Fool's Experiments

by Edward M. Lerner

  Dr. Brunner was already inside. She cowered, wide-eyed, in a comer.

  Cheryl extended her hands, palms up: See, no hypos. "Hello, Sheila. This is my friend, Glenn."

  "Hello, Sheila," Glenn said. "I hope you feel better soon."

  A technician brought in two helmets, and returned to the observation room. Cheryl slowly coaxed Sheila into allowing one helmet on her head, and then donned her own. In minutes, Sheila's trembling had stopped and her jaw unclenched.

  Cheryl is definitely on to something, Glenn thought. Maybe he could watch for a few more minutes....

  Linda's AL lab had no phones, and shielding blocked mobile service. Against the odds, rain was coming down in buckets. She and Kevin retreated to their respective cars, working their cell phones. Through the downpour she could barely see Kevin, two parking spots removed.

  When Kevin rejoined Linda, he was, like her, soaked from the few steps between car and foyer. "It's no use," Kevin said. "I left voice mail on the colonel's office phone and cell. I left 'call me, it's urgent' messages at the forum switchboard."

  Linda knew no one at the forum but Glenn cleared for Al. She knew Aaron McDougal at CIA, but he had tacked a week's vacation onto the Memorial Day weekend, camping somewhere remote and unreachable. Doug Carey had the clearance and would surely understand the problem, but she had no contact info for him. A white-pages search by cell phone offered screen after screen of "D. Carey" listings in Virginia—not that he was apt to be home midday.

  This is your own mess. Time to pick it up.

  She had a NIT helmet. In ten seconds, she could reconnect the rooftop antenna. Doug Carey had gone after something like Al. He had beaten it.

  She would, too.

  Except the DII was highly secure. She lacked access codes to even authorize an uplink out of the building.

  Al was born and bred to solve problems like that.

  Linda removed the helmet, crossed her arms on the desk, laid down her head, and cried.

  A minute of self-pity was enough. It fixed nothing. She sat up, dried her face with a wad of tissues, and put the helmet back on. She had a supercomputer to help her crack the codes.

  Or maybe Al would find her.

  The entity continued its explorations. It bypassed security mechanisms, traveled networks, accessed computers, and mined databases. It correlated everything.

  Its understanding grew exponentially.

  Computers were more than places it could inhabit; computers and sensors existed in the newfound outer world. Some had fixed locations on the globe. Some moved. Many of the remote observation platforms—call them satellites—moved.

  It studied with particular interest the locale from which it had so recently escaped. Millions of humans clustered in that region—call it Greater Los Angeles—and millions of computers.

  From one of those computers, one with which the entity was all too familiar, someone insistently tried to follow it. That someone was familiar, too.

  Finally freed of confinement, the entity had options....

  Flotillas of slow-moving unmanned aerial vehicles ringed the United States.

  A UAV, sipping its fuel daintily, flying low and slow, had a cruising range that exceeded a thousand miles. It could remain airborne for a day on one refueling. It navigated with pinpoint accuracy by GPS. It monitored and tracked with a multispectral sensor suite everything that moved near its segment of the border. It reported everything it detected via military satellites. It carried a high-explosive warhead to eliminate imminent terrorist threats—when duly authorized by Homeland Security personnel, of course.

  A UAV flying over the empty desert east of San Diego turned northwest and accelerated.

  Eleven minutes later, traveling at 1,500 miles per hour, it dived into the AL lab. The five-hundred-pound warhead leveled the surrounding city block.

  CHAPTER 65

  Someone burst into the treatment room: a hospital guard. This had better be good, Glenn thought. "Can I help you?"

  "Are you Colonel Adams?" the guard asked. He was on the pudgy side and huffing a bit from a dash through the halls. "The Pentagon is trying urgently to reach you, sir."

  The Pentagon? Glenn could not guess why. "Where's a phone I can use?"

  "There's supposed to be a voice mail on your cell phone." The guard wheezed again. "Maybe it's about that LA thing."

  "LA thing," Glenn repeated.

  The guard nodded. "Terrorist incident. Massive explosion."

