Puppet Master Read online

  As Chelsea described the problem and its solution in great detail—in layman’s terms, or as close to it as possible, it had to do with what was essentially a trick in utilizing memory more efficiently than the logic chip’s cache was designed to do—Massina’s thoughts drifted, scattering among some of the other projects his company was working on. While applications for industrial robots were Smart Metal’s major moneymakers, the company had projects in a vast array of areas; not all involved AI and robotics. One of his engineers had designed a golf club whose head corrected for imbalances in its user’s swing, practically guaranteeing long and accurate drives off the tee.

  At least according to its inventor. Massina had never tried it himself. He didn’t particularly like golf, and while he had taken a few swings with the club, he could not personally say that it did anything an ordinary driver couldn’t. He did, however, like the idea that the pros they’d hired to test it raved about it.

  “Want anything?” Chelsea asked, pulling into the lot of a strip mall dominated by Starbucks.

  “I don’t have any cash,” said Massina, suddenly remembering that he hadn’t managed to get to the ATM.

  “I’ll spot you,” laughed Chelsea. “Black, no sugar. Tall?”

  “Medium. Or small.”

  “That’s tall,” said Chelsea, slipping out of the truck. “Twelve shot latte for me.”

  “Hmmph,” he said, mentally calculating the effects of that much caffeine on her small frame.

  Chelsea Goodman shivered involuntarily as she stepped from the truck. Despite the fact that she had lived in the Northeast for some six years now—four while studying at MIT, and two with Smart Metal—the San Diego native still had not adjusted to the climate. Winter itself didn’t bother her as much as the long wait for spring that characterized the end of March and beginning of April. Mentally done with ice and snow, she wanted flowers and much longer days, or at least days where she could comfortably bike to work without a parka.

  Though it was barely past five, the line at the counter snaked around the ground coffee display to the mocha pots at the store entrance. This Starbucks was one of the few in the area that opened before six, which made it an oasis for caffeine-starved early risers.

  Chelsea took a step back and did a high lunge, a basic yoga move that stretched her lower body. The man in front of her glanced around, clearly concerned that she might do something more dangerous.

  “Just staying warm.” She smiled at him, twisting left and right. He rolled his eyes and turned back toward the counter.

  Chelsea was excited about the morning test; now that they had solved the memory problem, she felt the bot would easily pass its functional tests. The robot was an offshoot of an earlier design used by the military to retrieve mines and IEDs without exposing soldiers to their dangers. Where the original was operated by remote control, this one was completely autonomous; it could be told to locate ordinance, safe it, and then place it in a robot vehicle for transportation or disposal. While these tasks were relatively straightforward—Smart Metal had a “mech,” or programmed robot, that could do all of those things already—the bot’s size and production costs were the real innovations. RBT PJT 23.A—more commonly known to the developers as “Peter”—folded itself into a tool-bag-sized case. The AI computing unit and sensors were all off-the-shelf, the former actually centered around a processing unit used for the latest version of the Apple iMac. Pushing an architecture designed to run a home computer into areas ordinarily reserved for the human brain had been, and continued to be, an exhilarating challenge.

  Exactly the reason she was here.

  A strange scent tickled Chelsea’s nose as she moved up in the line. It was an off note, a double-flat in the olfactory symphony of coffee blends and roasts.

  Rotten eggs?

  It reminded her of the ancient gymnastics studio where she’d spent much of her elementary school afternoons.

  Mold?

  Natural gas?

  The Starbucks building was in a small strip mall directly across from a row of much older residential buildings; in a few hours the close-in suburb would be clogged with work traffic, but at the moment the streets were nearly deserted. Massina gazed at the row of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century row houses surrounding the plaza. Varying between three and five stories tall, each building housed several apartments, some two or three on each floor.

  The inventor had spent much of his childhood in a succession of similar houses. There was nothing to be particularly nostalgic about; his childhood had been far from gilded. And yet he remembered bits and pieces fondly, and knew he had learned a great deal, whether in the hardscrabble streets or the strict Jesuit grammar school where his abilities were first recognized.

  Massina had started working at ten, sweeping the floor of a butcher shop several blocks away from here. His boss, a cousin of his mother, had been difficult; work had nonetheless been an oasis compared to his home, where his mother’s erratic, alcohol-fueled behavior had filled the small rooms with danger as well as . . .

  . . . The building he was looking at suddenly flashed yellow, then red, as fire surged from a dozen points at once. The air filled with glass, wood, and brick. A shock of air yanked the front of Massina’s truck upward and back; it slammed down so hard that the air bags exploded.

  Dazed, Massina grabbed for the door handle and grappled with the seat belt. He fell out to the pavement, the car alarm blaring. Flames seemed to be everywhere, sucking air so quickly it whistled.

  Get Chelsea, Massina told himself, struggling to his feet. Get Chelsea to safety, damn you, old man!

  His mouth and throat filled with a mist of fine powder from the air bag. Massina began to cough. The air blackened as a furl of soot descended over the buildings; it gave way slowly to a red and yellow glow, the fire pushing away the smoke as it rose. The street looked as if a tornado had cut through a war zone: debris, big and small, littered the road and parking lot.

