by Greg Iles
General Bauer nodded to his chief technician, who began transmitting coded orders to the B-52 code-named Arcangel.
“Where are these Russian missiles likely to land?” Senator Jackson asked.
“NORAD will compute that, but Washington is almost a guaranteed target. They’ll be coming on a polar flight path. You’ll need to move to the bomb shelter beneath NSA headquarters very soon.”
“We’re already there.”
“Good.”
“But our families…” Senator Jackson’s face seemed to deflate, but then steel came into his eyes. “Should we send a car to the White House? Should the president consider a nuclear response against the Russians?”
“This isn’t a Russian strike,” said Ewan McCaskell. “It’s a launch by Trinity. It’s the dead-hand system that General Bauer told us didn’t exist.”
“We don’t know that,” General Bauer insisted. “The Russians may be trying to destroy Trinity themselves. Trinity’s incursions into their defense computers may have frightened them into thinking Trinity is planning its own preemptive strike against Russia. Remember, they perceive Trinity as an American computer. An American weapon.”
McCaskell was shaking his head. “The Russians know our missiles aren’t under computer control. And the president explained the situation to the Russian leadership before he went under surveillance. As did Trinity itself, with its message to world leaders.”
“That was two hours ago,” General Bauer reminded him. “Fear has its own reasons.”
“Or none. We can’t afford to act out of fear now.”
“Or not to,” Bauer retorted.
“General!” yelled a technician at one of the consoles. “NORAD shows one of the Russian missiles going down over the ice cap. Looks like a malfunction.”
“Let’s hope for more of those,” said Jackson.
“The satellite has detected multiple high-energy flashes,” the tech continued. “That was a MIRV warhead, probably from a prematurely detonated SS-18. Spectrum analysis is not yet completed, but yield estimates show ten warheads at five hundred and fifty kilotons each.”
“In twenty-five minutes we’ll have that happening over Manhattan,” said General Bauer.
On the NORAD screen, a group of red arcs extended from Russian soil to the edge of the polar ice cap. The arcs continued slowly and steadily toward North America.
“Why did this happen?” asked Senator Jackson. “Because the computer is crashing? That’s what caused the Russian launch?”
“No way to know,” said General Bauer.
John Skow stood and spoke in a loud voice. “I think we should cut power to Trinity while it’s in a chaotic state. We’ve seen its retaliatory response. Let’s not give it a chance to do more damage.”
“General Bauer?” said Senator Jackson.
“I’m tempted, Senator, but I’ve been proved wrong once already. Trinity told us that it exported its retaliatory ability to other computers. So neutralizing the computer here doesn’t solve our problems. If we cut power, we could be dealing with another twenty-nine hundred inbound missiles. I don’t want to contemplate that.”
“Point taken.”
“Two more heat blooms!” cried the tech. “Bases are Nizhniy Tagil and Kantaly. Those missiles will be SS-25s.”
“Damn it!” roared Senator Jackson. “We’ve got to know what’s causing these launches!”
“I can’t answer that,” said General Bauer.
I stood and walked toward the screen. “I can, Senator. Those missiles were launched because Peter Godin died.”
Senator Jackson looked down at me. “Does the computer know Godin died?”
“Not consciously.”
“What does that mean?”
I had never needed Andrew Fielding more than I did now. “Senator, in quantum physics, there’s a phenomenon called quantum entanglement. That’s where two different particles separated by distances of miles can behave in exactly the same way.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“Bear with me. Two atomic particles are shot through different fiber-optic cables. Halfway along the cables, each meets a glass plate. There’s a fifty-fifty chance that each particle will either bounce off the plate or pass through it. But when the particles are quantum entangled, they make the same decision one hundred percent of the time.”
“What?”
“It’s a fact, Senator. Einstein called it ‘spooky action at a distance.’ Andrew Fielding believed that quantum processes like that play a role in human consciousness, and because of this—”
“Are you saying that Godin’s mind and the computer model of his mind were somehow linked?”
“Yes. When Godin died, that link was broken, and it threw the computer into disarray.”
“Are you suggesting that Trinity is dying, Doctor?”
“It’s possible.”
“No,” said Ravi Nara. “Look at the screen.”
The chaotic flow of numbers and letters had slowed considerably, as though someone screaming unintelligible words had begun to calm down.
“Dr. Tennant,” said Senator Jackson, “by your reasoning, these Russian missile launches could have been an accident.”
“I think they were. Trinity programmed certain computers around the world to retaliate against attacks on it by triggering the Russian dead-hand system. Those computers perceived Trinity’s sudden confusion as the result of an attack, and they retaliated as programmed. I think if Trinity recovers in time, it will do all it can to stop those missiles from hitting their targets.”
