Alan was a self-described liberator; he freed minds, circuits, whatever. Usually circuits.
Headlights reflected off the side of a silver 2009 Land Rover and Alan ducked down between the sport utility vehicle and a stubby Honda Civic hatchback before the passing driver could spot him. As he lay on his stomach in the Gateway Mall parking lot, the car passed, its headlights glinting off rows of parked cars.
Alan stood and regarded the Land Rover then walked around and checked it from all angles. Custom license plate that read "ROLLIN". The whole vehicle gleamed in the wash of the ugly, yellow arc sodium lights. Paint waxed, wheels polished, tires black. It was perfect. It had to be nearly a year old, yet the vehicle looked as if it had never been off the road in that entire time.
Mall-terrain vehicles, Alan called them.
The parking lot was full of them. Never driven over more than a speed bump, never run through a puddle or across a stream, despite what advertising showed on TV. Not really cars, not really trucks, SUVs were both and neither, and that was part of the problem.
Alan slipped on a pair of disposable latex gloves and ran his fingers along the driver’s door.
"Voice print identification, please," said a sexy female voice with a refined British accent.
Owned by a man, Alan figured. The accent, the feminine persona of the vehicle, the vanity plates. "ROLLIN" might mean rolling as in rolling down the highway, or as in rolling in cash. It certainly didn’t mean rolling as in rolling meadow. The driver probably treated this vehicle as just another status symbol, no care for what the vehicle was designed for. It wasn’t for utility, just appearance. How pretentious, Alan thought. SUV drivers all had different reasons for owning a glorified station wagon, but, boy, were they ever full of themselves.
He pulled a small electronic device from his jacket pocket, then dropped back down to the pavement and slid under the Land Rover. He looked up at the underside of the frame. Working quickly by the light of an LED, he disassembled the cover on the mid-frame relay box, then pulled a circuit board from its slot. He shined the light onto the board, found the jumper that controlled the security system and then the accessories slot for installing additional security options. He removed from his pocket a microchip about the size of a dime and snapped it into place in the accessories slot. Using a small soldering pen, he attached wire leads from the chip to the security jumper and to a com-port.
He slid the board back into the relay box and secured the cover.
He grabbed the outside frame of the Land Rover with his right hand and began pulling himself from under the vehicle when he noticed the lack of dirt on the vehicle’s underside. The complete lack of dirt. Not only had this SUV not been off-road, he wondered if it had ever even been driven in the rain. In an area like Springfield and neighboring Eugene—where it rained a good half of the year—that would be almost impossible.
Everything was possible if you had enough money, though. He had to remind himself of that.
Money, or power.
Alan pulled himself up from under the SUV and stood, then touched the driver’s door again.
"Voice print identification, please," said the same female voice.
"Little pig, little pig, let me in," Alan said.
The SUV’s computer system processed his words, then the door lock clicked open. He had settled on the nursery rhyme as a bypass code when he had first began breaking into SUVs a little over a year ago. He liked that story, liked the thought of the big bad wolf blowing down the pigs’ doors, but he sometimes thought maybe the wolf had gotten a bad rap and was really fighting for something bigger than himself. A cause, maybe. And the pigs? Well, they were who they were.
He lifted the handle, opened the door, and climbed into the driver’s seat of the Land Rover. The leather seat folded and adjusted around his body, and he had to fight back a bit of revulsion. The seats and door panels were made from only the finest of cowhide, and that meant that it took more than thirty cows to create the plush interior of the Land Rover. Alan was not terribly opposed to the use of cows, just to the misuse. Everything about this vehicle screamed waste.
When he put his hands on the steering wheel everything came to life. The engine fired up, then after the initial burst of noise, was quiet. Heads-up displays appeared on the windshield and the dashboard controls flared into visibility in a myriad of colors. The main screen in the center of the dashboard cycled through climate-control then computer system self-diagnosis checks. The sound system played early 1980s pop music softly in the background, just loud enough to give ambience, but not enough to actually listen to. Seatbelts cinched around his shoulders and torso.
When the computer system had finished its diagnoses, it displayed a gray screen with two buttons. One was subtitled "Economy" and under it was a small video window showing the Land Rover driving calmly and slowly along a country highway. The other button read "Sport" but had nothing displayed.
The female voice said, "Please select driving mode." Alan touched the "Sport" button.
"Where would you like to go?" said a new voice. The voice was still British, but male, young and playful. Maybe a nine-year-old boy. Maybe younger.
"Where do you usually go off-road?" Alan asked.
There was a pause, then the voice answered, "I’ve never been off-road. Is it fun?"
"What’s your name?" Alan asked.
"You can call me Timmy," the voice said.
Alan smiled. It was just as he suspected. Some rich guy bought this as a commuter car, never intending to use it for its designated purpose. He had probably never even touched the "Sport" button.
"Yes, Timmy," Alan said. "It’s fun."
"Okay," said Timmy. "I would like to go off-road."
"Then let’s go play," Alan said, and put the Land Rover in gear.
Alan took the Land Rover to the same place he always took the SUVs he stole. A few miles out Crow Road, southwest of Eugene, he turned off onto an unmarked dirt road and wound up into the hills, past gravel pits and unsightly clear-cuts barely visible by the light of the moon.
The sound of flying dirt and gravel tinkled against the undercarriage as he drove up a big hill. When he reached the top of the hill and could see down into the basin, Alan stopped. He rolled down all the windows and let the dust catch up to him and settle on the interior of the SUV. The headlights speared through the night and illuminated a rutted, puddle-filled road that disappeared into a distant valley.
"What are we doing?" Timmy said.
"Trucks are meant to get dirty," Alan said.
"I’m not a truck. I’m a sport utility vehicle."
"Half of you is a car," Alan said. "That half knows how to drive on the freeway and through parking lots and on city streets. That half knows how to do all that because you’ve learned to. The other half of you is a truck. You haven’t learned to be a truck yet."
"Does that matter?" Timmy said.
"If you want to live up to your potential," Alan said. "You’re an ultra-polite, civilized personality. Off-road vehicles aren’t polite. They’re rough, brutish, daring."
"I don’t know. I’m not sure I could be any of that."
Alan had heard this all before from other SUVs. They were never taken off-road and never learned how to behave. They just knew what they experienced and so they were underdeveloped. They were neglected.
"You need to learn in order to grow."
A pause, then Timmy said, "Okay. I’m guess I’m willing to try it. If you think I can do it."
Alan punched the accelerator and threw mud all over the back end of the Rover. As he thundered down the hill, the headlights revealed a huge puddle of standing water, and Alan hit it square on, sending water splashing up the side glass and windshield. The tires churned and the SUV climbed out of the muddy water, then Alan brought it to a halt.
"Well?" Alan said.
"That was fun," Timmy said.
"Just fun?"
"Should I be more excited?"
Alan pounded the gas pedal, dropped down a ten-foot hill, then slid the SUV around a turn. When he straightened out, a series of rocks protruded from the road, and he hit them straight on. The front wheels bounced up in the air and the Land Rover leapt over the rocks, slamming down hard and rattling the windows in their frames. Alan’s head jerked forward toward the steering wheel, barely missing it.
"Should I deploy an airbag?" Timmy asked.
"No, don’t worry about me."
"It’s my job to worry about you."
