Shadowmark (The Shadowmark Trilogy Book 1) (4 page)

Nash took his tablet from Carter and stood. “It’ll all be clear once we arrive. We’re leaving at 1900 hours. Corporal Schmidt is going to stay with you from now on. If you need anything, ask him.”
 

Schmidt nodded in acknowledgement. “I’m also in charge of getting any supplies you need. Is this everything you brought?” He looked down at the bags scattered around the room. Lincoln hadn’t gone home to pack, so he had nothing but his messenger bag, jacket, and the clothes he was wearing.
 

“Yes,” said Carter.

“I’ll secure extra gear for you.” Schmidt stood. His wiry body barely filled the uniform he wore. He couldn’t have been more than twenty, Lincoln thought. Just a kid. Something about that fact irritated Lincoln. Like his team wasn’t being taken seriously.
Stuffed in a tiny room, no sleep, no information, and they put a kid in charge of us.
 

Halston picked up the maps from the table and stuffed them back in the envelope.
 

“Can’t we study those?” asked Alvarez.

Halston hesitated. Nash nodded, and Halston tossed the envelope back onto the table. The two men walked out, closing the door behind them. Schmidt took inventory of their things and made a list on a napkin. Then he left, too. Nelson opened his laptop and began typing again. Unable to focus on anything, Lincoln put his head in his hands and closed his eyes.
 

He began to doze again, lulled by the shuffling of papers as Alvarez pulled the maps out of the envelope, Nelson’s rhythmic typing, and Carter’s low voice as the kid came back in to ask a question.

Lincoln’s phone buzzed. He sat up quickly, reaching for the device clipped to his belt. The text was from Cummings:

Your sister on flight to Atlanta, arriving 5 a.m. I told her you would meet her there.

Lincoln tried to focus. He must have misread the text. He read it over again until he was certain of the message. Instead of texting back, he called Cummings to speak to him directly. Why would Cummings tell Mina that Lincoln was going to Atlanta when the team had just found out they were going to West Virginia? He must have made a mistake.

The call went straight to voicemail. Lincoln tried three more times with the same result. He typed a pointed text message and sent it. Then he sent an email to Mina, explaining that he wouldn’t be in Atlanta.
 

Mina would be safer in the States. But why did Cummings lie about Lincoln’s whereabouts? Lincoln didn’t worry about Mina being stranded—she could navigate airports and bus stations better than he could. But the unnecessary deception irritated him.

Awake now, he rose to go to the restroom down the hall. At the sink, he splashed cold water on his face, wishing they had been provided a place to shower. When he walked out, the stark hallway was quiet, and Lincoln walked up and down a few times to clear his head. Most of the people on this floor seemed to have left. Most of the offices were dark. Odd, thought Lincoln, since they were in a panic only a few hours ago.
 

On his third turn down the hallway, he recognized Halston stepping off the elevator at the other end, phone pressed to his ear, eyes darting down the hall. Lincoln halted, wondering if he should be walking around without an escort. But Halston ignored him and opened a door by the elevator. Lincoln turned and walked back to the conference room. When he entered, Schmidt was sitting at the table, talking to Carter.

“You can really do that with robots?” Schmidt was asking.

“We’re trying.”

“You want to send robots into space instead of people?”

“Technically, we already have robots in space. NASA launched Robonaut 2 to the ISS in 2011.”

“What does Robonaut do?”

“It performs mundane or dangerous tasks. And they have plans to further the program.”
 

“So why don’t you just work with NASA?”

Lincoln chuckled as he returned to his seat. “Because our programs are better.”

Nelson glanced at Lincoln and said, “Lincoln wants NASA to come to us.”

Schmidt’s eyes widened as he turned back to Lincoln.

Lincoln shrugged. “Eventually, a robot will do all kinds of things on a manned mission:
collect samples of foreign matter, determine up-to-the-minute weather conditions, apply first aid to humans
. And our AI is smarter and more advanced than NASA’s. We want to be the ones to put the next generation of genetic programming into space.
”

“We hope,” added Alvarez.

