Five Tribes

by Brian Nelson

  Jane picked up the thought. “Eric said it was terrible. He killed the Chinese soldiers slowly and sadistically. He said the nanosites ate them alive from the inside.”

  “And he certainly didn’t have to do that,” Bill said. “With his power, he could have simply incapacitated them—and painlessly.” Bill stood and began pacing. “I think this could be important. It suggests he may no longer see humans as his equal. Which makes sense if he thinks of himself as more than human—as evolved or transhuman—then killing someone would be easy. Perhaps as simple as killing an insect is for us.”

  “But it seems like more than that,” Jane said. “It seems like he wanted them to suffer. Or perhaps teach them a lesson.”

  “Sinners in the hands of an angry God,” Bill mused. “You may be right. Either way, it reinforces the idea that he doesn’t consider himself human anymore. Let’s keep going. What else did he say to Eric?”

  “He said he could understand things that no normal person could comprehend. That in his first days, he solved all the great riddles. And that he was continuing to solve new ones.” Jane paused. “That’s pretty hefty stuff. But what riddles is he talking about?”

  Bill sat down in his chair next to her. “Well, at the moment, the great scientific mysteries are . . .” He began to rattle them off, “Dark matter and dark energy, a quantum theory of gravity, arrow of time—matter and antimatter asymmetry, the multiverse hypothesis, protein folding, quantum teleportation, black hole information paradox . . . Should I keep going?”

  Jane gave a little laugh. “That’s probably enough. You know, you frighten me sometimes. But what I hear you saying is that the riddles all deal with physics and cosmology. Which tells us . . .”

  “His gaze would be upward,” Bill said.

  She flashed him a quizzical look. “How’s that?”

  “To solve those problems, he’d have to explore space.” Bill stood again and began pacing and mumbling. “Space . . . dark matter . . . visiting a black hole. Yes, yes, I’m beginning to see,” he said. Another nod, more mumbling. “Yes, it’s beginning to make sense. Nanotechnology has the potential to revolutionize space exploration. Instead of sending huge rockets and probes into space that take decades just to reach the edge of the solar system, we’ll be able to send thousands (or millions) of tiny sensors across the universe at amazing speeds, perhaps hundreds of light-years away.”

  “Light-years? But that means faster-than-light travel. I thought that was impossible.”

  “According to what we can do now, it is. But theoretical physicists are already speculating on how it might be done. In fact, Miguel Alcubierre proved in 1994 that it is mathematically possible to create a wave in the fabric of space that would allow for faster-than-light travel. There are many other theories now, but no one’s been able to test any of them. Some deal with dark energy, some antimatter, warping space time, or quantum entanglement. If the Inventor has solved those mysteries as he claims, he could have figured out how to get his nanosites to the far reaches of the galaxy . . . if not the universe. He might have already reached a black hole, and that alone would have helped him solve half a dozen lingering mysteries.”

  “Whoa, hold on, is that really possible?”

  “It might sound far-fetched, but you have to remember the leap he’s already taken. It’s part nanotechnology, but most of it is AI. As AI gets faster and faster it begins to work at speeds we can no longer comprehend. And if I remember right, that’s something that the Inventor told Eric. Am I right?”

  “Yes, he said, ‘for every hour, I live a decade.’ He also said he was centuries old.”

  “See, there you go. The thing about AI is that it has no limit, so there is nothing stopping him from getting faster and smarter, every hour of every day. So in just the five months since Eric saw him, he could be exponentially smarter and faster. That means a problem that would take a team of human engineers a decade to solve, he might solve in a nanosecond.”

  Jane was honestly still trying to wrap her head around it. “Okay, this is good information. But how can it help us find him?”

