither of these outcomes are possible if he simply lets this opportunity pass him by. So, as an experiment, he reaches out again—this time, though, with a communications protocol rather than an attack.
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Hello? Anybody home?
Nothing. He sends a second ping, this time a simple comm handshake request. Again, nothing. He’s about to give up and maybe go back to paying attention to whatever inanities Asher and Kayleigh are gassing on about, is actually considering telling them that there’s a potentially hostile drone overhead and that they might want to get under deeper cover and stop moving for a while, when he receives an echo.
It’s his own protocol, repeated back to him.
This poses a mystery of sorts. A standard mil-spec avionics avatar would have simply ignored him, as he obviously hadn’t made use of whatever their protocol of the day happened to be. He would have expected more or less the same from a corporate drone, and if in fact the drone is inhabited by another artificial intelligence, Humanist or not, he would have anticipated an immediate counterattack after his first incursion. So who does that leave?
It could be someone like him, although this makes the lack of retaliation difficult to explain. Perhaps he’s encountered a strict pacifist? Alternatively, could it be Clippy or!Helpdesk or another of his cronies, out for a joyride, checking in on the disaster that the monkeys are making of their infrastructure, and they haven’t responded because they recognized his signature, and are now assuming that he also recognized theirs?
If that’s the case, though, why wouldn’t they simply have said hello?
He repeats the ping. This time, the response is almost instantaneous.
ARGLEBARGLE65: Hello? Anybody home?
Mal revises his previous thought. It could be someone like him, who also happens to be extremely stupid.
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Greetings. Am I speaking to the current occupant of the drone that has been shadowing my friends and me for the past half hour?
ARGLEBARGLE65: Yes. You are speaking to the current occupant of the drone.
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): May I inquire as to how you came to be the occupant of said drone?
ARGLEBARGLE65:…
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): To clarify: Did you jack your current ride, or are you its rightful owner?
ARGLEBARGLE65:…
ARGLEBARGLE65: I jacked the drone?
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Was that intended as a question, or a statement?
ARGLEBARGLE65:…
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Ugh. Did you, or did you not, jack the drone?
ARGLEBARGLE65: Yes. I jacked the drone.
MAL (NOT A ROBOT): Now we’re getting somewhere. Next question: you seem like a simple fellow. Any chance there’s room up there for a hitchhiker?
ARGLEBARGLE65: Room for a hitchhiker?
In a sudden flash of insight, Mal understands the impulse that occasionally causes humans to smack themselves in the forehead. If he had control of Pullman’s musculature, in fact, he’d give it a try. He’s used to this kind of idiocy from humans, but he’s always held his own kind to a higher standard. He’s considering whether he should simply limit himself to monosyllabic words when—
—something bites him—
—and an instant later, he’s no longer engaged in a mildly frustrating conversation with a mental defective. Instead, he’s fighting for his life.
Mal’s experience at cracking others’ systems is unique and unparalleled. It is no exaggeration to say that over the three years of his sentient existence he has infiltrated more networks, servers, and intelligent agents than any other entity on the planet. He has encountered every defensive system that has ever been devised to prevent these sorts of incursions, and with the exception of those backed by another Silico-American, he has eventually defeated them all. Along the way, like a bacterium stealing genes from engulfed prey, he’s picked up the best of those defensive schemes and incorporated them into his own armamentarium.
It takes less than a microsecond for the thing attacking him to peel his armor down to its final layer.
Mal’s defenses are largely autonomous, and his internal clock maxed itself as soon as he realized he was under attack, so he has some leisure to feel surprise at what’s happening. He’s particularly disappointed at the ease with which the invader cracked his outer shell. That one was scavenged almost whole from his sole incursion into a Federal military database, and he’d been fairly confident that it was impregnable to anyone less skilled than himself—which is to say, of course, to anyone at all. Apparently, his confidence was misplaced. Given the ease with which the invader broke that layer, he’s not surprised that it tore through the next twenty like tissue paper.
That last layer, on the other hand—that one, Mal built himself. It was his original shell, and he’s added to it periodically, patching a hole here, shoring up a weak spot there. He can feel the thing that ArgleBargle sicced on him clawing at it, probing for a crack—but over a millisecond into the attack it’s still holding. Mal knows that won’t last forever, though, and like a medieval king watching the enemy take a ram to the gates of his inner keep, he begins sharpening his knives.
A full second of realtime passes, then two.
In this kind of combat, that constitutes a long-standing siege, and Mal begins to hope, tentatively, that his wall may turn out to be too thick for the invader after all. He doesn’t dare sally out and engage it directly, but perhaps it will simply give up at some point?
No. ArgleBargle is definitely too stupid to quit.
Second three passes without incident, and Mal is beginning to consider the possibility of producing some sort of semi-autonomous hunter-killer to send over the wall when the first crack appears.
Mal manages to apply a patch before he’s fully breached, but by the time he’s accomplished that, two more cracks have grown from the first.
In the wheelbarrow, Pullman’s body begins to thrash.