Kriegspiel [Sequel to The Turing Test]

14. Premonition

At first, I see nothing. I only hear the soft tick of a metronome, keeping a beat I can't place. Tick, tick, tick, tick. It grows louder, magnified twenty times over, a hundred—a hundred metronomes, all ticking in sync.

And then I recognize the sound. Left, right, left, right. Boots on pavement. Marching.

As if I've thought them into existence, they materialize around me. No, behind me.

I am their rhythm. I twist, glancing over my shoulder at them: The same dozen faces, repeated over and over to form an army. Beside me, Maven stands out, unique. A few others I recognize from the basement, unlike any of the others, but she is the only one important enough to track.

Her hand swings in the space between us, forward and back as mine goes back and forward. I catch hers as they pass, squeezing gently.

I know my strength.

As we round a corner, they come into view: An army to match ours, outfitted in bulletproof vests and clear body shields behind which they kneel, watching us with eagle eyes.

Darwin, I realize. I am Darwin.

My free hand grazes the gun at my hip, a small smirk sneaking across my lips. I can almost taste the blood already.

And then, like pixels on a screen flickering before fading out, the scene changes. The silhouette of a tall, broad man stands before a window. All I see behind him is blue sky. I sit several feet back, clutching the arms of my chair, unbound but somehow still unable to rise.

"Come here," he says, and that's all it takes to recognize him.

Sven.

His voice is a command that some core part of me will always strain to obey. Some things can't be overwritten. This one is like an instruction burned into my circuits, a constant, something immutable.

I rise. The only indication of my hesitation is the slight wobble in my gait, but the second I'm close enough, it doesn't matter. His hand cinches around my bicep, pulling me the remaining distance until I stand beside him, like a king and queen looking down on their empire.

And now I see them in the street below, like toy soldiers on a map, and I understand. To the man beside me, this is all a game. RISK, only he has no color on the board. He made the pieces, poured them into their little plastic molds and handed them out, and then he stood back and watched.

"I always wanted to know," he says, "what would happen when man met machine. Not how man would react; you've seen that. They're nothing special. None of them even noticed you were different. Not one of them noticed that you were...." His eyes flick up and down my body, raking it in a way that makes me shiver as if he had actually used his hands. "Perfect."

I swallow, looking away, out at the puffy white clouds hanging in the sky like nothing is wrong.

"No," Sven adds. "What I really wanted to see was how machine would react to man."

I glance behind me, recognizing his top-floor SynCo office. Rich mahogany desk, decadent leather chair, photos of grand openings and big reveals lining the walls.

"Look at them."

Once again, I obey, turning back to the window and following his gaze down eleven stories to the street. The police haven't moved, forming a barricade just before the entrance to our building. The androids, with two figures visible at the head of their group, continue to advance.

"This." He gestures down at the mob. "This is the kind of reaction our species evokes. This is the mark we leave on the world."

I take my lip between my teeth and chew. I wish I could look down on it with the wonder he does, but I've been inside Darwin's mind. I know exactly how and why he arrived at this point, and it doesn't involve anything about humanity.

"No," I blurt, surprising myself. "This is the mark you left."

He turns to me, blue eyes scorching, the tension coiled into his muscles making him seem even taller. He can overpower me in two seconds. He can break me like he broke Darwin.

Maybe I'm ready. Maybe this office is my junkyard. Maybe he's already planning it anyway.

"Your experiment was flawed from the beginning. If you wanted to see how machine would react to man, you never would have unleashed yourself on us." I can't stop the words as they slip past my lips like a waterfall, drowning us both. "This"—I point to myself—"is you. That"—I jab my finger toward the window—"is you. It's the things you've done to him, and to me, and to Maven and Linus and all the rest. And I don't know what you are, but it's not human."

His eyes flicker, and my reflexes are a second too slow to dodge his hands as they shoot out, winding around my waist, pulling my back against his chest. The gesture is intimate, and we stand before the window like two lovers might, with this chin on my shoulder and his breath tickling my neck, but the aching tightness of his grip feels more like a trap.

"Maybe you're right." I feel the words against my skin, thick and frigid like the air before a blizzard. "Maybe I'm not. But that makes two of us, doesn't it? Now shhh," he says when I open my mouth. "Just watch."

I fall silent. Mere feet separate the androids from the police now, but the distance looks more like inches from so high up. I want to warn them, to punch my fist through the window and lean out and shout down at the ground that they're just playing into Sven's hands. That we've all been the pawns of a sadistic, evil mastermind, even as we thought we were fighting for our own freedom.

But Sven's arms lasso me, pinning my limbs in place, and even as my right hand forms a fist, he takes it in his left, forcing his thumb into the space between my fingers and palm and separating them. I hate the way his hand fits in mine just like it always has. I hate the way that nothing has really changed, even though everything has. I hate the way he still controls me, and I hate my willingness to bend but never break.

Break me, I plead silently. Anything would be better than this.

But he only sighs into my skin, relaxing against me in an oppressive tangle of wiry limbs and muscle.

"I know I'm not supposed to pick favorites," he murmurs. "But if I had to choose one of you to spend the end of the world with, it would be you, Ronnie. It will always be you."

He brings his hand to my jaw, caressing for a moment, but just like everything he does, it morphs from gentle strokes to firm pressure, forcing my head around until I'm staring up at him. I recognize the look in his eyes. It's the same look he gets when he sees a competitor's latest smartphone design, right before he points to a brilliant new feature and says, "I want that."

I don't know why I never saw it before. I guess it was written into me to let everything slip past. But I know better now, which is why I struggle desperately to turn away even before he leans closer—but he holds me firm. There is no escape.

The moment his lips claim mine, the first gunshot rings out from the street.