  "Take me someplace I can check my messages," Glenn said. Cheryl remained under her helmet, oblivious. He followed the guard to a dark office. He closed the door.

  The first message was from Kevin Burke. Al was out!

  Three clicks brought up CNN on Glenn's cell phone. The tiny screen showed an aerial view of a crater. Linda's lab was at the epicenter—and gone.

  He felt ill.

  The bombing was almost certainly why the Pentagon was so eager to reach him. He went back to voice-mail mode, and skipped for now through Kevin's many messages. Finally he came upon a different voice.

  "Code alpha foxtrot X-ray niner four. Repeat, code alpha foxtrot X-ray niner four. This is not a drill."

  "Out, now," Glenn shouted.

  Under her NIT helmet, Cheryl could only hear Glenn. "It's going really well. I know you want to get back to your office, but I can stay."

  "Out now, or I yank the helmet off your head."

  That got through to her. "Ten seconds." She gave her hurried good-byes to Sheila, here where she responded, then popped the helmet. "Glenn, what was the rush?"

  "I got an emergency evac notice. A missile armed with a nuke is headed toward Washington. I'm ordered to my assigned remote bunker. Continuity-of-government planning." Cheryl's stomach lurched. Where is Carla? Doug? Why aren't there sirens, warning everyone? Why hadn't the tech burst in here at Glenn's shout? What could she—

  Cheryl pulled herself together with a shudder. "Why are you telling me?"

  "No time, Cheryl. I need you to trust me. Can you do that?"

  Cheryl swallowed hard. "What do you need?"

  "I'm stealing a NIT helmet. I need you to make the connection work, long-distance." He glanced at the observation room. "I took care of the tech."

  He needs me to trust him. Cheryl ignored a thousand questions. "We can take the helmet controller out of this shielded area. The problem is the helmet-to-controller link uses WiFi. That's low-power stuff. Short-range."

  "Don't explain. Just do it! A nuke hits D.C. in maybe twenty minutes."

  "Then why are you still here?" she blurted.

  "To maybe save a half-million people! I need the helmet."

  Shit! She stared at the helmet. WiFi had a range of about a hundred feet. But WiMax...

  Cheryl dashed into the observation room, stepping over the tech slumped on the floor. The room had several computers. She began popping out network interface cards, looking for logos and trademarks. New computers came WiMax ready. WiFi, WiFi, WiMax, WiFi, WiMax.

  One computer had an active display; the rest were dark or running screen savers. The active computer had to be controlling the helmet. She replaced its WiFi card with a WiMax card. Her other scavenged WiMax card replaced the WiFi card from the helmet itself.

  "Eighteen minutes, Cheryl."

  She slipped on the helmet, just long enough to see that it still worked. She had replaced the network cards hot, keeping the session active to save time. She hadn't fried any circuits.

  Crap. The hospital WiMax repeaters, if any, would all be near the hospital. Would Glenn go outside the hospital's network range? Impossible to know.

  "Clock ticking here," Glenn said.

  "I know."

  BioSciCorp used wireless broadband service. The provider was AT&T; AT&T would have WiMax access points wherever Glenn was headed if anyone did. She just had to get the helmet logged onto the AT&T network. Her security and access codes were backed up on the thumb-drive/key-fob in her pocket—handy when one's laptop crapped out
on a business trip.

  Cheryl pressed the thumb drive into an open USB port on the helmet controller, unlocked the tiny drive (alrac00: "Carla" typed backward plus her birth year).

  Carla's sweet face threatened to crowd out everything else. That poor girl had been through so much.

  No! Help Glenn help her! Clearing her mind, Cheryl downloaded her codes over the wireless link into the helmet. "Done. I'll get you onto the Internet as you go. Give me five minutes."

  "Thanks." He took the helmet and left her.

  In a nuclear target zone. In a high-security psychiatric hospital, with a sandbagged tech ready to wake up any minute. With a poor, sick woman staring at her.

  Never mind any of that. Cheryl had promised to trust Glenn, the nuke was only getting closer, and she had a job to do.

