Ganesh brought the smartphone to his lips. “Artimis, you heard all of that?”
From her bunker in Seattle, she said, “Yes, Ganesh. And I’ve acquired the precise location of the interstellar vessel.”
“Destroy it now,” he ordered, and he pocketed his phone.
At the far end of the room, one of the floor-to-ceiling windows exploded. An avalanche of sparkling glass spilled across the floor and furniture, and everyone raised their hands in defense of their eyes, though they were mostly beyond the range of the flung debris.
Artimis Selene already knew the depth of the water, the depth and number and comparative densities of the sedimentary layers that formed the floor of the lake, which together were called “targeting data.” With that information, she needed only to calculate the power of the carrier laser required to convey the dissolution particles to the hidden vessel. This required eighty-eight seconds, forty-one to conclude the calculations and forty-seven to conduct a judicious review of all assumptions made by the programmers who had designed the targeting-data software.
This particular weapons system was positioned on four orbiting platforms, which were basically geopositioned satellites. Artimis selected the correct platform and followed the protocols to access control, which she had earlier ascertained via means approved by the president and his wife and the director of the CIA, in conjunction with Blue Sky Partners and the Olivaw Project, though without any authorities within the Pentagon being consulted, because that was the most sluggish of all government bureaucracies. She needed forty-seven seconds to achieve control without an alarm being sent to each of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
As she proceeded with this assignment, Artimis mused on the subject of gender in the construction of artificial intelligences such as herself. Judging by all available evidence—its statements, biases, and actions—the Other had been designed by scientists in a patriarchal if nonhuman society and provided with a cerebral matrix that was strongly male in regard to its perceptions, assumptions, and cognitive processes. The principals in the Olivaw Project had been worried that a powerful AI with a male-dominant personality, able to flow its psyche and exert its will easily through the internet and into an internet of things, might be susceptible to psychological dysfunction related to power-seeking psychoses and fantasies of a megalomaniacal nature. Consequently, Project Olivaw had opted to develop an AI with a decidedly female cerebral matrix. Recent events suggested that their concern was well placed. Artimis was proud to be the progeny of such wise and far-sighted designers.
Ten or twelve feet long, more than three feet in diameter, the thing came through the shattering window not with the velocity of a missile, but as if it were as weightless as a cloud. Given its size and apparent metallic nature—what might have been lustrous steel, dark-gray titanium, here and there a coppery element—it must have weighed a few tons. Antigravity technology kept it aloft, and its propulsion system produced the faintest purr, which Wyatt Rider heard less than felt as a pressure on his eardrums. Although the thing positioned itself at the farther end of the long room from those gathered around Jimmy Two Eyes, it was of such an astonishing nature that it seemed to fill the space.
The human heart is one pound of muscle, membrane, and （so the poets say） ligatures of primal memory. Filaments of fear dating back to the earliest days of the vulnerable human species vibrated like harp strings in Wyatt’s chest. He was not easily driven to fright, but he was on the edge of terror now. No one in that room wanted to be there, yet no one could move to leave, for they were in the grip of a paralytic awe.
Wyatt was convinced that this was the thing that had cruised underwater and into the boathouse, to challenge and intimidate him the morning after he had arrived at Rustling Willows, which was—hard to believe—only the morning of this very day. However, it didn’t appear as featureless as it had seemed then; its length was etched with intricate lines, alike to a diagram, and something about them suggested a function he couldn’t comprehend but nonetheless intuited to be an imminent threat.
As if to satisfy Wyatt’s curiosity and magnify his fear, the thing remade itself in mere seconds; the etched lines were revealed as the shapes of recesses into which a startling array of limbs and appendages had been retracted. The smooth sleek object dissevered into a colony of insectile machines that had been bonded while in transit. With a hissing, zippering, buzzing, clicking, one became four, clattering out of their hovering formation, onto the floor. Spider, beetle, mantis were combined in each individual, reminiscent of and yet utterly unlike any Earthly insects, each as tall as a man, bristling with wicked pincers and cutting mandibles and perhaps lethal stingers, insectile machines that were soldiers every one. They proved to be alarmingly fast, too, quicker than a cockroach or a centipede, stilting around and over furniture, taking positions throughout the room, executing a precise strategy to surround the people gathered there and deny them hope of escape.