The Dragon Commander (SkyLine 1)

“You weren’t given… any details on this mission?” piped up the ponytailed man later known as Lee. The place of Tim’s answer was taken by the opening of a door. A woman in a gray suit jacket, with side-slicked dark hair stepped out of the briefing room beside him.

“No, he wasn’t,” said the woman. Both Chris and Tim’s ears perked up at the sound of a voice they both knew. It was Dorothy. “I needed him to show up.”

“You thought I wouldn’t?” said Tim, voice back at its usual high. Then he realized, “What is this mission?” Dorothy swung the door wider, to hold it with her heel.

“Let’s all step inside,” she said. She saw the terror in Tim’s eyes. “Let me be clear, Mr. Carver. if anyone else could handle this assignment, anyone else would be here. The World Crisis Committee needs you. Now come along.” Like she’d tugged on an invisible leash, Chris and his unit followed Dorothy into the briefing room. It took everything Tim had to peel his cheeks from his bench. It took a second, firmer, “Mr. Carver,” to pull him to the briefing room.

Tim was surprised to find it so small, in so large a building. The long, ovular table held enough seats for all invited, minus Dorothy. She stood beside a large glowing screen. Chris and the others sat without invitation in the curved, white backs of cushioned chairs. Numb at the whole situation, Tim imitated them. When they’d settled in, Dorothy ran her fingers over a smooth panel on the wall. The strip lights over them quieted to a dim glow. The rim of the screen before them blinked alive.

“Popcorn?” whispered the woman covered in ink dragons, later known as Morgan, to Tim. He almost answered, just before Dorothy announced,

“In lieu of a formal briefing… I will play you footage. What you will see should be impossible, I know. Mr. Carver, we need you to correct it, and prevent it from happening again. Chris, we need you and your unit to keep him alive.” Any brewing questions were stifled when the recording started.

The screen showed the inside of a police station. The camera’s angle showed an office full of cubicles full of officers. It was a healthy mixture of man and Squire. Everything appeared standard. The human half of the partnerships hunkered over their desks. The loose-formed, jet-black giants sat in wait for an order. There was only one thing out of place. One officer stood feet from his Squire, whose face was lit yellow as it spoke. The camera fixed on the robot, and zoomed in.

“Yellow… that’s…” Tim mumbled. He recognized the software instantly. If not for TE-Les, he wouldn’t have thought twice about walking away from Nanoverse for a job working on that with the WCC. A personality matrix. Dorothy swiped the wall-panel again to raise the volume of the recording.

“Do… do you not hear that?” said the Squire.

“Hear what?” said his partner. Another officer joined in, suspecting it might be a joke. But the Squire’s yellow light of terror was no joke. He wrestled with a voice no one around him seemed to hear, while the other model’s faces turned blood red around him and his partner.

“Do what? You want me to … no. I said no!” the yellow Squire grappled. Then the others turned. Tim’s hand flew to his mouth, but not before a cough of vomit spewed past it.

“My… God…” he mumbled between deep, sick breaths. Even some of Chris’ unit turned away from the footage. Forms of black, nanotech robots shifted to spears to skewer, blades to slice, and cannons to blast apart their partners. Pools of blood ran together across the tile. Hunks of flesh plunked into them. The howls of the dying scratched the speakers, before the recording cut to darkness. Dorothy looked out on Chris’ unit, the only one that had ever handled another situation even close. They kept their mouths sealed tight, to keep in the contents of their own guts.

“FOS wasn’t what it is now, when last I saw you all for a mission like this. As I said, I know this shouldn’t be possible. But it happened,” said Dorothy.

“Those Squires were hacked. Sorry about your floor.” Tim murmured, wiping the corners of his lips. Dorothy dismissed it with a shaking head. “That one that was talking, right before the…” he had to stop when toxins welled up in him again.

“His model is DA-Vos, partner to Robin Finch. Finch is the only body unaccounted for, before we lost surveillance… every other human officer in Precinct 117 is confirmed dead,” explained Dorothy.

“DA-Vos… he’s outfitted with a personality matrix, isn’t he?” Tim observed, “I thought it was still in beta.”

“He was our first field test,” Dorothy admitted. Chris and his unit marveled at Tim’s invisible transition, from helpless noodle to analyst, when the right trigger was pulled. He straightened up, sat forward, and eyed the screen with new scrutiny, like his lunch wasn’t sitting between his shoes.

“The way he was arguing with himself… what did you find, when you altered the frequencies around that time?” said Tim, knowing they must have. Dorothy nodded, impressed, and played the modified recording.

“Neutralize the humans. Neutralize the humans. No? Some may be extinguished, to find the one. One for many,” a digitally demonic voice beeped and scratched through the speakers. Parts of it were sharp enough to cause even Chris to wince.

“A voice? I was expecting some coding resonance,” said Tim, when the recording was done. “Machines don’t respond to voice commands unless we program them to. It was speaking directly to DA-Vos. It wasn’t a program. At least, not on

e that I’ve ever heard of. It was trying to… reason with him. No Earth or Martian AI can do that.”

“Not yet,” amended Dorothy. “Do you see now, why we’ve called you here, Timothy? We know about project TE-Les. A self-teaching software. This is it, to the umpteenth degree. It must be. An FOS or some other AI that learned how to reason. It forced the other Squires to kill their partners. As to why DA-Vos was able to resist, I don’t want to get too deep in conjecture. The bottom line is: you are the person with the most knowledge on software like this.”

“I-I-I mean,” Tim shuddered back behind his reliable old walls of doubt, “If I had the right tools, and I got to where it happened, I might be able to learn something about the AI, or whatever’s doing this… I don’t know if I can s-s-stop it.”

“This may help persuade you,” said Dorothy. She flattened a glossy ticket on the table. The WCC stamp at the bottom marked it paid, for a one-way trip across the SkyLine. Mars. It was as close as an arm length.

“I… I’d love to go there, but my life is here. I’d have to find-

“It comes with a second set of documents, upon completion of this mission,” said Dorothy. She slipped them halfway out her jacket. “Employment papers, for WCC’s Mars Labs.”

“You can’t mean that,” Tim sputtered before he could think to stop himself. Dorothy pushed the papers back in.

“If you can break whatever hold this AI has over the Squires in Precinct 117, maybe you can build one yourself, with the proper safeguards. Mars could use something like that, to replace its human miners,” she said.

“Can… can I think about it?” Tim said the same thing he had when Nanoverse called him, even after his horrendous interview. But, when he thought of his sister, he realized, “No… no if I think about it, I’ll back out. Or you’ll find someone else.”