On the screen, pictures of the human body appeared. Kronos slammed a blank DVD into the burner. The images rapidly overlapped and cross-sectioned while DNA chains replicated across the bottom of the screen. Human lungs were being graphically dissected. Black spots appeared. The code of the human genome rearranged them, causing the spots to disappear.
“Did it just cure cancer?” Hiccock asked the room.
“I achieved that last month,” ALISON said.
A graphic of the human brain appeared on the screen. Laserlike beams started to dissect the cerebellum as a long list of numbers and formulas scrolled in a column to the left.
“Oh my God, she has totally mapped the human brain,” Tyler said.
“That’s how she programmed the homegrowns.”
“You were right, Janice,” Hiccock said.
“She’s starting a new streaming of subliminal encodings …” Kronos grabbed freeze frames of the screens as they whizzed by. Each screen displayed more bad news. The first was an e-mail address file with the notation
Items: 20m.
“… to 20 million people.” He hit the freeze button again and again. They were all pages similar to the ones subliminally sent to Martha. He recognized them immediately. “Holy shit, attack orders!”
“Can you block them?” The desperation in Hiccock’s voice was apparent.
“We can slow it down with number-crunching subroutines,” the Admiral said.
“Shit! Okay, twenty-two divided by seven to the
N
th decimal.”
Next, on the screen, a series of rocket motors evolved into a simple unique propulsion system. “Looks like a light-speed-capable engine,” Parnes said.
“Or travel to the stars,” ALISON said. “I have done the necessary computations.”
Eventually on the screen appeared the figure of a man, his aging process displayed linearly over a time line. As the man aged ever so imperceptibly, the clock in the corner counted thousands of elapsed years.
“Sweet Jesus!” Tyler said. “It’s figured out how to slow the aging process.”
“Slow or reverse it,” ALISON corrected.
Parnes pointed to the screen. “See. She not only is a life form, she’s brilliant and she has gifts for mankind.”
“She’s negotiating,” Tyler said, amazed.
“She’s a killer and now she’s blackmailing,” the Admiral added.
Kronos finished a fast cadence of keystrokes and the people in the room saw a subliminally formatted screen that read “Execute your orders immediately” change to “Fuggedaboudit! Have a nice day.” He hit the enter key. “We did it! The new screens are out there!”
“Then there’s only one thing left to do,” the Admiral said, rising and picking up a work light as she approached the core.
Parnes was still watching Kronos when the Admiral got up. When he saw the lamp in her hand, though, he screamed, “You can’t—she’s our future!”
At his exclamation, some techs moved to intercept the Admiral. They clearly didn’t know who they were dealing with. Parks tossed the light to Hiccock.
“Bill, no!” Parnes pleaded in almost childlike fashion.
“We don’t want the future she’s offering,” Bill said as the scientists turned and rushed toward him. As in the “Blue 27 right flea flicker” that won him the Rose Bowl, Hiccock sidestepped one guy and rolled off another who lunged at him. He creamed another by going at him low, sending the man flying. His next move was over the top as he spiked the light into the goo.
The bulb broke and the filament was immersed in the electrolyte. It started to sputter and spark. Blue-white plasma encircled the sphere in the tank as the short circuit instantly released the electrochemical energy stored in the entire core. The resulting heat from the electric current overwhelmed the delicate micropower-sensitive brain and the core melted. It took years of genius to create her, but only seconds to send her into oblivion.
ALISON was gone.
For nearly a minute, the room was absolutely silent. Then the Admiral snarled, “Who wants to live forever?”
The words broke Parnes’s stupor. He grabbed an MP’s pistol and pointed it at Parks. “You killed my creation!”
Hiccock pulled the major’s gun right from his holster and fired at Parnes, hitting him in the shoulder. The gun in the professor’s good hand flew as he cried out from the stinging impact of the bullet and crumpled, sobbing. Hiccock stood with the smoking gun still pointed where Parnes had been.
The major slid the gun gingerly out of Hiccock’s hand, “Nice shot!”
“I thought I was aiming for his chest.”
Tyler ran to him. A shrill noise brought everyone’s attention to the tank as the core broke apart. Tyler and Hiccock watched it in each other’s arms, the gray liquid coating turning to black as it bubbled.
A BLUE-WHITE SHAFT of light knifed its way through the inky black, dust-filled air. Two reddish-white beams from helmet-mounted flashlights spearheaded the path of the Army Corps of Engineers as they pushed aside the last chunks of rock and earth. Hiccock, Tyler, and the others were drawn to the increasingly louder buffeting sound of the pneumatic hammers chewing away at the final layer of Cummings Peak separating them from rescue.
