Fantastic Stories Presents: Science Fiction Super Pack #2. Randall Garrett

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ he turned half-around to face her and the others. “Look … something has shut down the entire electronic infrastructure, right? Electricity, cars, phones, planes, computers, robots … everything networked to the grid was knocked down three days ago. And then, almost immediately after that, every part connected to the system that’s mobile and capable of acting independently … namely, the robots … came back online, but now with only one single purpose. Kill any human they encounter.”

      “Give me another headline,” Harold said drily. “I think I might have missed the news.”

      “Hush.” Cindy glared at him and he shut up.

      “The only other thing that still functions are networked electronics like smartphones and laptops … stuff that runs on batteries. But they don’t do anything except display a number and make a ticking sound just like the robots do. And that number seems to decrease by one every time there’s a tick.”

      “Yeah, I noticed that, too,” Cindy said. “It began the moment my cell phone dropped out.”

      Dale gave her a sharp look. “You were on the phone when the blackout happened?” Cindy nodded. “Do you happen to remember what the number was when it first appeared on your phone screen?”

      “Sort of … it was seven billion and something.”

      “About seven and half billion, would you say?” Dale asked. She nodded again, and he hissed beneath his breath. “That’s what I thought it might be.”

      “What are you getting at?” Sharon asked, although she had a bad feeling that she already knew.

      “The global population is approximately seven and a half billion.” Dale’s voice was very low. “At least, that’s about how many people were alive on Earth three days ago.”

      Sharon felt a cold snake slither into the pit of her stomach. A stunned silence settled upon the group. Her ears picked up low purring sound from somewhere in the distance, but it was drowned out when both Cindy and Harold started speaking at once.

      “But … but why …?”

      “What the hell are you …?”

      “I don’t know!” Dale threw up his hands in exasperation. “I can only guess. But —” he nodded toward the laptop “—the fact that the most secure computer system in the world is still active but not letting anyone in tells me something. This isn’t a cyberattack, and I don’t think a hacker or terrorist group is behind it either.” He hesitated. “I think … I think it may have come out of Bluffdale.”

      Sharon stared at him. “Are you saying the NSA did this?”

      “No … I’m saying the NSA’s computers might have done this.” Dale shook his head. “They always said the day might come when the electronic world might become self-aware, start making decisions on its own. Maybe that’s what happening here, with Bluffdale as the source.”

      The purring sound had become a low buzz. Sharon ignored it. “But why would it start killing people? What would that accomplish?”

      “Maybe it’s decided that seven and a half billion people are too many and the time has come to pare down the population to more … well, more sustainable numbers.” Dale shrugged. “It took most of human history for the world to have just one billion people, but just another two hundred for there to be six billion, and only thirty after that for it to rise seven and a half billion. We gave Bluffdale the power to interface with nearly everything on planet, and a mandate to protect national security. Maybe it’s decided that the only certain way to do is to…”

      “What’s that noise?” Harold asked.

      The buzzing had become louder. Even as Sharon turned to see where the sound was coming from, she’d finally recognized it for what it was. A police drone, the civilian version of the airborne military robots used in Central America and the Middle East. She’d become so used to seeing them making low-attitude surveillance sweeps of Minneapolis’s more crime-ridden neighborhoods that she had disregarded the sound of its push-prop engine.

      That was a mistake.

      For a moment or two, she saw nothing. Then she caught a glimpse of firelight reflecting off the drone’s bulbous nose and low-swept wings. It was just a few hundred feet away and heading straight for the balcony.

      “Down!” she shouted, and then she threw herself headfirst toward the door. Harold was in her way. She tackled him like a linebacker and hurled him to the floor. “Get outta there!” she yelled over her shoulder as they scrambled for cover.

      They’d barely managed to dive behind a couch when the drone slammed into the hotel.

      *

      Afterwards, Harold reckoned he was lucky to be alive. Not just because Officer McCoy had thrown him through the balcony door, but also because the drone’s hydrogen cell was almost depleted when it made its kamikaze attack. So there hadn’t been an explosion which might have killed both of them, nor a fire that would have inevitably swept through the Wyatt-Centrum.

      But Cindy was dead, and so was Dale. The cop’s warning hadn’t come in time; the drone killed them before they could get off the balcony. He later wondered if it had simply been random chance that it’s infrared night vision had picked up four human figures and homed in on them, or if the Bluffdale computer had backtracked the satphone link from Dale’s laptop and dispatched the police drone to liquidate a possible threat. He’d never know, and it probably didn’t matter anyway.

      Harold didn’t know Dale very well, but he missed Cindy more than he thought he would. He came to realize that his attraction to her hadn’t been purely sexual; he’d liked her, period. He wondered if his wife was still alive, and reflected on the fact that he’d only been three hours from home when his car went dead on a side street near the hotel. He regretted all the times he’d cheated on her when he’d been on the road, and swore to himself that, if he lived through this and she did, too, he’d never again pick up another woman.

       The drone attack was the last exciting thing to happen to him or anyone else in the hotel for the next couple of days. They loafed around the atrium pool like vacationers who didn’t want to go home, scavenging more food from the kitchen and going upstairs to break into vending machines, drinking bottled water, getting drunk on booze stolen from the bar. Harold slept a lot, as did the others, and joined poker games when he was awake. He volunteered for a four-hour shift at the lobby barricades, keeping a sharp eye out for roaming robots. He saw nothing through the peep-holes in the plywood boards except a few stray dogs and some guy pushing a shopping cart loaded with stuff he’d probably looted from somewhere.

       Five days after the blackout, nearly all the phones, pads, and laptop computers in the hotel were dead, their batteries and power packs drained. But then Officer McCoy, searching Cindy’s backpack for an address book she could use to notify the late girl’s parents, discovered another handy piece of high-tech camping equipment: a photovoltaic battery charger. Cindy had also left behind her phone; it hadn’t been used since her death, so its battery still retained a whisker of power. Officer McCoy hooked the phone up to the recharger and placed them on a table in the atrium, and before long they had an active cell phone.

      Its screen remained unchanged, except that the number was much lower than it had been two days ago. It continued to tick, yet the sound was increasingly sporadic; sometimes as much as a minute would go by between one tick and the next. By the end of the fifth day, a few people removed СКАЧАТЬ