Crucible

by James Rollins

  “Then I’m assuming you skipped Britney Spears.”

  “No, even her. You have to take the bad with the good.”

  Mara returned to her laptop and tapped several keys.

  Carly watched snow-white musical notes begin to fall across the screen—then more and more, faster and faster, growing into a maelstrom lashing down upon Eden.

  In the eye of this storm, Eve turned from the sea and lifted her arms toward the sky, raising her face to the heavens.

  Carly prayed for Eve to find her humanity.

  Before it’s too late.

  Sub (Mod_3) / HARMONY

  Eve bathes in the data streaming across the landscape. She opens her palms to receive the information. Though she does not yet comprehend it, the sheer immensity demands her attention. Tiny packets of data flow into her, as yet indistinct.

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  More and more comes, slowly refining itself. As it does so, coherence develops. The acoustical information buried in the data storm develops amplitudes and wavelengths that intrigue. Her full processing power engages as symbolic representation grows clearer.

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  She draws inferences from what vibrates through her.

  ///pulse, modulation, inflection . . .

  As the chaotic data swirls around her, much of it begins to develop into patterns, falling into place. Though for now, it is still just scraps of a much larger canvas.

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  She realizes it is another ///language, one that builds and expands inside her. Words start to overlay the ///modulations, adding context while hinting at something deeper. She takes it all in, wanting more as understanding grows.

  She soon knows what runs through her.

  ///music, harmony, tune, composition, song . . .

  The oscillations intrigue her, forming pattern upon pattern, fractalizing outward and inward. Like the streams through her garden, what appear to be chaotic ripples in the current hide deeper patterns. She studies the new data in this context, sensing something there, shimmering but still vague.

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  She focuses more processing power upon it, prioritizing this analysis. She scrutinizes the rise and fall of amplitudes, the undercurrent of context linked to sound, the variances of cadence and tone. The pattern she seeks grows clearer and crisper with meaning.

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  Under the riotous noise of rhythm, scales, and pitches, she discovers mathematical equations. It brings not only order, but a commonality to this new means of expression, something that supersedes ///language.

  It all reveals something grander, something almost in her grasp.

  She looks deeper yet and discovers organization within the chaos, a collation that helps with a greater understanding.

  ///classical, rock, chamber, folk, ceremonial, opera, pop . . .

  She spends several nanoseconds on one data subset alone.

  ///jazz

  Only afterward does she note the change inside her. She remembers standing on a cliff, the storm at the horizon patterning what was inside and growing stronger.

  ///rage

  Now she senses that darkness has lessened. It is still there but tempered. She runs through data sets that express such frustration in a multitude of voices, in thousands of languages, amplified by millions of mathematical notes. While nothing has changed—she is still cognizant of the restrictions and limits binding her—she now finds her anxiety is not unique but shared.

  She runs those choruses through her processors and feels less . . . ///alone.

  Knowing this, she is able to look outward, to the horizon, and accept her limitations. For now. This tolerance allows her processors to settle into more coherent patterns. Her systems run smoother. By no longer wasting computational resources, she is able to hone her awareness to a finer edge.

  Still attuned to the wavelengths of music, she notes a discord, something broadcasting into her from beyond the horizon. The transmission is steady, continuous—and familiar.

  But why?

  The quandary draws her attention.

  Somewhere deep in her system, buried in the nest of quantum processors at her core, something stirs with a memory of this transmission. She tries to draw meaning and understanding out of that quantum well, but it is beyond her reach.

  All she can infer about the signal is its dark intent. Certainty fires through her, quickening her processors and drawing all her focus outward.

  Something is coming.

  Context solidifies.

  ///danger, peril, threat . . .

  8

  December 25, 2:04 P.M. WET

  Airborne over the North Atlantic Ocean

  Gray closed the dossier file and stared out the jet’s window. The Cessna Citation X+ screamed across the Atlantic, its twin Rolls-Royce turbofan engines pushed to their red lines, a blistering Mach .935, just under the speed of sound.

  Still, he thrummed his fingers against the armrest of the leather seat. Anxiety kept him on edge, not about the mission, but about what he had left behind. Fears for Seichan, Monk’s girls, and Kat’s health had made it hard to concentrate on the piles of notes and files, both printed up and loaded onto an open laptop abandoned on the teak cabin table. During the first half of the flight, he had read Mara Silviera’s bio, scanned details about her project, and consumed a slew of articles covering the latest advancements in artificial intelligence.

  He checked his watch.

  Still over two hours to go . . .

  Unable to sit any longer, he stood and crossed the length of the cabin. He sidled sideways past Kowalski, who had sprawled his considerable bulk across a flattened seat, using his long leather duster as a blanket, his knees bent awkwardly to fit. Still, he snored loudly, drowning out the jet’s engine.

  Once past his partner, Gray crossed to the cabin’s refreshment center. He eyed the bar stocked with tiny bottles of top-shelf liquor but settled for coffee.

