I become so immersed in this imagined scene that I stop pacing. I also stop monitoring the data coming from my visual and acoustic sensors. I focus all my attention on the dreamlike stream of invented images. After a while I picture a different scene, the lawn behind our house in Yorktown Heights. I’m eight years old and playing touch football with Ryan Boyd and two other boys. One of them is a short, red-haired kid whose name I can’t remember. The other boy is tall and blond. I can’t remember his name either, and when I stare at his face, I can’t make out his features. His eyes and nose and mouth are all blurred together. But the sight isn’t frightening. I’ve played football with this kid plenty of times, so his blurred face doesn’t bother me.
By the time I emerge from the dream, my internal clock shows that forty-five minutes have elapsed. I realize I’ve just taken a nap. In computer terms, I guess you could call it “sleep mode.” Although I never lost consciousness entirely, most of my circuits stopped calculating. This is exciting news and also a great relief. I’ve been wondering if I’d ever fall asleep again.
Then I hear Shannon scream. It’s so strange and unexpected that for a moment I think I’ve slipped back into a dream. But according to my acoustic sensors, the screaming is real. It grows louder as Shannon races down the corridor toward my room.
“Adam! Adam!”
I rush to the door, unlock it, and stride into the corridor. I’m worried about Shannon’s safety, and that overrides all my concerns about her seeing me. She runs toward me as fast as she can, hobbling and swaying. “Adam, you have to come! You have to help us!”
Her lopsided face is pale, frantic. Something is very wrong.
“What is it?” I ask, but I think I know the answer. My system has already drawn up a list of likely threats, and the most probable one is Sigma. “Are we under attack?”
Shannon stares at the camera lens in my turret. “No, it’s Jenny! We’re losing her!”
As I stride into the laboratory I notice it’s more crowded than it was during my own procedure. In addition to Dad and his four assistants, General Hawke and half a dozen soldiers are in the lab, and so is Jenny Harris’s father, who’s wearing a fancy pinstripe suit. A Pioneer marked with a big white 2 on its torso stands in the center of the room, its legs restrained by thick steel clamps that fix the robot to the floor.
The soldiers have obviously learned their lesson from my procedure and are determined not to let this Pioneer run away. But now they face a bigger problem: the robot is in distress. Its arms are flexing and telescoping in and out, extending and retracting for no apparent reason, and its turret is madly spinning around. A blast of static comes out of the Pioneer’s speakers, followed by a prolonged shriek.
Dad hunches over one of the computer terminals. He’s staring so hard at the screen that he doesn’t see me come into the room. His face is flushed and sweaty, and when I look at him in infrared, I notice that his pulse is racing. He types something on the keyboard, then looks up at the Pioneer. “Jenny, please respond! Can you hear me?”
The turret stops turning, but the robotic arms keep waving about. Another shriek comes out of the speakers, then a high-pitched voice. It’s garbled and distorted, but it’s definitely Jenny’s voice. “Stop…stop…please…oh God!”
Shannon, who followed me into the lab, covers her mouth with her hand and starts to cry. At the same time, Mr. Harris rushes forward and points a finger at Dad. “What’s going on? What’s happening to her?”
Dad’s typing again. He responds to Jenny’s father without looking up from the keyboard. “Please stay calm. I’m working on the problem.”
“She’s in pain!” Mr. Harris points at the Pioneer. “Why is she in pain?”
Dad shakes his head as he stares at his computer screen. “She opened the links to her memories, but she can’t reassemble them. I’m trying to find out why.”
“But it worked before!” Now Jenny’s father points at me. “Look, the other robot’s right here!”
Nearly everyone in the lab turns to look at me. General Hawke narrows his eyes and frowns. Dad gives me only a quick glance, but in that fraction of a second I recognize his expression. I’ve seen it on his face before, most recently when Sigma attacked us in his office at Unicorp. It’s a look of desperation. Dad’s more frightened than he’s letting on.
“Please, Mr. Harris, I need to concentrate. I’m trying to help your daughter.”
Hawke steps forward and rests a hand on the shoulder of Mr. Harris’s expensive suit. “Come on, Sumner. Let’s—”
“No!” He lunges toward Jenny’s Pioneer. “Jenny? Are you in there? Talk to me, sweetheart!”
The robot lets out a third shriek, louder than the ones before. “Please…I don’t…I can’t… Let me out!”
General Hawke grabs Mr. Harris around the waist and pulls him away from the Pioneer’s flailing arms. At the same time, I turn on my wireless data link and connect to the laboratory’s computers. This enables me to see the same information Dad is viewing at his terminal about the dire status of Jenny’s Pioneer. Her neuromorphic circuits have already been configured to match the memory patterns of Jenny’s brain, but the system is generating new thoughts too slowly. The output isn’t enough to maintain her consciousness, so she can’t control her arms or speak more than a few words.
Something is interfering with Jenny’s calculations, and after a hundredth of a second I recognize the problem. Tremendous surges of random data are clogging her electronics. I experienced the same thing in the first moments after I became a Pioneer. Jenny is terrified.
I take a step toward Dad, who’s typing furiously on his keyboard. He’s sending instructions to the Pioneer, trying to staunch the flow of random data in Jenny’s circuits, but he can’t do it fast enough. The connection between Dad’s terminal and the Pioneer is like a bottleneck, preventing him from taking full control of the robot. Jenny has to fix the problem herself, but she’s not even trying. The fear has overwhelmed her. Because her circuits lack conscious control, they’re starting to randomly realign, erasing her memories. She’s literally disappearing.
I can’t let this happen. I have to help her.
I turn my turret away from Dad and stride toward the steel cabinet behind him. The cabinet is locked, but I rip the door open and grasp the item I need: a high-speed fiber-optic cable. It’s designed to plug into the Pioneers and transfer gargantuan amounts of data between them, a hundred times faster than the wireless data link. I knew it would be in the cabinet because this information was in one of Hawke’s databases. It’s a good thing I finally downloaded those files.
Dad looks up from his terminal and gapes at me. “Adam, what are you doing?”
“Stop sending instructions to Jenny,” I say, turning back to him. Then I insert one end of the fiber-optic cable into my data port, which is in the top half of my torso. “I’m going to transfer myself to her circuits.”
His eyes widen. “What?”
“I read the files about the Pioneer’s electronics. The circuits have plenty of extra capacity. There should be room for both of us in her machine.”
Dad shakes his head. “The circuits weren’t designed for that. You won’t be able to keep your mind separate from Jenny’s.”
“I don’t want to keep it separate. I need to show her how to control her system. I’m going to walk her through it.”
He shakes his head again, more vigorously this time. “It’s too risky. You can merge your files with Jenny’s, but how will you retrieve them afterward? If you can’t make a clean break from her, we’ll lose both of you.”