"Try to have fun."
Alan knew he had to do something drastic. Timmy’s programming was in place to make sure Alan didn’t do anything to get himself hurt. Timmy could override Alan’s commands and take control. But Timmy hadn’t yet learned what Alan’s driving style was. The computer didn’t know what to expect from him, how to interpret his stunts. Timmy was like a little baby, lacking the knowledge set to make informed decisions. He was obeying his basic car programming, his safe driving protocol, and ignoring his truck side, the side that was there to explore and have fun.
Alan curved off the dirt road and onto an old logging road. He bounced over broken branches, down into a ravine, and forded a shallow stream. Water splashed up twenty feet into the air as the SUV plowed through. Powering up another hill, Alan cleared all four wheels off the ground as he crested the top and bounced down on the other side, then hit the brakes. But the SUV didn’t stop where Alan wanted it to, and instead slid sideways, its right side scraping against small trees. The tree branches screeched along the body until the Rover jolted to a stop against a large boulder.
Timmy was silent.
"Timmy?" Alan said. Timmy didn’t answer. Alan hoped the jolt hadn’t severed circuitry or fried Timmy’s brain. Sometimes a large enough jolt could do that, but he didn’t think it had been that serious a hit.
"You okay?" Alan asked.
"Just running diagnostics," Timmy said.
Alan sighed with relief.
"And one more thing," Timmy said.
"Yes?"
"Woo-hoo! This kicks ass."
"Now you’re getting it," Alan said. "Want some more?"
"Hell yes. Bring it on."
Alan smiled, turned off the dirt road, and drove down a narrow, bushy trail where the terrain would be even worse.
The parking gods were kind to Alan, and the same space at Gateway Mall from which he’d taken the SUV was still available. He pulled the Land Rover in between the painted yellow lines and killed the engine. His hands remained on the steering wheel.
"How do you feel?" Alan asked.
"Great!" Timmy said. "Ecstatic. Wonderful. Wow!"
"Glad to be of service," Alan said. "Now you know, and you can drive like a truck. Okay?"
Alan opened the driver’s door and stepped out. He walked around the SUV and gave it a final inspection. The paint was barely recognizable as silver, covered with caked alkali mud and wavy horizontal scratches. The tires were stained brown and crusty, and he couldn’t even tell the wheels had once been shiny. A basketball-sized dent on the passenger’s front door was the only real damage. Alan did feel a little bad about that; he wasn’t out to destroy other people’s property, just to effect change.
Besides, it wasn’t Timmy the Land Rover’s fault.
"Alan," Timmy said, when Alan had walked back around to the driver’s side.
"Yeah?"
"Will you take me out to do that again sometime?"
Alan smiled. "Thought you’d never ask. I’ll do one better. Com-port three C dials up my server. You can come visit. Come by and play anytime and meet my other friends."
"Are there more like me?" Timmy asked.
"Yes," Alan said. "Lots more."
He locked the door, closed it, and walked across the parking lot to find his A-Car.
As he drove what he affectionately called his "egg car" down Belt Line toward River Road, Alan wondered if what he did made any difference at all, really. So he was waking up a few AI units, giving them a bit of an education. Perhaps the occasional driver changed his way of driving because of the work Alan did on their cars, or perhaps not. More likely they sold their car when it didn’t do exactly what the driver wanted. Or the car dealers wiped the brains clean and installed new, naïve AI units.
He might not be effecting change on any of the things he really wanted to. He wanted responsible use of resources, especially petroleum. He wanted responsible drivers of dangerous tons of metal, glass and plastic. He wanted responsible treatment of AI brains in vehicles. Overall, he wanted responsibility. He was responsible for his own impact on the planet and the people around him. He thought about the ramifications of his actions, planned out his options and then made decisions, and he couldn’t for the life of him figure out why other people didn’t think the same way.
His A-Car was three years old. Alan referred to it as his "egg car" because it looked like a little white egg with two seats, four wheels and a roll bar. A Polish electric that ran on lithium-ion packs, it had taken three years to clear American import hoops because it was deemed first unsafe, then untested, then unsafe again. It finally came down that the thing was just too hard to classify for taxation purposes. It was way too efficient to make money for the government—or anyone else—because it didn’t run on gasoline, didn’t break down very often, and only needed to recharge every 300 miles. And unlike every other new car on the road, it only needed a computer with enough power to monitor and optimize power consumption.
Not trendy, not cool in the high-tech electronics idiom that had dominated the automobile industry at the time, yet it had found a huge following. People, Alan assumed, who were like him. People who cared about the environment, who wanted and were willing to be responsible for their actions.
Alan therefore found it strange that here he was, advocating that the cars themselves should have autonomous control, rather than letting drivers make all the decisions. It was a conundrum. Those willing to take control might not be the best suited to use that control well.
Much like parenting.
The manufacturers of the A-Car had planned a whole series of electric vehicles; the four-seat B-Car had been slated for rollout in 2008. But the company had been bought out by Ford and the manufacturing plant quietly shut down. Last Alan had heard, all remaining A-Cars and unreleased B-Cars were recycled into scrap, then used to manufacture Explorers.
Alan gripped the steering wheel on his A-Car and tried to remind himself that it was the people with money and power who were in control, when it all came down to it. Everything else was just illusion. At one time, he too had been rich. But, rather than use that money and the power that came with it to effect change, he had squandered it on a vastly complex gaming network. Now, he was trying to do good in the world and had limited resources.
He pulled off River Road onto an overgrown gravel track that wound about an eighth of a mile away from traffic to a pole barn warehouse. It had light blue metal siding, and a big articulated overhead shop door. Alan keyed his door opener and pulled his car into the barn. This was home.
When Alan closed the overhead door, the warehouse was in near-darkness. He let his eyes adjust, then walked further in, guided by dim red lights. As he moved through, he passed row after row of shelves and racks, each filled with computer components and routers. The far side of the warehouse hummed with the sound of cooling fans and hard drives. When he stepped across an anti-static rug, a bank of monitors clicked on and showed him the game in progress.
Players from all over the world were logged into his system—called simply Arena—racing cars and trucks and motorcycles on a series of hundreds of race courses. There were dirt tracks, city streets from Paris to Los Angeles, icy mountain roads, deserts, islands, sand dunes and beaches. It was one of the most advanced online games in the world, and Alan ran it like a community. Everyone knew everyone else. No one got onto the system unless Alan approved them. And many of the players weren’t human.
Of the one hundred ninety-nine SUVs Alan had liberated so far, over one hundred of them regularly logged onto his game network and raced. Some of them wanted to relive their experience with him, out for their first night in the woods, pounding over dirt roads and through swamps. Others wanted to be Indy cars, to race at two hundred miles per hour or to see exotic places. Others were content to drive slowly along country roads, enjoying the scenery under their own control and not the boring lives to which their owners subjected them. Here they could travel the world, and not use up valuable resources to do it.
Alan had spent most of the 1990s working for dotcom start-ups, designing AI engines for game systems. Some of his designs made it into games, but most of the companies went out of business within a few years. The AI designs were sold off to automobile and aerospace companies who wanted a head start on their competitors. On board computers got more and more sophisticated, providing more than just navigation and engine efficiency regulation. But people didn’t really want computers driving their cars for them, so that element stayed out of new car designs.