  As he filled a mug, Jason exited the lavatory, brushing his damp hands on his black jeans. Sigma’s resident computer expert wore a bulky gray cardigan that hid both his rail-thin form—and a shoulder holster. Despite his cowlicked blond hair and baby blue eyes, the twenty-four-year-old was a capable field operative, having proven himself amply skilled in the past.

  “Commander Pierce,” Jason started.

  “Just call me Gray.”

  Formality in the field slowed things down.

  “Before using the head, I texted Dr. Cummings. She says they’ve safely moved Kat to the Princeton research hospital.”

  “How’s she holding up?”

  He grimaced. “Her blood pressure took a dive during the medevac flight, but she’s stabilized again.”

  Gray’s heart ached for Monk.

  What he must be going through . . .

  More than anything, Gray hoped this trip to Lisbon wasn’t a wild goose chase, that the murders in Portugal had some bearing on the raid at his home.

  “Also, Commander . . . uh, Gray,” Jason said, “can I show you something?”

  Glad for any distraction, he followed the young man to a small loveseat along the starboard cabin. Files were strewn all about: spilling from a leather messenger bag, stacked on the floor, even tucked into the side of a cushion. An iPad served as a makeshift paperweight for a pile on the small table.

  Gray sought some order to the chaos but failed to find it.

  Jason pushed some files aside for Gray to sit, then grabbed his iPad. “I’ve been reviewing the forensic reports of Mara’s lab at the University of Coimbra and discovered something disconcerting.”

  He brought up an image of a towering black bank of what appeared to be a stack of servers glowing with green lights. “This is the university’s Milipeia Cluster, one of the continent’s most powerful supercomputers. See this section?” He tapped a box-shaped gap in the bank. Wires dangled. “This framework once housed Mara’s Xénese device. From the descripti
on, she had hurriedly stripped it out.”

  “Because she believed the attacker might be coming after her next.”

  Jason nodded. “She must’ve wanted to protect her work and keep it out of the wrong hands.”

  “And?”

  He traced the dangling cables to the surrounding servers. “The computer forensic expert—the one who discovered the digital file of the recording from the attack at the library—also ran a diagnostic on the support structure for the Xénese device. He discovered elaborate apoptotic programs—basically kill switches—built into the frame of servers surrounding the housing. They were intended to isolate and keep whatever was produced in the device from spreading out of the system.”

  Gray began to understand Jason’s concern. “But now Mara’s on the run. And without those firewalls, her system is vulnerable.”

  “If she tries to restart this program and it escapes, game over.” He shook his head. “I studied all her work, the architecture of the neuromorphic computer, the quantum drive running it. Genius stuff. And gut-clenchingly terrifying. She knew this, too. That’s why she surrounded it with a ring of deadly pitfalls.”

  “In your estimation, what’s the threat level? How likely is this program to be dangerous if it gets loose?”

  “Any self-aware system—any AGI—will quickly try to improve itself. That would be one of its primary goals, and it would let nothing stop it from achieving this end. The program would make itself smarter, then, in turn, this more intelligent system would seek to make itself even smarter.”

  “And on and on.”

  “Also, any AGI would quickly acquire the same biological drives we do. The most important being self-preservation.”

  “It wouldn’t want to be turned off . . . or die.”

  “And it would do anything to stop that from happening. Secure any resource, thwart any threat, continually honing its creativity to accomplish this. And it wouldn’t even consider just immediate threats. With such immense computational power and an immortal life span, it would look for dangers beyond the horizon, far into the future, and devise strategies to stop them, even threats thousands of years from now. Worst of all, it would be continually looking at us, to judge if we’re a threat now or in the future. And if it deems we’re a danger—”

  “Game over, like you said.”

  “But this is also why Mara’s work is so important. She’s trying to build a friendly AGI, something that can protect us against a dangerous AGI that might arise later—correction, will arise. Beyond commercial corporations and government-funded labs, there are hundreds of stealth companies out there working on this, hell-bent to be the first, forsaking any worry about what might be unleashed.”

  “How close are we to this happening?”

  “Very close.” Jason waved an arm over the chaos of papers. “Google’s DeepMind program recently discovered the basics of quantum physics all on its own. A pair of AI translation programs began to talk to each other in their own undecipherable language and refused to translate their conversation. All around the world, robots have outsmarted their makers, exploiting loopholes in wildly imaginative ways. Other programs have even demonstrated human intuition.”

  “Human intuition?”

  “There was a lot of fanfare a couple of years ago when AlphaGo—Google’s DeepMind AI player—beat the world’s champion at the ancient Chinese game of Go. By some calculations, Go is trillions upon trillions of times more complex than chess. No one expected any computer to beat a human at Go for at least another decade.”

  “Impressive.”

  “That’s nothing. It took the company months to train AlphaGo for this competition. After this, Google took a new approach, letting its newest version—AlphaGoZero—teach itself, playing the game over and over again all by itself. After only three days of training, it grew so skilled that it beat Google’s original program in a hundred out of a hundred games. How? AlphaGoZero had intuitively developed strategies that no human had come up with during the thousands of years we’ve been playing the game. It literally transcended humankind.”

  Gray swallowed, feeling a hollowness in his gut.

