'Mr. Gray's down that way,' a soldier said from behind his heavy machine gun. Laura followed his finger past the sandbags surrounding the computer center entrance to the lone figure seated against the sloping concrete wall. 'He's been there a while.'
Laura headed out of the puny human fortress onto the flat green lawn beyond. The grass was gouged and scarred from the battle, and the field was filling again with Gina's army.
Gray stared at the Model Sixes and Sevens, which were forming lines facing out toward the jungle. He didn't bother to look over at Laura even after she settled to the ground right beside him. She studied his stony face — its intensity focused on the ranks of Gina's legion. The brilliant spotlights of Model Sevens scanned the jungle wall, but none of the robots dared stray inside.
'I was looking for you inside,' Laura said, speaking softly but feeling guilty for breaking the silence. She followed his gaze out to the lawn. Gray said nothing. 'Georgi told Hoblenz that this whole area has been declared a 'special security zone.' Isn't that like what you set up around that first runaway robot on the assembly line?' Still nothing. 'Like what you did with the entire assembly building after that worker quit?'
'I don't set up special security zones,' Gray replied. 'They're declared by the antiviral programs.'
'You mean like the phase-one or whatever?' she asked. Gray nodded. 'But I thought they just looked for viruses.'
'They look for errors,' he said as he drew his legs up, resting his arms across his knees. 'For malfunctioning system components. It all happens so quickly we could never see it coming. Humans can't function at the speeds of computers.' He leaned over to Laura suddenly. 'I have to rely on antiviral routines, Laura! You've got to understand!'
She arched her eyebrows and nodded. 'I understand, Joseph,' she said, worried by the tone of his voice. 'But I don't really know what you're talking about.'
Gray drew a deep breath and laid his head back against the wall. 'I know, but you're getting closer. The computer's right. You'll understand someday, you're just not ready yet.' He looked her in the eye. 'But what I'm trying to say now, Laura, is that sometimes you have to make difficult decisions. There are trade-offs. Sometimes you have to shoulder the burden of making the tough calls. Of sacrificing the things you love, and with them a piece of yourself.'
She rested a hand on his shoulder. It felt awkward, and she quickly withdrew it. 'I thought you had to go do something important.'
'I did.'
'Well, until you get started, can we talk?'
'I'm right in the middle of it, actually.'
'In the middle of what?'
'Thinking.'
'Oh,' Laura said. She rested her head against the wall and looked up into space. There were stars everywhere. 'Will we be able to see the nuclear detonations from earth?' she asked.
Gray pointed to the sky. 'See the red planet? The star that doesn't twinkle? That's Mars. Look off at four o'clock about the width of your hand at arm's length.'
Laura held up her hand. The patch of sky was black. When she looked down, she saw for the first time Gray's rifle lying on the ground beside him. He had taken the deaths of the Dutch soldier and the two security troops hard.
'Joseph?' she said quietly, trying not to disrupt his thoughts too much. 'What is the worst that can happen? With the asteroid, I mean.'
She might as well have struck up a brass band. He turned and looked at Laura, focusing on her and her alone. 'In the short term, a lot of people will die. In the worst case, hundreds of millions.'
It wasn't the answer she'd wanted to hear. It wasn't even a possibility she'd really considered, such was the extent of her faith in the man seated beside her. 'What about the long term?' Laura asked.
'What?'
'You said 'in the short term' when you answered. What about the long term?'
He stared straight ahead. 'In the long term,' he said slowly, 'we'll all die.'
She waited for more, but he said nothing. 'Is that some sort of philosophical bullshit — that we all die, sooner or later — or am I supposed to take it literally?'
Gray shrugged and fell into his normal pattern of ignoring the question. 'Well,' Laura said, 'I'm glad we had this chat.' She stood up and brushed the seat of her jeans.
Gray rose also. He headed out onto the field. Laura hesitated, but then followed along by his side. Model Sevens stood silent sentry in the rear ranks. The Model Sixes again drew the tougher duty at the front. Gray spoke quietly. The deep and confident tone of his voice was mesmerizing.
'We humans think we've run out of challenges. We perceive our world as having been tamed. Over hundreds of thousands of years we've carved out our biological niche. We widened it through incessant competition with, and ultimately destruction of, our closest natural competitors. Look at the primates. Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, baboons — all have varying degrees of intelligence arrayed along a spectrum. Each represents a point on that spectrum not very far from each other. But when you look down at the end of the spectrum, what lies next beyond the intelligence of the chimpanzee? There's nothing until you get to the standard by which all intelligence is measured — the human. We aren't the strongest, the fastest, or the greatest in number, but we are the smartest. Our forebears understood the threat posed by intelligence, so they extinguished our brighter competitors and left as our closest relative only the duller species that evolved into chimpanzees.'
Suddenly, a great crunching of metal could be heard from ahead. Laura froze and grabbed Gray's hand. A Model Seven patrolling the jungle's edge was being pulled into the bush by the leg. Its spotlight spun wildly about, and its other legs dug at the turf. If robots could scream, it would've been shrieking as the first of the fiery torches arced downward. The sizzling sound and screeching and tearing of metal were sickening enough to Laura. But she realized as the last of the thin legs disappeared into the jungle that the robot could scream. It could shriek in holy terror only Laura couldn't hear it.
All the robots around them were still, even the fidgety Model Sixes.
They all shone their lights on the same spot in the jungle wall, seeing nothing now more than quivering bushes. Hearing, Laura imagined, no more of the frantic, microwave pleas or wails of agony and death.
Gray's outward demeanor remained collected. 'Can I ask a question?' Laura said, barely able to keep her tone civil. 'Why are you not sick to your stomach over all this?' She looked across the destruction that had been wrought on his finely manicured lawns. 'Put aside any moral aspects of what's been happening! I mean just sick at the waste. The time you spent creating these magnificent machines. Your money! Sick at something!'
When he turned to face her, she felt drawn into him. 'There's only one common characteristic of life,' he said, speaking softly. 'It is violent. It is aggressive in its growth — in its replication. It carves out its niche… or it doesn't survive. It's that behavior which defines life best. That definition of life encompasses biological and computer viruses at the low end of the spectrum, and life's new and higher order as well.'
'Do you mean that the robots are the new higher order, Joseph? Are you saying we're no longer number-one? That the 'spectrum,' as you call it, that measures things by their intelligence now puts the robots ahead of us?' Gray shrugged and looked away — releasing her from his spell.
The moment had passed, and Laura felt again the unsettling emotional swerve. She looked out and saw a Model Six pick something up, look at it, and then drop it into its bin. Even on the eve of battle, it was still cleaning Mr. Gray's field of debris.
'We're talking about two different measures,' Gray said in resumption of a conversation she thought had ended. 'One is intelligence. Computers will certainly surpass us by that measure, if they haven't already. There's no upper end to their expanding ability. Their architecture is open-ended, unlike ours.'
'We could start bionics,' she suggested in an offhanded manner. 'Maybe begin implanting parts of computers and robots into our bodies to keep pace.' Laura's face grew flushed, and she expected Gray to laugh at the half- baked idea.
'But then we lose!' Gray said, grabbing her hand and squeezing so hard it startled her. 'Bit by bit we would cease being human. Over time, the process begins to look more like we're being eaten alive by the machines,
