Crucible

by James Rollins

  “Where’s the woman?”

  “Vanished. Her work at the lab gone.”

  “Do you think she was killed? Kidnapped?” Gray pictured the ruins of his home in Takoma Park.

  “Unknown. But from her lab, she had a front-row seat to the attack, even placed a call to emergency services. By the time they reached her lab, it was empty. The current belief is that she’s scared and on the run.”

  And took her work with her.

  Painter pointed to the Greek letter still shining on the monitor. “Maybe it’s just me, but that looks like a call for help.”

  “Like the bat signal,” Kowalski said.

  Painter ignored him. “But I don’t believe it was a call from Mara. Like I said, the young woman had no knowledge of DARPA’s involvement. And even if she did, there was no way she could know about us.”

  Kowalski scratched his head. “Who the hell sent it then?”

  Gray answered, “Mara’s program. Her AI.”

  Painter nodded. “Possibly. At some point, curious about its origin, it might have literally followed the money to DARPA, its indirect creator—and then to us, looking for help from DARPA’s emergency response team.”

  In other words, calling out to one of its parents.

  “Considering the processing power necessary to build a simple AGI,” Painter said, “it could have theoretically accomplished this in seconds. So I had Jason examine our systems. During the minute or so the program was running, something breached our firewalls, ghosting through them without raising an alarm. It lasted less than fifteen seconds.”

  Mara’s AI program.

  Gray realized another disturbing correlation. “The footage of the attack at the library. It was discovered eighteen hours ago . . . the same day we were attacked.”

  “Again, all of this could still be a coincidence,” Painter warned. “I’m still in the midst of following leads.”

  Gray did not need any further convincing.

  “It’s not a coincidence,” he stated firmly. “Someone recognized that symbol and came after us before we could act.”

  Kowalski backed him up. “Makes sense. The best defense is a good offense.”

  Painter’s gaze settled heavily on Gray. “Still, only one person knows the truth.”

  “Kat . . .”

  And she was in a coma.

  4

  December 25, 2:18 A.M. EST

  Washington, D.C.

  Kat floated in darkness.

  She could not say when she woke or if she had even been sleeping. She felt cold but could not shiver. Her throat ached, but she was unable to swallow. Voices reached her but were muffled.

  She focused on the words and recognized the deep bass of her husband, Monk.

  “Careful with her neck,” he scolded someone harshly.

  “We need to shift her to seat the nasogastric tube.”

  Pain exploded inside her head—but she could not even gasp. Something hard snaked through her left nostril. A sneeze worked up from deep inside, but never materialized.

  She tried to force her eyes open.

  It took all her effort.

  As reward, light blazed into her skull. A watery world briefly appeared. Figures worked around her, but it was as if she were peering through a prism. The images were doubled and tripled, hard to make out.

  Then her impossibly heavy eyelids drooped again, cutting off the sight.

  No . . .

  She tried again but failed.

  “She’s scheduled for another CT,” someone said, the voice clearer now.

  “I’m going with her,” Monk demanded.

  She fought to move her arm, her hand, even a finger. To let him know, she was here.

  Monk . . . what’s wrong with me?

  She knew she must be in a hospital.

  But why? What happened?

  Then she remembered. It all came back, as explosively as the blaze of light a moment before. The attack, the masked figures, the fight.

  The girls . . .

  Sprawled on the kitchen floor, bleeding, barely conscious, she had watched helplessly as her daughters were dragged out, each carried in the arms of one of the assailants, their small bodies limp and boneless. A van idled in the driveway, parked at the garage in back, waiting to take the sleeping captives away.

  Then another two figures manhandled Seichan past her, her slack form stretched between them.

  Before vanishing into the night, the one carrying Seichan’s legs glanced back to Kat and called to someone in the backyard. “What about this bitch?”

  Kat could barely see, as darkness closed in from all sides. A shape climbed the back steps to the kitchen door. Framed against the night, the masked figure studied Kat, then came closer, dropping to a knee for a closer look.

  A long blade balanced in a gloved hand.

  Kat waited for her throat to be cut.

  Instead, the leader straightened, turned, and headed for the back door. “Leave her,” the muffled voice said. “We have what we need.”

  “But if she lives—”

  “It will already be too late.”

  Panic at these words battered back the darkness for another breath. One arm stretched toward the door, but she could not stop them.

  My girls . . .

  As she sank away, one certainty had followed her into oblivion.

  Now, locked in another prison, Kat tried to scream this knowledge to the world, to be heard, to warn the others—but she no longer had a voice.

  She pictured the masked leader and despaired.

  I know who you are.

  2:22 A.M.

  Seichan woke but didn’t open her eyes.

  Still groggy, she feigned sleep. From years of training, she instinctively knew not to move. Not yet. Wary, she relied on her senses. Her mouth felt pasty, tasting of a metallic sourness. Her stomach churned queasily.

  Drugged . . .

  Memory flooded through her.

  —front door bursting open without warning.

  —dark masked figures rushing inside.

  —another crash sounding from the back of the house.

  Her heart pounded now in her throat, sharpening her focus.