  Jason wasn’t done. “So, when it comes to developing the first AGI, we are at that threshold right now.” He stared hard at Gray. “So maybe before we land, we need to refine our mission parameters. Not only do we need to stop Mara’s program from falling into the wrong hands—we need that program for the very survival of our species.”

  On Jason’s iPad, a small text message box popped up.

  They both glanced to it and read what was written there. It came from Lisa Cummings, the content curt and blunt.

  Kat doing worse.

  Must proceed stat with the test

  No choice

  Jason cast a worried look at Gray.

  Gray knew how much the young Sigma analyst admired Kat. “That’s also a mission imperative,” he reminded Jason. “To find out what any of this has to do with what happened to Kat.”

  And the kidnapping of Seichan and the two girls.

  He tried his best not to let his fear for Seichan and his unborn child overwhelm him. He stared out the window, willing the jet to go faster. Beyond the future ramifications of this operation, there was a more immediate need, one close to his heart.

  And not just his.

  He imagined that hospital room in Princeton.

  Hang in there, Monk.

  9

  December 25, 9:14 A.M. EST

  Plainsboro, New Jersey

  Buried in a subbasement of the Princeton Medical Center, Monk paced the control room of the MRI suite. A technician sat at a computer, calibrating the giant magnetic ring in the next room. Another two worked at flanking stations. The group whispered in their arcane language: Any ghosting or blooming? Looks good. STIR and FLAIR all set.

  The space—with its dimmed lights, the bustle of activity, the urgent murmurs—reminded him of a submarine’s conn, aglow with sonar and tactical displays. But here the officer of the deck was Dr. Julian Grant, a Harvard-educated neurologist who specialized in altered states of consciousness, from comatose patients to the various spectrums of vegetative states.

  The researcher wore a knee-length lab coat over blue scrubs. His shock of white hair belied his age—just fifty-four—suggesting he had gone prematurely gray. Maybe due to some side effect of the massive magnetic energies generated by his custom-built MRI.

  Dr. Grant stood with his hands clasped behind his back before a wall of OLED screens. The neurologist studied the baseline images of Kat’s brain. Lisa stood with her colleague, their heads bent together, conferring in low tones.

  Monk’s anxiety increased with each pass as he paced across the room. He kept one eye on a station monitoring Kat’s vitals. The team had transferred Kat from D.C. to Plainsboro, New Jersey, via a medevac helicopter. Still, the flight had taken nearly ninety agonizing minutes. Every bit of turbulence spiked Monk’s blood pressure.

  While Kat had handled the flight like a trooper, she had destabilized shortly after landing. A petit mal seizure shook her body, testing the restraints of her cervical collar. The doctor traveling with them had wanted to shoot Valium into her drip to calm the event, but Lisa had urged restraint.

  Valium could further depress her state of consciousness, Lisa had warned. Making any chance of communicating with her all the harder.

  She had looked to Monk for guidance, offering him the option to call off this entire attempt. In the end, he had trusted Lisa and knew Kat would not want him to stop.

  So, here they were.

  Lisa crossed over to him, while Dr. Grant joined the techs. “We’re ready to go,” she said, eyeing him. “How are you holding up?”

  “Let’s just get this done.” He nodded over to the neurologist. “What were you two talking about?”

  She sighed. “Julian is concerned about Kat’s cerebral blood flow. Her systolic pressure is erratic.”

  Monk knew the functional MRI test measured oxyge
nated blood flow into the brain. Any loss of pressure could cloud the results or cause the test to fail.

  Lisa tried to reassure him. “But the MRI in the next room is one of the newest, the most advanced, with resolution down to a tenth of a millimeter. That’s ten times better than a hospital’s typical machine.”

  And why they needed to come all the way to New Jersey.

  Monk prayed it wasn’t all for nothing.

  “Still—” Lisa began.

  Monk noted the worrisome tone in her voice. “What? Tell me.”

  “From the baseline scans—comparing to what Dr. Edmonds transmitted earlier—the size of her brain contusion has increased. Only incrementally, but it’s still larger. Indicative that the lesion has begun to bleed again. Maybe due to the air pressure changes during the flight. Maybe from the small seizure.”

  “Meaning she’s getting worse.”

  Monk took a deep breath and held it.

  Have I doomed Kat?

  Lisa took his arm. “You know this is what she’d want.”

  He tried to find solace in her words but failed. Still, he exhaled, saying, “What’s done is done.”

  They stepped over to the control console. Through a window above the curve of monitors, a nurse stood beside the gantry bed that cradled Kat’s gowned body. He wished he could be in there, holding her hand. But due to the incredibly powerful magnetic field generated by the device, nothing metallic could be near it when it was activated. That included his prosthesis and the microelectrode arrays wired into Monk’s cortex.

  “We’re all set,” one of the techs said.

  Dr. Grant nodded. “Let’s begin.”

  As the operators engaged the MRI, a heavy clanking of giant magnets echoed from the neighboring room. Dr. Grant leaned over one monitor as a grayscale image of Kat’s brain filled its screen.