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.