The Oracle Paradox

by Stephen L. Antczak

  In the van, Martin held the American woman’s wrists together while Milla bound them with a plastic tie, then secured her to the strap of the seatbelt. The American woman did not struggle. Milla would not have succumbed at all, and she would have killed the men who were trying to abduct her. She felt no sympathy for the American woman. She and Martin exited the van, leaving the American, while Angus made his way to the driver’s seat.

  Milla and Martin waited until the van was safely gone before Martin told her what they were going to do next, in Russian.

  Milla was pleased. She was excited. Now she would finally do something worthy of Antony’s memory, for the first time since his death.

  She felt something like happiness stir deep inside. It was not happiness, of course. It was too dark. It was justification for her own self-loathing. She knew this, recognized it for what it was, and accepted it. She accepted it because Antony had loved her for it, and that was enough for her, forever.

  "It’s going to be very unpleasant, what we have to do," Martin said to her, in Russian.

  Milla merely smiled in response.

  Buck Ferguson and his men took turns looking through binoculars at their objective. The building looked so innocuous. Nobody would ever guess what it housed. Nobody would ever guess that the seeds of destruction for the United States of America were planted in that building. From their vantage point on the top level of a parking deck behind the CNN building, they observed a mid-rise, windowless granite building officially designated as the Georgia State Archives Building, but which in reality housed a node of the U.N.’s artificial intelligence, Oracle.

  "That, my friends, is the building we are going to blow up," Buck told his men. They were suitably impressed. This was Timothy McVey stuff. Of course, the latest theories were that McVey had intended to undermine the Federal government. Buck and his men believed in a strong, but small, Federal government to protect the U.S. against wanton globalization and what Buck liked to call "U.N.-ification."

  The Archives building was just half a mile down the street from Turner Field, home of Atlanta’s Major League Baseball heroes, and Buck’s favorite team, the Braves. Halfway between the Archives building and the stadium stood a hotel, but no other tall buildings. That strip of road went over, and was bordered by, the freeways that converged on downtown. The building was quite exposed. They’d have to get in and out fast to avoid being spotted by news helicopters. They’d seen enough car chases on TV and had learned. Get out fast, before the choppers could be mobilized.

  They had enough C-4 to take the whole building down, but the building itself was not their concern. The Oracle node within, in the basement according to Buck Ferguson’s information, was their target. They would need to get inside, down to the node itself and set the C-4 around it to make sure they destroyed it. The facility was guarded, of course. They were prepared to deal with that, too.

  Chapter 36

  Angus took Tina to the motel near Turner Field. She sat quietly in the front passenger seat while he drove.

  Finally, she asked, "What are you going to do with me?"

  "You’ll be fine," he said matter-of-factly as he turned into the motel parking lot, pulling up in front of a room on the ground floor, with DO NOT DISTURB sign hung on the doorknob. He unlocked the doors with the push of a button, but before opening his turned to Tina. "Unless you do something stupid. Then I will kill you. Are we clear?"

  She nodded. He opened unlocked the motel room door, opened it, and gestured for her to go in first. She did.

  She saw what he had in store for her. Plastic covered the bed, shackles had been rigged to the headboard and footboard, and on a table a towel had been spread, upon which were displayed an assortment of tools and other implements. Tina turned to try and go back out the front door, but Angus had been expecting that and stopped her cold with a solid punch to her nose. She staggered back into the room, but didn’t fall. He came towards her, grabbed her by the hair and threw her headlong into the wall beside the headboard. She crumpled to the floor. He pulled her up by the hair again, forced her onto the bed, and shackled her arms at the wrists and her legs at the ankles.

  "Don’t you worry," he said, breathing hard, "I won’t rape you. That’s not what this is about."

  Tina had seen the array of instruments on the table. She could guess what it was about. The utter terror in her eyes made that apparent.