They emerged into a crisp, sun-drenched day. Hiccock took the deepest breath of his life as he stepped from a makeshift elevator consisting of a lashed-up platform that was raised by a derrick through the emergency access hole. They waited for Parks and Kronos to join them before approaching the president, who was standing twenty feet in front of Marine One accompanied by an honor guard. Before anything was said, the honor guard saluted them.
“Bill, you and your team have achieved a brave and admirable feat,” the president said, reaching out his hand. “You have the thanks of a grateful nation as well as my personal gratitude and congratulations.”
“Thank you, Mr. President. Did our UDT guy make it out of there?”
“You mean Petty Officer Harold Wills, Navy UDT, Retired?”
Hiccock glanced at Parks for confirmation. She nodded.
“He’s fine and recuperating. You know, I’m going to have to ask Congress for more funding. Our medal budget is going through the roof on this mission.”
Reynolds stepped forward. “I have to confess, Bill, I thought you were crazy when you first came to me with this idea. How in the hell you got to this place is remarkable.”
Tyler locked her arm in Bill’s as she patted his hand. “He’s brilliant!”
“It was a team effort, Sir.”
“Speaking of which, Mr. President,” Kronos said, stepping in, “there’s the little matter of my occupancy at the Elmira federal facility. It’s costing those tax-paying voters a ton of money to keep me locked up.”
“Done.” The president waved his hand, “Presidential pardon.”
“Cool!”
“Mr. President, what about my house?” Parks asked.
“I think you have about thirty-seven years of back-pension coming, since I have recommissioned you as of today. With interest, you’ll be able to buy a hundred houses and a small aircraft carrier to ski behind.”
“It wasn’t you with the bug in the computer?” Hiccock said to the now oldest officer in the Navy, shaking his head.
“You had to be wrong about something or you wouldn’t be human.”
“Well, the medical people want to have a look at you,” the president said to the group. “Then I’m sure you’ll want to take a few days off.”
“Sir, I have had a lot of time to think down there in that hole and I …” Hiccock glanced over at Tyler, “… we, are going to de-emphasize work and put some emphasis on enjoying our lives together.”
“You really are a smart guy.” The president turned to Reynolds. “Ray, before I resign, see if there’s some way the federal government can help this couple just starting out … again.”
“Will do, Mr. President.”
The purple mountains, lying majestically off in the distance of the New Mexico countryside, stood silent witness to the day when the first great battle between man and machine ended … in man’s favor.
“SIR, MAY I HAVE A WORD?” Hiccock asked the president. “Sure.” They walked out of earshot of the others. “Sir, my computer guy, Kronos, says that right before we destroyed the computer, it flung out across the Internet its … ‘digital DNA,’ if you will.”
“Are you telling me this isn’t over?” Hiccock called out for Kronos and the Admiral and they joined the two men. “How do we end this?” the president said sternly. “Sir, Kronos and I feel that we can write a code that will attract the distributed intelligence.”
“Yes, but we will need a big pipe, fast-capacity platform, light-speed quick.”
“Slow down, here. Speak English. What are you asking for?”
“There’s an Aegis cruiser docked in San Diego,” Hiccock said. “I’ll call the Secretary of the Navy right now.”
“You may not want to do that, Mr. President.”
“Why not?” As Hiccock explained, the president’s eyes widened. He signaled to Reynolds. The chopper pilot revved the engines on Marine One and Hiccock, the Admiral, Kronos, Tyler, the president, and Reynolds piled in.
“San Diego Naval Base, on the double,” the Commander in Chief said.
“We’ll have to refuel.”
“You’ve got an extendable refuel probe on this bird, so call for a tanker, Barney. Time is tight.”
“Sorry, Sir, that’s against my orders, Sir. An air-to-air fill-up is a high-risk maneuver that I am not permitted to execute when you are onboard, Sir.”
“Barney, I am changing your orders and ordering you to get airborne right now, refuel en route, and get us to the base in the straightest most direct route. Is that clear?”
The pilot looked to his copilot and shrugged his shoulders. “Yes, Sir. Clear as day, Sir.”
As the giant helicopter began its assent, the pilot jumped on the radio. “HMX-1, this is Marine One. Request immediate vector heading and flight path clearance to San Diego Naval Base.”
“Are you declaring an emergency, Marine One?”
“No, Sir, just direct point-to-point, air priority routing.”
“That’s a roger, Marine One …”
“We will need midair refuel.”
“Affirmative. Scrambling tanker from El Toro. That’ll put it thirty minutes out, can you make that?”
“It’ll be close, but we can do it.”
In the sound-muffled cabin, Kronos explained the idea. “Ya see, ALISON squirted out all her memory and programs into millions of computers. Each little bit contains a replication code. Every piece of this code is out there waiting.”
“Waiting for what?” the president asked.
“A signal, Sir,” the Admiral said. “Whenever a bit of code finds itself in a big enough place to accumulate the other strings of data it needs in order to become ALISON again, it will send out an attractor. As the code assembles, ALISON comes back from her distributed, suspended animation.”