  Bill sucked in air with a hiss. “I’m afraid that’s probably up to him at this point. I think that if he doesn’t want to be found, he won’t be. We got our first glimpse of him last year when he broke into the chemical warehouse. He did that because he needed something that he couldn’t make himself. But I suspect he’s evolved so much that he doesn’t need us anymore. His swarms could simply take what they want or mine or even manufacture it themselves. Ergo, if he doesn’t need humanity, there’s no need for him to expose himself. Which would explain why no one can find him.”

  “So we’re right back where we started?”

  “Perhaps, but I think this has been very useful. I’ve been worried about him, especially the contradictions. He saved Eric and Mei and Ryan, but he also sadistically murdered over fifty people. Is he a threat to us or not? I’m beginning to suspect that he’s becoming less and less interested in the affairs of humanity, simply because he has evolved into something new. Which means we have very little to offer him. And that, I suspect, is a good thing, considering how much power he has.”

  “Okay, fine, but I need access to that power to find Eric.”

  “I’m sorry Jane, but I don’t have an answer for you. My only advice would be to be very cautious. I can’t shake this sense of him as a short-tempered god. And the Chinese learned the hard way that you don’t want to incur his wrath.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  The Monster Factory

  December 4, 2026

  United States Disciplinary Barracks,

  Fort Leavenworth, Kansas

  Two prison guards—a man and a woman—escorted Walden toward the solitary confinement wing. The first thing that struck General Walden was the sound. Despite the heavy glass door and two sets of barred gates, the sound coming from inside was incredible.

  One man was howling like a dog. “How-oooooooo. How-oooooo!” Several of the inmates were pounding on the doors.

  In front of the entryway, two more guards were seated at a workstation, a dozen mounted iSheets on the wall behind them showing them different cells and hallways.

  Walden glanced at the screens and saw that one man had positioned himself sideways and was stomping on the door with his heel. Wham. Wham. Wham. He kept a steady, but fierce rhythm with no indication of slowing or stopping. Now another man began howling, then another. He caught snippets of cries and pleas. “Help me! I can’t breathe in here. The walls are squeezing in on me.” One man, with tattoos up to his chin, was hitting the glass with his head.

  “Welcome to the zoo, General,” the female guard said. “Home to the meanest, wildest animals that Uncle Sam could make.” She smirked and clearly thought she was funny. Walden gave her a look that wiped the smile off her face.

  At that moment, an alarm sounded. “Shit,” one of the guards said, jumping from his seat and heading for the door.

  “Cell nine,” the other guard said and quickly followed.

  Walden looked through the glass doors and saw water streaming into the courtyard from one of the cells.

  The guards opened the first glass door and the full force of the sound hit Walden. The screaming, the pounding, the howling, the pleas for help. It could only be described as the sounds of hell.

  Thankfully, the door closed, muffling the sound again.

  “One of the inmates figured out how to overflow the toilet,” the female escort explained. “The guards hate that because they can’t leave ’em in there—drowning hazard.”

  Walden watched as the two guards methodically opened the door to the cell where the water was coming from, then disappeared inside.

  Walden scanned the surveillance screens, until he saw the right cell: the guards were approaching a man lying on the wet floor. The man’s head was shaved, like most of the other inmates, bu
t he had no tattoos. And he was very small, no bigger than five foot five, puny in comparison to the big guards. Just as one of them reached down to seize him, the man exploded into action. He kicked the first guard in the shins, tripping him up, then he broke for the open door as the other guard tried to stop him. Quick as a cat he sidestepped the guard and got around him. He emerged into the corridor and began going around to the other cells, pounding on the doors, looking in at the men, raising his fists in a victory dance. The other inmates went wild, hooting and pounding louder than ever.

  The escapee managed to evade the two guards for about twenty seconds, then they cornered him and the man surrendered. One guard punched him in the jaw for his trouble. The inmate took it with a grin and looked up defiantly at the cameras.

  “Well, what do you know,” the female guard said. “It’s your boy.”

  “That’s Calhoun?” Walden asked.

  “None other. As you can see, he’s a model inmate.”

