“But why now?” Quinn asks. “Why would a second Epoch Index appear right after the attack in Paris?”
“Because someone figured out how to re-create it,” Moretti says. “Or will figure it out. Which means the clock is already ticking.”
“How do you know that?” Quinn asks. “How do you know what you found isn’t just a copy of the first Epoch Index?”
“Completely different technologies,” Moretti says, as if expecting that very question.
“What does that mean?”
“It means the first Epoch Index was sent back using particles. That’s why it was detected by the LHC. We don’t know how to accelerate particles to speeds faster than light—at least not yet—but we do know how to generate gravitational waves. This data was found by gravitational wave detectors, which means it was sent by Kilonova. Or rather, that it will be sent.”
“Maybe the first Epoch Index was just sent back twice. Using two different technologies. Like a backup.”
“Quinn, it’s the wrong size,” Van says. “And the old decryption keys don’t work. We tried them all.”
“Which means we need new decryption keys,” Moretti says. He looks from Quinn to Ranveer, then back again, and in his eyes, Quinn can see all that his statement implies. “And we need them fast. This one has more than twice the number of blocks.”
“What?” Quinn looks to Van for confirmation, finds it in the lines and eyes of a pained and anxious face, then looks back at Moretti. “You want to take out almost forty innocent people?”
“Fifty-six,” Moretti corrects. “And ‘innocent’ is a strong word.”
“No fucking way,” Quinn says. “I’m all for making whoever is responsible for Paris pay, but there’s no way the CIA can take out fifty-six innocent targets.”
“Correct,” Moretti agrees. “The CIA can’t.”
“Wait a second,” Quinn says. “If all this starts with a single person reverse engineering Paris, all we have to do is find him, right?”
Moretti holds up the flash drive, presenting it as what he seems to believe is irrefutable proof. “Apparently that ain’t how all this plays out.”
“Quinn,” Van says, “we will try to find him. But Al’s right. It doesn’t look good.”
“Well, that’s what I should be doing then,” Quinn insists. “I should be in Paris, with Henrietta, trying to find whoever is going to start all this.”
“We already have people on that,” Moretti says. “What we need are people who can execute Plan B.”
“Plan B,” Quinn repeats. “You mean people willing to murder innocent people.”
“There’s that word again,” Moretti says with distaste. “Innocent.”
“What if I refuse?”
“Go ahead,” Moretti says. “Go to Paris if you want. Go back to your apartment, open another bottle of wine, take another fistful of pills. I’m not ordering you to do this. I’m not even asking.”
“Then why the hell am I here?”
“You’re here because I already know that the day comes when you trade your identity for this flash drive. When the two of you take these cases and get to work. I figured maybe we could dispense with all the drama and get a head start.”
“What makes you so sure?”
“The only thing that makes me sure of anything anymore. Proof. From the future.”
“What kind of proof?”
“The prologue,” Moretti says. He holds up the flash drive so that it hangs in the space between them. Quinn recognizes the expression on his face from the basement of Swiss Fort Knox—from the moment he holstered his pistol, stepped forward, and identified his prize. “We know what we are,” he enunciates clearly, “but know not what we may be.”
Quinn has an image of pieces precariously stacked until they converge beneath the final gentle placement of a wedge-shaped cap. She is the keystone set at the arch’s apex—the meticulously chiseled missing middle that turns walls of wobbly, rough-hewn stone into a vast, weight-bearing dome. The buttress that must uphold the future.
Everyone in the room is focused on her, and she knows they are all thinking the same thing: the question was never how it was going to end for Quinn, and always how it would begin.
But there are two distinct and seemingly paradoxical interpretations of Quinn’s favorite quote from Hamlet. In fact, its subtle ambiguity is what drew her to it in the first place. We know what we are, but know not what we may be. Seen from one angle, it appears to emphasize the inevitability of the future—that we have little say in who and what we become. But lean slightly to either side, and it suddenly seems to reflect back at us the possibility of ultimate agency.
“There’s one thing I want,” Quinn says.
“Oh?” Moretti asks with sudden amusement. “Are we negotiating now?”
“I want access to Kilonova.”
“What, you want me to make you a key? You want to keep a toothbrush and a change of clothes here?”
“I want to store something.”
“That would make this place the single most expensive storage unit on the planet,” Moretti says. “You sure you can’t rent a U-Haul?”
“Not here here,” Quinn says. She steps forward and places both hands back on the electric surface of the plasma glass. “Before I can do this, there’s something I need to be able to leave in the past.”
39
OVERWINTER
HENRIETTA YI IS filling with antifreeze. The pale-yellow cryoprotective cocktail is being introduced through a vein in the back of her right hand while her body temperature is gradually lowered to exactly zero degrees.
