Five Tribes

by Brian Nelson

  As well as the guilt. You should be doing something to help find him. All this technology around you . . .

  You can’t help him, the other voice countered. You know that. So get back to work. Besides, if you do this right, you will save hundreds of lives.

  She forced herself to look at the dead goats again.

  Here was her problem:

  The number one cause of battlefield deaths was something called “incompressible hemorrhaging” from bullets or shrapnel entering a soldier’s abdomen. These injuries were impossible to treat in the field because medics could not see into the wound to stop the bleeding or protect the vital organs. Only a surgeon could do that. And if you didn’t get the wounded soldier to a hospital fast enough—in what was called the Golden Hour—they almost always died.

  Jane’s job was to find a solution. It was so important that Admiral Curtiss had come to her personally, showing her the statistics and—most sobering—telling her about the men and women he had lost to these types of wounds.

  On the bench were a dozen syringes, each holding a different recipe for her invention. “G2 Stasis Foam.” The first generation of foams combined two polyurethane polymers that created an expanding substance to fill the wound and slow the bleeding. Her job was to enhance that system with swarm technology. That is, make the foam intelligent enough to clamp severed arteries and veins, then identify the damaged organs, lower their individual metabolism, and supply them with enough oxygen and nutrients so they’d survive until the patient got to the hospital.

  But it just wasn’t working. Yesterday she had tried again. A new goat was sedated, shot, then Jane tried to stabilize it with the stasis foam. It had lived longer than the others, but it was still dead in forty-three minutes.

  Ironically, she knew the one person who could help her. Ryan Lee. But she was too angry at him—or was she too stubborn?—to ask for his help.

  Come on, just get on with it. She put in her earbuds and cranked “Aces High” by Iron Maiden. It didn’t help. Then she felt a tap on her shoulder.

  She pulled out her earbuds and turned to see Bill Eastman standing there. He was wearing a gray three-piece suit and looked every bit the confident genius he was. Just the sight of him made her feel better.

  “Hello, Jane,” he said softly, “how are you?”

  She nodded slowly, giving the question some thought. “I’m surviving.”

  “I know it must be hard,” he said, looking around the lab, then added, “And even harder to get work done.”

  She nodded. “I thought work would keep my mind off him. It helps, but it’s not enough . . .”

  “Well, why don’t we see if two heads are better than one?”

  She smiled and was about to refuse. Of course, she should refuse. It was way beneath Eastman’s pay grade—the top scientist at the lab—to be working with her. But then she changed her mind.

  “I’d like that,” she said and began to explain the problem to him.

  When she was done, Bill rubbed his chin pensively. “How many evolutions have you run?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “Hmmm, that’s too many. They should have figured out the different cell types by now. And you’re still losing too much blood?”

  Jane nodded.

  “You may have a problem with the original parameters.” He stood up and began to pace and mumble to himself, something he always did when he was thinking. “Losing blood . . . dying tissue.” Then he snapped his fingers. “What does a surgeon do if the patient isn’t getting enough blood to their heart?”

  “She does a bypass.”

  “Exactly!”

  “But I need to stop the bleeding.”

  He nodded, “True, but I think you’re approaching this as if it were two problems—trying to stop the hemorrhaging, then trying to nourish the tissue and organs—when it’s only one problem.”

  Jane was beginning to see. “You’re saying the best way to control the blood flow is to channel it to the damaged organs.”

  “Yes.”

  “But how?” She trailed off, trying to piece it together herself, then her eyes brightened. “I can use the nanosites in the foam to actually grab the hemorrhaging blood and put it where it needs to go.”

  “Yes, very good! You have billions of nanosites at your disposal. Put them to work. When the blood’s deoxygenated, you can send it back to the heart through the nearest vein. This way you simplify the problem.”

  A scowl grew across Jane’s face, and Bill’s enthusiasm faltered. “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “I really hate it when other people figure out things I should have figured out myself.”