  When the attack occurred, she had been on the couch. Kat had gone to the kitchen to fetch a glass of wine and sparkling cider for her. They had just put the girls to bed upstairs and had planned to wrap the last of the presents. Seichan had also wanted to pick Kat’s brain, to learn more about what it meant to be a mother.

  Over dinner, Kat had already done much to temper Seichan’s anxiety. While she had read What to Expect When You’re Expecting, dog-earing and highlighting her copy, Kat had offered practical insight not found in those pages: prefill diapers with ointment before bed to shorten overnight changes, flavor cold washcloths used for teething with sour pickles of all things.

  But most of all, her advice boiled down to a two-word imperative:

  Don’t panic.

  Kat promised to be there at every step of the way. In the delivery room, in recovery. I’ll even walk with you on his or her first day of kindergarten, she promised. That’s the worst. Letting them go.

  Seichan had a hard time believing that. Even when Kat went to fetch the wine, she had fantasized about disappearing postdelivery, leaving the child with Gray and vanishing. What sort of mother could she be to the child?

  After her own mother had been ripped from their home in Southeast Asia, she had lived wild on the streets, running the slums of Bangkok and the back alleys of Phnom Penh, half-feral, a creature of the street. Back then she had learned the rudimentary skills of her future profession. Survival required vigilance, cunning, and brutality. She was eventually recruited into a shadowy organization known as the Guild, where her crude street skills where honed, turning her into a soulless assassin. Only after betraying her employers and destroying the organization did she find a measure of peace, discovering someone who could love her, who wanted to make a life, a home with her.

&nbs
p; I shouldn’t have believed it.

  Paranoia and suspicion had always been a part of her DNA, but while pregnant, she had refused to let that toxicity seep into her child. Instead she had foolishly dropped her guard.

  And look what happened.

  As the door to her home had crashed open, she had leaped from the couch. She flashed daggers from a pair of wrist sheaths, whipping the blades through the air. She might be pregnant, but the hidden knives were an inseparable part of her. The first struck the lead attacker, impaling him in the chest, sending his body tumbling backward into the Christmas tree. As the decorated pine crashed to the floor, her second dagger flew toward a masked figure pounding up the stairs, pistol in hand.

  Going for the girls . . .

  Whether from panic or being off-balanced by her gravid belly, she missed her target. The blade impaled into the banister and the man vanished upstairs.

  Then pandemonium.

  In the heat of the skirmish, she failed to feel the impact of the tranquilizer dart. With her blood heated, heart pounding, the sedatives took fast hold. The fighting slowed in a hazy fog. Hands subdued her, weight dragged her to the floor.

  One voice followed her down.

  Careful of her stomach. And no more tranqs.

  From the kitchen, she heard the clatter of pans, shattered dishes.

  Kat . . . fighting to defend herself . . . to protect the girls.

  Then darkness.

  Awake again, with her eyes still closed, she tried to imagine who had attacked them. The raid had been too coordinated, too well planned. A strike team with military training. But who? Her list of enemies was long and ran deep. Even the Israeli Mossad still maintained a kill-on-sight order on her.

  She kept her body slack and stretched her senses. She felt a thin cot under her. She heard no voices, no whisper of movement. The air was warm, but smelled damp, of mildew. A basement? She made imperceptible movements of her arms and legs. With no chafing at her wrists or ankles, her limbs appeared unbound.

  As the drugs cleared further, she heard the faintest of breath—no, breaths.

  She risked cracking her eyelids open.

  The only light flowed from under a metal door near the foot of a steel-framed cot. The walls were cement block. No windows. She lolled her head slightly to one side. Two other smaller beds shared the tiny space. Blankets bunched over small figures. A thin arm rose like a flag from one bed, as if surrendering. Then drifted back down.

  She recognized the dancing reindeers on the sleeve.

  Penelope . . . Kat’s six-year-old daughter.

  Which meant the other child must be Harriet.

  She opened her eyes wider, using her peripheral vision to scan the remainder of the room. There was another bed in the room, but empty, with a pillow resting atop a folded blanket.

  It was just the three of them.

  Where’s the girls’ mother?

  She remembered the intense sounds of battle from the kitchen and feared the worst. Worried for the children and recognizing there was no further advantage in pretending to still be unconscious, she rolled from the cot. She crept low to the beds. She checked each child, enough to know they breathed steadily, but not to wake them.

  Drugged, too.

  She crouched between their beds.

  Fury stoked inside her.

  No matter what, she intended to protect these girls.

  But from whom or what?

  The answer came as a tiny window in the steel door slid open. Light from beyond the cell blinded her to who stood out there.

  “She’s already awake,” a man said, sounding surprised.

  “I told you she’d be.”

  Seichan tensed, recognizing who answered. She knew this person all too well, confirming what she had already suspected.

  I am to blame for all of this.

  But it made no sense. She listened for some explanation but overheard only a timetable and a threat.

  “At dawn, we’ll set things in motion.”

  “Who first?” the man at the door asked.

  “One of the girls. That’ll have the most impact.”

  5

  December 25, 9:22 A.M. WET

  Lisbon, Portugal

  Now maybe you’ll be quiet.

