“What is it?” I asked.
“Well, it’s a Simulation Training Device,” said Athalia. “Obviously.”
“You got that off the sign on the door,” I said.
“So?”
I ducked through the arms of the gyroscope and took a closer look at the cockpit. The seat was pushed forward into a locked position that made it so you couldn’t sit down, and lying beside it were a pair of headset/goggles like we’d seen in pieces out on the workbenches in the lab. I picked them up.
“Turn it on,” I said. “I want to see how it works.”
Athalia hesitated. “Ghost, it might be dangerous.”
“You forget who you’re talking to. I’m the guy who can’t remember why danger is a bad thing.”
“I…” Her voice caught. “I thought maybe you might have reason to remember now.”
I looked over at her. She was right. Since we’d got together, danger had lost some of its appeal, as had going off half–cocked. I had something to live for these days. Still, this thing looked cool.
“Come on, it’s a training tool. How dangerous can it be?”
She sighed and flipped the switch. “Fine. Have fun.”
I pulled on the goggles and the shed was gone.
I was standing outside the cockpit of a delicate little helicopter on the runway of a small airport. The heat was intense, coming off the tarmac in waves. Not even the wind from the slowly whumping rotors above my head could drive it away. Then a voice talked to me through my headset.
“Hi, I’m Major Taft Beckman of the United States Air Force here at the Davis–Monthan Base in Tucson Arizona, and I’m gonna be teaching you how to fly a Helicopter. Now, the first thing I’m gonna show you is how to unlock the seat so you can sit down. Just reach underneath it and feel for the lever, then pull it to the left. Got it?”
I did. The seat back flipped back and I climbed in. This was cool.
“Great. Now get yourself strapped in and comfortable and when you’re ready, just speak the word “ready” into your headset. And don’t worry, we’re gonna have some fun today!”
– Chapter Two –
Major Beckman was a good teacher. I quickly got the hang of moving the steering bar backwards and forwards and right and left to move the helicopter in those directions, and to push on the foot pedals to turn it one way or the other. It was harder to get over the strangeness of having a guy who had been dead for a hundred years chattering away in my ear like a cheerful little chipmunk. It was even stranger to feel like I was back there with him.
The goggles really did their job. No matter which way I turned my head, no matter where I looked, the helicopter and its surroundings were real and solid and right in front of me, and like I said, somehow it even felt like a hot summer’s day. I knew the illusion would be broken as soon as I tried to get out of the cockpit and walk around. I would trip over the gyroscope struts and bang my nose into the walls of the shed, so I didn’t do that. I didn’t want the illusion to be broken. I wanted it to go on forever.
And that feeling got even stronger when the Major finally had me stop doing low, level hovering and asked me to take the helicopter up into the sky.
Now, I knew what Arizona looked like from on high. I had strong memories of my former self standing on more than a few mountaintops and seeing the wastelands spread out like a soiled red carpet below him. I knew all about the craters and the poisoned lakes and the dry creek beds that cut like scars across a dead man’s face. I remembered the ruined towns and the desolate farms, the black forests where nothing grew.
That was not the Arizona that Major Taft Beckman showed me. Sure there was still plenty of red desert, but there was more than that. Much more. There were blue lakes, and green forests, white and glittering little towns with shopping centers and colorful restaurants on the outskirts. There were parks and pools and plazas. There were baseball fields and farms and silos. There were stadiums and skyscrapers and sewage treatment plants. But the thing that really got me about it was how lively it all was.
Everywhere I looked, there were people. Splashing in the pools, walking in the parks, zooming up and down clean white highways in their cars, playing catch on the ball fields, and not one of them, not a single one, with any idea of what was coming for them — of what was waiting for them in their future.
I wanted to scream down at them from the helicopter, tell them to run, to hide, to stop their politicians before they called down the bombs. But what could I do? I was a ghost from the future. They wouldn’t hear me. They wouldn’t do anything even if they could. They were too innocent. They didn’t know yet what man was truly capable of.
The flying lesson was long over by that time, but I couldn’t stop zipping around, looking down at it all, soaking it all in, trying to imagine living in a world that didn’t know anything about want or fear or sickness or killer fucking robots. I wanted it so bad.
A hand shook my shoulder. “Ghost. Hey, Ghost.”
I swallowed and pulled off the headset and goggles. “H–huh?”
“They’re calling us. We should— Are you crying?”
“No, I… It’s the goggles. They make your eyes water.” I wiped my nose on my sleeve. “Come on.”
Ace and Angie were still huddled at the computer terminal when we got back to the office. The rest of the rangers were crowded behind them.
“Whatta you got?” I asked.
“One of those scary pre–apocalypse stories,” said Angie.
“Huh?”
Ace looked up. “We think we found a way to wipe the Cochise AI off the map and shut down the killer robots all at once.”
“How is that a scary story?” asked Athalia.
“It’s all in the emails,” said Angie. “Apparently one of the researchers at Base Cochise tried to blow the place up once.”
Vargas chuckled. “And the disciplinary committee sent a lot of emails back and forth, which means we know how to blow it up now.”
“How?” asked Athalia.
“What happened?” I asked.
“There was a guy who used to work here,” said Angie. “Harrison Edsel. Little bit crazy. Some discipline problems here at Sleeper One — insubordination, general whining — before he got transferred to Base Cochise, but then he designed the Base Cochise AI, which was apparently the world’s first true artificial intelligence, and everybody called him a genius.”
“Another Finster then?” I asked.
“No, no. Different kind of crazy.” Angie scrolled through the text on her screen. “Says here that Edsel was in charge of the team that was supposed to install the Cochise AI on a space–based weapons platform called the Citadel Star Station, but then he started to believe that the AI had become self–aware and he tried to get his bosses to kill the project and shut down the AI.”
“And they didn’t listen,” said Athalia.
“Bingo,” said Angie. “And that’s when Edsel really went crazy.”
“And where we found out how to kill the AI,” said Vargas.
“So what is it?” I asked.
Angie smiled. “Turns out there’s a self–destruct mechanism in Base Cochise, and Edsel wanted to use it to destroy the AI, but it required four people to turn four keys in a certain order within twenty seconds of each other. He got in trouble with the brass when he tried to convince three other members of his team to turn the other three keys. Two of them apparently were ready to go along with him, but the last one ratted him out and he got confined to quarters.”