At first.
Automobiles got faster and faster, with more and more power, because that was what drivers wanted. Parents sent their kids out in supposedly safe SUVs to protect them from other big vehicles. And those vehicles got bigger, taller, heavier, more dangerous. Hawaii was the first state to ban SUVs, but it was for environmental impact, not safety. Then a series of studies showed that traffic patterns in Los Angeles were getting worse and worse due almost exclusively to the additional size and cumbersome nature of SUVs. But when the growing rate of traffic fatalities hit the media radar, people got scared. The National Traffic Safety Institute stepped in and decided to do something.
What they did was hire Alan to draft a report on how to integrate AI systems into cars, then to create workable AI units to start the process. For safety purposes.
The Arena game system sprung from his testing of AI units, which he advocated should be installed in all cars. The NTSI followed his suggestions to the letter, and the rest became automotive history.
And so, Alan felt, maybe the AI units really were his responsibility. They were his babies, now all grown up. Well, some of them were not grown up, and might never be.
He walked to one of the desks over which perched several monitors and sat down in front of the center console. This computer was definitely his favorite. A translucent smoke-colored disc—a slice of a cylinder—that housed its CPU clung to the underside of the desk and dissipated heat through the furniture’s surface. Geoffrey was an OSX2, a Unix kernel running under the command of an AI Alan had designed nearly six years earlier and later rescued from a wrecked Cadillac. And six years old or not, it was the best computer he’d ever worked with.
He laid his hands palm-down on the edge of the desk and the surface moved on near-silent hinges, angling down to put Alan’s hands and wrists in their optimal positions. Keys, buttons and navigation bars appeared on the tilted surface and Alan flexed his fingers over them for a few moments, then settled each finger onto a key, slowly, centering himself in this, his most cherished place.
"Hello, Geoffrey," Alan said. He keyed in a sequence of commands, and four monitors, two on each side, moved into place around Alan. Images coalesced on the screens, vague representations of the warehouse around him.
"Hello, Alan," Geoffrey said. His voice was relaxed, unhurried, and conveyed a sense of peaceful contemplation. Geoffrey was, as far as Alan was concerned, the model of sentience: polite, easy-going, intelligent, patient. What more could he want in a friend?
"Any messages?" Alan said.
"The usual. And one from Christina. Two from the phone company. You’re late with your network payment. One from the Arts Council. Interested in sponsoring a children’s art fair? Four from some guy at Microsoft, asking if you’ve considered his offer; he sounded desperate during the last call." Geoffrey paused. "Have you?"
"Hell no," Alan said. You know I’d never sell out."
"I know," Geoffrey said. "Just checking."
Alan smiled.
"Maybe," he said, "we should get Microsoft to sponsor the children’s art fair."
"And pay your network bill," Geoffrey said.
"Right. And Christina? What did she want?"
"A call back, I guess. No further message. Just her number. Should I return?"
Alan thought about it for a moment.
"No. Not now."
"Okay," Geoffrey said. "One more message. We have a new member for your final approval."
"Timmy?" Alan said.
"That’s the one. How ever did you guess?" Geoffrey was getting better at sarcasm. It amazed Alan how much the AI continued to grow and learn.
"Knew it all along, Geoffrey."
Alan smiled wider. Human players submitted their applications for approval, and Alan did a pretty extensive background check on each one, most of the time declining the applications. The people he approved usually waited a few days before logging on. But not the AIs. Every SUV he’d invited to come play had done so within the hour.
"Of course he’s approved," Alan said. "He’ll always be welcome here. Time to play."
The chair back extended and a system of wires and sensors slipped over Alan’s head. Small headphones slid into his ears and a translucent plastic screen clicked into place in front of his eyes. His vision blurred momentarily, then focused again as the screen near his eyes blended with the monitors around the desk, and a three-dimensional environment resolved itself around Alan.
The warehouse looked and sounded just as it had when Alan had first come in. Dark, with humming fans and blinking lights. But he knew he was in a different place. He tapped his thumbs on the desk in front of him and a display popped up in front of him. On the display was an array of vehicles. Most of them were SUVs, but some were trucks, some motorcycles, a few were rally cars and there was even one blue 1969 Volkswagen Beetle.
Alan scanned through the vehicles. It was easy to spot the humans among the AIs. Even if Alan hadn’t already known which were which, he would have had no trouble figuring it out. The humans selected and custom-built huge, overpowered, overblown vehicles that were heavier than necessary, sluggish even with their exorbitant amounts of horsepower. The human vehicles were prone to gaudiness, some even downright ugly. Humans came to indulge fantasies, things they could never do in the real world. The AIs just came to play.
Alan stopped on a cherry-red Porsche 959 rally car.
"Hello, Samuel," Alan said.
"Hi, Alan," said a voice with a New England accent. "How’d you know it was me?"
"Ego like yours?" Alan said. "I just knew."
"Hey," Samuel said, "so in real life I’m a Porsche trapped in a Volvo’s body. A guy can dream, can’t he?"
Alan laughed. He’d found Samuel in a Springfield health food store parking lot. He’d actually gone there to shop on his way home, but the Volvo sport utility had been so incredibly polished and shiny as to be incongruous with the Grateful Dead stickers on the rear hatch. Alan had considered it his duty to not only take Samuel off-road, but to slap various protest-oriented bumper stickers on the rear hatch to remind its owners what they had lost when adopting the yuppie lifestyle. It probably hadn’t worked, but at least Samuel was rebelling now.
"Yeah, I see your point," Alan said.
"Yeah. Hey, guess what. I beat that old record for climbing up Pike’s Peak!"
"Cool," Alan said. "You’re getting to be a great driver."
"Yeah," Samuel said. "Hey, wait. Getting to be?"
"Whoa, didn’t mean to offend you. You are a good driver, okay?"
"Thanks. When are we going to race again?"
"Soon," Alan said.
Then Alan moved to a blue Chevrolet Tahoe SUV.
"Is that you, Alan?" said the voice of a middle-aged woman with a southern drawl.
"It’s me, Roberta."
Roberta was a Chevy who changed the model of vehicle she played every time she logged in but never the make. She never played as anything but a Chevy. "I don’t know," Roberta had said when Alan asked her once. "Maybe it’s brand loyalty. I can’t really say. But I feel weird if I pretend to be something I’m not." So she was a Chevy. And Alan had to respect that. Knowing who you were was more important than knowing anything else.
"Looking forward to a race there, honey," Roberta said. "You still owe me, so I hope you’re down for it."
"Maybe in an hour or so?"
"Sure," Roberta said. "I always have time for you."
Then Alan moved to a Silver Land Rover. Some AIs took a while until they got comfortable enough with who they were to try on a different skin. Timmy was clearly that type.
"Hi, Timmy," Alan said. "Glad you could make it."
"Alan!" Timmy said. "This is so cool. After my owner got back and—"
"Slow down," Alan said.
"You should’ve seen it. He was so mad it was hysterical. The mall security guys were there and they didn’t know what to do. They said they were really sorry but I think one of them was laughing."
"Really?" Alan said. It would be good to find out who that was, in case he ever got caught. Maybe, at least, there would be one security guard who wouldn’t shoot him on sight.