  He laughed. “Well, you’re not out of the woods yet. Now you have to see if it will work.”

  She smiled begrudgingly. “Yes, but I think you’ve hit on a very good idea.”

  “I’m just glad I could help!” He sat down again and looked around the room wistfully. “I miss this sometimes—working in a lab, figuring things out. I’m just a manager now.” Jane detected a sense of surrender in his voice that she’d never heard before. “I used to know everything that went on here. Every project. Every person’s temperament. Every deadline. But not anymore. Things are happening too fast for me to keep them all straight. And I suspect that some people like it that way.”

  “So I’m not the only one who feels like things aren’t changing for the better?” Jane said.

  “No, you’re not. This whole business with Walden and Rosario. I don’t like it. Their Global Hologram project is reckless science, plain and simple.” He looked around, as if checking to make sure no one was listening. For a moment he seemed conflicted, but he clearly wanted to share his thoughts. “I don’t like the way they’re using Forced Evolution,” he said. “The beauty of Eric’s idea is that it can figure things out on its own, but that’s also why it’s dangerous. Because we don’t know what else it has figured out along the way. Mixing that with machine learning is irresponsible because we won’t know if the system will evolve a new agenda or not. And it only gets worse if you add in swarm technology.”

  She gave him a quizzical look and he went on. “Right now, AI is largely innocuous because it lives within a computer. It can’t pick up a knife or a gun. But if you give it access to swarms, then that all changes. Just consider its area of perception.”

  “Its what?”

  Bill laughed. “Its area of perception. In humans, our senses tell us where we are in space, so our area of perception is our body. It’s what we can see, taste, feel, smell, and touch. There are some exceptions, of course. Tennis players say that the racket becomes part of their area of perception, and a race car driver may say the same about the car. Years of practice and conditioning have extended their senses to the dimensions of the racket and the car. The race car driver doesn’t feel it’s a machine that is racing around the track, he feels it’s his own body.

  “Now take the Global Hologram, which would not only have swarm technology but would be connected to cameras and listening devices all over the world. Its area of perception would be enormous; in fact, it would be the largest living thing on the planet. It could potentially find, track, and manipulate anyone in the world.”

  Jane found the idea disturbing. “Is that what Walden wants to do?”

  Bill nodded.

  “But that’s a long way off, isn’t it?”

  Bill gave a sardonic laugh. “If I have anything to say about it, Curtiss will shut it down. Luckily, he agrees with me, but he’s being pressured by Walden and some of the other Joint Chiefs.”

  Jane nodded, still trying to process it. It was a frightening vision of the future, coming from a man who had an uncanny ability to predict such things. But there was something else, something beside the enormity of it . . . an idea . . . anyone on the planet. But then Bill spoke again, and she lost the thought.
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  “I’m so sorry, Jane. I shouldn’t be unloading my worries on you, especially when you have so much to deal with already.”

  “No, really, it’s fine,” she said, still trying hard to hold on to the idea.

  “Is there anything else I can help you with?”

  “Not unless you can wave a magic wand and find Eric.”

  Bill gave a long exhale. “You don’t know how much I wish I could. Curtiss is sick of me calling. But at least the Chinese are out of the way now. We just have to hope Sawyer’s team can find him.”

  “I know. It’s just that I feel so helpless. I’ve been pounding my head day after day, trying to think of a way to find him . . . some way to use our technology. But I can’t figure it out. And it’s driving me crazy.”

  “You’re being too hard on yourself. Yes, we have done amazing things, but we just aren’t there yet. Nobody is.”

  Jane suddenly flinched as a strange thought struck her. Her scientific mind—which was always questioning and testing and looking for a new way—asked, Is that really true? Nobody?

  “Hold on, what did you say?”

  “I said that we’re not there yet. This idea of global surveillance, of being able to find anyone, that’s what Walden wants, but nobody has done it yet.”

