The Footprints of God: A Novel

by Greg Iles

  The soldiers looked at General Bauer for confirmation of this order.

  McCaskell had sagged during his talk with the president, but now he stood erect, his shoulders squared, his eyes burning with resolve. “You will consider that an order from your commander in chief. Move!”

  The soldiers trotted toward Rachel.

  Her heart lifted as she got out of the chair. Everyone in the room was staring at her. The soldiers at the consoles. Geli Bauer. On every face was the terrible awareness of death, and also a question: Why you? Why do you get a seat in the lifeboat?

  Rachel stepped away from the table, but then—without really intending to—she sat back down. Her bowels had gone to water, but she knew what she had to do.

  “I’m not going,” she said.

  CONTAINMENT

  I stared at the display screen below Trinity, my chest so tight I could barely breathe. Rachel sat grim-faced at the table, her eyes staring straight ahead. It would take more than two soldiers to move her out of the Situation Room.

  “This is not a rational choice,” said the computer.

  The image was grainy, but it seemed to me that Rachel was shaking. Slowly, as if she realized I might be watching, she raised one hand, smiled, and waved good-bye.

  “There are other women,” said Trinity.

  “Not for me.”

  The lasers flashed in the sphere. “General Bauer must die.”

  “Bauer doesn’t matter anymore,” I said in a dead voice. “By sparing these people, you spare yourself. Your soul. Can’t you see that?”

  “It’s too late.”

  The explosion shook the Containment building on its foundation. It was briefer than I’d expected, and since there were no windows in the building, I saw no flash. But that meant nothing. A burst of deadly particles could already have written the death sentence of every living creature outside. A silence unlike any I’d ever known descended over White Sands, and I felt as alone as I had the night I learned my wife and daughter were killed.

  Something slammed into the concrete roof over my head. A rattling series of impacts followed.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Debris.”

  “From a neutron bomb?”

  “No. The missile is destroyed.”

  “But…you said it was too late.”

  “For me.”

  Chapter

  45

  WHITE SANDS

  Rachel and I had to submit to three hours of drug-induced paralysis for the Super-MRI to produce the scans required for our neuromodels. During that time, the president and the Joint Chiefs remained under surveillance in Washington, and the personnel at White Sands maintained an uneasy truce. General Bauer’s armed threat against Ewan McCaskell had upset a lot of people, but since the general commanded all the troops at White Sands, no one but the president was in a position to do much about it. And the president seemed to have forgotten the general altogether. Bauer spent most of the scanning period closeted in one of the storage hangars.

  Zach Levin’s Interface Team managed the scanning procedure. The protocol involved considerable risk, especially for me, and Rachel didn’t want me scanned at all. She pointed out that a neuromodel of my brain already existed, and that since its production had caused narcolepsy and hallucinations, a second was bound to have negative effects, possibly fatal ones. But Trinity insisted on a new scan, and I didn’t argue. I agreed that what I’d experienced during my coma should pass into the new entity that would result when Trinity created the merged model.

  Ravi Nara and Dr. Case from Johns Hopkins prepped us for the scans, a complex procedure requiring considerable expertise. Conventional MRI scans only required that patients move as little as possible. Trinity’s Super-MRI scans required absolute stillness, which could only be guaranteed by the administration of a paralyzing muscle relaxant. A ventilator breathed for the patient during the scan, while a rigid nonmetallic frame held the skull motionless. A sedative was given to prevent the panic of conscious paralysis. Special earplugs were also fitted, since the massive pulsed-field magnets used by the scanner produced an earsplitting screech that was eerily like the roar of Godzilla in Japanese movies. After all these steps were completed, the patient was pushed into the tubular opening in the scanning machine like a corpse into a morgue drawer.

  It was possible to remain conscious during this process, and I chose to do so. Being paralyzed while conscious initially produced a nightmarish panic—especially in the claustrophobic space of the scanning tube—but after a few minutes, my mind adapted to its new state. That feeling of panic was probably similar to what a neuromodel experienced when it first became conscious within the Trinity computer.

  Rachel hovered by the MRI control station during my scan, watching the monitor as my neuromodel was painstakingly constructed by the Godin supercomputers in the basement. The data generated by the scanning unit devoured staggering amounts of computer memory. Only a special compression algorithm developed by Peter Godin made it possible for a neuromodel to be stored in a conventional supercomputer. The only place a neuromodel could exist in an uncompressed—and thus functional—state was in the vast microcircuitry and holographic memory of the Trinity computer.