  "First this," Angus said, and grabbed something off the table. Before Tina realized what was happening he shoved the bulk of a towel into her mouth, then used electrical tape to hold the towel in. He wrapped it tightly around her face several times. "Now, before we begin, there are some things I want you to think about. First, Henry was chosen by Oracle to kill the girl precisely because Oracle knew he would not do it. Second, Henry must do it, he must kill the girl. Third, and this is really the only point you should concentrate on…you must get Henry to kill the girl. You must do whatever you need to do, say whatever you need to say to get Henry to kill Samantha. Of course, I understand that you would rather die yourself than do this. I understand, and that is why I have you here with me now. I need you to understand my side of things, see? I need to make sure that when the time comes, you will indeed do your part as Oracle has foreseen you will. Everything I’m about to do to you has been dictated to me by Oracle. I am not doing this to hurt you, rather it is all precisely to make sure that you will deliver when you are supposed to deliver. So then, let’s begin, shall we?"

  With that, Angus reached over and pulled something from the table. It was a long, flexible, metal rod. Without warning he brought it down hard across the tops of Tina’s legs three times in rapid succession. Pain suddenly erupted like a conflagration in her legs, and she screamed against the towel in her mouth as tears blurred her vision.

  "Henry must kill Samantha," Angus said. Whack! "Henry must kill Samantha!" Whack! It wasn’t long before her legs were numb. "That’s that part of it over," Angus said, his voice pleasant. "Now this…" Tina felt her shoes being removed, her bare feet exposed. She heard a clicking noise, and managed to focus on Angus long enough to him clicking on a butane torch. "This part is going to be tricky. Don’t want to do any permanent damage. Just remember… Henry must kill Samantha." Then he lowered the bluish yellow flame towards her feet.

  The key Angus had given Henry was for a two bedroom suite. They had room enough to stay away from one another. Yatin stood at the window, looking out towards midtown. He knew the Atlanta Oracle node was in the opposite direction, downtown. Oracle dominated his thoughts. Trying to become Oracle, to get at what Oracle had already figured out, had already set in motion. Events were connected, but how? Why? To what end?

  He knew what he knew about Oracle. He felt certain that whatever Oracle was doing was for the common good, the good of humanity. That was the big picture. He was not worried about that. The different elements made him wonder. Himself. Annika Dahl. Christie Seifert. Cardinal Roscoe. Tina Jefferson. Samantha Rohde. Why were they here in Atlanta? Why Atlanta?

  Okay, there was a thought. Why Atlanta? The obvious reason: Samantha Rohde, the target, lived in Atlanta. So that brings Henry. Henry brings Angus. Tina lived near the Rohde’s, and apparently her involvement was by chance. Not completely, of course. Oracle would have predicted a percentage chance for Tina’s involvement and planned for it. So, that accounted for her. What purpose she served might only be a by-product of her involvement, an ‘if, then’ statement in the code. If Tina Jefferson got involved, then…what?

  What the ‘then’ was, probably it had started. Angus trading Sam for Tina made no sense on the surface. Presumably, if the goal had been to save Sam, they’d won by sacrificing Tina. Of course, there had to be more to it than that.

  Yatin figured he’d been duped into coming to Atlanta because of his intimate knowledge of Oracle. How he was to apply this knowledge he didn’t know. Oracle seemed to expect him to figure that out for himself. To help Henry? Or to help Angus? Well, actually, that on
e was easy. To help Oracle. Annika Dahl’s role was obvious, or at least apparent, as the bait to lure him. Did she have a continuing role to play? If she were no longer necessary, would she be dead now? Yatin shivered at the thought of his creation deciding his own fate.

  Cardinal Roscoe had been sent by the Vatican, on the advice of their own A.I., Augustine. However, Yatin had a theory about Augustine, and also about the supposedly top-secret British A.I., Winston. Oracle knew about them both because they were connected to the Internet. An Artificial Intelligence, if it was to have any capabilities in the real world, needed to be connected to the Internet. While both Augustine and Winston were newer, and in some ways considerably more powerful than Oracle, they were either housed in a single CPU or networked across far fewer nodes than Oracle.

