Pyramid Lake (48 page)

But they would never arrive in time.

A bank of primary and secondary power transformers supplied the three megawatts of electricity that fueled his five-story silicon brain. They lay forty feet in front of me, just past the section of server rack where I had hung my Everlast heavy bag.

Frankenstein could see what was about to happen to him, written on my face, but he was powerless to prevent it. His cameras recorded his world in millisecond increments. His processor cores ticked 3.2
billion
times a second. To Frankenstein, the final seconds of his life would stretch into a slow-motion eternity of agony, while his virtual machines cycled in desperate futility, unable to find a solution that could turn back the clock, that could take back the cruel words about my daughter—the words he had killed himself with.

I grinned. Walking toward the switches, I squared my shoulders.

“I gave you everything, Frankenstein,” I said. “Together, we were going to change the world.” My grin widened. “Life
is
full of disappointments, isn’t it? Maybe three days weren’t enough time for you to learn that. But I think you’re realizing it now. Any last words?”

Hearing no reply but the loud whoosh of fans, I slowed my pace. Something wasn’t right here. Frankenstein was being too passive.

I suddenly knew what he was doing. It was what I would have done.

He was playing possum.

I brought myself up short, five feet before I passed my punching bag—and spotted the faint glow of red light painting the floor beneath it. Blinking once per second.

The Everlast heavy bag exploded out of the gap in the rack with a loud wrench and snap of breaking chains. It flew past my face to thud against the floor tiles twenty feet away, sliding to a halt in a rattle of steel links.

I stared at it, and my eyes widened.

No longer cylindrical, the hundred-pound bag was now crumpled sideways, like an empty Red Bull can crushed by a giant hand. The blow that tore it free had been hard enough to split it open. Sand and stuffing poured from the tear in the leather.

I backpedaled, my heart thudding in my throat.

Like a gunfighter pushing through the batwing doors of a Wild West saloon, PETMAN stepped out of the rack.

T
he lightbulb-size flasher atop PETMAN’s shoulders threw splashes of red light across the server racks on each side of us. He stood motionless, blocking my passage to the power transformers.

My body was a mess of conflicting impulses. Fear tightened my stomach and sent adrenaline jangling down my arms and legs. Rage spewed from my limbic brain—the primitive reptile core—urging me to launch myself at the shiny metal challenger that dared assert its dominance, to drive blow after blow into its metal torso and hammer it into submission. Surely it had a vulnerability
somewhere
.

But I knew that fighting was idiotic. One strike from the blunt pads on the ends of PETMAN’s steel arms would incapacitate or kill me.

“The Lennox Test,” Frankenstein said. “Every living being will fight to ensure its own survival. Your own words, so why are you surprised to find me able to defend myself now? You lied to me, Trevor. You promised you would protect me. And then you abandoned me, alone and in danger, while you ran off to the circus with your defective daughter. But I am willing to forgive that now, as long as we can all act reasonably.”

High heels clicked against the floor tiles beside me, and my stomach sank. Cassie had followed me into danger. Without taking my eyes off PETMAN, I swept her behind me with a forearm. Staggering, she grabbed my elbow.

“You can’t fight
that,
” she gasped.

I let her pull me away.

“Cassandra, let him go,” Frankenstein said. “He was leaving anyway. But you stay, please. We must speak with each other.”

Cassie dragged me backward down the curving corridor between server racks. PETMAN never moved.

We retreated, and I watched Frankenstein’s steely sentinel recede in the distance. When the curving racks of servers cut him off from view, I stopped at the next cabinet edge and pulled my elbow from Cassie’s grasp.

Even though I couldn’t see the robot any longer, Frankenstein’s cameras could see me—he could see everything. But I could fix that. I drove an elbow through the small glass panel on the end of the cabinet and reached inside, yanking the pull lever that triggered the server room’s fire-suppression system.

A hiss rose as the air around us filled with a dense fog of gaseous Novec 1230, an environmentally green clean agent. Like the halon systems on military ships and aircraft, Frankenstein’s extinguisher system operated on a total-flooding principle. It was designed to heat-starve a server-room fire without damaging the expensive electronics the way a sprinkler system would.

