Rude Awakening

Knocking, where was that knocking coming from?

Sam slowly drew himself back to the world of consciousness, the light in the centre of the ceiling burning his eyes as he opened them. What? He wasn't expecting anyone. They must have found out. Oh shit. At least his experiment was out of their reach now.

He scrabbled about for the pistol he had procured just in case. It was cheap but powerful, the best he could get in the circumstances. But he had never used it.

He moved to the door. "Who is it?"

"Are we talking to Samuel Deitel?"

"Who are you?"

The section of the door where the handle was disappeared with an accompanying boom sound. The splinters from the shattered door exploded over Sam as he threw himself back from the danger. A booted foot kicked the remains of the door aside and Sam started squeezing the trigger.

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG

A scream from the door indicated that he'd hit someone. They backed away or fell; Sam couldn't tell and didn't care. He just kept firing.

BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG

BOOM

They were firing back, with a shotgun of some sort. Sam's left shoulder stung but he kept on firing.

BANG BANG BANG CLICK

Shit, the clip was empty.

The men took the advantage to get in. They charged Sam, and one fired his own pistol repeatedly. Sam took several rounds and fell back. The men stopped their onslaught, as it was obvious that they'd got their target.

Sam weakly lifted his head to look at them. "You may have got me, but she's out and you're not going to get her." He croaked a sound that could have been a laugh and fell back, unmoving in his death.

The men looked round the room, searching for the other target they were required to find. A smaller man now advanced into the room.

"Where is the mainframe? Where is this Ada?" he said, in a shrill voice.

The computer box sat silent in one corner, power did not seem to be running to it. It took a few minutes for the shorter man to connect up the box and run the power to it. The screen flicked on and commands were flashed across it.

"It's not here. Where is the Ada AI?" The man seemed to be getting quite irate. "This is not right. It's as if she had been removed, deleted. Would he do such a thing?"

Looking around, the small man looked for evidence of what had happened to the computer. Had it been hit by a stray round? It didn't look like it. On careful checking of the box he found the process cube stolen by Mr Deitel had been removed; no wonder the AI was no longer there. The other junk didn't seem to give any other clues. There were empty food cartons, boxes that held computer parts and literature. There were boxes for speakers, expensive memory chips, crude nano-bots and a C-Gen power supply. A diary sat on the floor, well parts of it did. It seemed to have been hit in the fire fight - a lot of use that would be! Oh well, this was a write-off, the man had obviously destroyed the rogue AI and parts when he got scared and now the clean-up could be completed. He moved towards the door.

"Burn it, clean house," he said as he left the room.

Paul Taylor, 25/07/01

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