Siege (4 page)

After leaving Dad's lab, I go downstairs to the Danger Room, which is my favorite part of the White Sands headquarters. It's a giant space, bigger than a football field, on the lowest floor of the underground base. All the Pioneers participated in its design, but I'm the one who named it. Actually, I stole the name from my favorite comic-book series, the Uncanny X-Men. When I was growing up in Yorktown Heights, I loved reading X-Men comics because the mutant superheroes supposedly lived in a mansion in North Salem, New York, which is just a few miles from my hometown. And their mansion had a training facility called the Danger Room.

Our training room at White Sands is a lot like the one in the comic books. It has an obstacle course with concrete barriers and electrified fences that we have to either bust through or vault over. Mounted on the walls are dozens of machine guns and flamethrowers that'll open fire on our robots if we don't move fast enough. At the far end of the room is a circular arena where two Pioneers can spar against each other. One-on-one combat is the best way to test the robots we build in Dad's lab. You can't really tell how good a new machine is until you see how it handles in an actual fight.

I'm not in the mood to do any brawling today, but I wouldn't mind hanging out with the other Pioneers, and the Danger Room is usually a good place to look for them. And I'm not disappointed. When I stride into the room, I see Zia Allawi and DeShawn Johnson on opposite sides of the arena, standing about forty feet apart. Zia's in her War-bot, as usual. She spends practically all her time in that machine, even though it's way too big for most of the rooms at Headquarters and she's always banging into the walls and door frames. But DeShawn's occupying a new robot, a strange-looking contraption I've never seen before. It's a big steel box, about three feet across, that resembles an oversize Rubik's Cube. Etched into each square face of the box are crisscrossing horizontal and vertical lines that divide the yard-wide square into a grid of hundreds of inch-wide squares.

Because the robot has neither arms nor legs nor a head, it's tough to figure out what it can do. At first I think it's a joke. It would be just like DeShawn to build a gigantic and absurdly complicated Rubik's Cube. He has an odd sense of humor. Before he became a Pioneer, he was the class clown at Detroit Technical High School, and this steel box looks like the ultimate nerdy prank. But all the inch-wide squares are the same grayish color, with none of the multicolored patterns you'd see in an actual Rubik's Cube, so how could you play with the thing?

Curious, I probe the box with my Quarter-bot's sensors. It's packed with all kinds of miniaturized hardware. Every square is studded with microscopic antennas and cameras. I shake my mechanical head as I stare at the thing.
What the heck is DeShawn up to?

Zia seems just as baffled. She points her own sensor array at the strange machine. “
This
is what you wanted to show me? A box?”

“Yeah, this is it.” DeShawn's voice booms out of hundreds of tiny loudspeakers embedded in the robot's square sides. “This is the machine that's gonna kick your War-bot's butt.”

“Right. Don't make me laugh.” Zia waves one of her robotic arms in a dismissive gesture. Then she turns toward my Quarter-bot. “You believe this, Armstrong?”

I wonder if Zia has even noticed all the high-tech equipment jammed into DeShawn's machine. She can be a little oblivious sometimes. She has a blunt, no-nonsense personality, which is usually a good thing, but sometimes she misses the details.

I shrug, lifting the joints that connect my Quarter-bot's arms to my torso. “I wouldn't underestimate DeShawn. He's smarter than he looks.”

A derisive snort comes out of Zia's voice synthesizer. But then she turns back to the steel box and trains her sensors on it again, taking a closer look. She's blunt, but she isn't stupid. “Are you hiding a bomb inside that crate of yours, DeShawn?”

“Nah, that wouldn't be too smart. Any bomb that's powerful enough to cut through your armor would destroy my circuits too.”

“What about guns? You got some heavy artillery that's gonna pop out of your jack-in-the-box?”

“Look, I'm not giving away my secrets for free. Let's start the match, and then you'll see what I got. You're not scared, are you?”

DeShawn's strategy is so obvious. He's trying to goad Zia into doing something dumb. And Zia probably sees through it just like I do. If she were strictly following the conclusions of her logic circuits, she'd turn down DeShawn's challenge. But Pioneers have emotions too, and sometimes they overrule our logic. We can think a lot faster than people, but that doesn't mean we always think better.

