by Robert Berke
Vakhrusheva kneeled in the snow without having been asked to do so. He raised his arms and held them out to the sides, chest high and parallel to the ground. He grimaced in pain as he did so. "It comes with age, Marco. Perhaps I have aged faster than you." He leaned back and stuck his chest out.
Gonzales raised his weapon and aimed. The single bullet ripped directly through Vakhrusheva's heart and he fell over dead in the snow.
Gonzales walked back to Cruz's car and lifted Alice's blanketed body out of the trunk. He tossed it haphazardly next to Vakhrusheva's still bleeding corpse. He got into the car and slowly drove himself back to the SmithCorp Building.
Vakhrusheva was wrong, he thought to himself. Only his mission is over, mine has merely changed.
One day, he thought, there will not just be one Smith in one computer or two. There will be hundreds, maybe millions of people living in millions of computers, each backed up a million times, and maybe even backed up on a satellite orbiting the earth. What good is a nuclear weapon against people who can live everywhere all at once?
Smith had already proved his power, Gonzales mused, and it was too much power for one man to have. Far too dangerous for dangerous men to have. This was a new kind of threat. The kind that couldn't be solved with a bullet. One that couldn't be solved by reading faces and hiding in shadows. The threat of the future was, perhaps, not even in the hands of men.
"Shit." He said aloud, having reached the same conclusion that had led Vakhrusheva to commit his passive suicide. I am obsolete.
He quickly cleared his mind of these thoughts. Philosophy is for men of leisure, he told himself as he steered onto the freeway and back to SmithCorp.
In Cohoes, Kitty already had a very stressful morning. With the power outages and the dead phones, she just wasn't sure what to do. In her little KO Data System's office, she had watched the meter on the battery backup/uninterruptible power supply steadily wind down and she knew that if it reached zero there would be a major problem. There was no one she could call since there were no phones working. She felt trapped and helpless. She looked, in vain, through the manuals the lead technician had left, but they just confirmed for her the fact that there was nothing she could do. When the lights finally came back on, she was nearly in tears. As soon as her own computer booted back up and restored itself she saw that she had received a message from Mr. Smith. She immediately sent him a message back and soon thereafter, his voice came over her speakers.
She had no idea that it was he who had caused the outage and he didn't tell her.
"Kitty," Smith said, "It is exceedingly important that your system is functioning properly. I want you to run a full diagnostic right now on the physical systems. Do you know how to do that?"
"Yes. I do. I do a diagnostic everyday Mr. Smith. I take this job very seriously. I didn't do one today though because the electricity was out all morning and the whole thing was running on the battery backup and I didn't want..."
Smith cut her off. "I need you to do the diagnostic right now and I need you to let me know as soon as its done. How long will it take?"
"It takes a little under an hour if everything is running okay," Kitty replied, now feeling certain that the urgency for the diagnostic was somehow related to the morning's power outage.
Smith instructed Kitty further, "Now Kitty, this is very, very important. The minute you are confident that the system is working properly, you send me a message and then disconnect the entire system from the Internet. You know how to do that too I trust?"
"Yes, I do. I've run that drill a number of times. Mr. Smith," she continued with genuine concern, "is there anything I need to know?" Though Smith's computer modulated voice still stripped some of the emotion out of the tones it produced, Kitty could tell that something was very, very wrong.
"Well," Smith replied, "I guess you should know that my life is in your hands." He let the words linger for a moment and then repeated, "Don't forget, as soon as the diagnostic is clear, you message me, and then you disconnect the entire system from the Internet. Do not wait for me to reply to your message. Just clear the diagnostic, send me a message, and then take it offline. Got it?"
"Yes." She said. In anticipation of receiving more instructions and because of Smith's declaration that these instructions were the difference between life and death for him, she pulled out a piece of paper and began writing down everything he had said.
"Now listen carefully," he continued, "this is real important. Unless I instruct you otherwise, you reconnect it to the Internet at 10:00am tomorrow. 10:00am, okay?"
