Page 77 of Wild Sentinel

She caught him up on recent events.

“You shouldn’t have come here.”

"Well, we're here now, and we need to stop Sentinel."

Adam’s face tightened. "I told you to stay as far away from me as possible."

"Let's just do it. Let's take it down.”

“I need more time.”

Sometimes it could be hard to destroy your baby. I'm sure the two had worked so hard on the project.

"The longer we stand here bickering, the more opportunities we have to be seen," I said.

After a beat, Adam lowered his weapon and continued walking through the valley.

I shared a look with the others, then we followed.

Adam continued on.

He finally stopped, reached to the ground, and pulled up a hatch that had been camouflaged to look like rocky earth. If you didn't know it was there, you would never see it.

Steps led down to an underground bunker embedded in the hillside.

We followed him down. Adam clicked on a flashlight. I pulled the hatch shut behind us and secured it. Adam used an old-fashioned key to unlock the door. No keypad. Nothing that could be tampered with.

He pushed open the heavy composite steel door, and we followed him into the bunker. Once inside, he closed the door behind us with a clank. He twisted the wheel shut, locking it like a bank vault. Steel pins inserted into the door jamb.

The place was decked out with electronics, computer terminals, and flatscreen displays that showed various camera feeds around the hidden bunker.

"I saw you coming from a mile away," Adam said. "Nobody gets near this place without my knowing about it."

The cameras were all AI-enhanced and tracked motion. With ultrahigh definition and zoom capabilities, they could pick up a tortoise crawling across the desert.

There was a small living area, a flatscreen TV for entertainment, and a hallway that led to bedrooms, a bathroom, and a storage area.

"Nice place you’ve got here," I said. "I know they didn't give you a permit to build out here."

Getting a permit to build anything in the state of California was a nightmare.

Adam gave me a flat look. "This is where I’ll ride out the apocalypse.”

"Apocalypse?”

"Can't you see what's coming?”

"Brooke made it sound pretty dire," I said.

"This is an extinction-level event," Adam said. "Nobody understands what's about to happen."

"Why don’t you tell me?”

Adam exchanged a look with Brooke. “How much do they know?”

“Tell them everything,” she said.

After a hesitation, Adam said, "Sentinel is an autonomous multimodal AI system that gathers all available data—SIGINT, ELINT, satellite, social media, financial markets, telecom, you name it. It uses that to make split-second responses. Sure, we built in manual overrides, human oversight, and failsafes. But every single time we ran the system in a sandboxed environment, the AI changed the code.”