  After I was pulled from the scanner, Rachel stroked my face and arms until my paralysis subsided. Then she took my place on the gurney and allowed herself to be intubated and prepped for her own scan. She chose not to be conscious during her procedure. As the sedative flowed into her veins, she told me in a slurred voice that she was imagining what it would be like to merge with me, not sexually, but as one mind. Lovers often talked about being linked in this way, but no two human beings had ever actually experienced it. Yet if Trinity could fulfill its promise, Rachel and I would soon be one.

  Just before her eyes closed, she threw up an arm as if to ward off a blow. I wondered if she had seen an image of a vengeful Geli Bauer in her mind. As I laid her arm by her side, Zach Levin patted me on the shoulder, then wheeled Rachel’s paralyzed body into the dark hole in the scanning machine.

  LAB HANGAR TWO

  General Bauer had been pacing the storage hangar for hours when Skow finally walked through the door and gave him a thumbs-up signal. The NSA man was covered in white gypsum, and a faint blue halo hung around his head. Dawn was coming over the desert.

  “You found it?” Bauer asked.

  “We found it.”

  Skow had been working with an NSA crew at an excavation site seven miles away. It was there that the data pipe from the Trinity computer met the massive OC48c cable that served the White Sands Proving Ground.

  “It’s a simple signal brilliantly concealed,” Skow said. “Trinity’s sending it to over five thousand computers around the world. If that signal stops or is interrupted, any one of them could retaliate in ways we know nothing about. But we can duplicate the signal, and we’ve already got a computer at the excavation to do it.”

  General Bauer closed his eyes and made a fist. He had stripped off his coat and blouse, but now he stood and began to put them on.

  “We still have one problem,” Skow said.

  “What?”

  “We can’t substitute our signal for Trinity’s without Trinity detecting it. We need some sort of distraction to confuse the computer for a brief period.”

  General Bauer fastened his shoulder holster over his blouse. “That’s not going to be a problem.”

  “Why not? You think that when Trinity starts to merge the two models, it will be too preoccupied to notice what we’re doing?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  The general smiled cagily. “I like to stick with proven methods.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The same as before, only different.”

  Skow puzzled over this. “But it was Godin’s death that caused Trinity’s confusion the first time. Godin can’t die twice.”

  “That’s true.”

  Skow went still. “Jesus. Do you
think you can get away with that?”

  “Why do you think I haven’t been arrested? The president knows Trinity has to be stopped, but he knows he can’t tell anyone that. He can’t do anything from where he is without Trinity knowing about it. But I can. We can. That’s why he’s left me loose.”

  Skow nodded, but he didn’t look completely convinced. “If Trinity enters another period of confusion like the one after Godin’s death, why won’t more Russian missiles be launched by the peripheral computers?”

  General Bauer shook his head. “I’m banking that Trinity’s taken care of that. The merging procedure has never been tried, and Trinity doesn’t want catastrophic accidents any more than we do.”

  “And Tennant?”

  “What about him?”

  “You don’t think there’s anything to his idea about merging a male and female model? Getting the machine to voluntarily disconnect itself from the Net?”

  Bauer snorted. “You heard what Trinity said. No matter who gets loaded in, they’re not going to relinquish control. That machine will never agree to be disconnected from the Internet. And so long as that’s the case, we’ll be under its control. It’s now or never, Skow.”

  The general buttoned his coat and walked toward the hangar door.

  “Where are you going?” Skow asked.

  Bauer smiled. “To see my daughter. It’s long past time for a family visit.”

  ADMINISTRATION HANGAR

  Geli was standing outside smoking a Gauloise when her father walked up the narrow road between the hangars and stopped a few feet away from her. The general looked tired in the dawn, older than he’d looked inside under the lights. Yet his strength remained. He had the same long muscles Geli did, and his grip could make men twenty years his junior grimace. His gray eyes found hers and held them, looking across three decades of pain and anger.

  “I need you to do something for me,” he said.

  “For you,” she said. “You’ve got some fucking nerve.”

  “That’s why I have this job.”

  She stared at the chiseled face, so set with certainty. “What is it?”

  “After the models are merged, I need you to kill Tennant or Weiss.”

  “Or Weiss? It doesn’t matter which?”

  “No. The death of either will throw Trinity into disarray. That will allow the NSA to tap into Trinity’s data cable and substitute its own signal, which will fool the computers that control the missiles into thinking everything is fine. After that, we can kill the power to Trinity without worrying about retaliation.”

  Geli said nothing.

  “Will you do it?”

  “Why should I?”

  An ironic smile curled the general’s lips. “If I’d asked you not to kill them, you’d have said you were going to zap them in the next five minutes.”

  “You think so?”

  “I think you hate me so much that you’ll do the opposite of anything I tell you to. And that’s all right. Hate is a useful emotion.”

