LITMIR.BIZ

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what I’d like find out. Tonight, once we’ve gone upstairs to a balcony room.”

      *

      Minneapolis was dying.

      From the balcony of a concierge suite – the only tenth-floor room whose door wasn’t locked – the city was a dark expanse silhouetted by random fires. No lights in the nearby industrial park, and the distant skyscrapers were nothing but black, lifeless shapes looming in the starless night. Sharon thought there ought to be the sirens of first-responders – police cruisers, fire trucks, ambulances – but she heard nothing but an occasional gunshot. The airport was on the other side of the hotel, so she couldn’t tell where the jet which had crashed there was still ablaze. Probably not, and if its fire had spread from the runway to the hangers or terminals, those living in the Wyatt-Centrum would have known it by now; the hotel was only a mile away.

      A muttered obscenity brought her back to the balcony. Dale was seated at a sofa end-table they’d dragged through the sliding door; his laptop lay open upon it, connected to Cindy’s satphone. He’d hoped to get a clear uplink once he was outside, and a top floor balcony was the safest place to do this. And it appeared to have worked; gazing over his shoulder, Sharon saw that the countdown had disappeared from the screen, to be replaced by the NSA seal.

      “You got through.” Cindy stood in the open doorway, holding a flashlight over Dale’s computer. The satphone belonged to her, so she’d insisted on coming along. Sharon had, too, mainly because Dale might need protection. After the incident in the kitchen, there was no telling how many ‘bots might still be active in the hotel, as yet undiscovered.

      “I got there, yeah … but I’m not getting in. Look” Dale’s fingers ran across the keyboard, and a row of asterisks appeared in the password bar. He tapped the Enter key; a moment later, Access Denied appeared beneath the bar. “That was my backdoor password. It locked out my official one, too.”

      “At least you got through. That’s got to count for something, right?”

      Dale quietly gazed at the screen, absently rubbing his lower lip. “It does,” he said at last, “but I don’t like it means.”

      He didn’t say anything else for a moment or two. “Want to talk about it?” Sharon asked. “We’ve got a right to know, don’t you think?”

      Dale slowly let out his breath. “This isn’t just any government website. It belongs to the Utah Data Center, the NSA’s electronic surveillance facility in Bluffdale, Utah.” He glanced up at Sharon. “Ever heard of it?”

       “Isn’t that the place where they bug everyone’s phone?”

      “That’s one way of putting it, yeah. Bluffdale does more than that, though … a lot more. They’re tapped into the entire global information grid. Not just phone calls … every piece of email, every download, every data search, every bank transaction. Anything that’s transmitted or travels down a wire gets filtered through this place.”

      “You gotta be kidding.” Harold appeared in the doorway behind Cindy, apparently having found the restroom he’d been searching for. He’d tagged along as well, saying that Sharon might need help if they ran into any more ‘bots. Sharon knew that this was just an excuse to attach himself to Cindy, but didn’t say anything. Her roommate knew how to keep away from a wolf … and indeed, she left the doorway and squeezed in beside Dale, maintaining a discrete distance from the annoying salesman.

      “Not at all. There’s two and half acres of computers there with enough processing power to scan a yottabyte of information every second. That’s like being able to read 500 quintillion pages.”

      Harold gave a low whistle. “All right, I understand,” Sharon said. “But what does that have to do with us?”

      The legs of Dale’s chair scraped against concrete as he turned half-around to face her and the others. “Look … something has shut down the entire electronic infrastructure, right? Electricity, cars, phones, planes, computers, robots … everything networked to the grid was knocked down three days ago. And then, almost immediately after that, every part connected to the system that’s mobile and capable of acting independently … namely, the robots … came back online, but now with only one single purpose. Kill any human they encounter.”

      “Give me another headline,” Harold said drily. “I think I might have missed the news.”

      “Hush.” Cindy glared at him and he shut up.

      “The only other thing that still functions are networked electronics like smartphones and laptops … stuff that runs on batteries. But they don’t do anything except display a number and make a ticking sound just like the robots do. And that number seems to decrease by one every time there’s a tick.”

      “Yeah, I noticed that, too,” Cindy said. “It began the moment my cell phone dropped out.”

      Dale gave her a sharp look. “You were on the phone when the blackout happened?” Cindy nodded. “Do you happen to remember what the number was when it first appeared on your phone screen?”

      “Sort of … it was seven billion and something.”

      “About seven and half billion, would you say?” Dale asked. She nodded again, and he hissed beneath his breath. “That’s what I thought it might be.”

      “What are you getting at?” Sharon asked, although she had a bad feeling that she already knew.

      “The global population is approximately seven and a half billion.” Dale’s voice was very low. “At least, that’s about how many people were alive on Earth three days ago.”

      Sharon felt a cold snake slither into the pit of her stomach. A stunned silence settled upon the group. Her ears picked up low purring sound from somewhere in the distance, but it was drowned out when both Cindy and Harold started speaking at once.

      “But … but why …?”

      “What the hell are you …?”

      “I don’t know!” Dale threw up his hands in exasperation. “I can only guess. But —” he nodded toward the laptop “—the fact that the most secure computer system in the world is still active but not letting anyone in tells me something. This isn’t a cyberattack, and I don’t think a hacker or terrorist group is behind it either.” He hesitated. “I think … I think it may have come out of Bluffdale.”

      Sharon stared at him. “Are you saying the NSA did this?”

      “No … I’m saying the NSA’s computers might have done this.” Dale shook his head. “They always said the day might come when the electronic world might become self-aware, start making decisions on its own. Maybe that’s what happening here, with Bluffdale as the source.”

      The purring sound had become a low buzz. Sharon ignored it. “But why would it start killing people? What would that accomplish?”

      “Maybe it’s decided that seven and a half billion people are too many and the time has come to pare down the population to more … well, more sustainable numbers.” Dale shrugged. “It took most of human history for the world to have just one billion people, but just another two hundred for there to be six billion, and only thirty after that for it to rise seven and a half billion. We gave Bluffdale the power to interface with nearly everything on planet, and a mandate to protect national security. Maybe it’s decided that the only certain way to do is to…”

      “What’s that noise?” Harold asked.

      The buzzing had become louder. Even as Sharon turned to see where the sound was coming from, she’d finally recognized it for what it was. A police drone, the civilian version of the airborne military robots used in Central America and the Middle East. She’d become so used to seeing them making low-attitude surveillance sweeps of Minneapolis’s more crime-ridden neighborhoods that she had disregarded the sound of its push-prop engine.

      That was a mistake.

      For

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