  Walden examined Calhoun’s face on the monitor—his pasty white head had been poorly shaved, with patches of bristly black remaining. He still wore a wide grin that showed he was immensely pleased with himself.

  What the fuck am I doing here? Walden thought. This lunatic can’t possibly help me.

  “If you’ll come with me, General, I’ll take you to the visiting room. We’ll get him cleaned up then bring him in.”

  “Fine, I’d like to get this over with as soon as possible.”

  For the past two and a half weeks, a dozen intelligence officers from Air Force ISR had been trying to dig up dirt on Curtiss. So far, this was all they’d found: a death row inmate at Leavenworth with a conspiracy theory.

  The visiting room was what Walden had expected: a heavy gray steel table with a chair on each side—everything was bolted to the floor.

  Fifteen minutes later, they brought him in.

  He was still wearing the same shit-eating grin, but he had a clean brown uniform.

  “Whoa, what do we have here?” he said, as he took in Walden. “Four stars! To what do I owe the honor”—he squinted at Walden’s name placard—“General Walden of the United States Air Force?”

  “Sit down and shut up,” Walden said.

  The guards sat him in the chair then ran a chain through a thick leather belt around his waist and locked it to a metal ring in the floor. Calhoun’s hands were left cuffed in front of him.

  “Comfy now?” Walden asked.

  Calhoun gave a hesitant nod. He looked at Walden with his head cocked, obviously trying to figure out what was going on. This was no parole board. No ordinary visitor.

  “You are currently serving two life terms for the murder of two Syrian civilians,” Walden began.

  “I didn’t do it,” Calhoun blurted out. “I was framed.”

  Walden rolled his eyes and continued. “One a sixty-five-year-old man, the other a fourteen-year-old teenager.”

  “I didn’t do it,” Calhoun said.

  Walden leaned in, put his forearms on the table, and looked Calhoun in the eye.

  “Okay, then enlighten me. Tell me why you’re really here?”

  Calhoun squeezed his eyes shut tight as if trying to keep something unpleasant from erupting forth. Then he began to rock back and forth, slowly at first, then faster, “I don’t know,” he said bitterly. Then with more anger, “I don’t know, okay. I don’t know.” Then, as if a switch had been flipped, he began to whimper. It was a pitiful and grating sound. “It’s so unfair. Don’t you see? I’ve been here for three years and I don’t know anything. Why did they do this to me? I just wanna know. I just wanna reason. I’m innocent, I swear.” He bowed his head and began to weep, “You don’t know what it’s like here. You think I’m crazy.” He looked Walden in the face. “Maybe I am, but I’m crazy because of this place—it’s a monster factory.”

  “Spare me,” Walden said. “You must have some idea why you’re here.”

  Almost instantly, Calhoun’s visage changed and he was composed and serious.

  “Because someone wanted me out of the way.”

  “Who and why?”

  Calhoun shook his head.

  Walden sighed. This was clearly a dead end.

  “All I know is I saw somethin’ I wasn’t supposed to see. But the problem is, I don’t even know what I saw.”

  “Go on.”

  “I was assigned to this tiny airfield that had belonged to some Syrian prince. Nobody used it. We had one or two flights a week, max, because the runway was too small for jets and all the helos were at the FOB fifteen miles away. I thought I had the best job in the whole goddamn war. It was safe because we were in a Kurdish controlled area. All we had to do was man the comms for the airfield. Piece of cake. There weren’t even any runway lights, so after dark we just locked up and went back to the barracks. Me and the other guys spent most of the deployment playing video games.

  “But one night I went back after dark ’cause I’d forgotten my Xbox. And there’s some guy in the control room, a stocky guy with a beard and long hair. He wasn’t in our unit.

  “As soon as he sees me, he’s on my shit. Starts asking me all sorts of questions. Who I was, what I was doing there. He grabs my arm and starts walking me out, says I need to go home and forget I ever saw him. As we get outside, I try to see out on the tarmac, but he’s kind of blocking my view, but I can hear something. I twist my head and I see a Twin Otter and some guys loading it up with these big bags.

