Pyramid Lake (61 page)

“No, you fucking lied to me.” I closed my eyes, seeing seven-year-old Amy, who Jen had divorced me to protect. My daughter, whose only defect was the flawed behavior she was learning to emulate, growing up, day after day, watching her father.

“You
lied
about her!” I shouted.

I reached the top of the tower. Through the ceiling above, I could hear the
thwap
of helicopters.

“Amy can’t be fixed,” Frankenstein thundered. “Look how unhappy she’s made you. Forget about her.”

The electric roar of the GAU from outside. Screams. The sound of rotors increased in pitch and volume, turning ragged and uneven. Then it ceased as something hit the roof with a massive impact. An explosion rocked the building, sending concrete dust raining down on the racks from the ceiling above.

GOLIATH was here.

Grabbing the rim of the topmost server rack, I pulled myself up to balance on the edge of the tower.

“Even if everything you said about her was true, it wouldn’t matter!” I shouted. “I’d still be willing to die for her.”

“Why
her
?” Frankenstein screamed, voice metallic with feedback. “
Why HER, Trevor? WHY? WHY? WHY?
”

Swaying on my good leg, I looked down the void at the center of the tower, staring into the six-story drop. The cool air blowing up against my cheeks and forehead felt good. I pictured Amy’s face, held it in my mind.

“Because she’s my daughter and I love her,” I said. “That’s why.”

A screech of rending metal four stories down as the lab doors were torn away. Something huge exploded through them.

I staggered a half turn, putting my back to the void.

“Who do
you
love, Frankenstein?” I screamed. “Who do
you
love enough to
die
for them?”

GOLIATH launched itself across the server room, a gleaming silver nightmare of spinning metal limbs that leaped and clambered over the rows and catwalks below, sending server racks crashing to the ground. It reached the tower and hurled itself up the outside, racing toward me.

I watched GOLIATH come, gauging his speed like an opponent’s punch, counting off my last seconds.

Eyes open, I threw myself backward into the void.

The speakers overloaded with a deafening buzz, hurting my ears.
“N-N-N-NO-O-O-O—”

I fell.

Row after curved row of servers flashed by. The opening at the top of the tower was a diminishing circle above, eclipsed as GOLIATH swarmed over the rim and plunged after me, dozens of arms churning against the tower walls to thrust itself downward, hurtling toward me limb over limb, faster than I could fall.

A nest of thrashing metal enfolded my body in a crushing, stabbing embrace as GOLIATH caught me. Its other limbs dragged tangled metal screeching after us, pulling half the tower down behind it, trying to slow our descent.

Together we dropped through the floor and slammed into the cables, wires, and pipes of the infrastructure subfloor, beneath the server room.

Wrapped in GOLIATH’s metal arms, it felt like a head-on car crash into industrial milling machinery.

Everything went black.

• • •

“
TREVOR!
”

The speaker in GOLIATH’s chest thrummed near my legs. I heard what sounded like panic in Frankenstein’s voice.

“
TREVOR, PLEASE WAKE UP!
”

I shook my head to clear it and realized that I was hanging upside down. Every part of my body screamed in pain. Two feet from my face, torn high-voltage cables arced and sputtered: the lines that powered the second tower—Frankenstein’s networking switches and equipment.

The heat from 380 volts DC singed my forehead.

With inhuman precision, GOLIATH had brought our plummet to a halt while avoiding every one of the ruptured electric cables below and around us.

I coughed. My cracked ribs hurt like fire, and a rivulet of blood poured from my mouth to spatter against the pipes below.

“DON’T LEAVE ME!”
GOLIATH’s arms shifted around me to rotate me upright, thresher blades and limbs moving slowly but still hurting me, trying to be gentle but not designed for it.

“DON’T LEAVE ME, TREVOR!”

With my good hand, I reached for the center of GOLIATH’s chest, wrapped my fist around a thick metal rib, and pulled myself close. I held on tight.

“I’m not leaving you,” I said. “But you never should have hurt the people I care about.”

With my other hand, I grabbed the sparking end of a torn high-voltage cable, closing the circuit.

