The street leading to the Transamerica Pyramid was blocked.
Two massive machines stood guard at the intersection. They looked like old San Francisco trolley cars that had grown legs.
Sentinels.
Their brass and wood bodies were mounted on hydraulic spider legs. Miniguns were mounted where the conductor usually stood. Their headlights scanned the street with red beams.
"We can't fight those," O'Malley whispered, hunkered down behind a decorative planter. "Those are 50-cal turrets. They'll turn us into pink mist."
"We don't fight," Jason said. "We infiltrate."
He pointed to a sleek, armored truck idling at the checkpoint. It was marked with a barcode and the words: DATA COLLECTION UNIT 42.
"It's a hard drive transport," Jason realized. "Collecting physical backups from the local servers."
"Driver?" Hemingway asked, racking his shotgun.
"Wait for him to check the tires."
The driver stepped out. He wore a sleek, rubberized black suit and a full-face helmet. He moved stiffly. Cyborg.
As he bent down to inspect a wheel, O'Malley moved.
The big Irishman didn't use his gun. He used a brick.
CRUNCH.
The cyborg collapsed. Sparks flew from his shattered helmet.
"Strip him," Jason ordered. "We need the suit."
Minutes later, Jason sat in the driver's seat, wearing the rubber suit. Hemingway and O'Malley were crammed in the back with the manuscript bags.
Jason drove the truck up to the checkpoint.
A red laser grid scanned the vehicle.
HALT, a robotic voice boomed from the Sentinel. PRESENT HASH KEY.
Jason froze. He didn't have a digital key.
"Improvise," Hemingway hissed from the back.
Jason looked at the scanner slot on the Sentinel's leg. It was designed for a punch card or a disk.
"Give me a book," Jason said.
"What?"
"Give me a book! A thick one!"
Hemingway fumbled in his bag. He pulled out a first edition of The Sun Also Rises.
"Not my book!" Hemingway protested.
"Give it to me!"
Jason grabbed the novel. He jammed it into the intake slot of the scanner.
The machine whirred. It tried to read the paper pages as digital code.
CRUNCH-RIIIIIP.
The scanner choked. Paper jammed the gears. Smoke poured out.
ERROR, the Sentinel announced. INPUT UNREADABLE. JAM DETECTED.
The red laser grid flickered.
PROTOCOL 7: PREVENT TRAFFIC BACKUP. GATE OPENING.
The barrier lifted. Efficiency over security. Gates's obsession with flow was his weakness.
"Literature saves the day," Jason breathed, hitting the gas.
They drove into the base of the Pyramid.
The interior wasn't a building. It was a hollow shell.
The entire skyscraper was a single, massive atrium. It stretched up 800 feet, filled with floating server racks cooled by swirling nitrogen mist.
In the center of the floor was a pool.
It wasn't water. It was liquid mercury.
It rippled and flowed, forming shapes and currents. Above it, a hologram of the city rotated slowly.
"The Central Input Hub," Jason whispered, stepping out of the truck. "Liquid memory. That's where he aggregates the data."
"So we just dump the paper in?" O'Malley asked, hoisting a duffel bag.
"We drown him in fiction," Jason said.
They ran toward the pool.
BOOM.
The floor vibrated.
A shape rose from the mercury.
It was terrifying.
A mechanical spider body, made of brass and glass, dripped silver liquid. Mounted on top was a large glass jar.
Inside the jar was a human brain.
Attached to the jar were old-fashioned phonograph horns.
"Intruders," a voice scratched out of the horns. It sounded like a recording on a wax cylinder. "You interfere with the work."
Jason recognized the face floating in the jar's preservative fluid.
"Thomas Edison," Jason gasped.
"The Wizard of Menlo Park," Hemingway said, disgusted. "Preserved like a pickle."
"Tesla gave you lightning," the Edison-Bot droned. "I will give you the dark."
The phonograph horns vibrated.
SCREEEEEEE!
A sonic blast hit them.
It wasn't just noise. It was a physical wall of sound.
The glass walkway beneath their feet shattered.
Jason fell. He grabbed a strut, dangling over the mercury pool.
O'Malley was thrown backward against the truck. Hemingway tumbled, losing his shotgun.
The Edison-Bot stepped forward on spidery legs. A saw blade extended from one of its arms.
"Inefficient biology," Edison stated. "To be deleted."
"O'Malley! The fire!" Jason screamed.
O'Malley groaned, grabbing his flamethrower. "Burn, you patent thief!"
WHOOSH!
A stream of napalm hit the Edison-Bot.
The glass jar blackened. The brain inside boiled.
SYSTEM OVERHEAT, Edison screeched. COOLING FAILURE.
The bot thrashed, swinging its saw blindly. It cut through a support pillar.
Debris rained down.
"Now!" Jason pulled himself up. He grabbed the duffel bag.
He ran to the edge of the mercury pool.
He unzipped the bag.
Inside were thousands of pages. Rambling poetry. Nonsense stories. Paradoxes written by drunk writers on Alcatraz.
"Read this, you glorified calculator!"
Jason upended the bag.
The paper fluttered down like snow. It hit the liquid mercury.
The mercury tried to absorb it. The scanners read the text.
DATA RECEIVED, the Pyramid announced. PARSING...
THE SUN IS ALSO A STAR. A FISH IS A BICYCLE. TIME IS PURPLE.
LOGIC ERROR.
The lights in the atrium flickered.
PARADOX DETECTED. ATTEMPTING TO RESOLVE.
Hemingway grabbed another bag. He dumped it. More nonsense.
RESOLVING... RESOLVING... FAILED.
SYSTEM CRASH.
The hologram of the city turned red. Then static.
The mercury pool began to boil.
The floating server racks sparked and fell, crashing into the floor.
"It's working!" Sarah yelled over the comms. "The shield is dropping! The drones are falling offline!"
"The building is melting!" Jason realized. "The cooling system is dead!"
The glass walls of the Pyramid began to warp from the heat of the crashing servers.
"Run!"
They sprinted for the truck. O'Malley grabbed Hemingway, dragging him away from the burning Edison-Bot.
Jason floored the accelerator. They smashed through the glass doors of the lobby, launching out onto the street.
Behind them, the Transamerica Pyramid groaned. The top half sheared off, sliding down in a shower of molten glass and sparks.
They skidded to a stop a block away.
Jason looked up.
The blue energy dome was gone. The sky was clear.
"We did it," O'Malley panted. "We killed the computer."
"Look at the sky," Hemingway said quietly.
Jason looked.
The sky wasn't empty.
A fleet of airships was descending from the north. Massive, gray behemoths. Armored and ugly.
They weren't American.
On the side of the lead ship was a symbol painted in red.
A Star. And a Hammer and Sickle.
"The Soviets," Jason whispered.
Paratroopers began to jump from the airships. Thousands of them. Their chutes opened, filling the sky like white jellyfish.
"They didn't wait for the Cold War," Jason realized. "They were waiting for the shield to drop."
He watched the invasion force drift down toward the defenseless, rebooting city.
"We killed the god," Jason said, watching the first Russian boot hit the pavement. "And we just invited the devil to the funeral."