“What’s genetic programming?”

“Basically,” she answered, “it’s all about giving a computer a problem to solve, without telling it how to solve it. The computer uses algorithms to find its own solution. And before you ask, an algorithm is a set of logic instructions programmed into the machine.”

“What can it do?” asked Schmidt.

Carter pulled out another cigarette and smiled. “Anything we want.”

“Like?” asked Schmidt.

Lincoln sighed. He was tired of the kid’s questions. “Our robots will act like humans, and eventually look like them, decades before anyone expected them to.”

“Sounds like something out of a movie,” said Schmidt.

Lincoln smiled. The comparison didn’t bother him.
 

When Lincoln had met Carter ten years earlier, Carter had just left a lucrative civilian military position in which he had designed a robot interface for dangerous fighting zones, to be used specifically in urban warfare or hostage rescue situations. Lured by the idea of reducing human casualties, Carter had contracted with the Department of Defense on the project. His system exceeded their expectations: a robot that could make independent decisions and calculate the likelihood of hostilities to within one one-thousandth of a percent. Thrilled, the DoD envisioned other applications for the interface, including within civilian police forces on American soil. When he learned of their intentions, Carter worried his system would shift from protecting troops in combat to replacing peacekeepers in cities, and he walked out on the entire job.

About the same time, Lincoln was finishing his graduate work at MIT, and he teamed up with Carter, who was more than ready to work at a small private company. Soon after, they recruited Alvarez and Nelson with the idea of putting artificial intelligence into space.
 

“And what kind of program are you writing now?” asked Schmidt.

“It’s very similar,” said Carter. “And actually simpler, because right now the program we are working on is for one purpose only. Instead of providing general support, it will be used to communicate with the aliens. It’s based on work I did a few years ago.”

“As soon as we find out how they communicate,” said Alvarez. “And I don’t think it’s similar at all, Carter.” She drained her coffee cup and looked at Schmidt. “The problem is, we’re writing blind. And until we have real data for input, we’re just sitting in front of a bunch of useless algorithms. Carter’s program was written for humans, and we have no way of knowing if our AI can work with an unknown life form. Not until it’s tested. All our theories are just that—theories.”

Lincoln nodded. Two years ago, when Interface Labs began turning heads with their innovative work, Lincoln had received a call from the Department of Defense. At first he didn’t believe who he was talking to, and spent several days verifying the identity of the caller, Paul Cummings. Cummings wanted Interface Labs to sit on an advisory panel regarding cross-species communications, specifically in the event of contact with alien intelligence. Because of Carter’s background and the lab’s recent successes in artificial intelligence, the DoD wanted Interface to present several scenarios, hinting at further contracts in the future if Cummings liked what the lab provided.

After consulting with Carter, who gave in with some persuasion, Lincoln agreed to update certain DoD files from an outdated program initiated in the fifties: ARCHIE. The work was all hypothetical, of course, and Lincoln’s team had more than a few laughs over it as they wrote computer models to determine various possible means of communication. They did their job and collected the fee without the expectation that their models would be used for anything other than simulation. Lincoln hadn’t heard from the DoD in over a year until Cummings had called him last night. That seemed like a lifetime ago now.
 

Lincoln checked his watch again: 5:00 p.m. An entire day wasted. He drummed his fingers on the table.

Nelson stopped typing and closed his laptop. “I wonder what they want,” he said. “Why are they here?”

Carter scratched his whiskers. “How can we possibly know? For all we know, the towers don’t have anything in them.”

“Maybe the towers
are
the aliens,” added Lincoln, smiling. “Maybe they have different senses from us, and there’s no way for us to communicate with them.”

“What are they doing here, though?” asked Nelson.

“Research?” asked Alvarez. “Maybe they’re explorers, here to observe.”

“Right,” said Nelson. “Here to observe every major city on the planet. And it’s just coincidence they picked the most powerful cities to land in.”