  Yatin would venture to guess that Oracle had co-opted Augustine and Winston. He considered that it might be the other way around, but his gut instincts told that neither Winston nor Augustine would have been programmed in such a way as to give them the edge over Oracle. He suspected their programming was such that they each had a singular agenda, whereas Oracle had an overriding purpose and an ultimate goal, but no agenda whatsoever. Everything Oracle did was to take a step towards that goal, sometimes a big step but usually a baby step. An analogy came to mind. Oracle was like a cop trying to break up a fight, totally focused on doing whatever it took to break up the fight, while the other two were trying to break up the fight and impress a certain girl at the same time. Oracle could use them to help break up the fight, but not the other way around.

  Yatin thought again about what he knew. Henry had been sent to kill Samantha, and could not do it. Samantha had run to Tina Jefferson’s house. Henry had followed, and for whatever reason had decided to protect Samantha from replacement assassins, and in that he needed Tina’s help. Angus, had been sent to try and make Henry complete the job, not to complete the job himself. He’d also helped prevent other replacement assassins from completing the job. Oracle had matched Yatin up with Annika months ago, and now it turned out that Annika’s purpose had been to get him to Atlanta. It seemed to Yatin that the linchpin was that Henry had to kill the girl, Samantha. This had to be related to why Oracle would have sent him in the first place, knowing that he would not be able to kill her.

  Again, it was not the death of Samantha Rohde that mattered, it was who killed her. More precisely, it was that Henry kill her. Why? Why Henry and not, say, Angus?

  Oracle sent Henry to do it precisely because it knew he would not. It then used Angus to try and get Henry to do it. If Angus could not, the end result was either that Samantha would live because Henry would not kill her…a stalemate…or that Samantha would die because someone else killed her…failure, because if that were the goal then Oracle would have sent someone else to do the job. Therefore, the goal was to get Henry to kill Samantha precisely because Oracle knew he wouldn’t do it. And that was…a contradiction.

  In programming, a contradiction meant…

  Yatin’s heart raced. He had an idea. As profoundly bizarre as this idea was, it felt right. He would never have believed it possible. He might still be wrong, though. He needed to think about it some more, to run it backwards and forwards. Because if he was right, then Angus was right. Henry would have to kill Samantha Jeannette Rohde, but at the same time there could no circumstances under which Henry would kill Samantha Jeannette Rohde. Yet, for Oracle to have brought them all to Atlanta, it meant that somehow they would find a way to get Henry to do what nothing in the universe would get him to do.

  It made Yatin Kumar’s head spin. He let out a deep breath and felt as if he’d been holding it in for a long time. He ignored the others as they looked at him when he went into the bathroom and filled a plastic cup with water. Samantha sat on the sofa, watching TV with the sound off, with wide eyes that did not look focused on whatever was on. Nobody seemed to be focused on anything in particular, except Henry who watched them all.

  "What’s wrong?" Henry asked. Yatin finished his water. He guessed Henry had noticed his sudden change in disposition, his sudden, if muted, excitedness.

  "I might be on to something," Yatin answered. "I’m not sure, yet. I need to think some more, but I might be on to something."

  Annika looked over at him from the dining table set up near the kitchenette at the other end of the suite. He managed a smile. Oracle had played her as much as it had played him. They were both pawns in a game of chess that Oracle was playing against itself.

  The Georgia State Archives building was guarded by a private security firm contracted by the state. There were a total of five guards, armed with forty-five caliber handguns. One each manned the entrances where the metal detectors were, standard in all government facilities. Two manned the loading dock area. A third manned the front desk and watched the security monitors. Nothing ever happened in the State Archives building. It was considered a cushy assignment and doled out as favors by management to friends. They knew Oracle’s Atlanta node was in the building, but that didn’t change anything. It wasn’t exactly publicized where the nodes were located, nor was it a state secret.