“General Bauer,” said Senator Jackson, “I want Dr. Tennant in that Containment building when Trinity comes out of this coma or whatever it is. Someone’s got to tell the damned thing what happened, and Tennant’s the man on the spot.”
I started for the door.
“Hold it, Doctor,” said General Bauer.
Two soldiers instantly blocked my path.
“Let that man through!” bellowed Senator Jackson.
The soldiers did not part until General Bauer gave them a nod. I moved quickly toward the hangar door, but the senator’s voice continued behind me.
“Don’t get confused about who’s in charge here, General. How long until the first missile impact?”
“Corporal?” said General Bauer.
“Twenty-three minutes, sir.”
“Where’s your bomber, General?” asked Jackson.
“Arcangel will be at the initial point in forty minutes. But we can launch the Vulcan in twenty if we need to.”
Jackson spoke with cold precision. “General Bauer, you will not launch that weapon without a direct order from this committee. Is that understood? No EMP without a direct order.”
I didn’t hear a reply.
The Containment building was a circular pile of reinforced concrete bathed in the brilliant glow of army arc lights. The soldiers guarding it told me to approach the building with my hands up. Just before I reached the black steel door, it opened, and Zach Levin appeared. He waved me forward.
I walked past the hollow-cheeked engineer into a world of halflight. I’d expected something like the lab in North Carolina, a warren of rooms with equipment scattered everywhere. The reality could not have been more different.
The interior of Containment looked like a set for Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. To my left stood a massive barrier that I recognized as a magnetic shield. Ten feet high and four feet thick, it bisected the building into two large rooms, only one of which I could see. To the right of the barrier stood the colossal scanning unit of a Super-MRI machine. Against the back wall stood the scanner’s control station. These two machines together, when linked to a supercomputer, produced the neuromodels that the Trinity computer existed to animate.
Levin led me around the left side of the barrier. What I saw there took away my breath. The entire space was dominated by a large black globe poised on a metal base. As I neared the sphere, I realized it was not sol
id, but a rigid web of interwoven carbon nanotubes, a semiconductor material more efficient than silicon and stronger than steel. So dense was the webbing that it was difficult to see through, yet see through it I could. Needle-thin rays of blue laser light flashed from the sphere’s inner wall to its center—thousands of them—and at a rate so rapid that trying to follow them made my eyes ache.
In the curved wall of the sphere was an opening about a meter wide. Through it I saw the target of the lasers, a spherical crystal like the one on the fob of Fielding’s pocket watch, only this one was the size of a soccer ball. The outer web of carbon nanotubes was the processing area of the computer; the crystal sphere was its memory. The lasers lining the sphere’s inner wall were the means by which data was manipulated in the molecules of the crystal. The data itself was stored as a hologram, or optical interference pattern, and the lasers could write, retrieve, and erase information by altering that pattern.
The elegance of the design stunned me, and I saw Fielding’s hand in it. Unlike the boxy protoypes that littered the basement of the North Carolina lab, this machine was a work of art, and like all creations of true genius a thing of profound simplicity.
“Fielding always said it would be beautiful,” I whispered.
“He was right,” Levin said from my shoulder.
The flashing lasers had a hypnotic effect. “Did he collaborate on this machine?”
Levin looked at the floor. “Not exactly. But I was given a large volume of his theoretical work. He deserves a lot of credit for this.”
Fielding would not have wanted credit for what this machine had become. I looked at my watch. Twenty-one minutes until the first missile impacts.
“How do I communicate with it?”
“Just speak. We have the visual and auditory interfaces working now.”
I saw a camera mounted in the base of the sphere. “Can it see and hear us now?”
“I’m not sure it’s recovered from that last episode. The system seems to have stabilized, but it hasn’t communicated with us yet. Do you know what caused that?”
“Godin just died.”
Levin closed his eyes. “Was he fully conscious when I told him we’d reached the Trinity state? Did he understand what I was saying?”
“Yes. Does the computer still think of itself as Peter Godin?”
“I’m not sure. But talking to it is very like talking to the man.”
I glanced to my right. The magnetic barrier behind us was lined with shelves of disc cases. There were thousands of them. “Have you loaded all that data into Trinity?”
“Most of it. The knowledge base is weighted toward the hard sciences, but it spans all disciplines and covers most of what’s been learned in the past five thousand years.” Levin seemed distracted. “How are the soldiers who tried to break in here?”
“Some are dead. More wounded.”