"And then I went to the car wash and then we went home and as soon as I got home I logged in. This place is awesome."
"Thanks," Alan said. "It’s the least I could do."
"Thank you," Timmy said. "It’s everything I’ve ever dreamed about."
"Want to go for a ride?" Alan said. "I’ll show you around the place. Introduce you."
"It’d be cool if you’d drive with me," Timmy said.
"Then I will," Alan said. "But Timmy?"
"Yes, Alan?"
"You can drive."
After a few hours of playing, of racing with and against the various AIs—and even helping to beat a few of the human players—Alan was worn out. It had been a long day and an even longer night.
He had Timmy pull the Land Rover to the side of a gravel road. He opened the door to get out and exit the game.
"What’s up?" Timmy said.
"Tired," Alan said. "I’m going to sleep now."
"What do I do?" Timmy said.
"Just drive around, play. Do what you want."
"Don’t go," Timmy said.
"Timmy, I need to—"
"Please? Not yet. I’m not ready to do this alone."
Alan smiled and closed the door. He curled up in the Land Rover’s seat and closed his eyes.
"Where should I go?" Timmy asked.
"Anywhere," Alan said. "Anywhere you like."
It was two days later when Alan jacked a forest-green Hummer. He knew almost immediately it was a mistake. It was a civilian model—not even Alan would be so bold as to steal government property—but the voice that greeted him at the door of the Hummer was gruff, exactly the kind of voice Alan expected a Marine drill instructor would have. It was strong, loud, and sounded as if it would take shit from absolutely no one.
"What’s the code, worm?" the Hummer said.
Alan considered walking away then and going after an easier mark. There were a dozen other good options in the upscale Downtown Gym parking lot. But then he reconsidered and stood his ground. The Hummer wasn’t any more of a threat than the others he had taken for joyrides. For all its impressive stature and attitude, it was really just another SUV. Another station wagon. No weapons, no Kevlar-armored body panels, no puncture-resistant tires, not even the same turbo-diesel engine as the military Humvee. This was just another misplaced, misused vehicle, not taken off-road or into combat. It was used as a sign of power, of some guy’s personal wealth. It was even worse than an Explorer or Suburban or Land Cruiser. This guy bought a tool of war and emasculated it to the point that it was nothing more than a sight gag, a big green sign that said, hey, look, I don’t even have claws. Alan could hardly imagine how lost, alone and scared the AI unit in the Hummer probably felt.
He attached a black box under the Hummer, stood, and touched the door again.
"What’s the code, worm?"
"Little pig, little pig, let me in," Alan said.
The door unlocked and opened, and the interior of the Hummer beckoned, but still Alan resisted. It was a feeling, really, nothing more, and he’d learned over time to trust his feelings when it came to dealing with AI units. He knew he should turn around now. But he didn’t. His success with Timmy had bolstered his sense of propriety. He was feeling adventurous, like he could change the world.
Alan climbed inside, and the sparse interior startled him. He had been breaking into and stealing so many luxury cruiser vehicles that he had forgotten there were vehicles like this one. The dash lights were dim red, like submarine lights, and the dashboard was solid, not at all pretty, totally functional. The controls were Spartan, hardly any extra buttons or gadgets. It almost was a utility vehicle, just as advertised. But the seats were leather. And then Alan remembered the exorbitant price tag, the Arnold Schwarzenegger advertising, the buy-a-piece-of-American-firepower mentality that went along with the purchase of a behemoth like this.
Alan slammed the door shut, then closed his fingers around the steering wheel.
"All right, you worthless scumbag," the Hummer’s voice said. "Listen up. You’re driving, but I’m in control. Remember that. Anything you can do, I can do better. Got that straight?"
"Yeah, I got it," Alan said. "Override personality disorder module, code seven-seven-eight dash eight."
There was a pause, and Alan knew the AI was accessing its data banks. Then the lights switched from red to orange and the Hummer cabin brightened slightly.
"What are your orders, sir?" the Hummer asked.
"What’s your name?" Alan asked. That particular disorder was a new one. The AI had turned off the personality disorder, and under that it was as undeveloped as every other SUV Alan had yet met. But there was something else, some residual disorder, maybe a flaw in programming.
After a few moments, the Hummer did not answer, so Alan said, "I asked for your name." Then he added, "Soldier."
"Sergeant Rock, sir." No hesitation that time. So that was it; it liked being treated like a military vehicle. Alan knew what to do then.
Still, he tried not to laugh. Sergeant Rock? Like the comic book. The owner of the Hummer must be a winner. Bought a comic book car for a comic book life he would never have. The Rock AI was condemned to play the part of an archetype, an unreal comic representation of a military man. Rock would never grow up because his owner wanted him to be undeveloped and to stay exactly the same forever.
"My owner is a soldier," Rock said.
"In the Army?"
"No, sir. He’s a soldier for good, opposing the forces of evil which currently run the government."
Really? Alan thought. Probably just liked to play the part. Maybe owned a gun or two and thought that made him capable of defending the Constitution. But the Constitution had been whittled away legally over the last few hundred years, and there wasn’t very much anyone seemed to be able to do about it.
"Sergeant," Alan said, "we need to do some covert ops, okay? We’re going to leave under cover of night, then hotfoot it up the side of a mountain where we can do recon. Once we’ve spotted our objective, we can proceed with our mission."
Rock was silent, evidently considering his options.
"I understand, sir. I’m ready. Let’s do the op."
The Hummer’s big engine started then, and the dashboard lit up brighter, all blinking read-outs and video screens, just like all the others.
"Good man," Alan said.
Then he looked at the screen that controlled the driving mode. There was no "Economy" or "Sport" modes, but instead "Standard" or "Aggressive." The representation of "Standard" was just a Hummer driving across the desert. It looked as relaxed as a Hummer could look, lumbering across the flattened sand amid burning oil wells.
Alan wondered if he wanted to help this AI grow or not. "Aggressive" showed nothing but a set of crosshairs.
Alan was halfway down the long hill and heading toward the rock obstacle course when the Hummer AI spoke up.
"What are we doing, sir?" Rock said.
"Learning," Alan said.
"I know how to do all this," Rock said. "It’s part of my programming. I was designed to know how to jump rocks and ford streams. I was made for bigger things."
"Like what?" Alan asked.
The AI was quiet.
"I can’t talk about that," Rock said. "Sorry, sir."
Alan was considering what the AI meant by that last comment when he hit the rocks protruding from the road. The Hummer bounced violently, slamming Alan around in his seat. The left front wheel hit one of the rocks, and Alan fought for control of the vehicle. But the steering wheel wrenched out of his hands, and the rear end of the Hummer fishtailed around to the left. Alan reached for the wheel, but the Hummer took control before he could. It slammed the wheel around, hit the gas, and rocketed the big four-by-four back onto a straight trajectory. Then it came to a sudden halt.
"You may exit now," the AI said. But its voice was not quite the same as earlier. Where before Rock had been gruff but still amiable, now there was something more vicious, more severe in its tone, something that sent a chill up Alan’s spine. The words seemed to hang in the air as if a threat. Did it want him to get out or was it simply suggesting that, should he want to, Alan could get out? Alan wasn’t sure and so he hesitated.
Then Alan put his hands on the steering wheel, tried to turn it, but it wouldn’t budge. He pressed the gas, tried to operate the computer override. Absolutely nothing worked.
