Excerpt from the novel Infiltrator by S.M. Stirling

NEW YORK CITY: THE PRESENT

     Ron Labane was annoyed, glowering out his office window, fiddling with a cup of organic, peasant-grown, but cold coffee. It had been days and he’d yet to receive the courtesy of a reply from the CEO of Cyberdyne.
     He chewed hist lower lip as he worked on his press release about Cyberdyne’s precious secret project. His followers would just eat this up. Secret military projects made the damn fools cream in their jeans. And since this would be just the first of many such facilities, a lot of precious manufacturing jobs would be going bye-bye forever instead of just going south. That should shake up the complacent, secure middle class. It also meant the more militant Luddites would get on board and stay the course until the issue was resolved.
     He had a meeting arranged tomorrow with a group who would make the fab four look like the losers they were. This news would be at the top of the agenda. He’d received more information on the project, obviously from someone high up in the inner circle at Cyberdyne. Names, dates, places, logistics, even what had to be a general overview of the whole project.
     Nice to have friends in high places, he thought smugly.
     He read over what he had written.

Profit is good. Isn’t it? Profit drives the economy; it’s what provides jobs that allow us to have homes and buy the things that make life comfortable.
     Of course, sometimes the profit motive can override common sense, or even common decency. As when medical care is denied to a patient because it might cost too much. Yes, it would save the patient, but… that’s not really what health insurance is all about, is it? Health insurance is about profit, about dividends paid to investors. We all just think it’s about our personal health.
     What about when profit is so important that jobs are eliminated by the thousands?
     What about a factor that’s totally automated? A place that manufactures the machines it needs, repairs those machines, and sets them in motion twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No humans needed.
     No such place exists, you say. Except perhaps in the daydreams of engineers.
     Oh, really? Perhaps you should ask Cyberdyne Corporation about their plans to build such a facility for the military. Yes, it’s a real project and it’s due to be built…

     To find the date Ron consulted the secret files he’d been sent. It was wonderful to stick it to a major corporation and the military at the same time.
     He and his people would hit them seven ways to Sunday. Protest, lawsuits, and sabotage, maybe even a little bribery in the right places, maybe a few carefully placed bombs. Ron felt no guilt about moving to the next level. This thing was evil, he knew it, and it had to be stopped at any cost.
     Humanity against the machines, he thought, and their implacable masters!