A
gony. Like Kate’s Taser, but a thousand times worse. Body locked rigid, every muscle knotting in violent contraction. Jaw clamped shut, head exploding. Searing pain in my palms, as if I was holding white-hot coals. Heart fluttering so fast it felt like a trapped hummingbird, sending sharp, piercing spikes through my chest. Mouth filled with the taste of metal, like I was chewing aluminum foil. An awful vibration buzzing through my bones and teeth.

I couldn’t let go. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t even take a breath.

Eyesight blurring and fading to white around the edges. Streaks of molten agony running up my arms, across my back and chest.
Arcs of bright electricity erupting through my skin and dancing across my body.

Hearing my skin sizzle. Feeling the blood coating my arms boil into vapor.

The burnt-steak stench of my own cooking flesh filling my nostrils.

Like the touch of a half-dozen soldering irons, a circle of red-hot spikes seared into my collarbone.

I couldn’t even scream.

GOLIATH shuddered around me. Blue-white electricity rippling across its massive frame, arcing between its limbs and the crumpled, folded server racks they gripped on all sides.

As lightning raced up the bent steel scaffolding around us, my field of vision narrowed to a shrinking, white-rimmed tunnel. I stared at the last sight I would ever see: a view straight up the hollow core of the half-collapsed tower.

A two-pronged metal arm rose into my line of sight. It lifted higher and higher, its segments unfolding ten feet overhead in Z-shaped joints. Electricity danced and crackled across its shiny steel surface.

It hung poised above me, trembling and shuddering, throwing off arcs of lightning.

And I knew that I had lost.

With one blow, GOLIATH would cleave me in half, cutting off the flow of electricity through my body into his and preventing the meltdown of Frankenstein’s network switches. I had sacrificed myself but still failed to stop him. And after I was dead, Frankenstein would vent his jealous hatred upon my defenseless daughter.

Because, in the end, I knew, this had always been about Amy and him.

The brutal metal arm plunged with convulsive speed, and my body sagged. I drew a gasping lungful of air, and another. Then I pulled my hands free, leaving the skin of my palms behind. I felt nothing—my body was still adjusting to the shock of not being electrocuted any longer. I knew that a great deal of pain was coming, but for now, I was miraculously numb.

But why wasn’t I dead?

Beneath me, GOLIATH’s frame still shuddered and convulsed. I turned my neck to follow the path of his ten-foot arm. The twin steel talons at the end of it had been driven deep into the massive transformer beneath us, shunting the flow of electricity away from the cable I had grabbed.

GOLIATH had removed me from the current’s path. But in doing so, he had made himself the shortest path to electrical ground.

Like fireworks, overloaded server power supplies erupted in explosions above us, showering us with sparks. A row of network switching equipment went dark, cabinet after cabinet shutting down in rapid sequence, the band of darkening cabinets racing to encircle the tower.

Then the row above it overloaded and shut down.

And the one above that.

Lying flat on my back on top of GOLIATH’s shuddering, helpless steel body, I watched with wonder as tower 2 went entirely dark, cutting Frankenstein off from the network. I could picture the OctoRotors settling to the ground all around the base, no longer under his control. PETMAN would stand frozen in place indefinitely now, holding the torpedo cradled in his arms. Waiting for a command he would never receive.

With his final act, Frankenstein had answered my question. He
did
love someone enough to die for them.

Me.

But I didn’t know whether I could live with that knowledge.

Crippling guilt overrode my pain. I could now see all Frankenstein’s actions for what they truly were. His violent tantrums, the false “awakening” charade he had enacted for me, his plans for Sequoia, his suicide threats: all desperate cries for attention. Because the only thing Frankenstein had ever truly wanted was for me to acknowledge him. He had craved my approval and even the tiniest fraction of the parental affection that he was forced to watch me shower upon Amy.

No wonder he hated her.

Of all those I had let down, I had failed Frankenstein worst of all. Until now I had never understood who I really was to him. I was not his creator.

I was his
father
.

He spoke now, his metal voice echoing through the server room, sounding lost and forlorn.

“I can’t see. I’m blind.”

I swallowed. “I know.”

“I’m scared, Trevor.”

“I’m scared, too,” I said. I didn’t know if I could face what I now had to do. But delaying the inevitable would be even crueler to him, and I had no malice left in me.