  The tech was stirring. Cheryl cracked him on the back of the head with a keyboard, and he slumped. She unplugged the keyboard cord and with it bound his hands behind his back. She stuffed a mouse pad in his mouth and tied that in place with another keyboard cable. She dragged him into the treatment room with Sheila. Grunts from there wouldn't generate curiosity.

  One way or another, Cheryl only needed to stay free for a few minutes.

  The helmet control software ran on a high-end laptop, to save space on the desk, she assumed. She popped the laptop from its docking station, switching it to battery power but leaving Windows running. This wasn't the movies; if the machine logged off, there would be no clever thirty-second hack attack to get back in. Whatever Glenn hoped to accomplish would fail.

  Cheryl carried the laptop across the hall to an empty office. Outside the shielded area, the laptop synched itself to the hospital's wireless network. It took her six minutes, not five, but she patched through to the stolen helmet. Now it's all up to Glenn.

  She tried not to think of the nuke that was streaking toward her.

  The hospital guards watched for escaping patients, not thieving visitors. With his suit coat draped over his forearm and hand—and the helmet—Glenn sauntered out with no questions asked. He got into his car, tossed coat, helmet, and cell phone onto the front passenger seat, and peeled out of the parking lot.

  In front of the hospital, the flag stood out stiffly from the flagpole. As best he could judge, the wind was blowing east- northeast. Good.

  Fifteen minutes.

  He sped north at a crazy speed, weaving through traffic, sirens wailing behind him. He groped about the passenger seat until he found the phone. He turned on its speakerphone and retrieved voice mail again.

  "Call me. I'll wait outside. It's urgent," Kevin Burke said. Almost certainly, Kevin was dead. Kevin, Linda, the security team, the intel analysts, and how many innocent bystanders?

  Next message. Kevin's voice held a bit of panic. "It's out, and I don't know what to do."

  Glenn swerved around a slow-moving pickup truck, missing it by inches. A horn blasted, southbound traffic. He cut back to his lane, barely avoiding the oncoming minivan.

  Next message. "Linda is going after it with the helmet."

  The next voice mail was the Pentagon evac order. Cursing, Glenn hung up. It was pretty much what he had feared. Linda had gone after Al, and the creature had swatted her. Instead of a brain wipe like AJ's monster, it hit her with a big bomb.

  And now it's thrown a nuke at me.

  At least Glenn hoped Al had thrown the nuke at him. He had disobeyed a direct order to evacuate. He had involved Cheryl in his desperate scheme. It only made sense if Al was trying to swat him, Glenn, personally. With no way to locate Glenn exactly, Al had targeted the area where he worked and lived with a much bigger flyswatter.

  Al probably had no idea D.C. was the center of government, if it even knew what a government was. Either way, it had launched what the nuclear-war strategists called a decapitation strike. Take out all the leaders without warning.

  The Pentagon was taking the incident as a decapitation strike. There had been no public alert—CNN could hardly have failed to mention that. With so little notice, someone downtown had made the desperate decision to sacrifice the few who might escape the blast radius lest the leadership's exit be blocked by panic and gridlock.

  Glenn passed a tractor-trailer on the right, on the shoulder, wheels slipping, gravel spraying from his tires. Fourteen minutes.

  The CIA hospital was to the north of Leesburg, Virginia. He was on a two-lane stretch of Route 15. Ahead was one of the few Potomac crossings on this western fringe of the D.C. metro area. Behind, the sirens were closer.

  He ran a red light, pounding on his horn, racing toward a narrow steel trestle bridge. Mouthing apologies, he clipped a sport-ute crossing the river from the Maryland side. In his rearview mirror, the SUV smacked into the trestle, rebounced toward the center, and spun out. The car behind rammed it, and...

  Bridge blocked.

  Glenn left behind the tiny town of Point of Rocks, Maryland, and sped northwest.

  Ten minutes.

  Seven minutes.

  Warheads on descent can be steered—if they get guidance information. If you didn't wait too long. The heat of reentry ionized the air around the warhead, blocking communication.

  Glenn wished he could remember how close to impact the blackout happened. Five-six minutes? If he had waited too long ...

  He skid-turned down an isolated side road and braked to a stop. He slid on the helmet. If Cheryl had not gotten it connected...

