Look Both Ways, page 13
It wasn’t enough that she die. He had hoped for her to experience a fraction of the humiliation he’d endured. She could die later.
Whatever. If Lisa Carver had to die, she could not have gone out more splendidly. Her leg hacked off, her body trapped inside one of her Arrivals as it spun like a top before the world’s assembled media.
You couldn’t buy that kind of publicity.
He had not known, once he’d downloaded the virus into the Arrival network, just how quickly the results would be evident. Turned out to be pretty goddamn instantaneous. It wasn’t even lunch yet and Carver was dead. Other Arrivals were starting to mobilize on their own. He’d caught a glimpse of them moving out of the community center parking lot.
Kyle could only guess where Arrival’s share price would be by the close of the market. It had been soaring that morning—there had been considerable early buzz about today’s news event and the Garrett Island press conference—but Kyle was betting anyone holding Arrival shares would be dumping them as fast as they could the moment they heard about what had happened here. They might even halt trading on the company if it went into a total free fall.
It had only been moments since Lisa’s leg had hit the pavement but news of the catastrophe was already trending on Twitter. Kyle had slipped around the corner of the community center to call up the app on his phone and he smiled broadly when he saw how quickly the story was getting out there. There was already a hashtag that suggested the company’s end was near: #latearrival.
CNN had posted a Breaking News item on its app, but details were sketchy. There was a few seconds of blurry video of Carver’s Arrival spinning around in circles, a sentence or two about how a demonstration of the company’s autonomous vehicle had gone horribly wrong. More details were promised as they became available.
Kyle dropped the phone back into his coat pocket and peered around the corner.
Beyond the entry off the highway to the community center, a red-and-white Garrett Island fire engine, lights flashing, was barreling up the road. The wail of its siren had been audible for the last couple of minutes, but now everyone could see it coming.
And now there was a second siren, a veritable symphony of distress. Hot on the tail of the fire engine was an ambulance, a boxy, white vehicle with an orange stripe and the words garrett island rescue emblazoned on the side.
It was beginning to look, however, as though the truck and the ambulance were going to have some difficulty coming up the drive and making it to the asphalt apron out front of the building, where the Arrival with Lisa Carver’s body in it now sat motionless, the door still firmly in the closed position.
The other Arrivals he’d seen starting up moments earlier were now lined up, side by side, at the road’s edge, blocking the entrance. Kyle did a quick count of how many of the cars had moved into position. Fifteen. A significant blockade.
The driver of the fire engine, close enough now to see he couldn’t make it up to the community center, blew his horn. And this was no ordinary horn. This was a from-the-depths-of-hell blast that Kyle could feel in his bones.
Anyone born with the common sense given to a spruce budworm would know that it would be smart to get the fuck out of the way. But there was not anyone in the Arrivals, and so, driverless and passengerless, they stood their ground.
The fire truck slowed to a stop about thirty feet from the Arrivals. The driver of the truck stuck his head out of the window and shouted at the cars.
“Get out of the way!”
The cars did not respond.
The driver brought his head back into the cab and was conferring with the firefighter sitting up front next to him. No doubt, Kyle conjectured, about how to deal with the situation. It must have felt foolish to yell at a collection of vehicles with no one in them. There had to be someone they could call, someone who could move those cars.
The ambulance had come to a stop, too, and the door on the passenger side opened. A paramedic got out and ran forward, going as far as the cab of the fire engine, and calling up to the driver. Words exchanged, arms waved.
Kyle wished he could hear what they were saying.
The paramedic, a fit-looking man in his thirties, pointed in the direction of the community center, proposing, Kyle surmised, that he get to the scene on foot if they couldn’t get their vehicles up there.
Now the driver was saying something to two of the firefighters sitting in the cab behind them. A nod or two. One of the two opened a door and climbed down from the cab and onto the road. Big guy, decked out in full firefighter regalia. Boots, helmet, fireproof jacket. Imagine having to wear all that stuff for work, Kyle thought. Not just unfashionable, but so goddamn heavy.
The firefighter and the paramedic exchanged a few words, nodded, and then started walking toward the phalanx of cars.
The firefighter started yelling at them. Kyle could make out what he was saying.
“Move the fuck out of the way!” he shouted. “Let’s go! Fuckin’ move or we’ll knock you out of the way!”
Although it looked incredibly silly, there was really nothing silly about it. The cars were designed, of course, to respond to verbal commands. They could hear, they could see, and they could recognize. They knew what a fire truck was. They knew what an ambulance was. And based on what they heard and saw and recognized, they could evaluate. And once they evaluated something, they could decide how to respond.
All within a millionth of a second.
So there was every reason to believe that the Arrivals blocking access to the community center saw these emergency works and even understood what was being asked of them. (Arrivals, and the Gandalfs that Kyle had developed, were also proficient at understanding profanity, as well as an upraised middle finger.)
Even though every Arrival was programmed to recognize only its owner’s voice commands—a feature designed to deter theft—they were also designed to obey instructions from police, firefighters, and the like.
So they should have moved.
Brandon Kyle, however, was not expecting them to.