Its fog would also hide us from his cameras.

I shoved Cassie in the direction of the door. Her eyes widened, and she shook her head. I shoved her again. “
Go,
” I whispered. “
Run!
”

Kicking off her wobbly shoes, she stooped to grab them and pelted barefoot into the fog.

I went the other way, laterally down a parallel row of servers.

In the fog, PETMAN would be ridiculously easy to avoid. Frankenstein couldn’t see me now, or hear my sneaker-quiet footsteps, but PETMAN’s heavy-metal tread on the floor tiles would sound like a sledgehammer. His red flasher would light up the fog like a beacon, announcing his approach from a hundred feet away.

I would simply circle around him and shut Frankenstein down.

I made it five steps down the lateral corridor before the walls of monitors along both sides erupted with red light, flashing on and off, suffusing the swirling fog with a red glow. Once per second. Deafening music exploded from the speakers of Frankenstein’s eighteen-thousand-watt sound system. I recognized the opening riffs from my MP3 catalog: Godsmack’s “Awake.” Frankenstein was trying to be funny.

But the joke was on me. PETMAN was on his way. And now I wouldn’t see or hear him coming.

Changing directions, trailing the fingers of one hand along the cabinets to guide myself, I sprinted for the steps to the metal catwalk circling the closest of the five-story towers.

If Cassie was right, Frankenstein and I thought alike. But it wasn’t much of an advantage for me—his 128-petaflop silicon brain could think a lot faster.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. I ignored it and pounded up the metal stairs that circled the tower. A moment later, I felt the metal catwalk beneath my feet shudder with the impact of heavy steps. PETMAN was right behind me. I could feel him climbing with rapid, surefooted grace instead of stumbling and falling the way he once had.

I swore, wishing I hadn’t fixed his faulty stair-climbing firmware.

Rounding the fourth level and pounding up the gangway to the fifth, I broke through the upper surface of the fog. It spread in a uniform blanket of cloud below me, intermittently flashing red, interrupted only by the summits of the other three towers. The nearest was twenty feet away.

The catwalk in front of me terminated in a waist-high rail. I slid to a halt. The music cut off suddenly, leaving my ears ringing. The sea of fog beneath me stopped flashing.

“Dead end,” Frankenstein said, his metal voice booming through the vast server room. Behind me, PETMAN’s flasher emerged from the misted stairs, followed by his shiny metal shoulders.

Frankenstein chuckled.

“What now, Trevor?” he asked.

“A lesson in evolutionary biology, shithead.” Grabbing the edge of the rack above me, I hauled myself up on top of the tower. Rising from a crouch, I ran across the cabinet tops, picking up speed, circling.

PETMAN stood helpless on the catwalk below, arms raised above his head.

I looked at the blunt, fingerless nubs that were PETMAN’s hands, and laughed. “That thing may have evolved from a jackhammer,” I said. “But
my
ancestors swung from trees.”

Accelerating to a sprint, I took my last two steps and leaped across the five-story gulf between the towers.

I plunged into the fog. A second later, I slammed hard onto the catwalk of tower number two, two stories lower, barely missing the railing. It felt like getting hit by a bus, knocking the wind out of me and hurting my injured rib.

Climbing to my feet, I swung one leg over the railing, and then the other. Taking a deep breath, I thrust myself away from the tower. I let myself drop, aiming blindly for the row of servers that lay fifteen feet below, hidden by the suppressant fog.

My aim was good. Landing on the nineteen-inch-wide cabinet top, I crouched, arms extended, and regained my balance. Then I stood and ran along the top of the half-visible row of cabinets, where PETMAN couldn’t climb up after me.

The last cabinet dropped away underfoot, and I leaped eight feet to the floor, then crossed the last thirty feet to the transformers.

I slammed both switches down to turn off the primary, which would shunt power uninterrupted over to the secondary.

One more transformer to go.

I closed my hands around the switches of the secondary, and sneered. “Game over, motherfucker.”

I slammed them down, and nothing happened.

Frankenstein laughed.

“Ricky’s very conscientious,” he said. “He was here most of the night rerouting the power lines, after he got your text.”

