The third option is hunker down and wait for Calaphas to come into the house after them. Nina goes upstairs with John and hides somewhere. She has a handgun if the situation goes hard south. Calaphas comes inside. There’s either an immediate confrontation between him and Michael, or they end up stalking each other. But maybe Calaphas gets tired of waiting, for whatever reason decides not to be a loner this time, and calls in backup. Plus there are maybe twenty other ways that scenario could go wrong.
The issue is firepower. Michael needs more of it. He needs the kind of backup that Calaphas could have with a phone call. But he has no one to call, no authorities who wouldn’t, in the end, turn him over to those SOBs at the Internal Security Agency.
“What’s our S-O-B doing here?” Shelby Shrewsberry’s voice echoes in memory. Referring to Dr. Simon O. Bistoury. About two weeks before the catastrophe.
Michael halts. He’s in the living room, but in the eye of memory, he sees the cafeteria at Beautification Research.
“Damn, he got coffee . . . coming this way.”
Looming over them, Simon had said, “The bastards down at Encinitas . . . knocked it out of the park.”
“I don’t follow baseball.”
“。 . . dog-form bots . . . AI autonomy or remote-controlled . . . integrated action in the autonomous mode.”
BACKUP
San Diego County is home to several military installations, among them Miramar Marine Corps Air Station, the 125,000-acre Camp Pendleton Marine Base, Point Loma Naval Base, North Island Naval Air Station, and the Coronado Naval Amphibious Base. Numerous defense contractors and defense research companies maintain facilities throughout the county. Protean Cybernetics, located on the outskirts of Encinitas, is housed in sixty thousand square feet of buildings on ninety acres. The property is encircled by a ten-foot chain-link fence constructed on a four-foot-deep reinforced-concrete footing, topped by a forty-five-degree outward-angled scaling-spoiler panel wrapped in razor wire. The east gate and the west gate are manned twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, by armed guards.
Protean Cybernetics has two discrete computer systems, which the company’s IT mavens informally refer to as Homer and Lisa. The first enables employees to engage in emails with suppliers and others outside of the company; it has no links whatsoever to the other system, so that even someone as stupid and careless as Homer Simpson, of TV fame, could use it with no risk of the company’s most important and privileged information being compromised. The second system is for online research, lab computation, strictly internal communications, and project data storage. It is protected by a series of firewalls, and the employees authorized to use it must access the system with both a pass code and a retinal scan; it’s the kind of failsafe network that a grownup Lisa, arguably by far the smartest member of the Simpson family, might design.
Michael enters as easily as opening a door. Several projects are underway here, but it is only the robot dogs that interest him. In four seconds, he learns they’re housed in Building Four, adjacent to a thirty-acre testing ground at the north end of the property. Protean Cybernetics does not have a graveyard shift, so the building is quiet and dark. The security system is monitored and operated through the computer. Cameras are pretty much everywhere, and they have infrared capability, providing him with sufficient detail for his purpose and access everywhere except the lavatories. Because he’s not here in a corporeal sense, he has no need of a bathroom; besides, his visit isn’t likely to last longer than two minutes. He’s been on site fourteen seconds when he finds the robot canines in a windowless room, standing in their charging stations.
They are thirty-six inches high, approximately the size of a Great Dane, but they are like dogs only in a skeletal sense. They have cameras in the front and the back of the head, with both day and night vision. With current-best AI, they are able to act in an autonomous manner and coordinate one with the other to an impressive extent, or they can be operated by remote control in the manner of drones. Having been given auditory receptors and provided with a vocabulary of commands, they can also respond to a human companion whose voice pattern they have been programmed to recognize and obey. Eight lithium batteries provide power that lasts between six and ten hours of continuous operation, depending on the level of activity. They are able to climb steep hills, wade shallow water, and run at a top speed of eighteen miles per hour. Incorporated in each unit is a rifle that fires a 7.62 mm round with a muzzle velocity of seven hundred meters per second. A curved-box magazine contains fifty cartridges. They are capable of either semiautomatic or automatic fire. The magazines have been fully loaded in preparation for a field test in the morning. The long-term intention is for robots to one day accompany infantrymen into battle both to increase firepower and reduce the number of flesh-and-blood soldiers who must put their lives at risk.
Seen through cameras registering in the infrared spectrum, these steel-alloy canines appear ominous. When Michael extends himself into the Lutron lighting controls and brings up the room lights, the four-legged terminators are no less menacing; in fact, they’re demonic. The executive at Protean who officially named them Gog and Magog either doesn’t know what those names refer to in the Book of Revelation or he’s a closet reactionary among the ranks of the technology-besotted with whom he works. Most people in the company call them Rover and Spot.
Reviewing the protocols of the remote-control mode until he fully understands operational methods and limitations, Michael then takes Gog and Magog under his authority. He orders them to come off their storage platform. They disconnect from their charging stations and, with a scissoring-stilting of their three-jointed legs, they move quickly to the center of the room and stand to attention, heads up like alert Dobermans. Even though they have only four legs, when in motion they remind Michael more of insects than of dogs. Perhaps that comparison is too disturbing for those who are developing these weapons; instead, thinking of them as dog-form companions evokes memories of Lassie and Scooby-Doo.
Having been at Protean Cybernetics just forty-one seconds, he next transmits the address of the Chandra house into the mission-program center of Gog’s and Magog’s brains, designating that property as the sole battlefield in order to insure against collateral damage between here and there. He invades Durand Calaphas’s employee file at the ISA and transmits the agent’s photograph to Gog and Magog, designating the man as the sole target until Michael tells them otherwise.
While overriding the security system, Michael opens all the electronic locks in the building. Under his control, the robots proceed quickly into the moonlit night.
Fifty-six seconds and counting.
MAN OF ACTION
Yancy Norbert is working the graveyard shift at the east gate of Protean Cybernetics. He is twenty-five and believes that he looks like a young Brad Pitt. He styles his blond hair as Brad wore it in World War Z. Periodically, before a mirror, he practices Bradian smiles and other expressions he believes are unique to the actor, in the interest of having greater success with women. He has memorized numerous lines of dialogue from movies in which Brad is a romantic figure, but thus far he hasn’t gone on many dates where he’s had an opportunity to insert those words into a conversation in such a way that they are natural and effective. In truth, he’s not had nearly as many dates as he feels he ought to have had. The reason for his poor record with the ladies has mystified him, and recently he has begun to wonder if women of his approximate age do not find Brad to be the irresistible hunk that previous generations did.