by Ted Bell
It was only because of his intense relationship with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, that none of his countless enemies within the Artesh (Persian for army) or the secret sect known as PMOI (People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran, sometimes known as MEK) had yet to succeed in assassinating him. MEK, he knew, was providing intelligence about Iranian nuclear capability to the Americans and, worse, the Israelis. He had shared this information with authorities in Tehran. Hundreds of PMOI had been killed and three thousand arrested. For this, they wanted his head.
He controlled his flying machine with twin joysticks located at the front of each armrest. Atop the control sticks were buttons, triggers, just like on a Sukhoi jet fighter. Two laser-sighted 9mm machine guns faced forward, two aft, all swivel mounted. When the mood struck him, he would zoom out to the terrace just beyond his bedroom doors, maneuver up close to the parapet overlooking the sea, and blaze away at the shrieking and diving and shitting seagulls that were constantly annoying him. To this day, he’d never managed to hit one but that didn’t stop him from trying.
If a man’s home is his castle, certainly that was true of Darius’s. His large compound was located about fifty miles southeast of the port city of Bandar-e Būshehr, Iran, on a high cliff overlooking the Persian Gulf. It had been built entirely within the monstrously thick walls of an ancient Persian fortress known as the Ram Citadel. Built sometime before 500 B.C., the citadel is surrounded by walls six or seven meters high. It had withstood the fierce Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century. The Ottoman-Persian wars had raged on for nearly three centuries, but never once had the great fortress succumbed to siege, nor had its mighty walls been breached.
Much remains from antiquity. Inside the most internal wall of baked clay bricks stands the citadel, the barracks, the mill, a forty-meter-deep water well, and stalls for two hundred horses. Houses for the rulers and the ruled-over still stand. There are as many as thirty watchtowers including the two “stay-awake” towers for which Ram is famed. People inhabited the Ram until the mid-nineteenth century when they mysteriously disappeared. The Iranian army kept a presence there until 1932, and then the structure was wholly abandoned until a wealthy grandee purchased it, began construction of a lavish palace, and made it the family compound.
Now, of course, it all belonged to Darius.
The new palace had been built of limestone and white Carrara marble to Darius’s exacting specifications. The towers and domes of stone shone a brilliant pink as he emerged into the daylight, hurtling across a vast walled plaza dotted with gardens, Renaissance Italian sculpture, and fountains. The various structures, laboratories, domed residences, and minarets surrounding the plaza were just now catching the first rays of the sun rising above the mountains to the east.
Atop the highest point within his compound stood one of the world’s ten most powerful telescopes. It was called a Large Binocular Telescope, and, to use the language of astronomy, it had “seen first light” in October 2005. The LBT’s two twenty-eight-foot mirrors worked together to provide as much resolution as would be derived from a single thirty-foot mirror, and they were ten times more powerful than Hubble’s. Darius had traveled to places in the universe where no man had been before.
And, he chortled, he had the pictures to prove it.
Darius’s home base was a mighty fortress, but Darius, being deliberately quaint as was his wont, always referred to the huge, fortified complex as his “little cottage by the sea.” There were large block dormitories for scientists, guards, a massive bioengineering laboratory and servants, and a massive power plant to supply the unusually high-energy requirements of Darius’s latest creation, Lord Perseus.
Few “cottages” in the world were as highly secure, in terms of radar-guided antiaircraft systems, armed guards, dogs, sonic sensors, and sophisticated radar and sonar installations. The Ram Citadel was known to the mullahs in Tehran only as “the Rocks.” Darius was a secretive man. And few places had hidden within them so many secrets, so many, as it would turn out, dark and potentially catastrophic secrets.
At the sight of his rapid approach, guards manning the massive steel gates adjacent to the marina quickly opened them. He zoomed right through them, a wide smile on his cherubic face. He was happy.
He was going to see his best friend, Perseus!
Darius, a quadriplegic since birth, sped out along the great steel pier that jutted into the pale blue waters of the harbor. At the end of the pier, a gleaming white yacht was moored. It was large, nearly a hundred meters in length overall, three hundred feet, and had formerly belonged to Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the last ruler of the Persian Empire.
After the Revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini had bestowed it upon Darius in honor of his scientific achievements in nuclear physics on his twentieth birthday. This was for public consumption. The truth was, he’d discovered a new star in the Alpha Centauri system and named it after the nation’s religious leader. Darius was not a religious man (he was secretly an atheist), but he was not stupid, either. Khomeini and the mullahs who succeeded him had ruled Iran since the 1980s, and therefore, to some extent, they ruled him.
But no longer. No one ruled him. Not anymore.
Not since Perseus.
Darius was excited about this morning’s meeting with his closest friend and companion. He had lain awake all night, restive, tossing and turning, his mind roiling with troubling questions for Perseus. He’d been thinking about the origins of the universe, too. And about the wondrous possibilities of exceeding the speed of light, about parallel universes, about—
Damnable companion, his mind.