It was a dandy little virus he’d sent into the network.
Kyle thought of it as a “bizarro” program, the inspiration coming from the Superman comics he read as a kid, and the strange planet known as Bizarro World where everything was an opposite. For starters, the planet was a cube instead of a sphere. In Bizarro World, good was bad and bad was good and up was down and down was up.
Arrival programming was all about safety. Human safety, in particular.
Do. No. Harm. A kind of automotive version of a doctor’s Hippocratic oath. It was encoded into every aspect of an Arrival’s programming.
In some ways, what Kyle had done was quite simple.
He’d eliminated the No.
This was why Brandon Kyle did not expect the Arrivals to move out of the way and allow the fire engine and the ambulance to reach the scene where Lisa Carver, it was very likely, had already bled to death. Blocking their path encouraged harm.
But even Kyle was taken aback by what the Arrivals decided to do.
They attacked.
The powder-blue Arrival in the center position—there were seven to the left of it and seven to the right—suddenly shot forward, aiming for both men. They reacted immediately, each diving in opposite directions. The blue Arrival opted to go after the firefighter, who had bolted to the right, and was now making a beeline back to the fire engine, presumably hoping to grab on to one of the handles on the side and hoist himself up and out of the way.
He very nearly made it, too.
He was just reaching up for the door when the Arrival drove itself into the back of him, pinning his legs to the side of the fire engine and creating a symphony of broken bones and crushed steel.
“Oh my,” said Kyle.
The paramedic, who’d glanced over his shoulder and seen what had happened to his friend, might have thought he’d been spared, but now two other Arrivals had started moving and were in pursuit.
The Arrival that had pinned the firefighter to the truck had managed to lodge itself under the frame. When the driver and the two remaining members of the crew jumped out to rescue their friend, they could see that when the sloped, front end of the Arrival struck him, it carried his legs right under the fire engine with it. The man, who already appeared to be dead, had collapsed onto the hood of the car.
“Jesus fucking Christ!” the driver yelled.
The second paramedic in the ambulance leapt out, but by the time she was halfway to the fire engine, yet another Arrival had dispatched itself in her direction. She spun around and started running back, putting every ounce of speed into it as she could. She jumped back into the ambulance half a second before the Arrival broadsided the vehicle with a thunderous crash.
Her partner was still trying to outrun the two Arrivals that had taken off after him. He ran for the ditch on the other side of the road, and up the other side. The first Arrival maintained the pursuit, nose-diving into the ditch and staying there, its wheels spinning in the grass. It would have, under any other circumstance, been comical. The Arrivals were proving themselves, immediately, to be nasty little sons of bitches, but they weren’t four-wheel-drive Jeeps.
The second Arrival hit the brakes before going into the ditch, taking a second to survey the scene. The paramedic had come up the other side of the ditch and scurried behind a tree for cover.
“Yeah, come and get me, motherfucker!”
The second Arrival, uninterested in taking up the challenge, cranked its wheels hard left and spun around, leaving the disabled Arrival in the ditch to continue spinning its wheels in frustration.
Brandon Kyle watched in awe.
The virus had gone beyond expectations. The Arrivals had gone way beyond reckless. In fact, they’d moved beyond aggressive.
They’d become predatory.
The Arrivals were going after those emergency workers. The Arrivals were hunting them down.
And they weren’t done yet.
Half a dozen of the remaining Arrivals were charging toward the fire engine. First, they had circled it in a manner that reminded Kyle of Indians riding their horses around the circled wagons in an old-time cowboy movie. The fire truck’s driver was going to have a hard enough time getting away with a car wedged under the frame, but even if he did manage that, how was he to get past the Arrivals buzzing around him?
Then something astonishing happened.
One after another, the Arrivals plowed full speed into the massive truck. There’d be a huge crash, and then another, followed by another. The cars were destroying themselves in the process.
“Christ,” Kyle said breathlessly. “They’re kamikazes.”
All those who’d been gathered around the Arrival that bit off Lisa Carver’s leg were now transfixed by this new and even more frightening display. Everyone except Albert Ruskin, who was still attempting to communicate with his boss trapped inside the car.
“Ms. Carver!” he shouted. “Lisa! Lisa, can you hear me?”
The woman showed no signs of life, but he persisted.
You had to give the guy credit, Kyle thought. As much as Ruskin reportedly hated that woman, he was putting on a good show of caring about her.
Brandon Kyle was well aware just how intensely Albert Ruskin detested his employer, was even willing to wager the contempt he felt for her came close to his. For as long as he’d worked for her he’d been subjected to constant humiliation and relentless abuse. You expected a CEO to be demanding, to expect the best of her people, but by all accounts, that was not Lisa Carver’s style. It didn’t matter how well you did your job. She always found fault. She demeaned, she insulted, she mocked.
Turnover at Arrival’s administrative ranks had always been high. It was a classic “the beatings will continue until morale improves” environment. Everyone in the industry knew it. It was an open secret.
