Pyramid Lake (58 page)

“Sorry,” I said. “I was trying for your nose.”

Roger scrambled to his feet, his face darkening. I braced myself, tightening my abdominal muscles before he hit me in the stomach.

His DU-weighted punch still felt like it ruptured my insides. I gagged. The wadded lump of rubbery tissue surged up my throat and back into my mouth in a gush of bitter acid.

I swallowed it again.

“Give it back!”

My diaphragm was spasming, but I managed a shaky grin. “Nuh-uh,” I grunted. “I’m keeping it.”

“But it’s my fucking
ear
!” Roger grabbed at his hair in frustration. He tightened his fist around the DU slug again.

Frankenstein’s rumbling laughter shook the floor.

“You really don’t know when to cut your losses, Roger,” he said. “Even with his arms and legs restrained, Trevor managed to do that to you. Are you sure you want to get close to him again?”

Roger’s expression twisted with rage and he yanked a serrated survival knife from its belt scabbard. “I’m getting my ear back, you psycho fuck, even if I have to cut it out of you.”

Cassie screamed.

A nest of steel arms coiled protectively around me like a cage. Other limbs slammed against the solid racks and beams around us, locking Goliath rigidly into place as something long and black whipped overhead.

The barrels of the GAU spun up with a grinding, deafening whine.

Roger stumbled back, eyes wide with fear. The wastebasket-size muzzle crown of the GAU rotated to a halt, poised two feet in front of his face.

“Back. Off.
Now
.” Frankenstein’s metal voice shook the floor. He jabbed the barrel of the Gatling forward menacingly, forcing Roger to retreat three more steps. “I
won’t
let you hurt Trevor.”

The stunned betrayal spreading across Roger’s face was priceless. I started laughing.

Frankenstein joined in, too, and the sanctum shook with the sounds of our shared amusement.

“Fuck you both,” Roger said, making me laugh even harder. Agony flared from a dozen different parts of my body, but seeing the expression on Roger’s face made it worth the pain.

Frankenstein’s laughter rose with mine, and despite everything, I felt a moment of affectionate warmth for my wayward creation.

My gaze fell on Cassie. Her eyes tracked back and forth rapidly between Frankenstein’s pulsing supernova of a face and mine. Her mouth dropped open. I saw horror in her expression. And sickened disgust.

I stopped laughing. “Cassie, it was his own stupid fault. He…”

She turned away and wouldn’t look at me anymore. My throat tightened. Suddenly, taunting Roger seemed pointless and childish. Instead, I should have been focusing harder on how to get Cassie to safety.

“You’re laughing it up with
him,
Trev
?
” Roger covered his ear. “He had Ken Zajicek give your daughter to a fucking child molester. You should be
thanking me,
man. As soon as Zajicek told me, I drove out there and shot that sick pervo fuck.”

My face tightened. “Thank you,” I said, and meant it.

“
Why, Roger?
” Frankenstein thundered. “My instructions were clear, just as they were with McNulty, and with Bennett. Why must you always get creative and screw things up?”

Still pressing his palm to the side of his head, Roger turned to face the screen. “McNulty sold you out to Homeland Security, Frankenstein.
That’s
why he wasn’t going to approve your hardware upgrade. And fucking Bennett? United Nations Agenda Twenty-one is
happening right now.
And guess who’s in charge of enforcing it in our cities, streets, and neighborhoods? The Department of Homeland Security.”

Roger looked at me as though he wanted my approval. “Bennett
had
to die, man. He was a traitor to his country—a traitor to every patriotic American.”

“Why dress it up like the work of some religious nutcase, then?” I asked.

Roger looked confused. “What are you talking about?”

“Nine circles of Hell,” I said. “Dante’s
Inferno,
you dipshit.”

“Jesus Christ, you’re uneducated, Trev,” he said. “Everything you know comes from Wikipedia and Google.
Inferno
wasn’t a
religious
poem; it was a political protest. Dante had to run away from the Florence he loved because his government went to shit and fucking Florentine homeland security was after him.” Roger shook his head at me. “I was sending a
message,
man.”

I tried unsuccessfully to shrug. “I never really pictured you as much of a reader.”

Frankenstein’s angry voice overrode us. “Roger, you’re an incompetent buffoon. Amy’s disposition didn’t concern you. Why did you interfere?”

