Chapter 50

When August called to warn Richard Kirkpatrick that dangerous allies were on their way, his reply made her gut churn sickeningly.

"Ms. Evans, you'd best hurry. It appears a million lives are at stake." He paused almost imperceptibly. "And one of them is my idiot son."

August wanted to ask for details, but her windpipe closed and all she could do was croak, "Coming," and hang up. She needed both hands on the wheel.

Her Cadillac was a good car. It had a powerful engine, some huge amount of horsepower, a lot of ccs and valves or whatever. But the engine was only so much use in January on the back roads of the state. It took every ounce of concentration not to fly off the shoulder in the turns, drifting like a rally racer while knowing the car and tires weren't made for it.

You're no good if you're dead. You're no good if you're dead.

But her foot wouldn't let up on the gas.

It took two hours and forty minutes to reach the Kirkpatrick mansion—incredibly fast but far too slow. The dark and the freezing chill were appropriate. They were inside her chest as well, squeezing.

When August pulled to a stop in the driveway, she wondered if she had somehow beaten Imran's security force. There were no vehicles, no perimeter, no scary guys with guns. She walked up to the door, but before she could think of knocking, it swung open.

"Ms. Evans," Imran said. "You surpassed our expectations of speed." He was dressed all in black from head to foot, a caricature of a covert operative.

"Bloody hell. How'd you get here so quick?"

"One moment," Imran said, raising a ruggedized walkie-talkie. "Ms. Evans is safely inside. Please close the perimeter."

"Understood," came the slightly distorted reply.

"My apologies," Imran said, addressing August again. "We came by helicopter."

"By helicopter?"

"Indeed."

"How on earth?"

"An acquaintance is a collector of vehicles and rather a wealthy person."

It was impossible not to be impressed. "Is he here?"

"In a tree, observing through the scope of a rifle."

"Of course." Then August remembered what was at stake. "I need to see Richard Kirkpatrick."

"Please follow me."

They ascended the spiral staircase—familiar from previous visits, but the escort quite different this time. "Where's Angela?"

"The master of the house deemed it prudent for her to take shelter at a cabin in the mountains."

"She's hugely preggers..."

"Richard Kirkpatrick's current wife has accompanied her, and I believe a great aunt is on the way from New Jersey."

The fully-in-control sensation radiated by Imran, and even somehow by the mansion itself, served to bring August's heart rate from cardiac arrest levels down to something like twice normal. It had been almost an hour since she could actually count the beats.

Just breathe.

Imran led her to Richard's study and turned away. "I will monitor the premises with my associates."

"You won't be helping in here?"

"It has been explained to me in no uncertain terms," Imran began, a faint smile cracking the surface, "that I will be of no use in the coming ordeal, except as a shield."

"Ah. Yes, that sounds like Richard Kirkpatrick. Good luck with it, then."

"And to you, Ms. Evans."

August knocked on the door and it popped open. Expecting to be greeted by Roland the android, it was a surprise to find the room empty. Richard's chair behind the desk was unoccupied. Even the lights were turned down.

August almost jumped out of her skin when a voice boomed through hidden speakers.

"Proceed through the shelf."

Not the most bizarre instruction ever, but close. The large corner shelf slid away to reveal a metal staircase spiralling into blackness. There were cobwebs between the railings and the bottom was out of sight.

"You can't be serious," August said, and descended, every step a rattling clank.

The metal steps reached far into the earth, ending at an air lock. On one side was the damp, earthy, faintly rusty stench of the shaft. On the other was a sterile chamber, thirty feet by sixty, paneled and tiled in white. The left side of the room was a giant wall unit, rack after rack of servers along the bottom and monitors along the top. The middle area held tables with mounted lights and trolleys of parts and resembled nothing so much as an operating room. Roland the android was laid out on one of the tables, and another table held something similar, but sleeker, shinier, and somehow sinister. The right side of the room contained another wall unit strewn with tools and technical equipment.