She is on the Atlantic coast of South America, in French Guiana, just a few kilometers from the European Space Agency’s primary equatorial launch site. More specifically, she is in Project Overwinter’s underground cryobiology lab, entombed within a spacious trapezoidal hibernation pod obviously designed for future astronauts of far larger statures, monitored by a distributed team of off-site cryo-anesthesiologists. Fractal ice crystals creep in from the edges of the plasma glass lid to where they will finally close over the last remaining opening.
She is wearing a hooded, fitted, custom-printed bodysuit with a web of embedded electrodes and soft polymer tubing threaded throughout, everything gathered and tethered at her middle like a thick synthetic umbilical cord. The tightly bound, twisted bundle exits the side of the pod through an airtight port, where it is separated into its individual concerns and distributed across a wall of telemetric equipment. No metaspecs to exorcise her ghosts, but Henrietta’s eyes are already closed. Her Noctowl plush is cradled securely against her, swaddled in its own wings like a silent, watchful infant.
Project Overwinter was formed through a partnership between the world’s remaining space agencies. Cryopreservation is a critical missing component in the game of interplanetary exploration, since frozen astronauts do not need to be fed, kept warm, or stimulated during long flights through the void. The experimental technology is being developed in coordination with scientists studying organisms like the North American wood frog and Antarctica’s only insect, the wingless midge—both of which have unique biologies that allow them to survive being frozen nearly solid.
Henrietta is being transformed into an extremophile.
It was assumed that one of Project Overwinter’s primary challenges would be finding subjects willing to participate in long-term, high-risk studies. Prison systems were prepared to offer inmates the option of serving the reminder of their sentences in cryogenic stasis, and researchers even started eyeing patients in persistent vegetative states. But an open call for volunteers was met with an unexpectedly enthusiastic response. It used to be that the only axis along which you could distance yourself from tragedy and trauma was space, but Overwinter was now offering the promise of time.
One of the keys to feeding the o
ngoing study with a consistent, diverse, and statistically significant stream of subjects was, unsurprisingly, money. One thousand USD for every month you slept, usually direct-deposited into a bank account or crypto wallet anywhere in the world, from which otherwise destitute families withdrew enough to cover food and rent. In principle, it wasn’t much different from fathers leaving their families in search of economic opportunity, then wiring money back home. But instead of celebratory visits and video streams, the family’s main provider would sleep through milestones like graduations, weddings, and childbirth, which were recorded and saved for the day enough of the bills were finally paid that they could wake up and attempt to reassimilate.
A second way Project Overwinter attracted participants was by optionally guaranteeing anonymity. Sometimes in order to escape harmful cycles or extricate yourself from toxic relationships, it helped to disappear long enough to shift your temporal existence. But Overwinter was not to be used as a poor man’s Grid—a cryo-haven to escape paying for crimes by waiting out their statutes of limitation. Before requests to destroy biological samples and anonymize profiles were granted, thorough searches across all global most-wanted indices had to be independently verified. Of course, what administrators and legislators were still missing was the fact that with the right technology and the wrong motivation, it was perfectly feasible to commit unspeakable crimes even as you slept.
Paris being the crucible of so much cultural and scientific influence, Henrietta had decided to complete her manifesto there. The French were no strangers to crisis and had already started to move on, the city deftly routing around the Station F crater as it was being hastily hermetically capped, and politicians shifting from composed consolation and impassioned vows of swift reprisal to finding ways of using the tragedy to undermine their political rivals. Each day, Henrietta picked a different outdoor café, folding coasters into wedges to level cast-iron tables on cobblestone walks as she typed out her life’s work on a hacked CIA-issued laptop.
It is entitled Existential Threat Without Death: The Impending Permanent and Stable Global Totalitarian Dystopia. Part One argues that, for the first time in history, authoritarian regimes have everything they need to not only seize absolute power, but to retain it indefinitely, and that the greatest threat of AI was never that it might turn against us, but rather that we would figure out exactly how to master it. Part Two is a call to action—an assertion that anyone who is able has a responsibility to rise up against the primary apparatuses of total state control thinly disguised as the world’s various intelligence agencies. And Part Three gives anyone who wants it the means to do so: a library of schematics for building a wide variety of Antecedent machines—devices of all different sizes, configurations, and yields, some so discrete as to reclaim all the energy inside a sphere with the diameter of barely a centimeter, and some big enough in theory to collapse entire cities. All of them reverse engineered by recursive algorithms seeded with equations stolen from a heavily guarded and shielded cleanroom.
She uploaded her manifesto to an obscure corner of the shadowphiles, discoverable through a complex series of clues starting with a cryptic challenge posted to an anonymous, anti-government forum. In order to ensure that her work cannot be discovered and suppressed by undercover agents, some puzzles require compute power inaccessible to any single government entity. Others require recruits to collaborate across geographical regions located in countries either at war with one another or without established diplomatic relations. It is a new type of smart, decentralized bomb with a long, tamper-proof fuse. Self-interest will prove to be governments’ ultimate undoing. Just as science transcends politics, the future will belong to those who can bond across borders—a radically transformative feat achievable only by the people.