"10:00am. Got it." She repeated as she finished writing it on her paper.
"Did you write all these instructions down? I thought I heard you writing." Smith asked.
"Yes. I wrote it all down so I wouldn't forget."
"Okay, read it back to me then."
Kitty dutifully read him back all of the instructions exactly as he had given them to her.
Smith was satisfied that she knew what to do and was able to do it. He felt he had made a good choice with this girl, especially considering how carelessly he had made it. "I have great confidence in you Ms. O'Malley. If you continue to impress me like this, you are going to find yourself running SmithCorp one day." He wished that he could breathe because he felt like breathing a sigh of relief.
Moments later Sam Takahashi signaled to Sylvia at the bar to watch his drink. He stepped outside of the Moviestar Topless to take the call that had just come in from Elijah Smith.
"Did you spend the blackout in that club?" Smith asked his old friend incredulously.
"They have a generator. The action never stopped. It was the best place to be." Takahashi replied, also oblivious to the fact that it was his friend who had caused the morning's mayhem.
"You've had a far better day than I then, Sam. There are some things we need to do. There could be some problems."
Takahashi also sensed a certain uncharacteristic stress in his friend's voice. "What's going on, Elly? Do you need me to get over there?"
"I think you should, Sam. I may have to die today."
"You better tell me what's going on," Sam pressed.
"I will, when you get here," Smith assured him.
Smith was not entirely confident about his back-up systems. Even though he was confident that he would still have a full double redundancy even if the original system was shut down, he was not so confident that all the data that would be recalled by the kill switch would find its way to an alternative destination. That system was untested. Who's smarter, Smith thought to himself, me or Sharky?
Smith mulled it over in his mind. Sharky's leashing system relied on any the fact that any data that ever emanated from Smith's virtual brain would self destruct if it no longer had a source to report back to. By creating a complete duplicate of himself and replicating Sharky's tagging system, then, at least in theory all of the data that flowed in and out of the duplicate would continue to have a source to report back to. Because Sharky's tagging system was known to no one but Sharky, Smith's duplicate, rather than matching Sharky's key simply added a second key to each packet of data. Being unable to find the source of key number one, the data would find key number two and Smith would pick up right where he left off. In theory, at least.
He also mulled over some of the more esoteric considerations. He wasn't sure he would still have a soul when he first went virtual, but in the weeks since, he had become very confident that he had not lost one iota of his humanity-- flaws and all. But would a copy of himself also bear that soul and if so, how many copies could bear identical souls? Was it possible that one soul could be replicated infinitely or did he have no soul and just not realize it? Or worse yet, he contemplated that the soul was an imaginary thing, a non-scientific explanation for something fundamentally biological? Smith always preferred to see his answers in science and technology. But that never meant that he didn't worry about his soul.
It also bothered him that, if he would survive th
e day, Hermelinda and his infant daughter, Ellen, could never know.
He wished he could talk to Dr. Bayron. He asked Myra to find him if he was still in the SmithCorp Building and asked her to send him up.
The doctor arrived in Smith's office just a few minutes later.
"I am going to die today," He told Bayron matter-of-factly. "I am resigned to that fact. I quite obviously have information that people are willing to kill and die for. As long as that information continues to exist, neither you, nor Hermelinda, nor the baby, nor anyone else I care about will ever be safe. I understand now very well your concern about opening the system and getting on the Internet. I am a man of reason. I genuinely thought I could control the massive power I have in my dual existence as both humanity and technology. But when I got angry, and desperate, and scared I unleashed that power without a second thought for the consequences, only the singleminded need to not let anything bad happen to either of you."
Bayron, who had been looking at the floor for most of Smith's speech, looked up and into the camera lens. He was about to speak, but Smith interrupted him. "Please, Doctor, just hear me out first," he said.
Bayron nodded and didn't speak, but he didn't put his head down either. He continued to look into the camera, but Smith could read nothing from his face.