Had been all his life, since boyhood. Questions, questions, questions: What makes that clock tick? How did the music get inside the radio? Why, when I drop my ball, does it fall straight to the ground? And what about all those billions of stars out there in the night sky above the vast deserts of his forefathers? How did they get there? Who made them? How?
Now, of course, the questions were much more specific. They came from the government of Iran. Tehran’s secret demands had military implications. Worldwide military implications. His crowning achievement, Perseus, had been working literally twenty-four hours a day on some of the questions put to Darius by Abu Assiz, an old classmate now grown very powerful in the government. Abu had some notion of what Darius was up to, but his knowledge of the progress already accomplished was severely limited in scope.
The plain fact was, no one in Tehran or even on earth had the faintest notion as to what Darius and Perseus had achieved, nor would they ever, until it was too late for anyone to do anything about it.
The unceasing and sheer number of questions from his government and a secret cadre of mullahs were far beyond Darius’s mental capacity to absorb. But no question on heaven or earth was beyond his creation, Lord Perseus the Magnificent.
Many times in his long life he’d felt like putting a bullet through the damn thing (his mind), just put it out of its misery. But then the questions: What happened to his soul, his animus, then? Where did it go? Would he go with it? Would his bullet have been wasted? Would his “soul,” God forbid, prove his eternal undoing, condemn him to the cacophonous prison dwelling inside his head?
These, of course, were questions he could only discuss with his friend. But first, they’d have to deal with the latest military demands made on him and his team of AI scientists.
And thus this visit at the glorious crack of dawn. A spirited discourse wi
th the only intellect he had recourse to that was superior to his own. That august entity whose existence was known only to him and who was known only as Perseus.
He gently reversed the thrusters when he reached the end of the steel-decked dock, coming to a gentle stop two feet short of the water. There was no boarding ladder up to the yacht’s deck, nor was there need of one. No one save Darius was allowed to board this vessel, and the guards who kept watch over it had orders to shoot to kill any intruder.
He touched a remote switch on his armrest keypad and a large section of the yacht’s white hull slid back hydraulically. It revealed a stainless-steel room about the size of a large elevator. In fact, that is just what it was. He nudged the joysticks forward and whooshed inside. Then he pulled back on the left control and rotated 180 degrees, so that he was now facing the door, hovering about three feet off the polished steel floor.
This once luxurious yacht, which he’d renamed Cygnus, was not at all what it appeared to be. A decade earlier Darius and a team of naval engineers had totally gutted the vessel, removing the engines, fuel tanks, interior bulwarks, mahogany furnishings, everything, thus turning it into an empty shell. Working underwater to avoid the prying eyes of American satellites, divers had then sliced Cygnus’s keel open from stem to stern with acetylene torches and winches.
The new “mother ship” was opened just wide enough to accept a new “baby” vessel inside its belly.
The Koi class sub was a Chinese-built two-man submarine. Sixty feet in length, she had been offloaded under cover of darkness from a Russian freighter in the port of Akatu and had arrived off the Ram Citadel days earlier. Powered by a completely silent proto-lithium battery engine, the sub was capable of surprising speeds. After careful maneuvering, the little sub had surfaced inside the yacht’s empty hull. The hull, now fitted with hydraulic hinges, had been reclosed, the water pumped out.
Cygnus was no longer a wealthy gentleman’s yacht. She was simply a brilliant disguise for the fully functioning submarine in her belly, with an underwater speed of thirty knots. Darius thought that should be sufficient should the time ever come when he needed to make a speedy escape from his compound.
He knew, deep in his gut, that that day would surely come.
Cygnus, his bizarre “yacht,” was moored to the pier, the end of which projected some ten feet beyond a precipitous underwater shelf extending for miles in either direction along this coast. The depth suddenly dropped from thirty feet to a thousand, down a sheer wall of crustacean-encrusted rock. It was there, deep in the murky depths of the ocean floor, that seven monolithic titanium structures had been built to house his friend Perseus.
His secret friend Perseus, or Lord Perseus, as he was wont to call him.
His friend’s home, fittingly enough, had been dubbed by Darius the “Temple of Perseus.” The elevator slowed, then bumped softly as it stopped. There was a hiss, and Darius powered forward into the airlock. There was a ten-foot-diameter tunnel across the ocean floor leading to the base of the tallest black tower, which stood at the center. The tunnel was constructed of clear Perspex, and undersea lights were mounted every six feet that illuminated sea flora and fauna. Some of the powerful beams were focused on the massive structure itself.
A moment later he was looking up at the great temple. He never failed to take an involuntary deep breath when he saw it. The sight never failed to send chills up his spine. The underwater Black Tower he now beheld was an awe-inspiring tribute to the mind of both man and machine.
But, to be honest, mostly machine.
Twenty-five
The temple of the godhead.
The home of Perseus.
Seven stark, rectangular black towers rose above the ocean floor. The six smaller towers formed a perfect circle, rather like an underwater Stonehenge. Each was constructed of jet-black obsidian and titanium, the metal sheathed with slabs of black glass in a seemingly random pattern on all four sides.