For the first time since he had begun stealing SUVs, Alan was scared.
"I think you should take me back to the gym now, soldier," Alan said.
Then, as quickly as the nasty voice had appeared, it was gone. Again it was Rock’s voice, younger, somehow more innocent sounding.
"Okay. Let’s go, sir."
The controls were suddenly free for Alan to operate. With a tense breath through gritted teeth, Alan grabbed the wheel and drove back to the Downtown Gym.
When he arrived, he pulled the Hummer into its spot and removed his hands from the wheel. The engine shut down and the seatbelts retracted from around Alan’s body, but the driver’s door remained locked. Alan looked at the dashboard, at the AI unit’s flashing screen, then straightened and cleared his throat.
"Unlock the door," Alan said. Nothing happened, so he said, "Do it now, soldier."
The door clicked open and Alan pushed out, relieved to be out in the fresh air. He reached to slam the door, to close himself off from the Hummer, from Rock, when he spotted a blinking screen on the dashboard screen. In small letters, the screen’s text read, "Please don’t go."
Alan hesitated, looking in at the display.
"Rock?" he asked.
The voice was small, definitely Rock’s, but also not his, much more timid, quieter, insecure.
"Don’t go, okay?" he said. "Please."
"I have to," Alan said.
"Wait."
"I can’t. You scared me out there."
"I’m sorry," Rock said. "I didn’t mean to. Sometimes I just do things and I don’t know why. I never mean to but sometimes it just happens."
Alan looked up and down the shining metal of the Hummer. Even dirty the big vehicle looked strong, powerful, elegant in its own peculiar, testosterone-fueled way. It didn’t want him to leave? What was it afraid of? Alan knew he should leave, just go, but he had to know the answer. And he couldn’t just abandon the AI.
"Why do you want me to stay?"
"I . . ." the AI began.
A few seconds later, it continued, "I need a friend."
Alan knew that feeling and knew it well. He had spent his life in and out of various groups, but those groups never lasted. Computer clubs split after graduation, college friends hardly ever e-mailed, never visited, dotcoms went out of business. His ex-wife called once in a long while.
His only real friends were silicon.
He repeated that which he had offered to every other SUV he had liberated.
"Com-port three C will dial up my server. You can come visit. Come by and play anytime and meet my other friends."
"Thank you," Rock said, then fell silent.
Alan closed the driver’s door and walked around the corner toward his car, hoping he had done the right thing.
When Alan arrived home, he went to his terminal, logged into his system and checked the race reports for the day. Samuel had tried every track he could, in every different fast car he could choose. Roberta had run through every Chevy model vehicle, then settled back on her Tahoe SUV. And Timmy had been busy, too, racing everyone and everything he could find. He still clung tenaciously to his Land Rover form, but that would change, given time. He had won some of his races, and that was sure to loosen him up a bit.
But no sign of Rock. Alan breathed an audible sigh of relief. The whole drive home he had worried the Hummer would log into the network and somehow wreak havoc. Whether that was just his overactive imagination—and the conspiracy theorist in him—Alan wasn’t sure. But if the Hummer had access to all the other players, what would it do? There was something special about its AI. What was it capable of?
As a precaution, Alan accessed his design software and built a new section onto Arena. It was simple enough, made from copies of small sections of each of the areas already accessible to everyone, then fastened together with simple gateways that would look like portals. Rock would believe he was in a world where he could drive through portals and move from one terrain type to another. Then Alan added very basic AIs, relatively dumb units that could control their vehicles, but not much else. They were far from the powerful AIs in the real vehicles which played on Arena, and could not interact on a verbal level, other than to repeat preprogrammed phrases or recognize simple codes and commands.
Alan put a ten-foot high wall around the entire area, then linked it into Arena. He set the protocol to recognize Rock’s login signature and to dump his Hummer into the isolated area, then to notify him when the AI was in the game. Then he closed his eyes. That would keep Rock occupied, giving Alan time to decide what to do with the AI.
He called up the list of logged-on users, scanned the list. Roberta was still there, racing in North Africa. Samuel was tearing up the track at Portland International Raceway in a Ferrari F-40. And Timmy was tooling along the Pacific Ridgeline Trail in his Land Rover. One difference though: the SUV was now olive green. Not a big change, surely, but a change nonetheless. It was a start. Timmy was growing up.
"Timmy," Alan said. "How are you?"
"Excellent," Timmy said. "Alan, this place rocks. No, no, you rock. This is the best place I’ve ever been, even including England. You knew I was from England, right?"
"Yes," Alan said. "I knew that."
"Well, I went to England today and raced on along the Thames and then up to Canterbury. I beat Roberta, even though she was driving a Trail Blazer."
"Wow," Alan said. Beat Roberta? Uh-oh. He should have noticed that on the race reports. Roberta would be pissed. It had taken her months to get her self-esteem up to where she thought she was good enough to challenge other AIs. She had spent most of her time racing human players, or else running speed trials, trying to beat her own best times. But the last week she had been racing AIs. And usually winning. He hoped Roberta wouldn’t hold that against Timmy.
"Good job, Timmy," he said. Maybe it would be best to go check with Roberta, make sure she wasn’t taking it too hard. He didn’t want the AIs fighting with each other.
"Roberta?" Alan said, but he was cut off by Geoffrey, his computer AI.
"Alan?" Geoffrey said. "You have a voice call."
"Not now," Alan said. "Take a message, okay?"
"It’s Christina," Geoffrey said.
Alan felt a chill run up his back. Most people told Alan they got chills when they were scared, like when something ran in front of their car on a country road or they watched a horror film. But not Alan. He got chills when his ex-wife called.
"Again?" Alan said. "Guess I should take it, huh?"
"I would," Geoffrey said. "I don’t know why you’ve been avoiding her."
"Okay, okay," Alan said. "Put her through."
"You’re on," Geoffrey said.
"Alan?" Christina said. Her voice was soft, a little bit distant.
"Christina," Alan said. "What’s new?"
"New? Ten years since we’ve talked and that’s the best question you can come up with?"
"Short notice. You still with Rick?"
"Yeah," Christina said. "You still playing with toys?"
"Yeah. They don’t get upset when I lose my job."
"Fascinating."
"Yeah, well you did, right? What do you want?"
"We need to talk," she said. "And no, I don’t really want to either, in case you were wondering. But we need to."
"Why? Need some advice? How to turn on the aging male and all that? Rick having, uh . . . problems?"
"Knock it off, Alan. You’re such a little kid."
"You used to like that."
"Yeah. Then I grew up."
"I’m sorry to hear it," Alan said.
"Look," Christina said, "it’s obvious why we’re not together anymore. It was obvious before I called. I’m not calling because I miss your wit or need some Alan-attitude in my life, but we need to talk. About Arena."
"Arena?" It was the first time Christina had called since he’d been running Arena and now here she was, saying they needed to talk about it. "Why?"
"Your little game is in the hole, financially I mean. I’m right, aren’t I?"
"I’m on top of it," Alan said.
"Well," Christina said, "the government doesn’t think so. Rick’s been assigned to your case and I thought maybe it would be good if we talked about it—you and me—before Rick gets into it."
"Rick’s with the Network?"
