The firefighter and the paramedic exchanged a few words, nodded, and then started walking toward the phalanx of cars.

The firefighter started yelling at them. Kyle could make out what he was saying.

“Move the fuck out of the way!” he shouted. “Let’s go! Fuckin’ move or we’ll knock you out of the way!”

Although it looked incredibly silly, there was really nothing silly about it. The cars were designed, of course, to respond to verbal commands. They could hear, they could see, and they could recognize. They knew what a fire truck was. They knew what an ambulance was. And based on what they heard and saw and recognized, they could evaluate. And once they evaluated something, they could decide how to respond.

All within a millionth of a second.

So there was every reason to believe that the Arrivals blocking access to the community center saw these emergency works and even understood what was being asked of them. (Arrivals, and the Gandalfs that Kyle had developed, were also proficient at understanding profanity, as well as an upraised middle finger.)

Even though every Arrival was programmed to recognize only its owner’s voice commands—a feature designed to deter theft—they were also designed to obey instructions from police, firefighters, and the like.

So they should have moved.

Brandon Kyle, however, was not expecting them to.

It was a dandy little virus he’d sent into the network.

Kyle thought of it as a “bizarro” program, the inspiration coming from the Superman comics he read as a kid, and the strange planet known as Bizarro World where everything was an opposite. For starters, the planet was a cube instead of a sphere. In Bizarro World, good was bad and bad was good and up was down and down was up.

Arrival programming was all about safety. Human safety, in particular.

Do. No. Harm. A kind of automotive version of a doctor’s Hippocratic oath. It was encoded into every aspect of an Arrival’s programming.

In some ways, what Kyle had done was quite simple.

He’d eliminated the No.

This was why Brandon Kyle did not expect the Arrivals to move out of the way and allow the fire engine and the ambulance to reach the scene where Lisa Carver, it was very likely, had already bled to death. Blocking their path encouraged harm.

But even Kyle was taken aback by what the Arrivals decided to do.

They attacked.

The powder-blue Arrival in the center position—there were seven to the left of it and seven to the right—suddenly shot forward, aiming for both men. They reacted immediately, each diving in opposite directions. The blue Arrival opted to go after the firefighter, who had bolted to the right, and was now making a beeline back to the fire engine, presumably hoping to grab on to one of the handles on the side and hoist himself up and out of the way.