Henrietta calculates that it will take between six months and a year for all the clues to be solved and the manifesto to be uncovered. Maybe another three to six months for the first generation of Antecedent machines to be built. But even though it will be some time before the world realizes that The Static was somehow leaked, Henrietta knows that she needs to disappear now.
Kilonova was not built for the benefit of other timelines. The CIA has no intention of idly waiting for terrorist attacks to accumulate, then bundling names up into tidy blockchains and gravitationally transmitting them into the past. Moretti built a time machine because of Henrietta’s theory that its mere existence would increase the probability of names appearing in the present—names that, theoretically, Kilonova will send back sometime in the future. He initially wanted her to build a machine that could send particles back in time; accelerate them beyond the speed of light; control their spins so they could be encoded as bits. But superluminal technology did not yet exist. What she might be able to do, she explained to him—given enough mass and power—was cause infinitesimal perturbations in spacetime. Modulate both wavelength and amplitude to double temporal throughput. The second they broke ground on Kilonova, the AI Henrietta trained to find patterns in the particle detector backlogs at the Large Hadron Collider was deployed to monitor the four most sensitive gravitational wave detectors on the planet.
Which means the moment her plan reaches a certain threshold of quantum determinism, she has to assume that Moretti will know. In fact, the more likely it is to succeed, the greater the chances are that the second Epoch Index will spontaneously appear. And an audit of cleanroom logs will almost certainly surface one distinct anomaly: Henrietta Yi, a Korean American CIA researcher granted special dispensation by Jean-Baptiste Allard. It’s even possible that her name will be revealed to Quinn and Ranveer as the final block in the assassination chain.
If only she’d known where all this was going. If a younger version of herself could have at least conceived of this possibility. She could have built in a remote kill switch. Or made structural changes to the containment chamber so that, when the gravity spheres reached maximum rotational speed, the whole thing would shatter. All that mass would fall and the entire structure collapse. Alessandro Moretti, eventually found dead, crushed to death in his man cave turned crypt. But instead, in some ways, Henrietta has laid her own trap. Like so many of the obstacles we face throughout our lives, the result of oblivious yet insidious plots conceived by our former selves.
In retrospect, the appearance of the second Epoch Index was probably inevitable, predicted by the very existence of The Static. Why else would a future version of Henrietta want Quinn dead if not to prevent her from proactively dismantling her rebellion? In fact, Henrietta now believes that she has tried to kill Quinn at least twice across two different timelines: once with The Antecedent itself, and again through its mysterious emissions.
After she learned that Quinn was in the hospital during the attack, Henrietta tried to hack into her medical records, failed, then found an unpatched zero-day vulnerability in the CIA’s preferred medical provider’s back end, giving her access to the next best thing: all the financial data associated with her procedures. Quinn had been left with radar reflectors embedded in her left breast—beacons marking clusters of slow-growing but potent precancerous cells. An extremely unlikely combination that Ground Zero seemed explicitly engineered to exploit. A tragic but not unexpected death that her family and friends would mourn, but that nobody would find particularly suspect.
Henrietta’s theory is that her first attempt to kill Quinn in an even earlier timeline resulted in collateral damage—her ex-husband, just as they were in the process of reconciling—so her second attempt was designed to leverage the miscalculation by luring Quinn not toward The Antecedent itself, but into its lethal aftermath. And if that does not work, she will try again, escalating the brutality and complexity until she finds just the right sequence of events. Perhaps unsatisfied time cycles are what account for the world’s seemingly unrelenting campaign to attain chaos. Maybe they form the underpinnings of the second law of thermodynamics, which describes the tendency of systems to m
ove toward maximum entropy. Instead of working to exit catastrophic loops, perhaps the future just keeps doubling down on the past.
The fact that Quinn is still alive could mean that Henrietta’s plan is, once again, destined to fail. That she should already be documenting possible ways to try again. As in all things concocted for a long-term slow burn, time will tell, but Henrietta is confident in the bets she has placed. And that the future is more of a suggestion than a fixed, immutable rule. If the only goal of The Static was to assassinate Quinn, why include the Antecedent equation, perfectly color-coded to invoke a persistent and distinct ghost?
Henrietta believes it is because Antecedent machines are nothing like nuclear weapons. The number of people in the world capable of procuring fissile material and figuring out how to sustain thermal reactions is inherently limited. But the number of people capable of building Antecedent machines is, for all intents and purposes, infinite. The pace of assassinations that Quinn and Ranveer will have to achieve in order to keep the world safe will be almost impossible to maintain.
When filling out her application, Henrietta did not specify a predetermined amount of time to be in suspended animation. According to the intake coordinator, she was the first test subject to select the “open-ended” option. As long as her vital signs are stable, and as long as the project continues to be funded, Henrietta will remain in stasis. Overwinter wants to study dormant biology for as long as possible; it takes years to reach Jupiter and Saturn, where the moons most likely to harbor extraterrestrial life silently and seductively orbit.
Scorpion Page 30