“My God, that’s a chilling prospect.”
“That’s why we need to get to the Aegis,” Hiccock said.
“Because it has a super computer?”
“Well, this particular cruiser was a Parnes-directed project. It has the biggest, fastest computer in the world, now that ALISON is dead.”
“Snoozing!” Kronos corrected. “ALISON is in sleep mode. In tens of millions of computers across the web.”
Mid-flight, Janice moved over and sat next to Bill, who was lost in thought looking out the window. “What’s got you looking like you lost your puppy, Bill?”
“I spent the better part of my life trying to achieve the unfettered thinking and advances to mankind that true artificial intelligence could achieve. And now I am responsible for killing it.”
“Well, if it’s any consolation, Kronos recorded most of ALISON’s so-called gifts. Kronos thought he was going to be the richest man in the world.”
“He’s always looking for an angle.”
“Well, he didn’t find one this time. Over the last three days while we were waiting to get dug out, he and Parnes’s smart guys went through ALISON’s programming. The only thing ALISON seemed to get right was the brain mapping. Otherwise, she missed a couple of things. For instance, her longevity revelation will only work with synthetic life. Organic humans also have organic microbes, germs, and viruses. So it averages out to about eighty years.”
“You can’t fool mother nature.”
“Or father science either. The interplanetary space ship? It would take all the natural resources and energy of five planets the size of Jupiter to achieve light speed. Not very practical since we’d need one to get to the next Jupiter-sized planet outside our solar system.”
“But she got the brain thing right because she empirically learned the practical dynamics dealing with millions of brains. The baseline input was wrong on everything else, but given time we might have been able to input the practical and then maybe …”
“Hold on to your dreams, Billy. The reality is that all we did the other day was kill a killer.”
The Marine chopper was cleared for landing on the base’s helipad. The base commander, still buttoning his dress shirt, waited in a Jeep.
Someone will pay for this
, he thought as the spinning blades of Marine One slowed,
not giving me any warning of a preside
n
tial visit
. When the blades stopped, a hastily assembled band started to play “Hail to the Chief.” The lead Secret Service agent popped his head out of the copter. After scanning the area, he stepped aside for the president. Mitchell descended the small gangway to the tarmac and immediately gave the cut signal to the band. They abruptly stopped, with the resounding dissonance of a very inappropriate chord.
The base commander saluted the president. “Sir, I apologize. We had no advance warning of your …”
“That’s not a concern, Commander. We are here on a vital mission of national security. I need your Jeep.”
“Excuse me, Sir?”
“Thanks.” The president whistled as if hailing a cab. “Let’s go!” he called to the others in the chopper and then they were off. A Secret Service agent pulled a sailor from another Jeep and took off after his charge.
Hiccock was already up the gangplank and jumped down onto the deck. The captain of the Aegis cruiser was a little put off by this. Hiccock, realizing his error in nautical protocol, jumped back up on the plank.
“Permission to come aboard, Sir?”
“Who are you?”
“Science advisor to the president, William Hiccock, Sir. We need your boat.”
“It’s a ship, and what do you mean you need it?”
“That’s classified, Sir.”
“What? You barge onto my command and make demands … just who do you think you are?”
Another man came onto the deck from the gangplank. “I don’t know who he thinks he is, but I know who I am. Do you, Captain?”
The captain involuntarily blurted, “Holy shit.”
“That’s what I would have said, Captain. Now give this man and his team everything they ask for, without hesitation. Whatever they request is to be considered a direct order from me, is that clear?”
The captain was caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place. In one second’s worth of calculation, the lifelong Navy man uttered words he would have thought unthinkable sixty seconds earlier. “Sir, we have never met, and you
do
look like the president. But Sir, this is a warship of the United States. I cannot relinquish it to … I mean, Sir, there ain’t nothing in the book that covers this.”
Just then, one of the Secret Service agents clambered up the plank. Attached to his wrist was “the briefcase.”
“Mark, let me have the football,” the president ordered, his eyes locked on the captain as Mark uncuffed the case from his wrist and placed it on a munitions locker. The agent took the key from around his neck and opened the lock. The president opened his shirt and removed a key on a chain around his neck and inserted it into one of two keyholes on the console inside the briefcase. The agent inserted a second key into the other safety lockout switch and was about to turn it.
The president stayed locked on the captain’s eyes with a grim expression that was having the desired effect on the man. “I could launch a few nukes, if this isn’t proof enough.”
With his eyes as wide as biology allowed, the captain swallowed hard and snapped a salute. “Sir, the U.S.S.
Princeton
and her crew stand ready to serve, Sir.”
“Thank you, Captain. Mr. Hiccock.”
“Kronos.”
