the house somewhere and as he drew closer he could see that the back door through which he’d rushed out only minutes ago was nothing more than a splintered frame swinging gently on bent hinges.
He heard a high-pitched scream and identified the voice as Sal’s. Something inside his head twitched. Not the silicon wafer but the small wrinkled nugget of flesh, the brain the size of a rat’s with which it had a synaptic-wire link. As he bounded across the overgrown garden, his mind was drawing up a shortlist of candidate words to describe what he felt.
Guilt (90% relevance)
Shame (56% relevance)
Anger (10% relevance)
He’d been fooled, lured out into the field so that the others were left entirely alone, vulnerable. No gun between them. No support unit to protect them.
He crashed through the remains of the swinging back door, knocking it off its hinges. The kitchen looked as if a tornado had passed through it; everything that could be dislodged or broken had been. The wall was a mess of plaster dust and holes, revealing the wooden slats of support posts. The fist-sized holes punched into it all the way through to the hallway beyond. The door into the hallway looked just like the back door – smashed to splinters.
‘LIAM!’ Bob bellowed into the house.
He heard nothing now. The sound of struggling and screaming had ended at some point in the last thirty seconds.
‘SALEENA!’ he tried again, stepping into the hallway, his eyes adjusting to the gloom.
He could see scratch and scrape marks across the floor, along the walls … up the stairs. Quickly, urgently, he clambered up them, the old wooden steps groaning and creaking under the burden of his weight.
He turned right at the top of the stairs. A door at the end, scratched, battered and split with a deep crack down the middle, hung wide open. And into the room beyond he could see the frame of a bed on its side, an overturned chair. A last stand had taken place there. No bodies, though. Gone.
In the space of only minutes, seconds, the humans it was his duty to protect had been snatched away from him.
He took another few steps into the room and saw more signs of the struggle. A chair leg, wrenched from its seat, perhaps used as a club. One end of it was spattered with blood – black in this waning dusk light. There were splashes and dots of it on the pale walls.
The logical part of his mind berated him with a simple message.
[Mission status: FAIL]
The organic part was prepared to express its assessment of the situation with a flood of feelings he was unable, or unwilling, to find appropriate labels for right now. He backed out of the room and slumped against the landing wall, sliding down until he was a hunched mass of dejected muscle at the bottom of it.
‘You have failed,’ his deep voice rumbled softly, like a gas boiler switching on, a subway train passing through a subterranean tunnel.
‘You failed,’ he said again, this time his voice trembling slightly. He supposed, if Becks had been right here, she would have found that intriguing, impressive even, that his voice was unintentionally conveying an emotion.
The computer in his skull was nagging him to make a judgement call on a growing list of new mission-priority suggestions: to continue making his way north-east to New York? After all, Madelaine Carter was still there and still needed protecting. To attempt to locate the bodies of Liam O’Connor, Saleena Vikram and Abraham Lincoln? Because there was always the chance, a possibility, one or more of them might still be alive.
To self-terminate … out of sheer shame. Perhaps his AI was now unreliable, faulty. He had made a poor judgement that had resulted in this. An all-too-obvious ploy to lure him outside.
Subconsciously he balled a giant fist, angry with himself for being so … stupid. Perhaps another support unit uploaded with freshly installed software and not burdened with many months’ worth of memories of kinship, adventures, jokes even … would turn out to do a far more efficient job than he.
He was giving self-termination some serious thought, even though the software was advising him quite strongly that it was an illogical conclusion and achieved nothing useful … when he heard the scrape of a footfall beside him. He turned quickly to look along the almost pitch-black landing, quite ready to tear something, someone, apart, limb from limb, for no other reason than mere revenge.