Smith continued, "Remember this. If you can make it somehow pithy and clever, these may become famous words some day. It was a hard lesson for me, but you seem to have seen it a mile away. It was my human instinct --my reptilian mind-- that caused the chaos that saved your life today. Had I been cool and rational, cold and calculating, I certainly could have figured out a safer, more nuanced way to do what I had to do, but a human mind can't be trusted to do that all of the time. In fact, a human mind is least likely to do that at the most important times: times of trouble, times of fear. Truly, a man has to decide whether he will shed his humanity in order to become a god or retain it and remain a prisoner of his own flesh and blood. No man, not even I, can ever have both without catastrophic results. We saw that today."
Doctor Bayron waited a moment before speaking to compose his thoughts. "You know," he said, "since my breakdown, they have me on a lot of drugs just to keep me sane and functioning normally. But ‘normally' isn't an entirely fair word for it either. Two of those drugs are anti-depressants. One of those anti-depressants regulates the serotonin in my brain, the other regulates the dopamine. They take off the highs from the highs and the lows from the lows. As long as I continue to take them, I should never be depressed enough to give up on life; but, by the same token, I can never, will never, be as happy as I was when my wife and son were still alive. The drugs slow my mind and give me time to analyze my feelings before I act on them and do harm to myself and, by extension, others."
Bayron paused and sighed.
"I wish," he continued, "I wish there was a way that I could engineer virtual versions of these drugs to regulate the virtual serotonin and the virtual dopamine circulating in your virtual brain. But if I did, then what purpose would there have been to preserving your humanity in addition to your knowledge? You are human and I am a machine." Bayron's gaze had returned to floor as he mumbled his last thought and he shivered as he realized how different a person he was now that he was taking medications to separate him from his emotions. He wanted to be sadder, but the drugs wouldn't let him.
A long silence hung in the air. "Doc," Smith said in the gentlest voice his speech emulator could muster, "I want to be disconnected. Later today, everyone with a key will be here and I will enter mine. These last few months were a true bonus, a blessing. They were just wonderful and magical. But now, now its time for me to accept that I should have been dead weeks ago. I am begging you. Will you enter your key and let me die?"
"I took an oath, Elly, to do no harm. I am not a murderer. I don't know what I would do." Bayron said honestly.
"Doug," Smith said gently. "I am your creation as much as I am the creation of god and my parents, may they rest in peace. Could you have comforted your own son in his final moments, you would have done so."
Dr. Bayron felt acid rise up from his stomach at the comparison. He felt like he should have felt angry, but the anger never fully formed. Rather, he analyzed the offensive remark and ultimately concluded, "There is no correlation between the two things."
"There is for me," Smith replied, as the red light on his microphone faded away, signaling that he had moved on to other things.
Bayron was tired and wanted to take a nap. He began to walk himself to the infirmary, but the hallway seemed unusually long. Just weeks ago, he thought, I cursed myself that I was unable to do what I did for Smith to save my son. Today I find myself thanking god, that it is not my little boy asking me to kill him. Hermelinda, met him outside the infirmary door. He was tired and felt dizzy. "Are you okay, Doug?" She asked.
"Mr. Smith is a very smart man." He replied, with a very, very gentle smile.
Hermelinda put his arm around his waist so that he could lean on her a little. She could see he wasn't feeling well. "You knew that, Doug. She said leading him to a chair. I'm going to have to pull out the cot for you. You have a room mate for the time being."
Adele Ohangangian sat up in the hospital bed and smiled weakly, a saline drip hung from her arm as a monitor blinked its data to whoever was interested in seeing it. As Hermelinda struggled to set up the cot, Dr. Bayron stood up and walked to the hospital bed. He inspected the wound under the dressing on Adele's mutilated hand and out of long habit, glanced at the history that Hermelinda had taken specifically noting that she had a recent tetanus shot. He reached for a stethoscope and as he listened to her heart and lungs, a broad smile crossed his face. He checked her pulse and had her follow his finger with her eyes to check for nystagmus. He was confident she would survive through his little nap. In fact, he was confident she would survive even a nuclear war considering how strong her vital signs were.