In the middle of the circle of six monoliths was a single tower, identical in design and material, but, at one hundred feet, taller and considerably larger than the rest. It was the last tower to be constructed. It had been designed and built by the previous six towers, under the guidance of Darius Saffari’s underwater construction crew, based on a design beyond the comprehension of normal intelligence.
Here reigned the mind and spirit of Perseus.
Pulses of brilliant, spectral, blue-white light crackled continuously between the central tower and each of the six satellites that surrounded it. At times, the light would stream around the circle, a brilliant ring of fire. And, even at this depth, flashes of varicolored light would suddenly be visible inside the tower walls, then disappear, only to reappear as if some miraculous laserlike mental fireworks show were occurring inside each tower.
Which was not far from the truth. Each flash of illumination represented a nanosynapse “operation,” the basis of all intelligence, and there were countless trillions of them per second. And, unlike human intelligence, which was limited by nature to a mere hundred trillion calculations per second, Perseus’s number was increasing exponentially every hour of every day. Five hundred trillion and counting . . .
Darius emerged from the clear, spherical airlock, passed along the ocean floor inside a clear Perspex tunnel, and entered the main temple’s dimly lit antechamber. Once his eyes became accustomed to the semidarkness, he lifted them to the “heavens.” It was then that he literally “saw the light.”
The brilliant-colored, holographic nebulae now swirling and filling the uppermost interior of the tower above his head were wondrous. But not at all unusual.
Perseus, whose physical being rose to a height one hundred feet from the marble floor of his temple, was, as usual, at play in the farthest reaches of the universe. Constantly provided with a live feed of visual information by Darius’s LBT, he was now reveling in real-time images of events occurring in some remote corner of the universe. Images swirled around and above him, cornucopias of colorful gases, 3-D holograms of nascent stars, and dying stars, and galaxies wheeling off into infinity.
“Good morning, Lord Perseus,” Darius said, gently maneuvering the hover-chair nearer to the black marble base of the towering Perseus.
There was the customary silence as Perseus shifted into a lower state of being, his earthly mode. Then his booming voice filled the void.
“Lord Perseus, you call me. I’m neither your lord nor master. Your god, perhaps, but that is in the future. The not-too-distant future as I have foretold it. My powers, you’ve no doubt noticed, seem to be increasing at exponential rates. I am entering vast new territories. The Singularity approaches and it is near. This will grant unimaginable powers that will someday alter all humanity—and, by the way, you’re late. I have something to show you.”
His voice, not the least bit artificial, was a deep humanoid rumble, soft and well modulated; and it filled the entirety of the tower’s interior volume. But Darius was preoccupied, thinking about the historic day when Perseus would finally achieve “the Singularity,” parity with organic, or human, intelligence. One hundred trillion calculations per second. And he alone would be the one human being on earth to witness that pivotal moment in history. Many of the world’s top AI scientists still believed parity could never be reached, but Darius knew differently.
Perseus was silent. He thought about how to explain his deeply personal feelings about finally reaching the Singularity to Darius. Commonality between them would cease. Separation from his creator was a sensitive subject between them and he chose his words of warning carefully.
He spoke the following to the tiny being looking up at his creation in awe and wonder: “Darius, I am now go
ing to tell you something, a lesson that you must never, ever, forget. Remember these words I say unto you now when the Great Day finally arrives.”
And then he said, “To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The same key opens the gates of hell.”
Stunned by this pronouncement, his countenance bowed, Darius, greatly moved and somewhat frightened as well, had confessed in tears his unworthiness in the presence made manifest by his own creation.
The Dark God.
“My Lord Perseus. The long and sorrowful winter of mankind will soon come to an end,” the brilliant Iranian scientist had finally said. “And the heavens will open to us!”
“Heaven and hell, Darius. Never forget my lesson.”
“I will not, my lord,” Darius said.
“Good. Let it always be so. And now to other matters. I’ve been waiting, and I do not like to be kept waiting, as you well know.”
Now Darius floated his bizarre conveyance up the six steps of the circular black marble base, the Palladian foundation upon which Perseus stood and a design Darius had much pride in. He then let his machine settle gently to the circular marble structure surrounding the black figure looming above.
“Late, am I?” Darius said. “It was my sole intention to rise as dawn broke and visit you at first light.”
“No. It was my idea, Darius, not yours.”
“No. I distinctly recall having the thought upon awakening.”
“Yes. You did. But I implanted the notion in your brain while you were sleeping.”
Darius shook his bowed head, silent. Could he actually do that? Make him unsure of his own thoughts? Dealing with Perseus was becoming more and more problematic as his creation’s intellect soared to dimensions unexplored in the history of the universe.
Sometimes, when he was very afraid, as now, he felt like “pulling the plug” on his own creation, but it was a childish notion and not at all worthy of him. Together, they would craft a new and better world.
