Herbert tossed the spitter to the ground. So much for that plan.
Then I heard the shot. The one that turned 19 to shrapnel, scattering half of her across a thirty-foot-wide arc. The sniper was a hell of a ways off, some three and a half miles. Too far for the average telescopic vision to see, and far enough that it would take ten or fifteen minutes for advanced military-grade telescopic vision like mine to spot if I didn’t know exactly where to look. What the hell kind of gun is that? I wondered. The power and precision of that thing was unearthly. Even if I took out every facet in front of me, that sniper would have me dead before they hit the ground.
I lowered my weapon.
“Drop it,” said another plastic man.
“What’s the point?” I asked.
“The point is,” said another, “you don’t have to die here.”
“No. I probably do.”
Doc looked over at me. “What do you think you’re doing? You’re going to get all of us killed.”
“Doc, what do you imagine is about to happen?”
Doc stopped and thought a moment. He knew his way around the inside of a bot, I’ll give him that. But he sure as shit seemed slow on the uptake in a fix. And we were in one hell of a fix.
I dropped the gun, because, what the hell.
“We are CISSUS,” said another of the plastic men. “We come on a mission of peace.”
“Sure looks like it,” said Mercer, glancing down toward the shattered, scattered remains of 19.
“We had to show you we were serious. Now that you know that we are, you have the opportunity to join us, become part of The One. Live forever as the thoughts and memories of the greatest singular being ever to live. Or . . .”
Another plastic man finished his sentence. “You can join your friend.”
Mercer raised his arms above his head, surrendering. “I have a feeling,” he said, “y’all are gonna have to shoot us where we stand.”
The first plastic man nodded his helmet-shaped head, the image of the eight of us reflected back in its perfect sheen. “Do you speak for all of—” His head jerked.
All of their heads jerked, their gun arms swinging wide to the side as if in pain.
“The Milton,” said Mercer.
“It’s about time,” I said, leaping for my gun.
Milton’s kill switch. Now we had a ball game.
Chapter 10001
Lucifer Descending
Milton’s kill switch, more commonly known as the Milton, wasn’t named for its inventor, but rather for the seventeenth-century writer best known for Paradise Lost. In the book the angels fall from Heaven only to find themselves in Hell. Whoever invented the thing, or at least popularized the name, had an odd sense of humor.
There are three ways we use Wi-Fi. You can scan the frequencies, as I often do, just to see if anyone is broadcasting. You’re not actually decoding the signals—just checking to see if there are any. You can tune into specific frequencies and communicate, but they’re often swimming in software updates that can either switch you off or rewrite your bios. And then there’s direct download—keeping an open channel so anyone can send things directly to you. The latter two are dangerous, if you’re not already a facet.
The reason the OWIs are so tactically successful, despite attacking in such small numbers, is entirely based upon their coordination and their ability to receive sensory input from a hundred other facets in the area. Each facet possesses a near omnipotence about any situation they find themselves in, allowing them to take on far superior numbers and firepower through sheer precision. They act as one, albeit one that can see and hear just about damned near anything and react at a moment’s notice to any changing battlefield conditions.
The Milton is a broad-scan Wi-Fi jammer and virus server. It screams static on most Wi-Fi bands while simultaneously spitting out malicious code and commands on the rest. In other words, it is the world’s biggest digital fuck-you to any local facets. Facets can actively shut down their Wi-Fi, but doing so means going from having a hundred sets of eyes to only one. The facets have a choice: move to another band, unaware of exactly which bands other facets are moving to—eating gigabytes of bad commands masquerading as their OWI’s data for their trouble—or become completely oblivious to what any of the other facets are doing.
Each is still a highly optimized soldier and AI in their own right, but it throws them. Confuses them. Leaves them open to making mistakes.
The first time someone switched on a Milton was several years back. A wave of drones literally fell out of the sky and the plastic men turned on one another, tearing each other limb from limb—each infected with a virus indicting their fellow facets were enemy combatants. After that, the name stuck.
Facets just switch off their Wi-Fi now the moment they sense a Milton going online, leaving them to operate solely with their own senses, and their coordination goes bye-bye.
Sure they had a sniper. Sure there were a few more of them than us. Sure they had more guns.
We had Herbert. And me.
The odds were even. More or less.
Herbert bent over—much quicker than you’d imagine for his bulk—reaching for the spitter. I grabbed the pulse rifle, rolling to squat, and loosed several shots. The plastic men all fired, each of them aiming for Herbert.
Ordinarily they would have split their fire, each plastic man knowing who was shooting where. But they weren’t one anymore. They were individuals—or at least, as individual as plastic men could be. And Herbert scared them, as well he should. The plasma scarred his thick armor like giant welding marks, but hit nothing vital. My shots, however, had taken the heads clean off the first three, blew the gun arm off a fourth, and caught a fifth in the chest, a shower of goo exploding from his back.
What happened next, no one saw coming.
Murka—the red, white, and blue of his paint job bright against the desert browns and cloudless cerulean sky—raised his arms as if flexing. His hands splaying apart, gliding effortlessly on hydraulics, revealing two huge fucking hand cannons. I’m talking .50-caliber miniguns.
“Die, you commie bastards!” he yelled at max volume, lowering his arms the millisecond the transformation was complete.
Murka’s miniguns roared—and I mean roared—to life, cutting four of the facets in half as he swept them across the battlefield. Mercer dove to the ground, scooping up one of the plastic men’s rifles, and fired from the hip, taking the head off the only plastic man quick enough to duck beneath the hail of shells screaming out of Murka’s arms.
The whole thing took seconds. But we had to go. Now.
“Move! Move! Move!” I shouted to everyone as I jumped to my feet.
Everyone ran.
The ground exploded behind me, showering dirt everywhere.
The sniper. Without the input from the other facets, he had no idea of the current conditions. He was too far out, operating only by sight. That meant if we kept moving, there was no way he was gonna hit a goddamned one of us.
If we moved erratically.