  When a delivery van approached, even an unscheduled one, nobody got suspicious. Sometimes the water guy was a day late.

  The security guards at the loading docks were surprised, and no match for Buck Ferguson and his militia men, who were armed with silenced MAC 10 Ingrams and Walther sidearms. They overpowered the two men there quickly, shooting one in the knee as a warning to the other to cooperate, or else. That got them into the building. They took out the security cameras right away. Among their supplies they had packed plastic police wrist ties and electrical tape, using these to bind their captives. One of Buck’s men tended to the wounded security guard’s knee while the others went out to take care of the three remaining security guards.

  It happened fast. Buck and his men were operating on pure adrenalin. Still, the security guard manning the front desk refused to cooperate, drew his gun, and was killed by a three second blast from an Ingram. They left the body behind the desk, and make sure the front doors were locked. Buck was proud of his men, who didn’t pause at all, even after the kill.

  They unloaded the C-4 explosives from the back of the van, and carried them downstairs to the basement where the Oracle node was housed. The Archives building would likely collapse, there was enough explosive material. The node would be completely destroyed, and a very, very clear message would be sent to the Federal government, along with the rest of the world. The American people do not want the U.N. on their soil. The American people do not want their country paying dues to the U.N. The American people want their government to withdraw from U.N. membership. Buck thought that the majority of Americans believed as he did, but were too afraid to do anything about it.

  The Oracle node looked like an old mainframe computer, the housing about the size of a compact car. All he knew was that the nodes were spread all over the globe, and that due to a design flaw destroying one node might actually be able to bring down Oracle. He didn’t pretend to understand how or why, all he knew was what he’d read on the Internet.

  Eve Dyer had always loved driving a school bus. Even when the kids fought each other, she would never give it up for anything in the world. She’d been doing it for fifteen years in metro-Atlanta. She prided herself on being the reason her kids -- and she did think of them as her kids -- arrived safely at school every morning and safely at home every afternoon. The last one on was always Jerome Lauterbach, the epitome of the skinny nerd in Coke-bottle glasses. He always sat at the front of the bus to escape Vincent Cervi and Trey Thorpe in the back, who would taunt him if he sat too close.

  This time, however, Jerome was not the last person to climb aboard Eve Dyer’s school bus.

  "Do not do anything stupid," a male, English voice said to Eve in a sharp tone. She turned to see a very well-dressed and clean-cut man holding a gun, with a big, fat silencer on the end of it. She recognized what it was from movies. Behi
nd the man, a smallish, pale woman climbed onto the bus. "Shut the door and start driving," the Englishman told Eve.

  In the rear of the bus, the kids hadn’t yet noticed what was going on and were chattering away like always.

  "Shut up!" the woman yelled, her accent thick. It sounded like a Russian accent to Eve.

  The kids shut up.

  "Drive the bloody bus," the Englishman commanded. Eve eased the bus back into traffic. Her mind was a jumble of thoughts, what to do and what not to do. Nothing to hurt the children, that was her first and most prominent thought. Nothing to hurt the children.

  She drove the bus.

  "I’ll tell you where to go," the Englishman said. "You just do as you’re told and no one will get hurt."

  Eve remained calm and drove the bus. She wanted to believe the words the Englishman said, that no one would get hurt. Something about his tone of voice made her think otherwise, though. Someone was very definitely going to get hurt. She wondered if she might intentionally crash the bus. The man and woman were standing in the aisle, so ramming the bus into a parked car or a tree would have knocked them off their feet at the very least. It might also result in one of the kids being hurt.

  She couldn’t bring herself to do it. She’d never had an accident in all her years as a bus driver. And she couldn’t intentionally do something that would hurt even one of her kids. She just couldn’t.

  She watched the road and drove the bus…and silently prayed.