  Jane stood, the answer just on the tip of her tongue. She shook a finger at Bill. “You’re wrong.”

  For a second Bill seemed taken aback, then he chuckled. “Okay, how?”

  “You said nobody could watch the whole world. But someone can.”

  Bill’s lips parted slightly, then he nodded. “You mean the Inventor.”

  She looked out the window, trying to collect her thoughts. “All this time I’ve been obsessing with finding Eric, when I should have been obsessing with finding the person who must know where he is.” She turned to Bill. “You asked if there was anything else you could help me with. As a matter of fact, there is.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Sealed

  November 21, 2026

  Washington, DC

  “Have you seen Olivia?” Ryan asked Jessica.

  “No, and I’m a little peeved she didn’t show up for her own meeting this morning.”

  Ryan knew that wasn’t like Olivia to skip a meeting with her boss and immediately thought of her daughter Emma. He tried calling Olivia’s phone but got no answer. Was she ignoring him?

  Since the night at her apartment she had remained professional and courteous, but he knew she’d been hurt by his decision. However, she hadn’t asked for his help again . . . and Ryan hadn’t offered.

  In the meantime, they’d been moving forward with the Global Hologram project, and they were making progress. The decision to use a hybrid quantum computer was yielding some interesting results. Since quantum computers are made with the same building blocks as nature, Olivia had theorized that they would be much better at creating a synthetic brain, since the way qubits influence each other is similar to the way atoms influence each other in a molecule. By adding Forced Evolution to the program, she hoped to supercharge its ability to learn and adapt.

  The first ten evolutions had produced nothing that a normal supercomputer couldn’t do. But the eleventh evolution had been different. Eleven had processed its initial training data three times faster and with fifteen percent fewer errors. What’s more, it seemed to have a sense of intuition.

  Ryan’s next step was to teach Eleven to play games. Since the idea was to “teach it tomorrow,” playing games was an ideal place to start because games gave Eleven a model of the world (the rules of game) then taught it to view itself as an actor within that world pursuing a objective. Just like children learned about the world through the metaphor of games, so could Eleven. He started off with checkers, then moved on to chess, then Parcheesi, Stratego, poker, and Risk. More and more complex games every day. SimCity. Dungeons & Dragons. World of Warcraft.

  It was fascinating to behold. When Eleven was given a new game he would try to use the strategies of the previous game. When those failed, he began to experiment. And he learned quickly.

  Really.

  Quickly.

  In his first attempt at Civilization VIII, Eleven began with an empty field of grass and in 150 hours had created a balanced, modern civilization—the average for an experienced human. In his second attempt, it took the minimum number of turns or less than six hours.

  Today was supposed to be a big day: he and Olivia had planned to begin training Eleven with real-world data.

  But now, Olivia was nowhere to be found. He knew she wouldn’t miss this unless it was very important. He called her home number, and Natalie answered. “She’s not here, Ryan,” the nurse said. “I thought she was at work with you.”

  “No one has seen her today. Has everything been all right with Emma?”

  There was a long beat. “No, she had a seizure last night. We took her to the emergency room. She was there most of the night.”

  “I’m sorry, Natalie. How is she now?”

  “She’s sleeping, but the doctor’s say this is just the beginning.”

  “Thank you,” he said and hung up.

  Next he called lab security.

  “This is Ryan Lee, I need to locate an employee.”

  After the woman verified Ryan’s clearance, she said, “Olivia Rosario is in Bio Lab 17. Simpson Hall.”

  Simpson Hall? he thought. What in the world is she doing there? It was one of the original five buildings on campus and hadn’t been updated in ages. No one ever used it, and he actually thought it was abandoned. He grabbed his coat and headed over.