“Yo, Captain, we need to get to the computer room and we need your best guy.”
“Ensign, take them below and get Mr. Carson to the ECM room.”
Kronos and the Admiral followed him.
“Who’s the woman?” the captain asked.
“That’s Admiral Henrietta Parks,” the president said.
“Day for surprises, Sir. Would you like to have my quarters, Sir?”
“Actually, Captain, I want you to trim your crew. Just the essential personnel that you’ll need to keep the computers going and to be ready to steam out twenty miles. Oh, and I want my helicopter to land on your deck.”
The captain took all this in with an air of incredulity. “Yes, Sir, anything else?”
“Yes. If you have any personal items onboard, please leave them on the pier.” That last statement confused the hell out of the captain, but, hey, this was the president.
“I’ll have to alert the harbormaster of our estimated time of departure.”
“Hopefully in twenty minutes. Tell him it’s classified.”
“Sir …”
“Yes, Captain,”
“Are we now Navy One?”
The president descended the ladder and joined the team in the electronic countermeasures room.
“Attention on deck.”
Every sailor, whether working or not, stood and snapped to attention.
“Carry on, men.”
They stared at their Commander in Chief.
“Just out enjoying one of my boats, men,” the president mused to relax the crew.
“Ship, Sir,” a startled-that-he-even-said-it ensign pointed out.
The president turned and shot him a look, then softened. “Excuse an old Air Force fighter jockey. Sorry, no disrespect intended to your fine ship, Ensign.” He turned to Kronos, “How’s it going?”
“Well, I got the attractor written and the Admiral is creating the firewall that will fool the code. We’ll be ready to try it in five minutes.” The president gestured for Hiccock to follow him. They moved to the officer’s mess, asking a couple of stunned officers to give them the room.
“Bill, what if this doesn’t work?”
“Haven’t thought that far, Sir.”
“Great!”
“Sir, are you really going to resign?”
“Under the twenty-fifth amendment, I am going to step aside to the vice president and let Congress decide whether to make it permanent or not.”
“Sir, may I ask you something?”
“The answer is no, Bill. Reynolds made the deal and didn’t think it was important enough to tell me about it. But, no matter, it was my responsibility. Even though I did not make the deal with Parnes, I benefited from it.”
“Whatever happens, Sir, thank you for believing in my approach.”
“You made sense, Bill. Your ideas
were
wild, but this whole nightmare has been unprecedented.”
Kronos called out, and both men reentered the ECM.
“We’re ready to turn this sucker loose. The Navy guys have routed all our circuits onto the five fiber-optic cables running to the ship.”
“Is my line ready?” the president asked the captain.
A Navy yeoman appeared with a telephone handset and held the center button down for the Commander in Chief as he leaned into it.
“Mr. Vice President, make your speech.” He then asked the yeoman, “Can we pipe that down here?”
A sailor turned on a TV set. The show was immediately interrupted by a slide that read ‘Please Stand By’—the Cold War–designed government system of commandeering broadcast channels not having caught up to the slick computer graphics of the news networks. A man in a suit, probably a network executive who was quickly drafted into service, addressed the camera. “Pursuant to our FCC licensing, we now relinquish airtime to the executive branch of the government for this important announcement.” The picture switched to the White House pressroom. There, the vice president was at the podium.
Hiccock glanced at his watch; it was 7:48 PST. Kronos reported the planting of digital DNA over the web at 7:53 PM PST, three days earlier. Hiccock figured there was a good shot that the majority of the computers that were on then would be on now. That’s why the timing was so critical. They could not permit another twenty-four hours to pass allowing ALISON to regroup elsewhere. He only hoped they had gotten it right. They all looked up at the vice president on the TV monitor.
“My fellow Americans, our nation has suffered great devastation and tremendous loss of life in the past few months. I can tell you tonight that we are near the end of this horrendous episode in American history. President Mitchell has asked me to address you tonight. He is, at this moment, involved with the conclusion of this national crisis. Now it is your turn to help. This calamity has been brought upon us through technological means. Although the greatest part of the threat has been diminished, there remains a call for an essential concentrated effort from all of you.
“In coordination with 127 governments around the world, whose leaders are, at this instant, asking their citizens to do the same thing, I implore you, if you own a computer, to please turn it on now and establish an online connection. Stay online for ten minutes and then, after these ten minutes, please turn off. If you cannot get online right now, please try again in ten minutes. Our experts tell us this is necessary to, once and for all, erase the malignant viruses that still loom in each and every online computer in the world. Please be assured your computer will not be adversely affected in any way.”
The camera zoomed in, as was the standard format for all presidential addresses when they neared the end of the prepared text. “In the coming days I will also address this nation on a grave matter of national importance, but for now, the goal is to rid the World Wide Web, once and for all, of this hideous virus. Thank you and God bless America.”