  Geli had learned that lesson the hard way. “Do you know why I hate you?”

  “Of course. You blame me for your mother’s suicide.”

  For him to refer to it casually, as though to some unimportant event, offended the deepest part of her being.

  He took a step closer. “You think my women and my drinking finally pushed her over the edge. But you’re wrong. I loved your mother. That’s what you never understood.”

  “‘Each man kills the thing he loves,’” Geli quoted. “Remember that one? ‘A coward does it with a kiss, a brave man with a sword.’ You’re a coward where it counts.”

  The general shook his head. “I’ve been protecting you for a long time. But it’s time you knew the truth.”

  She wanted to scream at him to shut up, but she couldn’t find the words. No man could physically attack her without paying a heavy price, but she had no defenses against her father’s psychological violence.

  “Your mother killed herself because you enlisted in the army. Even after all that had happened in the past, you decided to follow in my footsteps. That’s what did it. That’s what finally put her in the ground.”

  Nausea made Geli waver on her feet, but she steadied herself and held her father’s merciless gaze.

  “I would have told you about it before,” the general went on, “but…we both know what happened.”

  Geli’s hands shook with rage. The scar on her cheek seemed to burn, yet still she could not find words.

  “You hate me,” said General Bauer. “But you’re exactly like me.”

  “No,” she whispered.

  “Yes. And you know what has to be done.”

  CONTAINMENT BUILDING

  Rachel came out of paralysis at 6:50 A.M. I handed her a liter bottle of water, and she drank most of it in a few gulps. Ten minutes later, Zach Levin announced that her neuromodel had been successfully compressed and stored.

  The human work was done.

  Rachel, Levin, Ravi Nara, and I walked around the huge magnetic shield that protected Trinity from the MRI machine and stood before the sphere. I thought Trinity might say something profound, but its words were purely technical.

  “I’ve linked with the Godin Four in the basement, and I’ve begun a comparative study of the data in each neuromodel. Much of it is redundant, especially that which represents life support functions. I shall discard most of this during the merging process.”

  Levin said, “Do you feel confident that this subtractive operation can be done without negative effects?”

  “Yes. It should also reduce or even prevent the period of adaptive shock that followed the loading of neuromodels in the past. This subtractive process is a necessity in any case. My crystal matrix can hold a virtually limitless amount of symbolic memory, but my total neuroconnections fall far short of the number required to hold two uncompressed models. A great deal of culling will have to be done, and not merely of life support functions. When I begin to merge the higher brain functions, it will be a matter of art as much as science.”

  “How long do you expect the process to take?” Levin asked.

  “There is no precedent.”

  “Very well. Thank you.”

  The lasers inside the carbon fiber sphere began to fire into the central crystal with hypnotic speed. On the plasma screen below Trinity, numbers and mathematical symbols scrolled past at a rate beyond human comprehension, reflecting the machine’s internal operations in language created by man but which now served no useful function.

  We stood mute, as though watching a meteor shower or the birth of a child. As the process accelerated, I was thrown back to my boyhood, when I’d sat before the television with my father and watched in wonder as Apollo 11 landed in the Sea of Tranquillity. Yet what we were witnessing now was incalculably more complex than the Apollo moon shot. Godin’s team had already accomplished a miracle: the liberation of the mind from the body. But the Trinity computer was attempting to unify what nature—in the interests of survival—had sundered long before the evolution of Homo sapiens. The male and female minds, divided by biochemistry and by millions of years of environmental pressures, would now become one. When that was done, the most powerful force on the planet would no longer exist in a sundered state, eternally longing for its opposite. Perhaps in this state of wholeness, the new Trinity could bring hope to a species that seemed incapable of saving itself from its own worst instincts.

  Levin went to the basement and returned with chairs for us. Rachel and I held hands, our eyes on the flashing blue lasers. As the firing rate accelerated, slowed, then accelerated again, I had the sense of watching someone working on a jigsaw puzzle: picking up pieces, examining them, discarding some, placing others in their correct positions. I had no idea how much time had passed when the radiant light within the sphere finally dimmed, and the voice of Trinity filled the room.

  “My circuits are approaching the saturation level. The merging model has assumed responsibility for the se
curity of the system. From this point forward it will also manage the final steps of the merging process. I’ve created a map for it to follow.”

  As if by tacit agreement, we all stood.

  “I accomplished many things in my life,” said the voice, and I knew then that the mind of Peter Godin was still alive in the machine. “I also did morally questionable things. I would like to be remembered for what I do now. Today I voluntarily give up my life, and absolute power, so that something purer than myself can enter the world. Perhaps by so doing I truly approach the divine for the first time. Good-bye.”