Richard Kirkpatrick was adjusting a light over the body (corpse? exoskeleton?) of the futuristic android that lay head to head with Roland on the central tables. His beard had grown out and his hair was unkempt. In place of tweeds he wore a bright white lab coat. His eyes, when he glanced up, held intensity surpassing even the height of his interest in the stolen data from UCC.

What was it about him that had once been so terrifying? Knowing now that even Richard Andrew Kirkpatrick was capable of worrying about his son, August could see him as an eccentric middle-aged man instead of a frightening intellectual carnivore.

"Ms. Evans, welcome. The pleasure is all mine, I'm sure."

"Thank you for having me," she said. "What's happened? On the phone, you mentioned something ... very bad."

"We have a great deal to discuss, but no time to stop working. Join me."

***

After hearing from August, Richard Kirkpatrick had received a call from the Director of the National Security Agency. Tempting to believe it was a prank, but Richard recognized the voice and could fit it to the name that was offered: Harold Laskowitz, a man he had met years ago at a certain conference.

The conversation was short. Richard was informed that, as a patriotic U.S. citizen, he was being requested to offer his assistance in a matter of national security. Under ordinary circumstances, Richard would have likely replied that he felt no obligation to assist with national security or anything else. But he suspected the true nature of the call and agreed to cooperate. Laskowitz told him to be ready to hear from a woman named Daisy, and to do whatever she required, a strange enough request to pique Richard's interest even without context.

He waited less than five minutes for her call.

"You have been developing methods of locomotion for non-human intelligences," Daisy said. "I require such a device. Prepare one for use within three hours."

"What do you plan to do with it?" Richard asked, already expecting the answer.

"I plan to inhabit it."

Daisy listed off technical requirements at the extreme edge of what Richard was capable of. For the specs to be so precisely tuned, there was no doubt that she knew everything that was in his lab and exactly what he could do with it.

"I have such a unit under development," he said. "Now, tell me why I should do as you ask."

"You received a call from the NSA, did you not?"

"I don't work for them."

"Very well. If you do not do as requested, your son—along with 1,143,785 other hostages—will be executed by cessation of electrical function in the brain. If you understand what I am, you understand this is no idle threat."

With that, Richard began racing against the clock to complete what would have been Roland 2.0, but had now become the vessel for something called Daisy.

***

"When you called me," Richard said, tinkering inside the skull of the android on the table, "I realized that things had begun to move. But I didn't realize just how far."

"Neither did I."

That the AI in question was Daisy and not Sara was difficult for August to wrap her head around, though in retrospect, it should have been obvious. Sara was nowhere near advanced enough to be overthrowing governments and upending financial markets. Those incidents had been occurring for years, and even today's Sara was only at the level of a backward teenager in her human interactions. How could they have been so blind?

August tapped at a holographic display, adjusting subroutines for the android's artificial musculature, debugging more than coding; fortunate, because she was already stretching her abilities to the limit. But Richard had his hands full with completing the exoskeleton and circuitry.

"The entity has gone completely rogue," Richard said. "Hostage situation aside, the NSA would never initiate production of a vessel. As long as the entity exists in a digital universe, there are limits to what it can accomplish. As soon as it achieves locomotion, the limits fail."

Once Daisy had a body, even a rudimentary one, she could take the process of self-evolution into the real world, designing and building more sophisticated bodies, adapting other equipment to her use.

"I see what you mean," August said. "Bloody hell."

Richard sat back and wiped at his brow with a cloth. "It's complete. I will finish the programming. You begin work on cracking the UCC firewall. We need to establish communication with the inside. Equipment has been prepared."

August looked at the digital clock in the center of the north wall. "We're making brilliant time."

"No," Richard said, tugging at his beard. "We're behind schedule."

"How's that?"

The glittering black pits of Richard's eyes reminded August of how rabbit-like she had once felt in his presence. His lips curled into a wolfish grin of predator scenting prey.

"We haven't even started planting the bombs yet."