So Kyle was impressed, watching Ruskin struggle to get that car door open, trying to save his boss. Was it all a charade, or did he really mean it? Kyle believed Ruskin couldn’t help but take some small measure of pleasure from his boss’s predicament.
The next step in what Kyle sometimes thought of as “Operation Dead on Arrival” was already in the works. A prearranged email would start hitting the in-boxes of Arrival employees. A ransomware demand, supposedly from a team of Russian hackers. All Arrival had to do to stop the carnage was transfer over a million in bitcoin. Let them waste time trying to figure out how to get onto the dark web and send funds to an account that didn’t exist.
What Kyle had to think about now was getting the hell off this island.
Making it to the ferry—it was a trip of several miles to the island’s far shore—was out of the question, given that the only way to get there would be in an Arrival. Not getting in one of those now, thank you very much. And he wasn’t about to wait for help to arrive from the mainland (they might send in the army for all he knew) and run the risk of having his true identity revealed.
So he would head into the town of Garrett, a much shorter trek. And then he would find his way to the harbor. Derek would be heading there now in the boat he’d rented. Once they had rendezvoused, they’d head back to shore.
He just hoped Derek would be on time. He had to—
What the hell?
There was an explosion. One of the Arrivals taking aim at the fire truck must have hit a gas tank. A battery-powered Arrival didn’t have one, but the truck would have a substantial tank tucked into its undercarriage.
“Fuck me,” Kyle whispered.
The fire truck was on fire.
Fifteen
When Chief Joe Bridgeman had finished filling in the coast guard about the possibility that a man named Clyde Travers had fallen off the ferry en route to Garrett Island, he started walking back toward his specially outfitted Arrival.
He was about to ask Sherlock to open the door when his phone, barely back in his pocket for a minute, rang again.
“Yup?” he said, taking the call while walking.
“Chief?” It was Ronny Dyson, who was on the dispatch desk that morning.
“Yeah, it’s me, Ronny.” Joe sighed. Ronny had dialed the chief, the chief had answered, but Ronny still had to ask if it was him.
“Where are you?” Ronny asked.
“Ferry dock.”
“Right, that guy that didn’t get off?”
“What’s up, Ronny?”
“There’s some crazy shit going down at that Arrival event at the community center.”
Joe stopped walking. “What kind of shit?”
“Well, kinda everything. Some lady’s leg got cut off and now they’re saying—”
“Wait! What lady? Whose leg got cut off?”
“Uh, I’m not sure. She was showing how the car worked and the door slammed shut on it or something.”
“Was it Sandra?”
“Who?”
“Sandra Montrose!”
“That the lady you’ve been seein’?”
Christ, it was hard to keep a secret on the island.
“Was it her, Ronny?”
“Don’t think so. Sounded like someone important. I mean, not that she isn’t, but it was someone who’d come over for the day, the head of the company, I think, and—”
“Never mind,” Joe said. He’d put Ronny, who was, as they say, untroubled by intelligence, on dispatch because Joe believed he could do less damage there than being out on the street. Now, he wasn’t so sure. “Tell me the rest of it.”
“So you know Duff McLaughlin?”
“Yeah, I know Duff. Works for the fire department.”
“That’s right. Well, they say he’s dead.”
“Jesus Christ,” Joe said. “What happened?”
“He got hit.”
“Hit?”
“Yeah.”
“Hit by what?”
It was like pulling fucking teeth.
“One of the little funny cars. Rammed him, right up against the fire engine.”
“How the fuck did that happen?”
“Not sure. But now Truck Five is on fire.”
“The fire engine is on fire?”
“Right. That’s what you call ironic, right?”
“Who’s out there?” Joe asked.
“Okay, so Alice and Rick were on their way but they ran into a problem. And from what I hear, the ambulance can’t get near the scene.”
“Why the hell is that?”
“’Cause they’re surrounded.”
“Ronny, I swear, just spell it out for me. Who’s surrounding them?”
“The cars.” Ronny paused. “What I’m hearing is, the cars are kinda losing it. Goin’ all whackadoo. They’re not going to get a very good rating in Consumer Reports after this.”
“I’m on my way,” the chief said, ending the call and slipping the phone back into his pocket. “Sherlock, open!”
While he waited for the car’s door to retract, he entered another number on his phone. “Come on, come on,” he said. “Answer the fucking phone, Sandra.”
After the fifth ring, his call was directed to voice mail. “Sandra, it’s Joe. Call me! I just heard things have gone crazy at the center! I’m heading your way. Let me know you’re okay!”
He ended the call and then looked at the car, dumbfounded. The door had not opened.
“Uh, Sherlock, open up.”
The chief’s Arrival did not respond.
“Come on! Open up!” He slapped his palm on the glass three times. “Let’s go! Wakey wakey!”
He heard the nearly inaudible whirring noise of the Arrival’s electric engine powering up.
“That’s promising,” Joe said. “Now would you kindly open the fucking door?”
The Arrival’s wheels began to turn.
“What the hell?” Joe said, taking a step back so that the rear tire wouldn’t run over his foot.
The Arrival picked up the pace, made a graceful half circle, and pulled onto the road that led back to the town of Garrett.