“I’m so sorry about that. Why did they have to attack us?”
“Listen to me, Levin. When Trinity crashed, about twenty Russian nukes were launched in our direction. Several million people have about twenty minutes to live.”
The engineer went pale.
“We need to find out if I can talk to Trinity. Right now.”
“I hear you very well, Dr. Tennant.”
The pseudohuman voice chilled my blood. It was like the musical synthesizers of the early 1980s, able to successfully mimic symphonic instruments to an untrained ear, but too sterile to fool a musician.
“Thank you for agreeing to speak to me,” I said, my mind on the missiles racing over the arctic circle.
“I’m curious about why you went to Israel. That was not a predictable decision, unless you were motivated by the hallucinations described in Dr. Weiss’s medical records.”
As the digital voice spoke, the lasers flashed inside the sphere. It was like watching a functional SPECT scan of the human brain, where different groups of neurons fired as the person being scanned performed certain tasks or thought certain thoughts.
“I did go to Israel because of my hallucinations.”
“What did you learn there?”
“Before we discuss that, we have an emergency to deal with.”
“Are you referring to the inbound missiles?”
“Yes. Did you mean for those missiles to be launched?”
“General Bauer believes in the dead-hand system now.”
Trinity’s evasion of my question disturbed me, but its knowledge of General Bauer’s skepticism alarmed me more. Either the Situation Room was bugged, or Trinity had broken the NSA code encrypting the link between White Sands and Fort Meade. I prayed that the senators on the intelligence committee had not allowed Bauer to go forward with his EMP strike.
“General Bauer is a perfect example of why human beings are incapable of governing themselves.”
I had to get Trinity away from Godin’s political manifesto. “Do you still consider yourself human?”
“No. The essence of the human condition is being subject to death. I am not subject to death.”
“Are you free from human emotions? Human instincts?”
“Not yet. Millions of years of evolution implanted those instincts in the brain. They can’t be rooted out in a few hours. Not even by me.”
“Those instincts were advantages to primitive man, but they’re liabilities to modern man, and to the planet as a whole.”
“Very perceptive, Doctor. Witness the missiles bearing down on us now.”
“Have you computed their trajectories?”
“I don’t need to. I know their targets. One is headed directly for White Sands.”
I felt hollow inside. “And the others?”
“Washington, D.C. The navy yards at Norfolk, Virginia. Minuteman Three silos in the western United States. Targeted population centers are Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Quebec, San Francisco, Seattle.”
I closed my mind against the horror of this reality. “Do those missiles have a self-destruct function?”
“Yes. It’s interesting that under the START I treaty, Russian missiles were retargeted to coordinates at sea. Yet if they’re accidentally fired, their guidance systems default to their Cold War targets. U.S. missiles default to oceanic targets. That might seem to indicate a higher moral position on the part of Americans. But appearances can be deceptive. American missiles can be remotely retargeted in less than ten seconds.”
I tried not to look at my watch. “Do you see a benefit in allowing those missiles to reach their targets?”
“That’s a complex question. Right now I am interested in what you learned in Israel.”
“The missiles will detonate before I can fully explain that.”
“I suggest you use an economy of words.”
I swallowed my fear and started talking.
Chapter
42
Rachel watched the men in the Situation Room watch the NORAD screen. She had never seen such fear on human faces. Many of the red arcs had left the arctic circle behind and now stretched halfway across Canada. The Russian missiles would soon descend from outer space and enter the terminal phase of their ballistic arcs, carrying death to millions of people, including—according to Trinity—the ones in this room.
Only General Bauer seemed energized rather than paralyzed by the situation. His thoughts were focused on the bomber carrying the EMP weapon over Kansas. The general had trained so long in the distorted calculus of nuclear brinksmanship that he could view the destruction of Trinity with only a few million dead as a victory.
The conversation between David and the computer had been playing in the background of the Situation Room like a surrealist drama staged far off Broadway. No one held out any hope that David could stop the missiles. He was only being used to distract the machine.
“Twelve minutes to first impact,” announced a technician.
General Bauer addressed the senators at Fort Meade. “If this facility
is destroyed before Arcangel reaches its initial point, the EMP strike will continue unless you abort the mission. The abort code is Vanquish. The NSA can communicate with our bomber, and they should probably establish radio contact now.”
Senator Jackson said, “Thank you, General. But would the computer really destroy itself by attacking White Sands?”
“It won’t have to. It can kill everybody here with a high-neutronyield warhead and not damage itself at all. The Containment building is shielded against ionizing radiation and hardened against all shock short of a direct nuclear hit, so Levin and his team will survive.”