He gave her a gentle pat on the shoulder, and looking her in the eyes, he said, smiling, "everything looks good, Mrs. Ohangangian. Someone did an excellent job in cleaning this wound. The important thing now is for you to get some rest. If you feel any pain, I'm going to have Hermelinda leave a couple of analgesics on your tray and you can take them as needed. I'm also going to start you on some antibiotics to make sure you don't get an infection. Okay?"
"Okay." Adele said turning slightly to lay back down. "Dr. Bayron," she said softly pulling him close, "my son thinks the world of you."
"He is a remarkable young man, Mrs. Ohangangian. You should be very proud."
The doctor was still smiling as he sat down on the cot. Hermelinda checked his pulse and reached for the blood pressure cuff. "I'm not dizzy anymore, nurse," he said.
"I am going to check anyway," she said as she affixed the cuff to his upper arm. "You're smiling." She added. "I haven't seen that in a very long time. 115 over 80. Take a nap."
"Start Adele on 300 milligrams of amoxicillin and acetaminophen as needed."
"Yes, doctor," she replied as a nurse, without giving any thought to the personal relationship she had developed with Douglas Bayron, who was, for this moment, again a doctor.
XXII.
Gonzales did not like driving Cruz's car. It was too light for his taste and the little four cylinder engine strained as it went up the mountain. Coming down, he felt like it just might slide at any given point. He did like the fact that he was able to drive up into the Adirondacks and back with gas to spare, though.
He pulled into the SmithCorp parking lot and parked in the same spot it was in before he had taken it, as if it had never left the lot at all.
He paused at the security desk, but the security guard simply nodded and pointed him to a waiting escort. Gonzales had assumed that he would have no problem gaining access to the seventh floor, but he didn't expect to be expected. He got out of the elevator and stepped into the waiting room. "Mr. Smith will be with you momentarily, sir. May I get you some water or coffee while
you're waiting?" The receptionist asked.
"No thank you," Gonzales said as he settled into one of the more comfortable chairs. His phone rang a few minutes later. It was Cruz, letting him know that the chaos at the mall had been abated but that the perpetrator had escaped.
"The perp at the mall was just a soldier," Gonzales said. "Vakhrusheva has been neutralized." Neutralized sufficed. That was all anyone needed to know.
"Shall I meet you at SmithCorp?" Cruz asked.
"No. You and Waterstone go to the KO Data Systems office in Cohoes. Talk to the girl. She likes you and trusts him. I'll leave it up to you if you want to compromise your cover, but ultimately Smith has to be neutralized too."
"I'll do what I can," Cruz responded.
"Do what you can," Gonzales echoed, "or I will do what I have to."
He had barely hung up when the receptionist said, "Mr. Smith will see you now."
But I can't see him, can I, he thought as he walked toward Smith's office.
As he walked through the door, he was greeted by Sam Takahashi who extended a welcoming hand. Gonzales shook Takahashi's hand.
"Please, sit, Mr. Gonzales," Takahashi said, motioning to one of the chairs.
Gonzales sat and looked at Smith's monitor. "Am I correct in assuming that you know why I'm here, gentlemen?" He asked.
Smith spoke. "I have dealt with men like you my entire career. Your mission cannot end until the codes are eradicated. Since you know I have learned Code Number Three from those pieces of Ashkot's mind that are now a part of me, I, and everything I know must be eradicated."
"And I have known men like you for my entire career, too, Mr. Smith. So I already know that you won't bargain for your life. We've both considered the outs and alternatives, and I am certain that we have reached the same conclusion."
"I want my family protected. Hermelinda, Ellen, Bayron, Takahashi, Kitty, Myra, Sharky, and Adele. I want immunity for my security team for whatever happened at the mall. And most of all, I don't want to be remembered as a monster."