Lincoln drifted over to a news site and browsed the latest updates. “It’s not public yet that they are actually aliens, but people are getting out of the cities anyway. Listen to this: Interstates and highways are clogged. People are driving across medians to go the wrong way down the highways. They’ve already declared martial law in the affected cities. The military is surrounding all the towers.”

“Why haven’t they evacuated those cities already?” asked Nelson.

“Probably don’t want to start a panic,” said Carter, his wry laugh prompting Schmidt out of his silence.

“They will evacuate,” Schmidt said. “I heard the colonel say something about it.”

“Is the president going to tell people they’re aliens?” asked Lincoln.

Schmidt shook his head. “Don’t know.”

Lincoln thought of Mina landing in Atlanta. Wasn’t there a tower there? He clicked through several more news sites to double-check. Yes—a tower had landed not too far from the Atlanta airport. He sent Mina another email, this one telling her to get out of the city as quickly as possible.
 

Lincoln looked at Alvarez, who often spoke of her mother in California, and Nelson, who rarely visited his father, who lived down the street from him in Boston. Carter coughed, his hand automatically going for a cigarette from the pack in his shirt pocket. When he wasn’t positing theories about robot communication, Carter whiled away his time at a favorite fishing hole, which he kept secret. Thrice divorced, Carter had gotten remarried to his research and claimed fishing helped him work out ideas. He didn’t have any family to contact that Lincoln knew of.

Mina’s godparents, Karen and Tom, were probably worried about Mina. Lincoln didn’t have their numbers, so he checked his Facebook page and sent them a brief message telling them she was on her way home. His newsfeed updated constantly with rumors and footage of the towers. He spent a few minutes there, sucked into the hole of clicking on one story after another, each one more outlandish than the next. Lincoln’s favorite theory was that the towers contained demons from hell, sent to punish the Earth for its wickedness. The news article was accompanied by some very talented artwork. Aware of the time he was wasting, Lincoln logged out and returned to work.

When Halston eventually came to retrieve them, Lincoln had never been more excited to leave a room. Finally they were going somewhere. Hopefully, somewhere ended in a warm bed in a dark room. The team quickly packed up and followed the lieutenant to the elevators. He pushed the down button.

“Are Cummings’s people here yet?” asked Lincoln.

“No. We’re leaving without them.”

“How will they get to West Virginia?”

“Cummings will have to arrange that.”

Lincoln glanced at Alvarez, who hefted a large backpack onto her shoulders. She shot him a look that clearly said she was too tired to question what the team would do in West Virginia without experts there to guide them.

Outside the office building, Halston directed them to a white SUV, the setting sun reflecting off its sides. Lincoln squinted. Alvarez pulled her jacket close about her in the cool spring air. Carter lit a cigarette on the short walk to the SUV, then put it out and stuck the unused portion back in his shirt pocket. The team stuffed their belongings in the trunk and piled in, with Schmidt driving and Halston riding up front.

They rode along miles of darkening road, past offices, warehouses, barracks. Finally they stopped in front of a long line of military vehicles of various makes—Humvees, flatbed trucks loaded down, and others Lincoln didn’t recognize.

They exited the SUV and followed Halston to the open door of a Humvee where Nash stood, signing something on a tablet. He handed it to an aid standing next to him. “Ready?” he asked as the team approached.

“Where is Cummings?” asked Carter.

“His people will meet us there. In the meantime, my orders are to get you and this unit in place before they get there. I’d like to get a team into the facility and have it operational when they arrive, so we can get right to work.”

“We don’t even know what this place is,” said Lincoln, his lack of sleep finally overtaking his judgment. “What are we making
operational
?”

Nash looked at Lincoln coolly. “Don’t worry, Surrey. I’m sure we’ll find something there for you to do.”

“Hope so,” said Lincoln.

The team was assigned to ride together in a Humvee with Schmidt. Nelson climbed in and found a port to charge his laptop. He plugged into it and opened the computer. Before Carter and Alvarez had climbed in, he was typing again, his mousy hair falling down over his forehead as he worked.
 
Lincoln settled himself into the uncomfortable seat and lay his head back immediately, using his jacket as a pillow.