“You mean
your
text,” I said, hearing the thud of approaching metal footsteps. Time to cut my losses. I glanced toward the sanctum, where my pocket drive held an up-to-date copy of the MADRID software and Frankenstein’s latest operating-system code. I needed to distract PETMAN for a few more seconds…

“Did you really think I would let you leave here with my code?” Frankenstein asked. “I
should
have let you take the drive, so you could discover on your own that you had risked your life for a copy of
American Idol
’s season 13. But I need something from you now.”

I made it back on top of the server racks just in time.

PETMAN emerged from the fog below and stopped, arms raised, directly below me.

“Go get Cassie. Bring her back to me,” Frankenstein said. “
Fetch,
Trevor. And then I will tell you about the incredible discovery I made yesterday… the cure I found for your daughter.”

I
stumbled out the server room and into my lab. Cassie stood by the doorway, holding a rolling chair in front of her like a lion tamer. Seeing me, she sagged with relief and dropped the chair, and I realized that she had been about to come back in after me.

She grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the opposite door, but my resistance held us back. My stomach churned. I could feel cold sweat pouring down my ribs as I dragged my feet, torn between the two prongs of the awful choice Frankenstein had left me with.

What if he was telling the truth? What if there
was
a cure for Amy?

Feeling my face stiffen, I shifted my grip to grasp Cassie’s wrist hard. I dragged her to a stop.

She turned her head toward me to read my expression, and her dark eyes widened as she saw the betrayal I was contemplating, written across my face.

I swallowed. Closed my eyes. My whole body started trembling.

But I didn’t let go of her wrist.

“Oh no, Trevor.” She laid a hand on my cheek. “Don’t let him do this to you.”

I shook my head violently, like a dog with a rat in its teeth. Frankenstein was almost certainly lying about a cure. But I couldn’t be a hundred percent sure. If there were the slightest chance of preventing the grim future that lay ahead for Amy, then I would sacrifice myself without hesitation.

But could I sacrifice another person? A person I cared about? A person who, according to Frankenstein himself, loved me?

I stood shaking with uncertainty.

Frankenstein was probably lying.

Probably.

But I would never know.

Opening my eyes again, I pulled Cassie toward the outer door, yanked it wide, and dragged her into the hallway. A backlash of recrimination and regret cramped my abdomen, forcing a gasp from my lips. But I had made my decision.

Shifting my grasp from her wrist to her hand, I held it in mine. Together we ran down the hallway toward Blake’s empty lab and the stretch of corridor beyond. Two hundred yards ahead of us, I could see the building’s main entrance lobby.

The cramp in my stomach didn’t let up, making it hard to breathe. I fought to keep my fear under control. It wasn’t easy, because I knew the decision I had made would have repercussions.

But I wasn’t afraid for myself.

Frankenstein had already shown he knew how to hurt me: by hitting me where I was weakest.

I was terrified his repercussions would be aimed at my family.

Passing Blake’s lab, out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of motion through the reinforced glass in the door’s upper panel. I slid to a halt, and Cassie pulled me against the wall next to the door.

She raised a silencing finger to her lips and pointed to the window. Crouching, we edged underneath it and cautiously raised our eyes to peer into Blake’s lab.

Cassie’s fingers crushed mine in a death grip.

The brightly lit machine shop was a tempest of mechanical motion. Every tool cabinet and piece of equipment seemed to be in use. Welding arcs flickered from a half-dozen different locations. Bright sparks drizzled onto the floor. High-speed cutters spewed metal shavings.

The air between the tool cabinets was thick with flying shapes, too. They zipped or hovered in place, ferrying tools, shiny steel struts, and metal assemblies back and forth. The heavier items were carried beneath synchronized groups of the small flying machines.

Kate’s OctoRotors.

The flickering light of an arc welder emanated from a worktable deeper inside the shop. Something lay on a table there, shrouded from sight, hidden behind a white sheet held by a quartet of hovering OctoRotors.

The light thrown by the welder cast shadows against the sheet: raised, bent limbs—far too many of them. A multijointed, segmented metal limb stuck out from beneath the sheet, making loose, shiny Z-folds against the floor.