Machines of the Dead

Chapter 1

“Damn it,” Dr. Reynolds said when he looked through the glass into the containment room. Homeless person number 14 was d ead, the bots taking too much of the man’s energy, sucking him down to almost nothing more than a husk.

“I don’t understand why the programming isn’t working,” he said, and hit the kill switch, filling the containment room with enough electromagnetic energy to wipe out a small town ’s electrical equipment. “The bots worked perfectly in the rats.”

“Sir,” said Dr. Chan, his assistant. “The human brain is just too complex. Maybe we-”

“Maybe we what, t ell the military that their project is too much for us? That they should find another company to work on this project? We’ll just give back the millions upon millions we’ve been funded, and say sorry.”

Dr. Chan sighed and looked down. “I’ll have more test subjects rounded up. The city’s full of them.”

“ Get on that; tell C hambers I want at least twenty-no, thirty.”

“Thirty? Sir that’s too many at one time. We’ve never-”

“ I need to be alone,” Dr. Reynolds said, cutting his assistant off.

“I’ll take lunch then,” Chan said, and left the control room.

When the military first approached him, Dr. Eugene Reynolds had thought it a good thing. Now he wasn’t so sure. What if he couldn’t deliver? What would they do to him? Would he ever be able to work again, or would his reputation be ruined? None of that mattered, because he was going to make the project work; give the government what they wanted. He had never failed before and he wasn’t about to now. With thirty more subjects coming in, plus the ten he had left, he would be able to get the bots to work. He had to.

Sitting down at his computer, he began to re-wo rk the nano’s interface module. He needed stronger bots, and ones that required less host — energy.