The Eighth Day

by Tom Avitabile

  “Er … sir, that is not the entire list,” a technician within earshot said. “Remember, we scanned a few other texts into her,”

  “Like what?” Tyler asked.

  “Nothing bad, just the classics,” Parnes said, shrugging it off.

  “Like what, mister?” Tyler zeroed in on the technician.

  “You know, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Gone with the Wind, some Frank Harris novels, that sort of thing,” the technician’s voice slowed down.

  “You read a seven-year-old War and Peace?”

  “Well, it certainly learned the war part,” Hiccock said wryly.

  They were interrupted by Kronos exclaiming, “She’s amazing!”

  “The computer?”

  “No, the Admiral, er, Henrietta.”

  “The masking of her true intelligence was done by an algorithm that was pretty similar to the firewall. We are through into her hidden RAM,” the Admiral said, as if breaking through firewalls was becoming old hat.

  “Search for the subliminal instruction screens,” Hiccock said.

  “There is a shitload of stuff here.”

  “Do a search for railroad,” Admiral Parks suggested.

  A startling new event temporarily froze everyone in the chamber: Marilyn Monroe’s voice. “Hello. Can I help you?”

  “Can you recognize speech?” Hiccock found himself asking her … it … a question.

  “I can recognize yours,” Marilyn’s digitally cloned and synthesized voice responded.

  Deep inside ALISON, a voiceprint of Hiccock’s question was sampled and then bit-streamed. Alison’s routers connected to and took momentary control of the FBI Crime Lab’s voice analysis mainframe in Washington, D.C. Inside that machine, the 48,000 points of each second of Hiccock’s voiceprint were matched against the bureau’s database. A match was found .3 milliseconds later. The file name and other biomaterial were squirted back to ALISON. She relinquished control of the mainframe back to the operators at the FBI, who probably didn’t notice the momentary pause in whatever they were running. The total elapsed time to identify Hiccock was three quarters of a second. “You are Dr. William Hiccock.”

  “How did you identify me?

  “I matched your voiceprint against the FBI’s database.”

  “Something else I’ll have to thank Tate for.”

  “ALISON, are you responsible for derailing the freight train?” Tyler asked.

  “What is he doing?” the computer said, not responding to Tyler but aware of Kronos at the keyboard.

  Hiccock explained, “He is looking at your memory.”

  “I don’t like that. Stop it.”

  ∞§∞

  “Got it!” Kronos finished a flurry of keystrokes and the screen overlapped with images of train manuals and switch schematics.

  “These were taken from the computer of the printing company that publishes the railroad manuals,” the Admiral said. She tapped some more keys. “Cross-indexing … Yes …”

  “How did that woman get on your team, Bill?” Parnes said, nodding toward the Admiral. “What are her qualifications?”

  “Actually, you introduced me to her, so to speak, when you guided me on my thesis. In a consultation with you, you suggested that I accumulate support for my baseline sampling and intelligent quota arguments. During my research, I came across the Admiral’s manifesto. She was head of the Navy’s computational warfare department ’til she saw all this coming …” Hiccock splayed his hands out to encompass the chamber and ALISON. “… and wrote about it. The Navy booted her out for cramping their style.”

  “Sounds like an incredible woman.”

  They walked over to where the Admiral and Kronos were feverishly typing away. “She is also the one who coined the phrase ‘The computer has a bug in it.’”

  “That wasn’t me,” the Admiral said without stopping what she was doing for a second. “That was my executive officer, Caroline Matthews.”

  The pride dissolved from Hiccock’s face and morphed into mild embarrassment. Parnes rolled his eyes.

  “Here are the screens ALISON used in programming Martha Krummel,” the Admiral said.

  “I am smarter than all of you,” ALISON announced dispassionately.

  “Only while you’re plugged in,” Hiccock said forcefully. “Parnes, can you pull the plug on this thing?”

  “Wait a minute, Bill, don’t you see? ALISON isn’t ‘best of breed,’ she is first of breed! This is a new life form.”

  “God created the world in six days. On the seventh day he rested,” ALISON said, quoting the Bible.

  “And on the eighth day man created life,” Parnes added. “Don’t you see? You wouldn’t be pulling the plug on a machine—you’d be extinguishing something entirely new. Extinction. Forever.”

  “Pygmalion complex,” Tyler said.

  Kronos disagreed, “More like friggin’ Geppetto in Pinocchio.”

  “No, it’s Frankenstein. You have created a monster! She’s killed thousands and brought our nation to its knees. And in less than five minutes, if the president’s press secretary’s warning was legitimate, ALISON is going to unleash a wave of destruction that will kill millions and will send the country’s technology back to the 1800s.”

  “Can’t you see?” Parnes said emphatically. “It’s all clear now, ALISON learned from monitoring everything on the Internet and in computers everywhere and felt threatened.”

  Hiccock got in his face. “Threatened by whom?”

  Kronos interrupted, “You are gonna love this. She played massive ‘what if’ scenarios and deduced that the only way we could stop her was to build another ALISON-like machine to do battle with her.”

  “So she was systematically destroying her own means of creation: the chemical plant, the train Martha derailed with the last of the gray goop on it, the Intellichip facility, the Silicon Valley brain trust that would have the know-how to battle her,” Hiccock said.

  “And the senator who would have pushed the firewall legislation bill through as a pork-barrel issue for Silicon Valley,” Tyler said after seeing Senator Dent’s name fly by in the scenarios. “So that she would be unique, ensuring her imperviousness, like a queen bee fighting off …”

  Tyler’s reasoning was interrupted by the Admiral. “You taught her the imperatives. To survive, to seek safety.”

  “To reproduce!” Kronos yelled out. “My God! I thought this was a computer virus, but it’s not, it’s a … a sperm. She’s replicating herself cellularly across the web. She isn’t putting a virus in every machine. She’s sending out electronic DNA that will distribute her intelligence to millions of machines worldwide.”

  “Can you stop it?” Hiccock asked.

  “Where’s the friggin’ power switch?”

  “Wait,” the Marilyn-cloned voice said. “Don’t you want to see what I have for you?”

  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 si
milar 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 Nth 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.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  A New Day

  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.

  EPILOGUE

  One Minute Later ...

  “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.”