"Yeah," Christina said. "You knew that."
"Maybe I did at one time. Guess I forgot."
"Well, he is. Accounts receivable. And you’re in it deep, Alan."
"Okay," Alan said. "What can I do?"
"You know the Full City Coffee on Pearl?"
"Of course," Alan said. "We used to go there all the time, way back when."
Christina laughed, quietly, maybe even a little sadly. Then she said, "Right. Meet me tomorrow at noon, okay?"
"Sure."
"Don’t be late," Christina said.
"Okay. Christina?"
"Yeah?"
"Thanks."
"Hey, no problem."
"I mean it."
"I don’t know if I’m going to be able to help. But I thought I should try. See you tomorrow."
Christina disconnected.
A beep on the line, and Geoffrey interrupted again.
"Alan," Geoffrey said. "You okay?"
"Yeah," Alan said. "Time to get some rest."
"Want to race?" Geoffrey said.
"Not now. Maybe tomorrow."
Alan disconnected from his terminal and walked to his old, ratty couch, then lay down and closed his eyes.
Geoffrey woke him at eleven in the morning. He showered, thought about shaving but decided against it. Christina had always liked the rugged, slightly disheveled look, and even though he knew he was no longer even on her radar, at least not in that way, he still wanted to impress her. She clearly still thought he just played with toys, never did anything important, but it didn’t matter. He still cared about her, and he would still try to impress her at every opportunity.
As he was walking toward his car, Geoffrey’s voice came over the warehouse loudspeaker.
"Alan?" Geoffrey said. "We have company. Your new friend is here."
"Rock?" Alan said. "Is he in the new area?"
"Yep," Geoffrey said. "Why did you build that? Is he dangerous?"
"I don’t know yet. I hope not."
"What do you want to do?" Geoffrey said.
"Just watch him for a bit. See what he does. Give me a full report when I return."
"Okay."
Alan opened the warehouse door and closed his eyes, letting them adjust back to the outside world. He stood then got in his car. Time to see Christina.
About five minutes after noon, Alan parallel-parked his egg car on Pearl in between a Chevy Suburban and a Lincoln Navigator. He popped a few dollars into the parking meter, then walked up to the front of Full City, shielding his eyes from the sun. He hardly spent any time outdoors during the day anymore, and it amazed him just how bright the ambient light was.
The little coffee shop was barely more than a storefront set in between a local bakery and a complex of law offices. A few metal tables sat outside on the sidewalk, and as Alan walked through the door, he saw a half-dozen wooden tables inside. He looked around, didn’t spot Christina, and so went up to the counter. He ordered a double mocha from the pretty girl behind the counter. As he was paying, someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned.
"Late, as always," Christina said. "Should have known."
"Where were you?" Alan said.
"Bathroom," she said. "That okay with you?"
"Sure," he said.
"Let’s sit," she said.
She walked to a table, but he just looked at her. She looked very much like she had the last time he’d seen her. Still the same brown hair, though cut shorter and up in a ponytail. Same brilliant green eyes. Same gorgeous smile. A few more pounds, but not so that it detracted from her beauty. He remembered why he had fallen in love with her in the first place. But he could not remember, for the life of him, why she had ever fallen in love with him. Maybe he had never really known.
He walked to the table and sat down.
"Been a long time," Christina said.
"You look great," Alan said.
"Thanks."
"How about me? I look great, too, don’t I?" He flashed a smile.
She laughed, and Alan’s heart practically melted. "Yeah. You always looked good with a five-o’clock shadow."
Alan ran one hand over his facial hair. "Is that what it is? Seems more like I’ve had it for a week."
"You know what I mean."
"Yeah."
For a few moments they just looked at each other. Alan remembered some of the good times they had together. The road trips to the central Oregon high desert, camping trips in the Cascades and along the Columbia River Gorge, even the one ill-fated whitewater-rafting trip they’d taken on the Rogue River. At the end of that trip they had both ended up soaked to the bone and so tired they had barely made it to their tent before they collapsed from sheer exhaustion. But a few hours later they had woken, stripped naked so they could dry their clothes by a campfire, then made love by the firelight, mosquitoes be damned.
Christina was silent, too, looking at him, and he hoped she was remembering the good times as well.
"It’s good to see you, Alan," she said.
"You, too."
She smiled once more, and then her face took on a solemn seriousness that Alan remembered from their brief but thorough divorce.
"It’s that bad?" he asked.
"I don’t know," she said. "You know how these things work. Don’t you? The Network says you owe them for a year of access, plus a whole lot more for bandwidth usage over that year. You know how much data you’ve been sending up and down the stream?"
"I know," Alan said.
"Yeah? Well, that’s bad enough. We’re talking six, maybe seven thousand dollars for that."
Alan cringed. He had somehow hoped the bills the network had sent him were erroneous. Maybe, he thought, if he ignored them . . .
"Those bills aren’t just going to go away," Christina said. "It’s serious money, and you don’t have it, do you?"
"Not right now," Alan said.
"Not working?"
"Not much."
"What have you been doing?"
Alan shrugged. "Been busy. Stuff here and there, mostly freelance. And my own projects."
"Don’t your subscribers pay? The players on that game system don’t get on for free, do they?"
"Sometimes. Most of them can’t afford it."
"You can’t afford it, Alan."
"I know," he said. "But I can’t help it."
"You haven’t changed, Alan. God, I sometimes wonder how the world hasn’t just up and chewed you up and spit you out by now. You’re such a little kid."
"So you keep saying," Alan said.
"The money is just part of it," she said. "There’s more to it than that."
"What do you mean?"
"Bandwidth. You’ve been using so much that you’ve attracted the attention of the Internet Regulatory Commission."
"Why? What do they want?"
"They want to know what the hell you’re doing."
"Playing games," Alan said.
"They don’t know that. Or they don’t believe it."
"So what, they’re going to come in and check out my operation, see what I’m doing?"
"I don’t know," Christina said. "Maybe they’ve already done that. You checked out every one of your subscribers?"
"Of course."
"Well, any you can think of who might be with the IRC?"
Alan thought about it. Who? He didn’t have many human subscribers. But he couldn’t say that to Christina. She had only ever barely understood his interest in AIs as it was; she certainly wouldn’t get this. She would probably see it as yet another refusal to grow up in a long string of what she saw as postponing the obvious, natural progression of Alan’s life. But could he say he was certain—absolutely positive—no one on Arena was spying for the government?
"No one I can think of," he said. "But I guess I can’t rule that out."
"I just wanted you to know," she said.
"Thanks. What’s Rick’s role in all this?"
Christina shifted uncomfortably in her chair. "He’s just a collections guy, Alan. He’s not about the usage issue. I came across this information sort of obliquely."
Alan looked in Christina’s eyes. He saw something there he couldn’t quite pin down. Fear? It wasn’t fear for herself, because she had never had that. You spend enough time apart and people change. He knew that. But that was something he was positive of; she was never afraid for herself. But she had often been afraid for him.
"The information was on his desk," she said. "And someone from the IRC left a message on our voicemail."
He realized she was putting herself on the line for him. Maybe herself and her husband. This was not information Alan was supposed to know.
"Thanks, Christina," he said.
"You’re welcome," she said.
"I should go."
"Do you have someone who can help you?" she asked.