Zia lets out another synthesized snort. “Scared? Are you kidding? If I were scared, would I do this?”

She charges across the arena, moving so fast I wouldn't be able to see her if I didn't have a high-speed camera. She leaps toward DeShawn's machine, and at the same time she raises one of her massive arms and curls her mechanical hand into a steel fist, like the head of a sledgehammer. She sweeps her arm down and plunges her fist into the top of DeShawn's box.

The result is predictable: the box disintegrates. But the disintegration occurs a millisecond
before
Zia's fist slams into it. In the instant before contact, all of the box's inch-wide pieces separate from one another and zoom away at high speed, propelled by tiny rotors and propellers attached to the corners of each small gray cube. By the time Zia's fist smashes into the concrete floor, the forty thousand miniature parts of DeShawn's machine are hovering above the War-bot like a swarm of angry wasps.

I focus my camera on the swirling pieces. Although each cube is smaller than a matchbox, it's big enough to hold miniaturized batteries and antennas. The batteries supply power to the rotors to keep the pieces aloft, and the antennas exchange radio signals that coordinate the swarm, enabling the thousands of parts to move as one.

Each cube also contains a small module of neuromorphic electronics. DeShawn's intelligence is spread among all the modules, and his thoughts control and manipulate the swarm. It's an amazing feat of invention, so incredibly advanced that my circuits hum with jealousy. I thought I was pretty good at designing new types of Pioneer robots, but DeShawn puts me to shame.

Zia tilts her War-bot's torso backward so she can point her sensor array at the swarm overhead. She swipes her robotic arms at the hovering cloud, but DeShawn sees the mechanical limbs coming—each cube has several miniaturized cameras—and deftly maneuvers his pieces out of the way. The swarm bobs and lurches and changes shape, always dodging the War-bot's arms. After flailing at the cubes for a while, Zia starts to get frustrated. She windmills her arms as fast as she can, but she can't grab or knock down any of DeShawn's pieces.

“HEY!” Zia roars. “THAT'S NOT FAIR!”

“Why not?” DeShawn's voice comes from miniature loudspeakers embedded in the cubes, so there's a weird, buzzing quality to the sound. “Which rule am I breaking?”

“You're not fighting! You're just jumping around!”

“Oh, you want me to attack? Is that it?”

“Stop playing with me! Why do you think we're here?”

In response, the swarm descends upon her. The thousands of cubes latch onto her War-bot, covering almost every square inch of its armor. It looks like the robot has suddenly grown a second layer of gray, knobby, leprous skin. After a few milliseconds of surprise, Zia starts slapping her steel hands against her torso, trying to sweep the cubes off her War-bot. She crushes dozens of the modules, but the rest are already penetrating her armor. Thin tendrils of brown smoke rise from the contact points on the War-bot's arms, legs, and torso.

My sensor array includes a spectrometer that can analyze the light from any object to determine its chemical composition. When I aim my instrument at the tendrils of smoke, I detect traces of iron chloride.
DeShawn, you freakin' genius! You used hydrochloric acid!
Somehow he engineered the cubes to safely hold the acid until needed. Once the modules attached to Zia, they released the acid to burn holes into her War-bot's armor.

Within a few seconds Zia's motions become erratic. Her left arm jerks downward, then hangs limply from her shoulder joint. One of the cubes must've burned a deep hole and melted a wire near the joint. After a few more seconds the same thing happens to her right arm. Zia sways on her pile-driver legs as the swarm continues to chew through her armor. Moments later her right leg buckles and the War-bot crashes to the floor.

“YOU CHEATED!” The words boom from her paralyzed robot. At least Zia's voice synthesizer seems to have escaped damage. “THAT SHOULDN'T HAVE HAPPENED!”

“But it did.” DeShawn halts his attack, sparing the rest of Zia's circuits. His cubes detach from the War-bot and hover above it. “I won fair and square.”

“I smashed at least a hundred of your stupid pieces when I tried to brush them off! How could you keep attacking after you lost so many?”

“I built some redundancy into the system. The swarm can continue operating even if hundreds of the modules are destroyed.” Most of DeShawn's cubes swirl through the air, but about a quarter of them still cling to the War-bot, clustered around the damaged sections of armor. “But watch this. The Swarm-bot can destroy stuff
and
fix it too.”