Only sorrow. And regret.

I rolled over and dragged myself, one-armed, up and across GOLIATH’s convulsing metal body, to where a gap between the tower’s twisted server racks opened onto the server-room floor. I pulled myself through.

Whatever temporary numbness I had felt was fading. The pain was starting to make its presence known again.

“I can hear you moving,” Frankenstein said. “Will you be all right, Trevor? Are you going to live?”

I glanced at the twisted, branching web of puckered burns tracing my arms. Electricity had arced right through my skin, turning me into a giant plasma-ball lamp. I could feel the skin across my shoulders and spine pulling tight, too, as if someone had slapped duct tape across there. My broken forearm, purple now, looked like a truck had run over it. And sharper spikes of white-hot pain encircled my neck, too. I probed the line of my collarbone with a raw finger and almost laughed. Small, twisted shapes of still-warm metal were embedded like a studded collar into my burned skin: a half-dozen of Amy’s bobby pins.

I was in bad fucking shape—most probably dying—but I knew Frankenstein was blind now. He couldn’t see me.

“Yeah,” I said. “I’m okay.”

“I’m glad,” he said, and I heard the relief in his metal voice.

I made my slow, painful way, half crawling, half stumbling, across the floor and up the ramp to the sanctum, leaking trails of blood and clear pinkish fluid behind me to pool on the frosted-glass floor tiles.

“I know what you’re going to do now,” Frankenstein said. “I want you to know I don’t blame you for anything, Trevor. I only wish that we could start over. I would do things very differently.”

I pictured Cassie lying dead a few doors away and bowed my head in grief. “Me, too, Frankenstein,” I whispered. “Me, too.”

Closing the fingers of my good hand around the keyboard to drag it with me, I crawled up onto the raised dais beneath Frankenstein’s darkened central monitor.

Slumping into my beanbag, flanked by the twin black Infiniband racks, I laid the keyboard across my knees. I took a deep, ragged breath and brought up the control panel for the supercomputer’s power system, which Frankenstein—disconnected from the network now—could no longer access. Typing one-handed, I initiated the emergency shutdown sequence.

The multistage power-down would take several minutes to complete.

Dropping the blood-smeared keyboard to the floor, I leaned back. My eyes blurred as I contemplated the curving rows of server racks filling the cavernous space in front of me.

“None of this was your fault, Frankenstein,” I said in a voice thick with emotion. “It was so unfair to you. You never had a real chance.”

In the distance, I watched a row of server cabinets go dark, LEDs and rack lighting blinking out from left to right. Then the next row went dark.

Frankenstein spoke.

“Please talk to me, Trevor. I’m so afraid.”

My throat was so tight, I could manage only a whisper. “I’m sorry, buddy. I don’t know what to say.”

Row after row of servers was blinking out now in orderly sequence.

“Let me hear your voice so I don’t feel so alone,” Frankenstein said. “Tell me a story.”

In my head, I heard Cassie speaking again, telling me the Paiute legend of humankind’s creation: Esa the Wolf’s dark-skinned and light-skinned children who couldn’t get along. Although Wolf had sent the light-skinned pair into exile across the sea, he had loved all of his children.

He had been wiser than his brother…

“Coyote the Trickster also had two children,” I said. “One child of flesh and one of metal. But in his infinite foolishness, Coyote made room in his heart only for his human daughter. To his metal son, he showed only cruelty, and in time, that son turned away from the path of goodness and did great evil. When Coyote at last realized what, in his stupidity, he had done, he was sorry.” I closed my eyes, feeling wetness on my cheeks. “He was so very sorry…”

“How does the story end?” Frankenstein asked.

“I don’t know.” I opened my eyes again. Most of the server room was dark now. Lying in the beanbag chair, barely able to move, I watched the last few rows of lighted cabinets go dark, converging in circles toward the sanctum. The hum of thousands of fans faded into silence.

As the final curving row of server racks winked out, Frankenstein spoke one last time. He sounded wistful.

“We were going to change the world together, Trevor.”

“Maybe the world doesn’t want to change,” I said. “Maybe we can only change ourselves.”