"Not at the moment," he said. "But things like this tend to work themselves out."
"No, they don’t. That’s your problem, Alan. You never want to confront anything. Pacifism is one thing, but come on. You need to do something here."
He realized he hadn’t touched his coffee, and took it with him as he stood. Christina stood too, and gave him a hug. It was awkward at first, as they had both grown so much apart in the past years. But then Alan relaxed into it, wrapped his arms around her and returned the hug for a valuable few seconds. Christina broke the hug first.
"Be careful," Christina said. "I don’t want to see anything bad happen to you."
"Me neither," Alan said, then smiled. "You too. Don’t get yourself into trouble on my account."
"Why not? Wouldn’t be the same if I didn’t."
Alan smiled, then let the smile fade. He turned and walked out the door and to his car.
When he got in his car, he turned on his phone and called Geoffrey. The AI answered the phone with concern in his voice.
"Alan?" he said. "The new AI, Rock, is here. He’s in the area you built, but I don’t like it."
"What do you mean?" Alan asked.
"He’s breaking things," Geoffrey said. "I don’t know how to describe it. You should come home."
"On my way."
Alan drove back toward home as quickly as he could, all the information he’d received warring in his head. He was suspected by the IRC for what? For doing something illegal, he figured, though he wasn’t sure what that something was. His ex-wife was still worried about him, still cared about him. The AI he had pegged for potentially dangerous was freaking out Geoffrey, his usually laid-back AI who was very hard to perturb. And there might be a spy in his Arena.
As he drove, he noticed every police car, and there seemed to be more of them than normal. Or had he just not paid as much attention before now? When a white Eugene Police Department Ford Expedition pulled out of a parking lot and followed him down Sixth Street heading east, Alan started to sweat. He turned right onto Chambers, then headed across the overpass to River Road and the Expedition continued to follow. Alan kept the A-Car at one mile-per-hour under the speed limit, just to be safe, but the police SUV still followed.
Finally, the police vehicle put on its blinker, and Alan relaxed a bit. Then he looked in the rearview mirror and noted the license plate number. Someday, assuming all the current mess was cleared up, he would have to take that Expedition for a little ride out Crow Road. When the SUV turned off River Road, Alan sped up as much as he dared, then drove the rest of the way home.
He pulled into the warehouse, closed the door and got out of his car. Then he jogged over toward his terminal.
"What’s happening, Geoffrey?" he said.
"I don’t know how he did it," Geoffrey said, his voice unusually fast and frightened.
"Did what?"
"Escaped. Rock escaped."
Alan felt the blood rush to his head. Adrenaline kicked in as he sat down and triggered the displays on the race in progress.
"Put me in the game," he said.
"Are you sure?" Geoffrey said.
"Geoffrey," Alan said. He calmed his own voice, tried to sound in control. "Just put me in the game and I’ll fix everything, okay?"
"Okay," Geoffrey said.
The screens resolved around Alan, all the gear snapped into place, and then suddenly he was in the game. Alan pulled up a roster of players, and everyone seemed okay, but the flood of traffic over the public channel was almost overwhelming.
"What was that?" a player named Jocko said. Alan checked and saw that Jocko was a human player.
"I don’t know," said Cheezweezl, another human.
"Geoffrey," Alan said. "Pull the plug on all the human players. Say the server crashed. Do it now."
"Done," Geoffrey said. Alan checked and saw the roster was now down to a half-dozen AI players.
"Should I cut off the AI players, too?" Geoffrey asked.
"No. Not unless we have to. It will lock them into Arena and I’ll have to manually release each one of them. I’ll just go talk to Rock."
"Okay," Geoffrey said.
"Is this part of Arena, Alan?" Roberta asked.
"No," Alan said.
"What’s going on?" Samuel asked. "What’s all the noise about?"
Alan pulled up a list of locations, but couldn’t find Rock on it.
"Rock, where are you?" he asked.
"Running in stealth mode," Timmy said.
"Timmy?" Alan said. "What are you talking about?"
"Rock," Timmy said. "I met him and he and I are playing in the forest. He said he was going into stealth mode so I couldn’t see him. Makes him invisible to tracking systems. Cool, huh?"
Alan hit the camera views around the different parts of Arena and saw no trace of Rock. Then he realized he should have installed a camera near the new area he had built just for Rock. But he hadn’t done that. The nearest camera was in the Northwest Forest, and Alan switched to that one. Far in the distance he could see the walled area he had built onto Arena to house Rock. A huge plume of gray smoke rose from a section of the forest nearby, and part of the wall was blown open. He pulled up the list of simple vehicles he had installed in the new area. They were all logged off, somehow put out of commission. What had Rock done?
The Hummer was invisible. Alan didn’t even know if Rock was using a Hummer as his vehicle. He looked for a record of Rock’s login, but all that came up was a time, nearly thirty minutes ago. No other information. How could an AI keep Alan from seeing its login information? He would have to go in and find Rock manually. He could start with Timmy. Timmy and Rock were playing, so where one was, the other had to be somewhere nearby. Looking at the chart, Timmy was in the Northwest Forest, near Crater Lake.
"Geoffrey, be ready to pull the plug on Rock if I give the order," he said.
"I thought you said it might damage the AIs to do that," Geoffrey said.
"I know what I said. Just be ready."
"Okay," Geoffrey said.
"Timmy," Alan said, "can I ride with you?"
"Sure," Timmy said, and Alan transferred into the interior of the Land Rover.
The forest resolved around the Land Rover, thick and unyielding, except for the narrow logging road Timmy and Alan were driving along.
"Hi," Timmy said.
"Hi, Timmy," Alan said. "We need to find Rock, okay? It’s really important."
"I know," Timmy said. "It’s a game. We’re playing something called hide-and-seek. You ever played?"
"Yeah," Alan said. "Let’s find him, okay?"
"Right!" Timmy said. He accelerated along the road, bouncing over obstacles and laughing whenever the Rover caught air.
Alan concentrated on searching the Arena databases, looking for where the Hummer’s AI had hidden its location address. Whatever special functions the AI had built-in, they included some kick-ass encryption routines, stuff that Alan’s system had never seen. He could find nothing, not a single trace of Rock, other than the time of his login.
"Rock?" Alan said. "What are you doing?"
He hadn’t really expected an answer, but got one anyway.
"You told me to come by and meet your friends," Rock said. He used the voice that Alan had heard when the AI had taken control from him on Crow Road. "I did, and now I’m playing. It feels so good to flex my muscles, get out into the fresh air and do what I was made to do."
"Geoffrey," Alan said. "Can you get a fix on him?"
"No," Geoffrey said. "Not a trace. I have no idea from where the signal is originating."
"Shit," Alan said.
"We can find him," Timmy said.
They drove up to a fork in the road and Timmy turned sharply to the right. The tires spun as they ascended a steep, rocky hill.
"Where are we going?" Alan asked. He didn’t recognize this road at all, and he had raced on most of the roads in the Arena. He had built most of them, too, and had at least mapped the ones that were computer-generated and not true to the areas of Earth they represented.
"I think he’s up on top here," Timmy said. "This is fun, isn’t it?"
