Extinction

-21-

Nearly two months later I finally had Andros Island ringed with automated beam turrets. We still had no ships in the sky, but we felt secure.

Sandra complained bitterly about the turrets, saying they were ‘creepy’. They never stopped moving, it seemed, and she found this disturbing.

“Have you watched those damned things?” she asked me. “They are always tracking someone or something. It’s as if they examine everyone, thinking about us. Every seabird that hops along in the surf, every fluttering palm frond. If no one is around, they scan the skies and look at the waves or the clouds as if studying the movements.”

“They are building their neural nets,” I told her.

“They are freaky.”

“Yes, but only because they are machines. If a bird in a tree watched you that way, you wouldn’t feel disturbed.”

“I would if the bird could kill me at any moment.”

I had to give her that one. I shrugged. “They are still young. They are like kids, trying to figure the world out around them. They do learn, but in a more limited way. They are classifying everything around them as normal and safe.”

“Why are they always checking me out then?”

I grinned. “Obviously, they are good judges of character.”

“Maybe they are better at it than I am.”

I thought I might have been insulted, but I went on unconcernedly. “When they see something new, they are very curious about it. They want to know if you are a good, safe thing, or a bad dangerous thing. They have already figured out the trees and the birds. You are something new.”

“When I walk near, they aim their big guns at me and I know what they are thinking.”

“What’s that?” I asked, bemused.

“They are thinking about killing me every second. I can feel them.”

I shrugged. “I guess we will have to get used to them.”

“What if they get smarter, Kyle? Did you ever think about that? What if they talk to each other somehow, and get ideas? What if one of them, just one of them, decides to go crazy and starts burning down everyone in sight? What will you do then?”

I tried to let the air out of my lungs without sighing. “I know they are disturbing, Sandra. What do you want me to do about it? We have to keep the governments of the world at bay. They won’t try to invade again as long as we have them outgunned.”

She pouted and walked around my office, messing with things. She picked up all my pens, including the stylus for my tablet computer, and put them all into a cup.

“Look,” I said, “let’s make plans for later. I’ll finish up what I’m working on and we’ll go to the beach, okay?”

Sandra didn’t answer. She cruised by my desk and looked over my shoulder at my tablet. I reached up and retrieved my stylus from the cup she had deposited it into and tapped at the screen.

Her face suddenly slid close to mine, making my neck tingle. I could feel her warmth there. She whispered into my ear. “Not okay.”

I swiveled my chair around to face her, half-smiling. “What’s plan B?”

“Plan B? You come with me to the beach, right the hell now, or I’m going alone.”

“The turrets will keep you company.”

Sandra huffed out. My eyes followed her, admiring her shapely rear end. She paused in the doorway. She slipped off her pants and top. Underneath, she wore a bikini. It wasn’t much of a bikini. Technically, I’d classify it as a network of pink straps. She left the rest of her clothes in a heap in the doorway and walked away.

I got up out of my chair. A man has to recognize when he’s been beaten. I trotted after her and together we headed out to the beach. We walked until we were as far from the nearest beam turret as we could get, which was nearly a mile. We could see two of them at that point, one to the north and one to the south. I gazed at them, and they were indeed creepy. While I watched, they targeted and scanned everything. Once every few minutes, one or the other of them seemed to notice us on the beach and tracked us for several seconds before moving on to a new target.

“What if we have kids, Kyle?” Sandra asked suddenly.

“Uh…” I said.

Sandra reached up and pushed my chin upward, closing my mouth with a snap. My teeth clacked together and I must have looked confused. She frowned up at me.

“Don’t pass out or puke or anything,” she said, suddenly angry.

Inside I wondered how I’d stepped into this. Was it even possible I could have avoided it? I decided to keep up the dumb act. “I’m not sure what you mean.”

“Noooo,” she said, “I’m not pregnant.”

“That’s good,” I said. “Right?”

“I’m talking about these machines, Kyle. What if we had kids, and they went out to play on this beach, and those things were tracking them all the time. Staring at them. Would you be cool with that?”

I blinked and tried to follow her logic. I had trouble. “You don’t like them because—because they might threaten kids we don’t have yet?”

She walked off a dozen steps, shielding her eyes from the blazing sun. She pointed up at the one that was closer. I took the opportunity to admire her figure. I almost missed what she said next.

“There it goes. See? It just noticed my movement. It’s looking over here. I’m about a mile away, and it’s still tracking me and thinking about burning me.”

“They don’t shoot harmless people, Sandra.”

“Well, you had better make damned sure they know what they’re doing. What if I ran up and kissed you, would they freak out?”

“Let’s experiment,” I said, stepping back a few paces. I braced myself for impact. “Okay, get up some speed and make it look real.”

She twisted her lips, not falling for it. “How about if a kid ran around aiming a stick at them?”

I appeared to consider the idea. Mostly, I wondered how I could get out of this conversation unscathed. I had been hoping to get a little reward for letting her lure me out onto the beach hours earlier than I had intended. Instead, I was being interrogated on hypotheticals.

“They are more interested in real weapons,” I told her. “Anything that emits dangerous radiation or projectiles. They won’t trigger on something simple, like throwing a rock on them.”

“You could blow them up then,” she said, looking down the beach. “I think I should try it. What if I just walked up to the base and left a bag of plastique there and walked away. I could blast it apart. You could have commandos walk up to each one, unarmed, seemingly innocent. I wonder if the other side will ever figure that one out.”

I frowned. “I hate to say it, but you might be right. I’m going to have to work on that angle.”

Sandra bounced over to me excitedly. “Are you going to actually blow one up? I want to do it.”

I snorted. “You really hate them, don’t you?”

She finally started kissing on me. I think she liked the fact that she had managed to come up with a worry I hadn’t thought of. I responded to her touch as I was genetically predisposed to do. Sometimes, when we made out like this, I wondered if this relationship really would explode in my face at the end of two years. I mentally counted the months I supposedly had left. They didn’t seem adequate. Maybe the relationship-calculus didn’t apply to college professors who had moved on to bigger things. It was a hope, anyway.

“Hold your arm up,” she commanded.

I smiled indulgently and did so. I held my arm out stiffly at shoulder-level, parallel to the beach. She climbed up there and perched on my arm like some kind of happy, sexy bird. I walked along the beach while we both smiled. Holding her up was easy for me as she didn’t weigh much over a hundred pounds, but I had to lean in the other direction to keep from tipping over.

“I need another girl on the other side to balance me out,” I said, my mouth being faster than my brain at times.

She tweaked my ear viciously.

“That hurts my feelings,” I said.

Sandra hopped down from my arm, ran into the waves and splashed me as I chased her. We ended up making love out there in the ocean. I kept checking the beach for prying eyes, but didn’t see anyone.

Only the beam turrets watched us with silent, alien interest.