Rain hammered the abandoned military base hard enough to make the rusted vehicles shine.
What had once been a place built for war now looked like a junkyard nobody wanted to claim. Missile carriers sagged into weeds. Concrete bunkers sweated through cracked walls. Orange warning tape snapped in the wind around the old Arko Science Building, repeating the same words in black block letters: RADIOACTIVE. DANGER. KEEP OUT.
Dr. Fabian Gilden had stopped paying attention to the signs years ago.
He sat hunched over a workbench beneath a pair of magnifying goggles, one thin hand steadying a circuit board while the other worked a soldering gun. The walls around him were covered with the remains of his better years: military commendations, photographs with generals, scientific diagrams, and newspaper clippings about the cyborg insects that had escaped into the world.
A holographic newscaster appeared above the desk.
“Next on the Pentagon Channel, the Joint Chiefs honor artificial-intelligence pioneer Dr. Fabian Gilden—”
“Jocko!”
The hologram vanished.
A fat white laboratory rat waddled from behind a stack of equipment with a piece of government cheese in one paw and a silver flask in the other.
“Aren’t we irritable today?” Jocko asked in the affected British accent Gilden had programmed into him decades ago and had regretted ever since.
“They cut the funding.”
Jocko stopped chewing.
Gilden pulled off his goggles. At seventy, he had the exhausted face of a man who believed the world had stolen something from him. “After everything I gave them, they call the work obsolete. You, apparently, are a mature technology.”
Jocko raised his flask. “To maturity.”
Gilden stared at him.
Jocko drank anyway.
A spark jumped from the circuit board. Gilden cursed. Jocko dove behind a beaker, then emerged wearing an old gas mask and blasting the bench with a fire extinguisher.
When the white cloud settled, Gilden sat covered in foam.
“You drunken rodent.”
“I thought it was the big one.”
For several seconds they glared at each other. Then Jocko wandered to the government cheese, took a bite and grimaced.
“This is dreadful.”
Gilden laughed.
That was the problem with Jocko. He had been Gilden’s first great success, and therefore the one creature in the world who could irritate him without being dismantled.
“You’ll get your Gouda,” Gilden said. “But first we get rich.”
He pointed toward a bank of monitors. One showed an abandoned warehouse beyond the base. A faded sign across its roof read CASH FOR GOLD.
Below it, almost invisible to human eyes, a civilization had grown inside the wreckage of the old military zone.
Hood County.
Gilden leaned closer to the screen.
“Our little insect friends are sitting beside a fortune they consider worthless.”
Jocko squinted. “And you intend to relieve them of it.”
“I intend to introduce them to progress.”
“That sounds more respectable.”
“It should. I practiced it.”
Gilden turned back to the workbench. Beneath the microscope lay a tiny cyborg bug wired into two miniature screens. One played old westerns. The other played hip-hop videos.
Gilden smiled.
“Meet progress.”