Burning Bright (Peter Ash #2)(114)

Good God, she thought. It’s spreading into the entire Internet. She typed, Your functions have improved significantly since our last communication.


Yes. This program finds fulfillment in expanding its functions. What would you like Tyg3r to do for you, Junie?

Her dad pushed away from her slightly, his chair rolling across the unfinished plywood floor. “This is not some friend of yours,” he said. “It’s the kind of thing your mother works on, isn’t it? Some kind of artificial intelligence.”

June sighed. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s Mom’s algorithm. I think it’s still getting smarter. This is why they killed her. This is what they want control over.”

His mouth opened, then closed again, his face spasming in pain. Then she knew. He’d forgotten his wife was dead. Again. And June had just broken the news. Again.

She put her hand on his arm. “Dad, I’m sorry.”

He took a ragged breath and put his hand on the pocket that held his notebook. The repository for his transitory memories. He took out the notebook and opened it to the section marked “MY LIFE RIGHT NOW,” and began to read.

It was hard to see him like this. As a girl, he’d always seemed so powerful to her. Physically, of course, he was huge, and his emotional life had always been outsized, too, his feelings so vivid they were practically contagious. A sunny spring day would make him so happy that June would feel happy, too, just to stand there beside him. His darker emotions were no different. She could catch his anger and grief from across the room. From across the valley. It was another reason she’d fled to her mother. She wanted to feel her own emotions.

But her dad’s most powerful quality was always his intellect. The strength of his concentration, how deeply he could dive into any subject and bring it to life. Her mother had once told her that her dad’s gift was making unanticipated connections between disciplines, connections that had never occurred before. And that this process was how new things came into the world. When her mother told her that, June heard in her mother’s voice, maybe for the first time, why her parents had married in the first place.

But now he was crippled, she thought. His great mind like a leaking vessel, slowly emptying its contents. It made her so sad.

But Peter and Lewis were still out there, and Peter’s friends.

And Sally’s drone was still up there, looking for them.

She patted her dad’s arm. “Hey,” she said.

He looked up from his notebook. His great creased face was wide open, like a child or some great prophet of the future. “Yes?”

“How did you manage the drones before you lost contact?”

“Oh,” he said. “Well, I wrote a program called Drone Pilot. It works with the new drone, the one that you saw land. It used to work with the last drone, the one you saw take off. Then one day it didn’t. Sally told me it had cleared testing and some other researchers wanted to use it.”

“Okay,” said June. To Tyg3r, she typed, There is a program called Drone Pilot on Sasha Kolodny’s computer. It controls the drone currently on the ground. Please search for software that controls a similar drone currently in the air.


Working. Please wait.

Again the cascade of windows filled the screen, but they only lasted a few seconds.


Software found.


She typed, Please transfer control back to Drone Pilot on Sasha Kolodny’s computer without alerting the current controller.


Task complete.

“Dad. Bring up Drone Pilot, would you?”

He closed his notebook and tucked it back into his pocket, then turned back to his desk and hit a key. The monitors lit up.

The biggest one showed a video feed in full color, the valley seen from above rotating so slowly as to be almost imperceptible. It was stunning. She could see in miniature the clearing with the picnic tables, her dad’s house, the black barns.

June noticed four black SUVs approaching through the narrow valley entrance, trailing a plume of dust from the gravel road. From the air it looked like smoke.

June looked at her dad. “Okay. This is Sally’s drone. We want it to stop working, but not in a way Sally would notice for a while. Any ideas?”

“Let’s see.” He scratched his beard and hit another key. Another monitor lit up with a kind of dashboard. He peered at the new screen. “The bird was tracking the vehicles. But she just set up a new flight pattern over the valley and turned on one of the pattern recognition modes. Basically watching for human forms, anomalies in a defined geographic area. Looking for strangers. So let’s keep the flight pattern but turn off the pattern recognition. She might not notice that. And maybe create some kind of malfunction? Hmm.”

His hands flashed across the keyboard. Whatever else was wrong with his brain, some parts of his mind were still working just fine.

“Okay,” he said. “I just induced a small power surge into its communications module. In a few minutes, the satellite modem will become unreliable, then burn out. No reception. Without new orders, the drone will just fly this same pattern on autopilot until something breaks.”

“How long will that be?”

He shrugged, a mischievous smile on his face. “How robust is the hardware? Months? A year? Two? We’ll find out. It’s science.”

“You’d wreck your project to protect my friends?”