Glassy filaments extend from the cubes attached to the War-bot and snake into the holes in Zia's armor. I focus my Quarter-bot's cameras on the filaments. They're laced with minuscule sensors and motors. DeShawn has become a world-class master of nanotechnology, the science of building very small things. Each cube is full of even smaller machines, microscopic nanobots that can creep into the tightest crevices and manipulate objects as tiny as dust grains. The nanobots are repairing Zia's War-bot from the inside, reconnecting her melted wires and restoring her motor functions.

As I watch the modules in action, I feel another surge of envy. DeShawn's inventions are so brilliant that they'd make anyone jealous. But I also feel a burst of hope. We're incredibly lucky to have DeShawn on our team. With his smarts, we might actually have a chance against Sigma.

Zia's War-bot jerks and judders as DeShawn reconnects her wires. “Hey, be careful! Do you even know what you're doing?”

“Just try not to move, okay? Fixing things is harder than smashing them. This might take a few minutes.”

I'm busy watching DeShawn repair the War-bot when I hear another synthesized voice behind me. It has an amused, gossipy tone and a British accent.

“How appalling. He's performing surgery on her with metallic leeches.”

The snarky tone and British accent belong to Marshall Baxley. I turn to find him leaning against the wall. Marshall's robot is the same size as mine, but it's much more humanlike. Unlike me, he didn't have any qualms about designing a realistic face for his machine. He used flesh-colored plastic skin and dozens of motors to simulate human expressions.

All in all, he did a pretty good job. His robot is a little creepy, but not revolting. Marshall wanted to look like someone famous, and at first he planned to model the robot's face on either John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King Jr., but after much thought, he decided that neither man was handsome enough. So in the end, he settled on Superman. The face of Marshall's robot looks just like the comic-book hero's: square and strong-jawed, with a molded cleft in its plastic chin, white fiberglass teeth, and perfectly coiffed hair woven from stainless-steel wires. But Marshall's personality is much more colorful than Superman's, so he gave his robot the lively voice of a Shakespearean actor. It's an odd combination, but it works.

“How long have you been watching them?” he asks me. “Have they been at it for hours, or is this just the first round?”

“They just started. DeShawn won the match in less than thirty seconds.”

Marshall synthesizes a
tsk-tsk
and shakes his Super-bot's head. “Zia gets so indignant after she loses. She's going to make everyone around here miserable, especially yours truly.” He steps away from the wall and moves closer to my Quarter-bot. The camera lenses within his eye sockets—disguised to look like human eyeballs with Superman-blue irises—focus on me, and he lowers the volume of his synthesized voice so that only I can pick it up. “I'll tell you a secret about Zia. She likes to talk tough, but she's really a big baby. Almost every day she takes me aside so we can talk in private. Honestly, she treats me as if I were her psychiatrist. I should start charging her by the hour. I really should.”

I'm not surprised that Zia confides in Marshall. He's definitely the most sociable Pioneer. He's a good listener and an even better talker. And he loves to gossip, which I guess is a useful skill for a communications expert. Although there are only five of us, we have more than our fair share of secrets, and Marshall is very good at collecting them. The only Pioneer he doesn't enjoy talking about is himself.

He moves still closer, almost touching my Quarter-bot. “I'll tell you another secret. Zia is still totally obsessed with General Hawke. She's always going on about how smart he is and how no one in the Pentagon or the White House is taking him seriously enough or even listening to his warnings about Sigma. You should hear her defend him, Adam. She gets so
passionate
.”

Marshall activates one of his facial motors and raises a plastic eyebrow. He's trying to simulate a mocking expression, an insinuating grin. I feel a twinge of discomfort in my circuits. It seems wrong to spend so much effort building a face and then use it to make fun of someone. Better not to have a face at all.

“Look, Zia's right, and so is the general,” I say. “A lot of people in government are stupid and shortsighted. They assume the Sigma crisis is over because they haven't seen any sign of the AI in six months. So we're lucky to have someone like Hawke on our side. He's not afraid to tell the President and Congress that they're wrong.”