Siege Read Online Free PDF Page A

hole you drilled in the floor.”
    This is disturbing but not surprising. The bullet that penetrated her control unit must’ve degraded her short-term memory. But she should have backup copies of her memory files stored in other sections of her electronics. “Shannon, you climbed to the top of the assembly line, and then you said you were going to show me a video feed of the conveyor belt. Search your backup files for the video.”
    Shannon completes the search in a hundredth of a second.
    â€œYou’re right. There was a backup video file. But it’s gone.”
    â€œGone?”
    â€œI can see its history, but the file’s empty.” Shannon’s voice is quiet now. Quiet and scared. “Someone erased it.”
    Although Shannon and I aren’t sharing the same circuits, I feel her fear creeping into my own wires. I know who erased the file. We all know.
    Sigma. It’s back.

CHAPTER
2
    Dad looks terrible. He’s hunched over one of the computer terminals in his laboratory, his bloodshot eyes reflecting the bluish glow from the screen.
    The Pioneer Project has aged him. He turned forty-seven last week, but he looks at least ten years older. He’s lost a lot of weight over the past few months and his hair has gone completely gray. Whenever I see Dad like this, so pale and tired, I feel a painful contraction in my circuits and a strong urge to pulverize the nearest wall. Even with all my power, I’m powerless to help.
    Dad’s been studying the data from the North Korea mission ever since we returned to White Sands, our top-secret Army base in the middle of the New Mexican desert. His lab is on the second-lowest floor of our headquarters, which is a fortified complex located several hundred feet underground. The Army moved the Pioneer Project to this deep bunker because it wants to protect us from missile attacks, but to be honest, I’ve never felt that safe here. The same protections didn’t stop Sigma from destroying our previous headquarters in Colorado.
    Most of the time, the lab’s a fun place to be, a kind of playground for robots. In addition to the terminals used for computer-aided engineering, the lab has half a dozen workbenches that are always piled high with circuit boards, sensors, antennas, and cables. This is where the Pioneers come to test their hardware and build new robots for themselves. But now the room is empty except for Dad and me, and neither of us is having any fun.
    I stand behind Dad’s chair, looking over his shoulder at the computer screen. As soon as we got back to Headquarters, I transferred out of the Snake-bot and moved all my data to my usual robot, the one I designed in this lab. I call it my Quarter-bot. It’s a smaller version of the War-bot, just seven feet tall instead of nine feet. Although it has less armor than Zia’s machine, it’s faster and more humanlike. The knob on top of its torso looks more like a head than an oversize helmet. The Quarter-bot’s camera lenses are positioned where the eyes should be, and the voice synthesizer is a few inches lower, where you’d expect to see the mouth.
    In my original plans for the Quarter-bot, I tried to give it a face—specifically, my own human face. Working from photos taken before I became a Pioneer, I built a prototype with artificial cheeks, lips, nose, and chin, all molded from flesh-colored plastic. Then I installed motors beneath the plastic skin to mimic the movements of facial muscles. But I wasn’t happy with the results.
    The prototype didn’t look like the old Adam Armstrong. It was disturbing, actually, like something out of a horror movie. This is a common problem in robotics, so common there’s a name for it: the uncanny valley. When a machine looks almost—but not exactly—like a human, it just seems creepy. The only solution is to build a perfect replica, and we don’t have the technology to do that yet.
    So I