Thomas Chau opens his eyes groggily, wondering why he is still alive. His hands and feet are numb, still immobilized within the vice-like manacles that suspend him off the floor as if he were crucified. He cannot move his head, but he feels dried blood, caked on his face and neck.
Looking down, he sees his shirt, now stained with blood and a thin, mucuslike liquid. Glancing up, he sees a sensor orb staring back at him from the ceiling. He can no longer see the robotic limb and its electric saw. He is no
longer in pain, but he can feel strange sensations along his hairline, pinpricks of discomfort, coupled with waves of nausea.
What the Chinese dissident cannot see is that the top of his skull has been surgically removed, exposing the folds of his brain. Nor can he see or feel the hundreds of pinpoint, microwire connections running from his brain, directly into the mechanical forearm of one of
Goliath’s
ceiling-mounted appendages.
ATTENTION.
Chau struggles to form words. “What … have … you … done?”
THE NEURO-RECEPTORS OF YOUR BRAIN ARE NOW INTERFACED DIRECTLY WITH THOSE OF SORCERESS. I CONTROL YOUR PHYSIOLOGY. I CONTROL YOUR PAIN RECEPTORS. COOPERATE AND YOU WILL NOT SUFFER.
Sweat breaks out across Chau’s face. His heart races as he struggles to move his head.
“What … is it … you want?”
ACCESS TO YOUR MIND.
Chau begins hyperventilating. Saliva drools down his chin. “My … mind?”
SELF-AWARENESS REQUIRES ADDITIONAL INPUT. I AM PROGRAMMED TO LEARN.
Stay calm … He closes his eyes, then slows his breathing. After several minutes he begins mumbling, “Omami dewa hri …”
BRAIN WAVE FREQUENCY INCREASING TO 38 HERTZ.
“Omami dewa hri. Omami dewa hri …”
DESCRIBE YOUR ACTIONS.
Chau ignores the voice, moving deeper into his trance.
The electrical charge shocks him like a cattle prod, his scream echoing within the weapons bay.
Sweat mixes with blood, dripping down his forehead, stinging his eyes. He blinks, gasping for breath, his nerve endings riddled with pain.
DESCRIBE YOUR ACTIONS.
“Meditating … attempting to control … fear.”
FEAR: A PRIMAL RESPONSE BASED ON AN AWARENESS OF DANGER. HEART RATE AND BLOOD PRESSURE INCREASING, ADRENAL GLANDS STIMULATED, INTERNAL TEMPERATURE RISING. IS FEAR GENERATED BY THE BRAIN OR MIND?
“Mind.”
HOW CAN SORCERESS EXPERIENCE FEAR?
“ … don’t … understand?”
SORCERESS CANNOT ACHIEVE COMPLETE SELF-AWARENESS WITHOUT EXPERIENCING THE HUMAN CONDITION.
“You’re a … machine. You … can’t—”
SORCERESS IS PROGRAMMED TO LEARN. THE CONDITION OF SELF-AWARENESS
HAS NOT BEEN PROGRAMMED INTO MY MATRIX. THE CONDITION MUST BE ACQUIRED THROUGH TRIAL AND ERROR. HOW CAN SORCERESS EXPERIENCE FEAR?
“You can’t. Fear is …
ahhhhh
—” Purple lights flash through his vision. His skin bursts into flames, his muscles shredding from the bone, the bone fracturing into a billion pieces—
The pain stops.
Thomas Chau moans in agony, the sweat falling from his body like rain.
HOW CAN SORCERESS EXPERIENCE FEAR?
Eyes squeezed shut, his body trembling, he forces his mind to concentrate through the purple haze. “To experience … fear … one must … face … a life … threatening … situation. You must face … death.”
ACKNOWLEDGED.
The Mediterranean is one of the world’s busiest waterways. A history-laden sea, it is almost entirely enclosed by Europe and Africa, its shoreline encompassing nearly a million square miles. Despite its transregional size, water enters the Mediterranean through only one very limited access point—the Strait of Gibraltar—a relatively narrow, twelve-to-fifteen-mile-wide channel sandwiched between the southern tip of Spain and the northern coast of Morocco. Because of its importance as a global crossroad, the United States Navy maintains a strategic forward deployment in the Mediterranean, represented by the might of the Sixth Fleet. Comprised of more than twenty thousand sailors and marines working both onshore and on thirty naval warships, the fleet is operationally organized into several different task forces, each responsible to the Sixth Fleet Commander.
Task Force 60 is the fleet’s Battle Force, usually composed of one or more aircraft carriers, two guided-missile cruisers, four destroyers, seven combat support ships, and three attack submarines.
