Daemon

in twenty years. They received financial advice money couldn’t buy. Their medical plan, too, was top-notch. The Daemon took care of its own.
    Voelker turned toward his Haas milling machine. It was busy churning out grooved steel plates, six inches long and an inch wide. He had no idea what they were for. But they had a work order for three hundred copies. Some strategic plan somewhere required them. A plan born in the mind of a dead genius and enacted now, when the time was right. Butright for what? Only the Daemon knew. Certainly no one among the living did.
    Voelker took one of the finished plates and placed it in a laser scanner. He tapped a button and the object was instantly measured at two thousand critical points for accuracy. It was dead-on. It was always dead-on. The Haas knew what it was doing.
    A two-tone chime came in over the loudspeakers. Voelker, Khan, and McCruder looked up at the same time, then at each other. They all knew what it meant. New plans were in the queue.
    Voelker motioned to them.
I got it
. They looked back down and kept working on the Mustang, while Voelker took off his gloves. He moved to a nearby computer workstation.
    A new 3-D plan file was in their company inbox. He noticed from the byte count that it was a big one. He moved it into a central share and then opened it in AutoCAD. It took several seconds, even on his powerful Unix workstation.
    When it was finished loading, he stared for some moments at the wire frame model now rotating in three dimensions on his screen.
Ours is not to wonder why, but to do or …
    What the hell was he looking at? He turned back to the Mustang. ‘Guys, get over here and look at this.’
    Khan wiped his forehead, smudging grease across it. ‘Later, man. This steering column’s a bitch.’
    ‘No. I think you should take a look at this
now
.’
    Khan rolled his eyes dramatically, then tapped forcefully on McCruder’s shoulder.
    ‘
What?
’
    Khan pointed. ‘Goggles says we gotta see the new plans. It’s urgent.’
    ‘Fuck …’ McCruder threw down his wrench with a
clang
, and the two of them strode leisurely toward Voelker’s workstation.
    ‘This had better be good, Kurt.’
    Voelker simply gestured to the screen. Both men wrinkled their brows.
    ‘What the?’
    ‘You have got to be kidding me …’
    Voelker shook his head.
    They exchanged looks. It had always remained unsaid. They knew that some would suffer the Daemon’s wrath. After the events at Sobol’s mansion, the purpose of the AutoM8s could scarcely be a mystery – but they always nursed a hope that perhaps they would be used for transporting critical materials, operatives, or something unimaginably brilliant.
    Voelker sighed and sat on a nearby stool.
    Khan pointed at the screen. ‘What
is
that?’
    McCruder pointed, too. ‘This is serious shit, Kurt.’
    Voelker kept his eyes on the floor. ‘It’s just after-market customization.’
    McCruder laughed. ‘No kidding. That’s not what I mean.’
    Khan was nodding. ‘He’s right, Kurt. This is designed for one thing, and one thing only: killing people.’
    They contemplated this silently. This raised the stakes. They were now clearly producing weaponry. The pleasant fiction was over.
    Khan added, ‘I mean, it’s cool-looking and all, but this is real life – not a fucking computer game.’
    ‘What do we do?’
    Voelker tapped his fingers on the workbench, thinking. ‘I’ve almost got the current order filled. While I finish that we can decide the best course of action.’
    McCruder threw up his hands. ‘Like we have any
choice
, Kurt? If we don’t make these things, our own toys are going to come back to kill us.’
    ‘All right, calm down.’
    Khan gripped his own head. ‘I should have known this was going to happen. It was too perfect.’
    McCruder waved it aside. ‘Let’s stop kidding ourselves. Weall know we’re going to build these things – so why go through the theatrics of feeling bad about it?’ McCruder grabbed a grease pencil and turned to a whiteboard. He started drawing a casualty list with little human stick figures. ‘If we don’t make them, someone else will and people will die –
along
with us. That’s X number of people plus three. If we do make them, then people will die, but
not
us. That’s X number of people plus zero.’ He looked up, vindicated by mathematics. ‘So we take the course that harms the least number of people.’
    Voelker threw a glove at him. ‘That’s fucking