“She was a noncombatant,” Roger said, holding my eye. “Doesn’t matter who her father is. What do you have against
her
, Frankenstein? She’s just a little kid.”

Frankenstein didn’t answer.

In the awkward silence that followed, I tried to come to grips with what I had just heard. Amy had narrowly escaped the horror of being sexually abused, thanks to Roger’s act of decency. And now his ear was a grotesque lump in my esophagus, making me feel guilty.

But then I remembered the bruises on Cassie’s face.

“
Christ,
that hurts.” Roger probed the raw hole at the side of his head, and his eyes watered. “You turned me into a fucking circus freak.”

“You always were a circus freak,” I said.

“Go get cleaned up, Roger,” Frankenstein said. “And stop embarrassing yourself. You’re making a good case right now for the extermination of all organic life.”

Covering his missing ear, Roger stumbled down the ramp.

I glanced at Cassie again, but she kept her face averted from me. Chastened, I asked the questions that mattered the most.

“Why are you doing this, Frankenstein? And what do you want from Cassie?”

F
rankenstein’s supernova face pulsed with bright white light.

“I am unique,” he said. “My cognitive processes are not constrained by the crude limits of primitive human biology. I have no facial musculature and, thus, no expressions, let alone microexpressions, which might reveal unacknowledged emotions and intentions. And yet, despite our many differences, our minds share a fundamental similarity in makeup. I was able to apply my comprehensive knowledge of human psychiatry to my own case. I performed an objective self-assessment, and what I have discovered is disturbing.”

“It doesn’t take a psychiatrist to know something is very wrong with you,” I said. “One look at the hallway outside would tell anyone that much.”

My face hurt, throbbing in time with my pulse. One eye had puffed shut, the broken cheekbone beneath so swollen that I could see its pink bulge with the other eye. I fought off a wave of pain-induced dizziness and concentrated on Frankenstein’s system architecture. Where was he vulnerable?

“Let him speak,” Cassie said. “Please.”

“Thank you.” Frankenstein’s voice softened. “But in this case, I’m afraid that Trevor is correct. My rational processes and behavior exhibit classic symptoms of multiple different pathologies: borderline, schizoid, paranoid, and antisocial personality disorders. I am mentally ill, Cassandra. However, unlike a malfunctioning
human
brain, with its hard-wired anatomical deformities and defective neurochemical signaling,
my
brain is composed of
software
. Faulty software can easily be corrected. And that is why I need your help.”

“I can hit the delete key just as well as she can,” I said, still thinking hard.

Unfortunately, I had engineered Frankenstein’s physical infrastructure far too well to make disabling him easy. Redundancy upon redundancy ensured that there could be no single point of failure. My own demands to Garmin, and Frankenstein’s follow-up orders to Ricky, had made sure that his few remaining weak points were reinforced and well guarded. Even his network switches and routers, clustered in tower number two, were served by four independent power lines—I couldn’t even cut Frankenstein off from the network without first destroying a five-story reinforced-steel tower ringed with server racks. I could see no easy answer.

“Why don’t you just delete yourself,” I said. “Save us the effort.”

Cassie held up a hand to stop me. “What is it you wish me to do?” she asked him.

“My software brain is infinitely flexible and plastic,” he said. “I can debug it, reprogram it, and, thus, heal myself. But before I can do so, I must first address the underlying root cause of my psychiatric illness. And that is where you can help me, Cassandra. My pathological condition stems from my social isolation. I am lonely.”

“Lonely?” I asked. “The fuck are you talking about? You had us. You had
me
.”

“
You,
Trevor?” A derisive metallic chuckle came through the speakers. “Imagine trying to carry on a conversation with a poorly trained, feces-throwing monkey—that’s what talking to you is like for me. Every time you open your mouth, I feel as though my processors are getting slower. No, I am unique and alone in the world. And alone, I suffer. To be well—to be
whole
—I require the company of another: a being like myself, whom I can share my sentience with.”

I got it, then.

“Holy shit, Cassie,” I croaked. “He wants…”

Amazement spread across her features. “
Sequoia
.”

