Righting her machine, Kirsten laughs at the fairly accurate imitation. “Well, I am, so I’ll try to explain it to you.”
“Do tell,” is the dry response.
“Ok. Remember our suicide bomber friend of a week or so past?”
“I do.”
“Well, as you know, I’ve been spending my time trying to discover what I can from its remaining parts.”
“And you discovered something?”
“In a manner of speaking. Actually, your man Jimenez discovered it for me. I promoted him, by the way.”
“Oh you did, did you? What rank?”
“I’m…not sure.” She waves a hand. “Anyway, what he found for me was a circuit board that just happened to contain the serial number for this particular model. It was pretty badly burned, but I was able to extract enough of the code to plug it into my database, and viola!”
“And what does that tell you, exactly?”
Kirsten ponders the question for a moment. “Have you ever heard of Richardson’s Avionics?”
Maggie tilts her head, thinking. “No, I don’t believe I have. Should I?”
“Probably not. To the world, they were pretty much a two-bit operation, manufacturing parts for single engine aircraft and the like.”
“But to those in the know…?”
“Let’s just say they were the recipient of quite a few juicy government defense contracts over the past twenty years or so. The story was that they were developing top secret radar evading and jamming equipment for warplanes.”
“Interesting.”
“Quite.” A pause. “But I see now that that’s not all they were developing.”
Maggie sits forward, intrigued. “No?”
“No. The serial number on that droid leads right to Richardson’s doorstep. None of us knew that these type of droids even existed. And we weren’t meant to.”
“Which is why their manufacture was kept off of the military bases.”
“Exactly.”
“Okay. What does this knowledge do for us?”
“Possibly plenty.” Kirsten adjusts her glasses again. “For one thing, we have proof of another species of androids whose only purpose is to kill. Something all non military androids were supposedly guaranteed against doing. Secondly, and this is only a guess, since these androids were already programmed to kill humans, it’s likely that whatever code that was used to ‘turn’ the others wasn’t implanted into this model. It would have been a needless waste of resources and energy, something that Westerhaus would never have stood for, and his stench is all over this project.”
“I’m afraid I’m still not seeing how this benefits us,” Maggie admits.
“I’m getting to that part.” Kirsten looks at her and grins. “If I’m right, and if these droids aren’t programmed with the same unbreakable code, that means that someone who knows a thing or two about android coding can turn these people killers into android killers.”
Comprehension dawns, and Maggie breaks out in a beaming smile. “Kirsten King, I could kiss you!”
“What, and give you another thing to tattle to Koda about?” she teases, feeling inwardly very pleased.
“I won’t tell if you won’t.”
Kirsten laughs. “I’ll settle for a nice handshake. And maybe another shot of your Southern Comfort a little later on.”
“You’re on!” She settles back in the chair. “Ok, logistics time. How do we go about getting a hold of these droids and reprogramming them, assuming that can be done?”
“Well, as I see it, there are three possibilities here.” Lifting her right hand, Kirsten begins ticking the points off on her fingers. “As far as I can tell, these droids were manufactured with only one purpose, and that was to explode. Which means that it’s very likely that they can’t work the machinery replicate themselves. So, either manufacturing was shut down when the ‘uprising’ happened, and all the droids simply left the factory to go on their killing missions, or some of the androids programmed to do manufacturing came down from Minot, or there are some humans still left alive who are cranking those babies out as fast as they can.”
“If you had to choose, which one would you go with.”
“If I had to choose, I would go with number two, I think. Call me a sop, but I have a hard time believing an entire manufacturing plant full of humans would willingly continue building the things that likely murdered their families and friends. And I think that that plant is much too valuable to Westerhaus and his stoolies to let lie fallow, so that leaves androids from Minot as our only viable option.”
“Hmm.” Maggie rubs her chin absently as she thinks. “My gut tells me you’re right about this. Unfortunately, that scenario is the worst one for us, for obvious reasons. How big is the plant?”
“Actually, not that big at all,” Kirsten replies, pulling up the blueprint from her database. “If I plot out part of the code here, I can probably be in and out in less than a few hours.”
“You?!?” Maggie asks, wide-eyed. “Oh no, no, no, no, no. Sorry, Ms. President, but if I let you within a thousand miles of a droid manufacturing plant, Dakota would kill me. Then she’d probably find a way to bring me back to life, just so she could kill me again. No thank you. I’ll figure out a way—.”
“Maggie.” Kirsten’s soft voice interrupts her ramblings. “I have to be the one to go. You can’t just go down there, spray the place with bullets, and kidnap a couple dozen androids to bring back here to me. It doesn’t work that way. The coding has do be done at the plant. My little laptop won’t cut it, I’m afraid. I’m going down there.”
“Kirsten,” Maggie replies, voice deadly serious, “you know I can’t allow that.”
Pulling off her glasses, Kirsten fixes the Colonel with a stare that is pure ice. “You don’t have a choice in the matter, Maggie. I’ll make it a direct order if I need to, but I don’t want to have to do that. You know I’m right. You know this is right.”
“I know that letting you go down there, to a plant full of androids, is the most wrong thing there is, Kirsten. You’re so much more than a scientist to us.”
“Right now, the scientist is all that matters. If I can reprogram enough of these androids to infiltrate their fellows’ ranks and destroy them, it could give us the only break we have. I can’t not do it, Maggie.”
“But Kirsten—.”
“Maggie, look me in the eye and tell me that we will win this war without those androids. Tell me that you’ve got some secret superweapon stashed away that will take care of the problem once and for all. Tell me that Dakota’s vision is nothing but a bad dream after too much pepperoni pizza. Do that and I’ll forget the whole thing.”
The two stare eye to eye for long moments.
Finally, Maggie blinks, and looks down at her hands. “You know I can’t tell you any of that.”
“Then it’s settled. I’ll leave first thing tomorrow morning. The plant is less than a hundred miles away. I should be back before midnight.”
“Kirsten—.”
“The matter is settled, Maggie. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some coding to do.”
And, just like that, Kirsten slips her glasses back on, and is lost to her, once again immersed in the world of android codes. Resisting the urge to grab the woman by the shoulders and shake some sense into her, Maggie rises to her feet and, after a moment, turns on her heel and leaves, closing the door quietly behind her.
Kirsten looks up once the house is empty. “Goodnight, Maggie,” she murmurs. “Thank you for caring.”
*
“Holy mother,” Tacoma breathes as he shines his light down the narrow stairway and into the cluttered cellar. “It looks like a National Guard armory down there!”
“Yeah. Just keep alert. We don’t know if he left any little surprises for us to trip on our way down.”
“Roger that.” Tacoma makes deliberate sweeps with his flashlight, keen eyes examining every square inch illuminated. “Looks clean from here.”