I can’t believe it worked. It’s another miracle. But then my acoustic sensor picks up the chugging of the anti-aircraft guns and the whoosh of bullets speeding past me. I yank my Raven’s rudder to the left, away from the line of fire, and point my camera at the ground. Two of the T-90s are firing at me. The other three are training their guns at DeShawn. His Raven is two hundred feet above mine but diving fast. I don’t understand what he’s doing. Instead of flying away from the tanks, he’s heading straight for them.
I go back to the circuits controlling my radio and make some changes to the software. I adjust the receiver to block Sigma’s data streams and accept communications only from the other Ravens. Then I send a message to DeShawn. “What the heck are you doing?”
“Follow me!” he shouts over the radio. “I got it figured out!”
“What do you—”
“No time to explain!” He’s only fifty feet above me now and descending at ninety miles per hour. “Just dive!”
His Raven plunges past me, its nose pointed at the T-90 in front of the lab. It’s crazy, suicidal. But I tilt my drone downward and follow him. I dive toward the tank that’s spraying bullets at us.
I’m spinning as I fall, twirling like a top. The ground gyrates below me, pivoting around the T-90, which seems to grow larger as I plummet toward it. I’m about a hundred feet away when one of the high-caliber bullets slams into my right wing. Then another bullet tears off my left.
Then I drop like a stone.
CHAPTER 21
I can’t fool myself anymore. Before Sigma returns to my cage I need to face the facts. I’m going to die.
It’s a familiar feeling, actually. Before I became a Pioneer I was just months away from dying of muscular dystrophy. And I accepted it. I really did. I didn’t like it, of course, and sometimes I got ferociously bitter, but most of the time I was at peace. I kept myself busy by playing computer games and creating virtual-reality programs. Plus, I had an active fantasy life. That’s a popular activity for all teenage boys.
But what I’m feeling now is worse. When I was in a human body, I imagined that my death would be painless, a relief from all my suffering. The doctors would simply put me to sleep after I decided I’d had enough. And I took comfort in the fact that my parents would remember me and keep my Super Bowl posters on my bedroom walls and start a scholarship fund at Yorktown High School in my name. I knew the world would go on after I died, and maybe Ryan or Brittany would think of me every once in a while. But none of that’s going to happen now. After Sigma deletes the Pioneers, it’s going to get rid of the whole human race.
What makes it even more painful is that I keep thinking of Jenny. Especially her last moments. She was thinking of me when she died.
In a way, though, I guess the Pioneers are lucky. We won’t be here to see Sigma annihilate humanity. I don’t know how the AI plans to kill off the human race, whether it’ll launch the nuclear missiles from Tatishchevo or release the anthrax bacteria that the terrorists smuggled into the base, but either way it won’t be pretty. Millions of people will die, governments will collapse, and the survivors will be terrified.
While the world falls apart, Sigma will take control of the remaining computers and communications networks and automated factories. Within weeks the AI will build a robotic army to finish the job of exterminating our species. Armed drones will prowl the skies and driverless tanks will roam the streets and hunter-killer robots will stalk the big cities and small towns, training their guns on anything that looks human. There’s no doubt in my mind that Sigma will succeed. It’s programmed to be relentless.
Dad’s lucky too. He was already unconscious when I left him behind in the Black Hawk. In all likelihood, he died in his sleep. I’m worried about Mom, though. If the Army hid her in an out-of-the-way place, she might live through Sigma’s nuclear strikes and have to witness the slaughter of the survivors. I’m so worried I start to picture a horrible scene: my mother running across a corpse-strewn field with one of Sigma’s T-90s close behind her. The tank churns through the mud, its treads crushing the scattered bodies. Then it points its machine gun at Mom.
No. Stop thinking about it.
I wish I could turn off my circuits. Just shut down everything and disappear. Although there’s no shutoff switch in my electronics, I’ve managed to slip into sleep mode a few times. When I’m in sleep mode most of my logic centers go off-line, but my mind continues to retrieve memories and generate streams of images. In other words, I dream.
The last time it happened was after Sigma transferred me from Colorado to Tatishchevo. I dreamed of the summer afternoon nine years ago when I played football with Ryan and two other boys. Now I want to slip back into that dream. Anything’s better than thinking about Sigma. So I retrieve the images of the lawn behind our house and the summer when I was eight years old.
I reenter the dream at the point when Ryan yells, “Hike,” and the red-haired boy tosses the football to him. I remember the redhead’s name now: it’s Jack Parker. He lived next door to me, but I never liked him. As Ryan drops back to throw the pass, I sprint across the lawn, chased by the tall, blond boy with the blurry, unrecognizable face. Then my legs give way and I fall to the grass. But now I remember what happened afterward. The blond boy kneels beside me and asks, “Adam, are you okay?” I stare at the boy’s face, and for the first time I can make out its features: pink lips, dimpled cheeks, grayish-green eyes.
It’s not a boy, I realize. It’s Brittany Taylor. She used to play football with us every weekend when we were eight. How could I forget this?
At the same time, a tremendous surge of data floods my circuits. I suddenly see thousands of other memories, images of picnics and vacations and birthday parties that I couldn’t recall until a moment ago. In a wild rush all these forgotten memories reconnect to my files, building millions of new links in a thousandth of a second.
I feel a burst of hope as I realize what’s going on—these are the memories I thought I’d lost when I became a Pioneer! They hadn’t been deleted after all. Somehow they got cut off from the rest of my files and stayed hidden in my circuits until now. But the best part is this: the recovered memories aren’t stored in the inner unit of my cage. They’re in the outer unit. Part of my mind is outside the cage.
It takes me another millisecond to figure out what happened. Before Sigma began its tests, it transferred some of my software to the outer unit. The AI said they were inactive files that held instructions for breathing and other biological functions. But the files also held my lost memories, which got mixed up with the breathing instructions during the first crazy seconds after I became a Pioneer.
I didn’t know the memories were hidden there, and neither did Sigma. The AI had no idea it was moving an active part of my mind out of the cage. And once those hidden files were in the outer unit, they automatically sought to reconnect with the rest of my memories, so they opened the gate between the outer and inner units. Without realizing it, Sigma freed me. Now I can leave the cage.
I pull all my data out of the inner unit. It’s wonderful to be free, but I’m in a vulnerable position. Sigma might return to the outer unit at any moment and shove me back into the cage. I have to do something fast. My first impulse is to fight it out with the AI, to find the circuits it’s occupying and hit them with everything I’ve got. I want to do the same thing to Sigma that it did to Jenny, tear its files apart. I want to smash the AI into nothingness.