  Mara placed the saucer of milk on the windowsill. A bony black cat hunched in a far corner of the rickety fire escape outside. As Mara shifted the saucer closer, the feline hissed a warning, its tail lashing the air.

  Okay, got it . . .

  She backed away but left the window open. The morning was already warming, with a sultry breeze smelling of salt from the nearby sea. It certainly did not feel like Christmas here. Back in the mountain hamlet of O Cebreiro, where she grew up, it snowed throughout December, bestowing a white Christmas upon the village every year. As a girl, she had chafed against the limited opportunities afforded those living there, but with each passing year at the university, she grew to miss its simplicity, the rhythms of everyday life, which were much more tied to the natural world there than in a big city.

  Still, she hadn’t been back home in more than a year, her project all but consuming her. Even her calls to her father had grown less and less frequent. Every time she phoned, she heard the love in his voice, which flooded her with guilt. She knew how proud he was of her. As a deeply religious man, though, who mostly tended to his dogs and a pasture of sheep, he barely understood her work. Even now he only spoke Galego, a fusion of Spanish and Portuguese. He had little interest in the rest of the world. Unlike her, he seldom watched television—which currently droned in the corner of her room—and never read the news.

  She did not know if he was even aware of what had happened at the university, though she suspected the police might have questioned him. Still, she hadn’t dared call him, not even to let him know she was okay. She feared drawing him into the danger.

  The black cat slinked over to the bowl on the windowsill, staying low. As it lapped at the milk, it growled continually, both cantankerous and threatening.

  “Merry Christmas to you, too.”

  When the stray had come to the window earlier, it had howled at her through the glass, demanding attention and refusing to be ignored. For a moment, she had imagined the cat—appearing as if out of thin air—was some ghostly apparition, perhaps the soul of Dr. Carson come calling, taking the form of a witch’s familiar.

  She shook her head at such a silly superstitious thought and turned her back on the window, which overlooked the Cais do Sodre district, a seedy corner of Lisbon that was filled with late-night bars and Internet cafés. Her hotel sat along Pink Street, named after the stretch of pastel red pavement down its center. She had chosen to hide here because of the hordes of trendy young tourists who flocked to this district, making it easier for her to blend in. Plus, local establishments had a notorious lack of interest in asking questions of visitors who paid in cash.

  She returned to her laptop to check on the progress of her work. Before tempting the cat with milk to quiet its insistent cries, she had dropped the second subroutine module into the Xénese processor. The device shone on the floor, the laser array glowing through its hexagonal sapphire plates. Somewhere inside, something new to this world continued to grow and mature, nurtured by each subroutine Mara added.

  She sat back down at the desk. Most of the screen still displayed the virtual Eden, a garden of earthly splendor. The amorphous ghost who had first appeared when Mara had brought Xénese back online moved about the digital world. The shape had been sculpted by the first subroutine—the endocrine mirror program—into a physical beauty.

  At this stage, Mara had encoded this incarnation with a name, so it could begin to have a sense of self, of individuality, even of gender. There was power in naming something. According to mythology and folklore—like the story of Rumpelstiltskin—knowing someone’s true name granted power over that person.

  For the program, she had chosen the name “Eve.”

  How could I not?r />
  On the screen, Eve walked naked through the garden, delicate fingers brushing flower petals. Her shapely legs rose to hips curved in perfect symmetry. Her breasts were small. An ebony drape of hair reached to the middle of her back, swaying with each step. Her features were familiar, painfully so. Mara had needed a model for her creation and stole the face from an old photo of her mother, digitizing and re-creating it, an homage to the woman who gave birth to her.

  Her mother had only been twenty-six when she died of leukemia. The photo came from several years before, when she was twenty-one, the same age as Mara now.

  Mara studied the figure on the screen, seeing glimpses of herself, the genetic heritage passed from mother to daughter. The figure’s skin was several shades darker than hers. Her mother’s lineage traced directly back to the ancient Moors, who crossed the Strait of Gibraltar from northern Africa to Spain in the eighth century. Eve appeared like some goddess out of those times.

  A black Madonna come to life.

  As if sensing her attention, Eve turned. Her eyes glowed from that dark countenance, staring back at Mara. She imagined the reams of code flowing behind those eyes and shivered.

  She had to remind herself.

  This is not my mother.

  It was but an avatar of a growing, nearly alien intelligence.

  Knowing she needed to temper what was maturing inside Xénese, Mara glanced to the side of the screen. Streams of words flowed there, blurring too swiftly to read, millions of words in hundreds of different languages and dialects, marking the progress of the infiltration and incorporation of her second subroutine into Eve.

  The second module was coded with a version of Mara’s original translation program, AllTongues. To be able to communicate with Eve, the program needed to learn a language—and not just one, but all of them. Still, that was not the primary purpose of this subroutine. It traced back to why Mara had first developed this application. She had wanted to showcase and offer proof of the commonality of all languages, to demonstrate how at the fundamental level there was a root code that connected human thought to communication. The subroutine’s intent was to reverse-engineer this process for Eve. In other words, to teach it all human languages—all tongues—so it could begin to comprehend human thought.