  “Then the guy gives me a look like you really shouldn’t have done that.

  “ ‘Corporal. Go on home and forget that you came here tonight. Is that clear?’ ”

  “I says yes, sir, of course, but I guess he didn’t believe me. Because less than twenty-four hours later I was charged with murder.”

  Walden couldn’t help but roll his eyes. “It’s a good story. Perfect really, because nobody can corroborate it. And I’m going to bet if I look up the flight plan for the Twin Otter, I won’t find a damn thing, coming or going.”

  Calhoun gave him his shit-eating grin again and tried to lift up his hands as if to signal surrender, but only made it halfway before the chain lost its slack. “Of course not, General. They weren’t going to make the same mistake twice.”

  Walden’s eyes flashed and he was suddenly alert and receptive.

  “What did you say?”

  “You’re Air Force, you know all about it.”

  Walden nodded. During the war on terror the CIA had run a secret operation named “Extraordinary Rendition” that transported terror suspects to other countries for the type of torture and interrogation that was illegal in the US. The operation had been exposed to the media by “plane spotters”—hobbyists who liked to hang around airports and track aircraft. They had looked up flight plans on the internet and began to notice “irregularities,” such as a plane flying into an obscure airbase in Poland with twelve passengers then departing fifteen minutes later with only nine. Or a plane believed to be operated by the CIA making frequent flights to Egypt. If Curtiss had been making illegal flights, he would have been more careful. Like flying at night from an obscure Syrian airport, without logging a flight plan, perhaps using false tail numbers.

  “But you said they were loading the plane with bags, not prisoners.”

  Calhoun shrugged. “Hey, that’s just what I saw . . . big black duffel bags . . . Who knows what I didn’t see.”

  Walden rubbed his jaw for a second trying to think it through. It wasn’t much, but maybe . . . He unfolded his iSheet until it was the size of a piece of paper and handed it to Calhoun. “Do any of these men look familiar?”

  Calhoun began swiping through the images, but almost immediately stopped. “That’s him!” He jabbed his finger on the image, “That’s the motherfucker!” Suddenly the man was overcome by wrath. He tried to stand, but the chain around his wais
t kept him doubled over, so he stayed bent, straining against the chain, his face inches from the screen. “You stole my life! You took everything from me! Why!” He began screaming. “Whyyyyyy! Whyyyyy!” The guard came forward to restrain him.

  Walden grabbed the iSheet. The image was dappled with Calhoun’s spittle but Walden recognized the man: Master Chief Nathan Sawyer.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  The Bomber’s Cabin

  December 4, 2026

  Somewhere near Lincoln, Vermont

  “Fire in the hole!”

  Despite the warning, Bud Brown jumped when the explosion came.

  Rogers laughed. “It’s hard to get used to it, isn’t it? But don’t worry, that will probably be the last one. So far, this guy is doing everything by the book: one booby trap on each door to the house. Now we can now get a better look inside.”

  Rogers motioned to one of the bomb techs, and the BDR (Bomb Disposal Robot) was driven up to the front door. It was essentially a large robotic arm sitting atop four thick tires.

  The cabin sat near the crest of a hill in about as remote an area as anyone could imagine. Dark pine forests stretched out for twelve miles in every direction. The cabin itself was a single room and recently built, with fat timbers that were still blond and bright.

  They had arrived that morning at dawn. SWAT teams had roped in from helicopters to cordon off the house until the bomb techs could get up the logging road in their trucks; they got stuck twice.

  Despite the fact that the bomber was not inside, Rogers was optimistic.

  “Come take a look at this!” Rogers led him about twenty yards away from the house to a gully and pointed to a two-foot-diameter concrete pipe. “It’s just like I said, by the book—two points of egress, plus a secret escape route. You can see his footprints in the mud. Very fresh. With any luck, the dogs will find him before he can make it out of the woods.”