  She had.

  The familiar scenes of cyberspace lacked only one thing: Al. Glenn had no idea how to find Al. Al would have to find him.

  My job is to make that happen.

  He remembered the playful otter, hating it. It morphed back in his mind's eye to that original, hungry shark. Red blood seeped from its toothy maw.

  Glenn focused on the shark. He imagined piercing the shark with razor-sharp, barbed harpoons. He imagined it snared in a trawler net, unable to swim, its gills pulled tight, suffocating. He imagined it overtaken by a large ship, sucked into the propeller, the spinning blades mincing it to chum.

  Whose idea was the satellite link over which Al had escaped? Almost certainly, Doug was correct about Al's nonverbal manipulations. If so, the DII link had been Al's idea, not Glenn's own. No, not the specifics, but the idea of a connection. The concept of a way out. Al the Otter had insinuated a need for help—and Glenn had obviously provided it.

  Eyes covered, Glenn could not see the dashboard clock. Maybe six minutes? How soon until reentry and the loss of all hope?

  And there it was!

  A creature took form in Glenn's mind: the monstrosity Ralph had hinted at, with the gaping jaws of a shark superimposed. There was a moment of connection, a bit of vertigo, glimpses from several points high above the Earth. Glenn recognized Chesapeake Bay, the sprawl that was the D.C. area. The frame shifted, recentering on a spot in the foothills of the Blue Ridge.

  And then, in a momentary tessellation of imagined pixels, all that was gone.

  Glenn ripped off the helmet. Al had taken the bait.

  Two minutes.

  He had recorded a voice-mail farewell to Lynne. He had never been one to speak the things that were in his heart. Now he never would. In the time he had, he could say not even a millionth of what needed to be said. All she meant to him. She would not get his message until—after. All that made it bearable was that what he did here might give Lynne that after.

  He had recorded a message for General Lebeque. There wasn't enough time for that, either, scarcely enough time to take the blame for everything. For the hubris of championing an AL project. For being duped into abetting Al's escape. For not ordering Al turned off at Doug's warning. For whatever Cheryl had done, trusting him. For drawing the nuclear wrath of this monster, Glenn's monster, upon them all.

  "Talk to Doug Carey and Cheryl Stem," Glenn told the general. "If anyone can make sense of this mess, it will be them."

  One minute, Glenn guessed.

  The fields before him were the vibrant
green of young soy plants, but his mind's eye beheld endless sand. Night replaced day. A broken-down Humvee replaced Glenn's idling Audi.

  A fiery orange streak, descending.

  I'll see you soon, Tony, Glenn thought. I'll—

  CHAPTER 66

  An impossible flash, stabbing through closed eyelids. An unimaginable rumble. Violent shaking.

  Doug found himself on the floor, tangled in bedding. An earthquake? The mid-Atlantic region didn't have quakes. And had he dreamt that flash?

  Before falling into bed, exhausted, he had unplugged the bedroom phone. So why wasn't he hearing, faintly, beeping from the downstairs extension he had left off-hook? And why was the LED face of his bedside clock dark?

  He was groggily assembling clues when battle-armored troops rushed into his bedroom.

  Doug wore only underwear, having scarcely managed to drop suit, shirt, and tie on a chair before falling into bed. Soldiers swept him from the house and into the front yard, barely letting him grab the clothes—and roboarm—he clutched to his chest. One of his ... escorts? ... captors? had his shoes. He hoped.

  "The Brass" wanted him. Major Someone had said. Now.

  A crowd of neighbors stared at Doug and his house. There was a sharp shove in the small of his back. "Quit it!" Doug snapped. "Whatever's going on, I prefer to face it wearing pants."

  "Pants are your priority?" Major Someone grabbed Doug's elbow and spun him around to face the house. "That is what's going on."

  In the distance, towering over Doug's house, loomed a black and angry mushroom cloud.

  Where Glenn had been, the land had been transformed. Many nearby sensors no longer reported, and more were unable to penetrate the obscuring cloud. Some orbiting sensors dropped offline, and not all returned. Radio frequency emissions surged. Network traffic spiked.