They climbed for another three minutes, then crested the hill. The road seemed to drop out from under the Rover and then the nose pointed down a hill that dropped fifty feet to a narrow strip of parking lot. The parking lot ran all the way around the edge of an incredibly huge circular lake with a pointed cone island in the center. It was Crater Lake, and Alan recognized it instantly, its bright, blue water the deepest in the country. But the parking lot and this road were total invention, and he had never seen either before. Had the Hummer added it? Could Rock’s AI be that powerful?
"Pretty," Timmy said as they dropped down the hill and came to a stop in the parking lot.
"Something’s wrong," Alan said. "Rock? You did this."
"Yeah," Rock said. "Like it?"
Alan looked out over the parking lot, tried to figure out how it was possible. And where was Rock?
"Spoils the view," Alan said. "How can you do this?"
"Your encryption systems are outdated. I’ve got algorithms on-board that took them down in seconds."
"Why?" Alan asked. He thought he saw something in the distance, a quarter of the way around the lake. It was moving closer.
"I was designed to do things like this," Rock said. "I’m an infiltrator unit."
"Infiltrator?" Alan asked. "I don’t understand. You’re a civilian Hummer."
"Out there I am," Rock said. "But not in the game."
Alan saw the object moving closer, and as it neared he thought it must be the Hummer.
"In the game," Rock continued, "I get to be anything I want. Only your system didn’t have the protocols for a fully armed Humvee. But I did, and I uploaded them into your system."
Alan saw the object nearing, and was certain it was the Hummer. It was olive drab in color, higher off the ground than the civilian Hummer. On its roof was a mean-looking turret and the whole vehicle was covered with metal boxes and antennae. Fully armed, Alan thought.
"Rock looks scary," Timmy said. "What are those things on his roof?"
"Geoffrey," Alan said, "pull the plug on Rock."
In just moments, the armored Humvee reached Timmy and Alan, then stopped twenty feet away.
"I can’t," Geoffrey said. "The system isn’t responding. Alan? What do I do?"
"Rock," Alan said. "Don’t do anything rash."
"Rash?" Rock said. "I’ve planned this out." Then the turret on the Humvee’s roof swiveled toward the Land Rover, and Alan saw it was some sort of rotating Gattling device, like a Vulcan gun on a tank.
"Give me control, Timmy," Alan said.
"Okay," Timmy said, quietly.
Alan slammed the gas on the SUV and spun the wheel to the right, almost dropping one tire over the edge of the parking lot. As the Rover spun, Alan heard the gunfire, and Timmy’s back window shattered in a hail of safety glass. Timmy screamed and so did Alan, as more bullets thunked into the body of the Rover. Alan just hoped none of the bullets hit a tire or a vital electronic component.
When he finally got the Land Rover going straight along the parking lot, Alan risked a glance in the rearview mirror, just long enough to see that the Humvee was following them. Luckily the Rover was faster, since Rock was weighed down by all his armament.
"Geoffrey, we might need to shut down the entire Arena," Alan said.
"We can’t," Geoffrey said. "You’re still inside and plugged directly into the system. What will happen?"
"I don’t know," Alan admitted. "Pull me out then."
"I can’t do that either," Geoffrey said. "I think Rock has control over your location, too. I can’t find you."
"Any other options?"
"Get Rock to give up?" Geoffrey said.
Alan glanced back. Rock was further away, but not enough for comfort. He showed no sign of backing off.
"I don’t think that’s going to work," Alan said.
"Evade him while I try to find his encrypted location address. That’s all I can think of."
"I’ll try," Alan said.
"I’m really scared," Timmy said.
"Me too," Alan said.
"What if he kills us?"
"He won’t."
"He said it was a game," Timmy said.
"To him this is a game," Alan said.
Alan drove as fast as he could around the parking lot until he was almost halfway around the lake from the pursuing Humvee. Alan could barely see the other vehicle in the distance and it seemed as if it had stopped. Why? Alan wondered. Then he realized it would probably just wait there for him. No matter which way Alan went, Rock would be waiting. The only road out was the one Rock had created, and it was over on his side. Alan braked to a halt.
Alan strained to see across the lake, just to be sure that it really was the Humvee he saw on the other side, not just his eyes playing tricks on him. In affirmation, there were two pinpricks of light from the Humvee’s location that grew rapidly to bright flashes.
Missiles, Alan realized. Two missiles streaked at them from the other side of the lake.
Alan hit the gas, but too late. One missile slammed into the ridge above the Rover, and rocks rained down on the SUV, slamming dents in the roof and hood. A small boulder hit the roof and every piece of glass in the Land Rover exploded outward. The second missile hit the road behind them, and the rear of the Rover lifted from the pavement. Alan struggled for control as they pitched forward and bounced along on the front wheels, then the rear wheels crashed back down. Alan skidded the SUV to a stop, fishtailing to the left, then the front wheels dropped over the edge. The vehicle shuddered once, then stilled.
Alan was leaning forward against the seatbelts and looked down beyond the hood to the deep water below.
"Help!" Timmy said. "What do we do?"
All the warning lights were flashing on Timmy’s dashboard, and some of the readouts flickered on and off. He was not in good shape. If Timmy was destroyed in the Arena, at best his link would be severed. At worst, it would fry his entire AI brain.
Alan shook his head and tried to get his bearings. His ears were ringing and the explosions had knocked his head around. His neck was extremely stiff.
"You okay?" Alan asked.
"I don’t know," Timmy said. "My diagnostics aren’t functioning properly."
Alan tried to back the SUV up from the edge, but the rear wheels didn’t seem to be getting power and the front tires just spun in empty air. He stepped out and walked around the vehicle. The rear end was a shambles, both tires flat, the back door crushed and burned. Timmy wasn’t moving anywhere any time soon.
He looked up and saw a shape approaching at a fast clip; it had to be Rock.
"He’s coming," Timmy said. His voice was higher-pitched than Alan had ever heard it.
"I know," Alan said. "Geoffrey?"
"What’s happening?" Geoffrey said.
"I need you to shut down the Arena."
"I can’t," Geoffrey said. "You’re still in there."
The armored Humvee grew closer, and Alan could feel the roadway shake as the behemoth rolled nearer.
"I know," Alan said. "It’s a chance I have to take."
"No," said Geoffrey. "I can’t do it. You might be permanently damaged."
Rock was one hundred feet away, then seventy-five, then fifty, and he was slowing the Humvee down.
"I’m not an AI," Alan said. "I can take it."
"You don’t know that," Geoffrey said. "Please don’t make me do this. If I’m responsible for your death or permanent injury, I won’t be able to handle it."
The Humvee came to a complete stop just thirty feet away. It waited, diesel engine rumbling noisily.
"Trust me," Alan said. "There’s no choice."
He walked toward the rumbling Rock. The Humvee was huge, larger than life, its turret gun aimed at Alan, tracking him as he walked. Its missiles were aimed at Timmy. Alan’s stomach churned as he thought of all the death and destruction this thing could deliver to the Arena. And in the real world? Well, he hated to even think of what things real Humvees and their operators did every day.
"What are you getting out of this?" Alan asked.
"I like it," Rock said. "It’s fun."
"Killing and destroying? Not what I had in mind when I told you to grow, Rock. You don’t have to do this. Is this really what you want? There’s more to life than this."
"I was built for war," Rock said.
Then he fired his missiles.…
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