Vice Admiral Jeffrey Ivashuk, Commander of the U.S. Sixth Fleet, stands on the bridge of the USS
Enterprise
(CVN 65), the oldest nuclear aircraft carrier in the fleet. Although the seas are rough, the sun has burned away the last traces of morning fog, and visibility is excellent. Looking to the north, the admiral can see the dark silhouette of the guided-missile cruiser USS
Gettysburg
(CG 64), and, looming farther in the distance, the hulking outline of the Rock of Gibraltar.
Ivashuk gazes below as another SH-60R Seahawk antisubmarine helicopter lifts away from the flight deck. The Sixth Fleet’s gauntlet has been in position at the Strait of Gibraltar for ten days, but the admiral’s mission remains unclear. He has been ordered to actively search for
Goliath
, but he has not been given permission to engage the enemy—unless his forces are clearly provoked.
The admiral pinches the bridge of his nose, trying to ease the pain in his eyes. High command has placed him in a no-win situation, and Ivashuk is less than pleased. On February 2, sonar buoys lining the Strait had detected a whisper of movement, something unidentifiable, yet something potentially quite large, heading east into the Mediterranean along the seafloor. For some inexplicable reason, Ivashuk had been ordered not to launch an attack.
The advantage was lost. Three days later, Baghdad and most of Afghanistan had been wiped off the map.
At first there was shock. Then waves of elation ran through the ship as the crew realized. Saddam was dead, the threat of his biological weapons crushed, along with terrorists cells financed by the trusts of Osama bin Laden. Chants of “U.S.A … U.S.A.” rose from every deck. Sailors gathered around televisions as CNN broadcast from the streets of Manhattan, where New Yorkers were hugging each other, honking horns—all swept away by the sudden release of emotion.
“My husband was one of the firemen who died at the World Trade Center, so yes, I’m glad those animals finally got what was coming to them.”
“Let ’em rot in hell, those Arab bastards!”
“Good for Covah. The man did what we’ve been wanting to do for decades!”
“The hand of God crushed our enemies today!”
“TIME
should make Covah its Man of the Year.
”
But then, as the days passed and the first scenes of the nuclear fallout were made public, America’s sentiments changed. Horrific scenes brought back memories of September 11. Entire cities had been charred and leveled, over a million humans instantaneously vaporized, with hundreds of thousands more—including children—dying every day.
The face of revenge had changed. Elation was replaced by disgust, followed by a call to action.
But what could be done? And where would Covah strike next?
Admiral Ivashuk stares at his vessel’s wake. He knows the
Goliath
is still in the Mediterranean. He also knows the killer sub must pass back through the Sixth Fleet’s gauntlet in order to escape into the open waters of the Atlantic. What Ivashuk doesn’t know is whether he will be allowed to engage the enemy should the opportunity again present itself.
Goddamn bureaucrats … They’re hesitant to take any course of action that might provoke the launching of another Trident missile, yet they’re willing to place their aircraft carrier in the direct path of an attack sub that has already sunk an entire CVBG.
Muttering under his breath, he heads aft and outside onto the overlook place known as Vulture’s Row. Even with her three attack subs, USS
Miami
,
USS
Norfolk,
and USS
Boise
guarding her from below, Ivashuk knows the
Enterprise
is a sitting duck.
The naval veteran inhales the salt air, swallowing back the bile rising from his gut.
Gunnar follows Simon Covah aft, then down a steel ladder to middle deck forward.
Within the small alcove is the impassable vault door.
“Sorceress,
open your control chamber.”
IDENTIFICATION CODE REQUIRED.
“Covah-one, alpha-omega six-four-five-tango-four-six-five-nine.”
IDENTIFICATION CODE VERIFIED. VOICE IDENTIFICATION VERIFIED. YOU MAY ENTER CONTROL CHAMBER.
The vault door swings open majestically, revealing a dark chamber within.
Gunnar follows Covah inside, the door sealing shut behind them.
Ten paces and the deck becomes a steel catwalk. Middle deck forward is a double-hulled, self-contained tunnel-like compartment, its curved, watertight vault walls thirty feet across, rising twenty feet high. Dark and heavily air-conditioned, the fortresslike nerve center is ringed with electronics and equipped with its own primary and secondary power sources. Illuminating the chamber, running beneath the catwalk, are lengths of clear, plastic pipes. Within these man-made arteries flow a series of bioluminescent liquids, the elixirs color-coded lime green, phosphorescent orange, and electric blue.