  Legs shaking, Massina steadied himself against his truck, then started toward Starbucks.

  He found Chelsea lying on the sidewalk just in front of the building. She had just stepped out when the explosion occurred; knocked backward, she lay on the ground, stunned and surrounded by glass.

  Massina bent to her, not sure whether she was dead or alive. He caught a glimpse of people inside the store trying to help each other, moving as if in slow motion.

  Chelsea moved her head.

  “Up!” Massina barked at her. “We got to get away from the building.”

  Chelsea’s face and clothes were speckled with blood where small bits of stone-shrapnel had peppered her skin. She was in shock.

  “Chelsea!” Massina barked. “Get up!”

  She blinked, then slowly got to her feet. “My coffee!”

  “Come on.”

  Massina helped her to the side of the Starbucks building, struggling to get his own bearings. The blast had muffled his hearing, and he felt as if he had a helmet over his head.

  “Are you bleeding?” he asked.

  She waved her hand; she didn’t seem to be hearing well either. But she seemed OK, just dazed.

  Massina reached his right hand—the artificial one—into his pocket and took out his phone. “Nine-one-one,” he told the custom dialing app. “Report fire at this location. And an explosion.”

  There was already a siren in the distance. People from the buildings across the street came out to see what was going on.

  “People!” yelled someone. “There are people inside the building on fire!”

  Chelsea looked at Massina and blinked. Her eyes seemed to focus. In the next moment she was on her feet, running toward the far end of the building.

  It took Massina a moment to react, and several more before he realized that, rather than running away to safety, she was running toward the fire. “Wait! Wait!” he yelled, running after her.

  The Starbucks had received barely a glancing blow from the explosion; the only damage wa
s to the windows. The two stores next to it were similarly pockmarked by flying debris and shattered glass; the masonry fronts on both were caved in but still intact. The real damage was to the older building adjacent to them. The explosion had obliterated the front half of the building, a three-story Victorian-era house that had been clad in shingles; the back wall was twisted and shriveling, though its panels had somehow managed to resist the fire. The two row houses that abutted it on the other side had been largely untouched by the explosion, but they were now on fire, as were two more beyond them.

  Chelsea stopped in front of the destroyed building, gaping at the twisted wreckage. A woman in a cotton nightgown stood nearby, her face covered with soot.

  “Mrs. Stevens! Mrs. Stevens!” shouted the woman.

  “Who’s Mrs. Stevens?” asked Massina.

  “Look!”

  Massina saw a shadow in the top window. He guessed it was Mrs. Stevens.

  “We have to get her out of there,” said Chelsea.

  As if on cue, flames flared behind the woman, throwing her silhouette in sharp contrast. She had something in her arms—a child.

  Chelsea had stopped a few feet away. She stared up at the house, then started for the front door.

  Massina ran to grab her. “No, no, no!”

  A ball of flames burst through the first-floor façade. Chelsea stopped short.

  “Get the bot!” Massina shouted to Chelsea. “Get Peter.”

  She stood motionless for a moment longer, then twisted around and ran back in the direction of the truck.

  “She’s going to die,” said the woman in the nightgown. “Where are the firemen?”

  “We’ll help her,” said Massina. He looked up at the window. The woman had disappeared.

  Chelsea’s thoughts moved in four directions at once; she felt as if her brain were physically bumping against the confines of her skull. She ran in the direction of the truck, or what she thought was the direction of the truck, only to realize that she had gone out to the road; she corrected and darted back toward the rear of the pickup.

  The bot’s container was in a large box at the back of the truck bed, wedged between two larger boxes that contained monitoring gear and backup controls. Chelsea grabbed the box and, despite its size and weight, hauled it on top of the truck cab; she had to pull over one of the other boxes to get high enough to reach the snap locks at the top of the case.

  Come on, come on, she mumbled to herself. Get it out!

  Peter looked a little like a headless horse designed by Picasso. Made primarily of carbon fiber compounds and titanium, the small robot had four legs that articulated from a slim, seven-sided irregular central box; it could stand and move on two or four of any of these legs. The six-fingered claws at the end of each could pick up and hold items as small as a dime. Despite its size—unfolded and standing on four legs, it was only .683 meters tall, or a little over two feet high—it could carry roughly five hundred pounds.

  Something exploded in the distance. Chelsea froze, bile creeping into the back of her mouth.

  Go, girl, go!

  The words were her father’s, seemingly implanted at birth. It was his voice she inevitably heard when in trouble, whether on the uneven bars as a five-year-old or a work project now.

  Go, girl, go!

  His voice was as strong now as it had been in the gym at the state gymnastics championships—embarrassing then, galvanizing now.

  Go, girl, go!

  The heat of the fire on Massina’s face felt like a sunburn. No more than two or three minutes had passed since the explosion, yet it seemed like an eternity.

  Where are those fire trucks? Where is Chelsea with the bot?

  “Here we are!” Chelsea dropped to her knees, skidding on the hard concrete. She had RBT PJT 23.A in her arms.

  “The control unit!” said Massina. “Go back and get it.”

  “No time,” said Chelsea. “And we don’t need it.”