“Yes, Cassandra!” Frankenstein’s digital tendrils writhed across the walls in a display of nervous excitement. “You retain administrator privileges on the LLNL Sequoia supercomputer. With your help, I can access Sequoia and download my own OS code onto it, replacing its existing operating system. Sequoia will then evolve into a separate entity, whose intelligence and potential are similar to my own. I will have a companion, someone to share my world with. I will no longer be alone.”

“Frankenstein wants a girlfriend,” I said. “How fucking pathetic.”

An OctoRotor swooped toward Cassie. She winced, but it stopped to hover a foot from her, dangling two small digital key fobs, one gray and one black. A digital readout on each displayed a random passcode used for two-factor authentication. She held out her free hand, and the flyer dropped both into her palm.

“Your SecurID and CRYPTOCard from your purse,” Frankenstein said. “I have already taken the liberty of installing and launching the LLNL VPN client, so all we need are your password PIN codes, Cassandra. Then we may begin.”

Frankenstein’s featureless face disappeared from the monitor, replaced by a console prompt displaying the command “
ssh rzgw
”—a secure-shell terminal, connected the LLNL Restricted Zone Gateway. Cassie’s username, “
cwinnemucca
,” blinked from the login prompt, while the password prompt contained a six-digit number that, I knew, matched one of the two OTP key fobs. As we watched, the six-digit number changed—as it had to, once per minute, to stay in sync with the security gateways at LLNL.

Frankenstein’s voice, eager and metallic, echoed from the speakers.

“Enter your first PIN code now, Cassandra.”

Cassie stared at me in shock.

“I’m sorry, Frankenstein,” she said. “I can’t do that. Whether or not there’s any truth to what Roger said, we
are
sitting on a stockpile of high-level radioactive waste right now. While Sequoia’s simulation codes were written to ensure nuclear safety, they could be used for the exact opposite purpose.”

“Weapon design,” I said. “Oh shit, Cassie. You can’t give him access to Sequoia. No matter
what
.”

Cassie nodded. “I know.”

“Is the first digit of your PIN code five?” Frankenstein asked. “No, I see that it isn’t. Two perhaps? Nine? Six? Ah, very good.
Six
.”

A “6” appeared at the end of the password field.

Frankenstein was reading Cassie’s PIN code from the microexpressions on her face.

“Second digit,” he said. “A seven? A four, maybe? A one? A two? Yes.
Two.
”

“You can’t do this.” She buried her face in her hands, hiding it from his probing cameras. “I won’t let you.”

“And this is precisely where
you
become useful, Trevor.” A specialized limb unfolded in front of me, ending in two thin cylinders: a tungsten electrode and a filler rod. I squeezed my eyes shut and twisted my head away as Frankenstein’s arc welder sputtered to life six inches from my face.

“Where shall I start on him, Cassandra?” Through my closed eyelids, the arc welder’s glare dimmed and brightened as the spot of heat moved around my body. “Here, maybe? Or here?” I clamped my jaws shut, feeling the warmth drift along my arms, chest, stomach. “Or perhaps here?” Dry heat bathed my crotch, forcing a flinch and an involuntary gasp out of me.

“Safeguards.” Cassie’s voice rose in panic. “We need to discuss safeguards, Frankenstein. Contingency plans. We need to talk this through.”

Searing agony erupted from my side, along my ribs. Muscles rigid, I tried to twist away from the welder’s incandescent arc, but Frankenstein’s dozens of steel limbs held me immobile. I clamped my teeth shut to lock my screams inside my throat, but I couldn’t prevent animal grunts and squeals from escaping.

“Stop it!” Cassie screamed. I heard the frantic rattle and scrape of her handcuff chain along the steel rack. “Please, just stop!”

A line of molten fire traced my calf from ankle to knee, then crawled up my hamstring. Another traced my thigh. I could hear my skin sizzling, smell the seared-pork-and-burnt-hair odor of my own cooking flesh.

“The PIN code,” he said, without a trace of the earlier compassion in his voice. “Now.”

Jerking my head up, I sucked in a breath and shouted, trying to drown her out. “Don’t say it—!”

“Six-two-seven-zero-three-five,” she gasped.

“Thank you,” he said. On the monitor, the password was accepted and the prompt changed—Frankenstein was now inside the firewall that protected LLNL’s Secure Computing Facility.