  As he suspected, the building was deserted and appeared to be used for storage. It had once been a beautiful building, with an open mezzanine, marble floors, and wide staircases. Now stacks of outdated computers and lab equipment were piled around an old fountain. The air was humid and stale. He checked the building map on the wall. Lab 17 was in the basement. As he descended the staircase, it felt like he was entering a different time. The basement had clearly been flooded at least once. There was dirt and debris in the corners, and water stains along the walls. He looked down the dimly lit hallway. Okay, this is downright creepy. It looked like the set of a zombie movie. There were half a dozen rusty gurneys along one wall. He examined one and found cracked leather wrist and ankle restraints. Some of the doors he passed looked like holding cells, with wired glass observation holes. He knew the NRL had been opened in the 1920s, which meant it was over a hundred years old. He shuddered to think of some of the other experiments that had taken place in that time.

  Finally, he came up to the door of Lab 17. There was no window to look in. He opened it.

  Olivia was seated at a desk, busy on a folded out iSheet. She glanced at him for a mere second, then went back to work.

  Ryan looked around the room. It was mostly in shambles, but he realized why she had picked it. It was still a functional lab. It had a tissue culture room for Emma’s iPS cells, a fume hood, spectrometers, a capillary electrophoresis apparatus, and a DNA sequencer—Jesus, what a dinosaur. It was perhaps one of the original ones from the ’80s, bigger than a washing machine, but it was sequencer nonetheless.

  He came up beside her. She looked exhausted—her hair was disheveled and she had bags under her eyes. But she was still beautiful. Achingly beautiful, and he had to resist an urge to touch her, to surrender to her, to hold her.

  “I . . . I talked to Natalie. I’m sorry.”

  She ignored him, stood, and headed to the tissue culture room.

  So that’s the way it’s going to be.

  He picked up her iSheet and began looking through her files. It only took him a few minutes to realize she’d been right: in their race to beat the Chinese most of the work had already been done—inadvertently. He couldn’t help thinking it was amazing how she’d turned so many concepts
that were conceived as weapons and forged them into something that might cure a fatal disease. But as he probed deeper, he saw that she had also made a series of critical errors. She just didn’t know forced evolution like he did.

  Ah shit! he thought. What am I going to do?

  He thought back to the night at Olivia’s apartment, the tears he’d seen in Emma’s eyes. At first he’d tried to explain it away as a reflex, but he couldn’t shake the truth. The girl still had periods of normal cognitive function.

  Now he was in a serious bind. He knew what she was doing. They were all under the authority of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), of which he was currently witnessing a dozen violations. Not reporting her could cost him his job. Reporting her meant . . .

  “Olivia, you have to stop . . . and I mean right now. You can’t do this.”

  She came back and snatched the iSheet from his hand.

  “Watch me.”

  He grabbed her wrist and pulled her close. “No, you have to stop. You’re exhausted and upset and you’re not thinking straight.”

  She yanked her hand free. “My daughter is dying. Do you have any idea what that feels like? To stand by, helpless, and watch? Do you? Do you have any idea what it was like telling her she had less than two years to live? All she said was, ‘I don’t want to die, mom.’ That’s all. ‘I don’t want to die.’ It’s the most basic thing that a parent has to do, the most fundamental thing, yet I can’t even do that. Damn it!” Her frustration seemed to break for a moment, and she let out a sarcastic laugh. “Can you imagine? Olivia Rosario, genius tech entrepreneur, can’t even do that. Every ounce of my being, every atom, is screaming at me, night and day, to help her. It’s the only thing that matters. And last night, when she started shaking, and I couldn’t get her to stop . . .”

  She wiped her eye with her thumb.

  Ryan closed his eyes for a moment and breathed, but he let her talk. He knew she just needed to let off some steam.

  “Emma didn’t give up soccer,” she continued. “Did you know that? She insisted on playing. I’d watch her, and she’d be so perfect one moment, then she’d suddenly fall. She’d get up, start playing, and fall again. Sometimes the other players would make fun of her, but she didn’t quit. Every time she fell, she’d get up again. If she can do that, then I can do this. I refuse to give up.”