  She reached under the robot’s body and found a small slide; pushing it back revealed a fingerprint reader. Seconds later, the bot stiffened its limbs, signaling that it was powering up.

  Massina went down to one knee opposite Chelsea. The bot was between them. He reached underneath, sliding his fingers around until he found the slot where the reader was. The machine, now alive, beeped in recognition.

  “Skip diagnostics,” he told the robot. “Natural language mode.”

  It beeped, acknowledging the order.

  “Proceed to the four-story building that is on fire. Retrieve woman and child from floor four.”

  The robot didn’t move.

  “Go,” Massina added. “Take the woman and child to safety one at a time.”

  The bot still didn’t move.

  Massina’s hasty and frankly vague instructions had to be translated and analyzed before they could be acted on; not only were they fairly generic, at least to a machine, but they also related to a task that the machine had never encountered before. Though it had climbed numerous buildings, and it did know what a woman and a child were, it had never had an exercise anywhere near as complicated as this.

  “We’re going to have to get the controller,” said Massina. “We need to make sure it knows what to do.”

  Chelsea grabbed him as he got up to run. “Wait. Look.”

  RBT PJT 23.A beeped and started toward the building.

  Massina and Chelsea followed. The heat seemed blast-furnace hot.

  But what had happened to the woman? She wasn’t at the window.

  The robot continued into the flames.

  Turning, Massina ran to the truck. The control unit would be the only way to alter the bot’s commands at this point, and very possibly the only way to get the small machine out of the building if it got stuck.

  If this had happened in six months, even three, the bot could get them out. Now, though . . . there is still so much to do.

  Massina grabbed the case and started back to the building. It was a long box, awkward to carry, though not heavy. Firemen were arriving, pulling out hoses, directing a ladder truck. In the confusion no one questioned him; the case made him look as if he belonged.

  By the time he reached Chelsea, the woman had reappeared at the window. She was holding her child in one hand and pushing at the glass pane with the other. Someone nearby yelled at her not to open the window, to wait for the firemen to arrive, but even if she could have heard them, the advice would have been difficult to follow, flying against all instinct. She finally succeeded in breaking the glass with the palm of her hand, pulling it back and knocking at the rest of the pane with her elbow. Wind whipped through the opening; the wall at the far end of the room caught fire, flashing red behind her.

  “Oh God! She’d better jump,” said Chelsea, running toward the building.

  Massina left the control unit in its box and followed, thinking they might at least catch the baby. But the flames at the base of the building pushed them back.

  More glass shattered above, raining through the fire and smoke.

  “Look!” yelled Chelsea.

  Peter had bulled its way through a second-story window. Crawling up the frame, it clawed at the shingles, moving up the outer wall like a slow-motion spider.

  “Hey! Get back!” Someone grabbed Massina’s shoulder, pulling him around. It was a policeman. “The place is going to explode!”

  “We have to get that woman out of the building!” yelled Chelsea.

  “Let the firemen work!”

  The officer began pushing Massina back. Massina raised his right arm, took hold of the officer’s uniform, and lifted him backward and out of the way.

  Clearly surprised by the strength of the rather short man before him, the officer grabbed at Massina’s arm. It was then that he got his second surprise—never much on appearances, Massina hadn’t bothered to put the “flesh” covering on today, so the cop gripped several tubes of steel and protective carbon tunnels for the wiring.

  A fresh explosion r
ent the air. Flames shot from the top of the building next to them. Massina released the policeman and turned back, searching for Chelsea through the smoke and dust.

  “Chelsea!”

  “I have her,” yelled Chelsea, emerging from smoke with the baby in her arms.

  RBT PJT 23.A followed, moving on three legs; the fourth held the woman it had rescued a foot above the pavement, as if it were an ant retrieving a prize grasshopper for the queen.

  3

  Boston—that same moment

  Standing at the edge of the small crowd that had gathered to watch the fire, Stephan Stratowich felt a surge of relief as the woman was helped to the paramedic van that had just pulled up. It wasn’t because he would have felt any guilt over her death; rather, his boss had told him to avoid unnecessary complications. The woman’s death would have counted as one.

  Stephan had blown up two other similar buildings over the past several years; it was a sideline he didn’t particularly like, but the assignments were something he couldn’t refuse, especially when they came from Medved and the other associated with the clans that kept him employed. The trick wasn’t in making a gas explosion look like an accident; it was in limiting the damage. There was always an unpredictability that the most thorough plan could not eliminate. In this case, the explosion had occurred nearly ten minutes after Stephan had intended, greatly increasing the collateral damage—only the commercial building at the end of the row was supposed to have been destroyed. It was empty; the job was probably part of an insurance scam, though Stephan never knew, or wanted to know, the particulars.

  Now that the woman was out of the building, Stephan turned his attention to the odd-looking creature that had retrieved her. It was mechanical, some sort of robot, very unlike anything Stephan had ever seen at a fire.

  He had other work to do today, a full agenda. Still, the contraption intrigued him enough that he decided to get a better look, so he edged around the back of the crowd. He took his phone from his pocket and slipped over to the video screen. This was definitely something worth taking a video of.