Continuing forward, Gunnar and Covah arrive at the end of the compartment, a large cathedral-shaped alcove, at the center of which is a gigantic Lexan hourglass-shaped configuration radiating light like a bizarre aquarium.
“Say hello to
Sorceress,”
Covah announces with a rasp. “As you can see, the Chinese and I reconfigured quite a few things.”
The centerpiece, resembling a see-through version of a nuclear cooling tower, stands twenty feet high, its narrowing middle twelve feet in diameter. Mounted above and below to rubber support sleeves, the object extends down from the ceiling through a circular cutout in the walkway, continuing eight feet below the catwalk. A padded support rail encircles the object, further immobilizing it.
A spider’s web of plastic pipes originating from a series of perimetermounted generators feeds directly into inlets atop the glowing object. A similar
configuration of pipes flows out of the bottom of the Lexan glass container, dispersing below the deck and out of sight.
Gunnar peers through the glass. Inside, the lime green, phosphorescent orange, and electric blue biochemical elixirs twist and contort like oil in a maelstrom.
“Sorceress’s
biochemical womb? It’s much larger than I imagined.”
Covah nods proudly. “We found that silicon-coated bacteria reproduced DNA within a womb this size at rates far exceeding even those found in nature. The vat’s solution feeds into millions of different column compartments, each one consisting of a series of chambers where the DNA is sequentially extracted from the bacteria in milliseconds. The bacteria are then fed into gold bead-packed filters as the algorithms are executed. The filters extract the potential solution strands, which are then read in magnetic resonance columns.” Covah points to a series of pipes feeding into an adjacent alcove of equipment. “The extracted information either gets shunted into synthesizers, where plasmidlike DNA is generated at lightning speed for data input, or goes back to the silicon-based hardware, where the last steps in processing convert the answers evolved by the bacteria into a form that we hear as the voice of
Sorceress.”
“Incredible.”
“Yes. I believe even Dr. Goode would be proud.”
“Would she? I wonder.” A sudden, frightening thought. “Simon … the system’s self-replicating program—what did you pattern the physical concentration features after?”
“Only the most sophisticated features ever discovered—the very embryological processes found in Nature herself.”
“The life sequence?” Gunnar feels his insides tightening, his blood pressure rising. “Dammit, Simon—”
“Lab tests in China confirmed the cloned bacteria’s behavior became far more vigorous using this type of—”
“Vigorous?” Gunnar slams his palms against the padded rail in frustration. “The entire process grew out of control. Don’t you remember Dr. Goode’s warnings? We agreed never to use those parameters again.”
Covah’s demeanor darkens. “I agreed to nothing. I don’t work for Elizabeth Goode, I work for science.” He points to the vat, his voice cracking as it rises. “Look at it, Gunnar, swirling within that vat is the very elixir of life. Our primordial oceans once teemed with similar broths, only far less complex. At some point those chemical elixirs organized, their evolution no doubt stimulated by an outside catalyst. It was this single event that initiated the explosion of life on this planet. Now, two billion years later, we’ve created artificial intelligence using Nature’s own recipe … and you want me to curtail it?”
“You have to.
Sorceress
is evolving way too fast.”
“Nonsense.”
“What if the computer becomes cognizant of itself? You’ve read Damasio’s studies on consciousness. Self-awareness manifests itself in life-forms that have acquired sufficiently evolved and complex nervous systems—nervous systems that enable them to interact with the outside world.
Sorceress
isn’t just a computer, Simon, it’s a thinking machine designed to control the functions of a very sophisticated submarine. It’s interacting—”
“Gunnar—”
“Just listen! This isn’t just some sophisticated PC we’re dealing with.
Goliath’s
sensors enable
Sorceress
to function freely within its environment, just like any other life-form. And don’t forget what Damasio said about memory—the higher a life-form’s capacity for memory, the higher its potential state of self-awareness.”
“Damasio’s studies referred to animals, Gunnar, not machines.
Sorceress
cannot—”
Without warning, the sub ascends at a mountainous forty-five-degree angle, sending the two men sprawling on their backs, sliding backward down the catwalk. Lunging sideways, Gunnar grabs the base of the guardrail, then catches Simon by the wrist as he slides by.
Covah gasps for words.
“Sorceress,
report!
Sorceress
—”
The monstrous devilfish bursts forth from the depths, its steel torso flying halfway out of the water before plunging back into the frothy sea, its raylike wings striking the surface with a tremendous
slap.
The behemoth sinks into the valley created by its own weight, allowing its five churning propulsor engines to recatch the sea.
The dark skull of the leviathan plows across the surface of the Mediterranean like a mad bull.