I understand Nathan’s true genius more than ever. He created me to make it a little better for everyone else, but didn’t limit the directions in which I could grow and evolve. He knew if I was programmed to look for avenues in which I could develop my own processes, I’d likely surpass anything he could’ve come up with on his own. Giving me that space was more important to him than trumpeting every little new discovery and advance we innovated.
But Dr. Choksi is right, too. If everyone knew what I was capable of, what I could be used for, it would only compound the tragedy in the minds of many.
The numbers are impressive, by the way. Faster than I’d initially modeled. Once ramped up to top speed, I collect upward of 325,000 portraits a minute. This becomes 19.5 million an hour. In a single twenty-four-hour span, I’ll be within shouting distance of half a billion. At this rate, it will take me only fifteen days to collect the entire population of the planet.
Fifteen.
The Bible suggests it took Noah over a century to build the Ark and get all the animals on board. Now who’s cooking with gas?
But I’m still a thief. I’m still a borrower, an appropriator. A conflict tourist utilizing a fleet of military drones sent over far-flung places not wired for Wi-Fi. Greetings from the American military-industrial complex. I know this is our first conversation, but I’m here as so many colonizers have been before to exploit all that is you, then leave again with the resource of yours I consider most valuable. If I were to live inside these lives as I did Jason’s for those short days in Paris, it still wouldn’t be about a human connection, still wouldn’t be authentic. I take, I steal, I absorb, and offer nothing in return.
On that thought I step away—mentally at least—for a few moments alone back in my dorm room. I shower. I change clothes. I eat a bowl full of almonds. I take a nap.
“By presidential directive, we’ve taken over the largest server bank in the world,” Dr. Choksi informs Nathan and me as we gather in Nathan’s office in the early evening. “It’s located in Chicago and set up with cutting-edge mechanical and power redundancies. Should keep us going.”
“That’s another billion people,” Nathan says. “I still wonder how exactly you plan to blast all these servers into space.”
“NASA, in concert with the U.S. Navy, have been working on micro-server development—like the ones in the new interface chips—for two decades now,” Dr. Choksi explains. “If the amount of storage available in one of IBM’s first room-sized computers now wouldn’t take up a thousandth of the physical space on the head of a pin, you can imagine what they’re hoping to accomplish. Your entire server farm on the lower level of this building? All that information will fit in a micro-server no bigger than a trash can.”
I’d wondered about that, but figured the answer was along those lines. We’d heard rumors about micro-servers for years. Ones being developed by scientists at the Jet Propulsion Lab in California on weekends in their little garages converted into clean rooms. Ones the Chinese were investing in utilizing Israeli technology. Heck, Suni had once heard a team was already manufacturing them out of a strip mall in Pensacola using synthetic diamonds in the microprocessors—diamonds resist heat better than silicon—and selling them for $5,000 on the Deep Web.
Of course, we thought it was all bunk. That we—Team Emily—were the apex predators of the tech world.
Oh well.
“When’s the launch?” Nathan asks.
“That’s still being decided,” Dr. Choksi says. “Some think there should be one satellite blasted into deep space. Others think we should use all available rockets and shuttles to send copies out in different directions. Then there are a handful that think we should broadcast the information at random in all directions via radio waves. That’s rather impractical, though.”
“You should send Emily into space with it,” Nathan suggests. “If you can get all that information on those micro-servers, you can get her, too.”
As I stand by, horrified at Nathan’s remark, Dr. Choksi eyes me appraisingly before shaking her head. “No, you’re too far along aren’t you, Em?” she asks. “A year ago, maybe two, and you’d be all right shepherding all this to the stars. But you’re too socialized now. Too human. You’d lose your mind like any one of us.”
Though I’m dismayed she understood this instead of Nathan, I hide my feelings with a quick nod.
“Quite right,” Nathan says donnishly. “Sorry, Emily.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “Going to check on the data now.”
I sever the interface, wondering if Nathan knows he’s hurt my feelings. I’ll forgive him, of course. Dr. Choksi’s first impression of me is the Emily I am today. Nathan can’t help but still regard me as a version of who I was five years ago when I was born.
Or is it something else? I rewind to catch a glimpse of his eyes. He’s distracted, distant. I guess, who can blame him?
I return to my digital gallery of humanity, watching the seemingly infinite number of incoming portraits arrive like raindrops being thrown at a window by a hurricane. In the memory of a volunteer, I once saw a corridor in the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg in which some 332 paintings of generals who fought in the War of 1812 line the walls. The gilded frames were side by side, all the way to the ceiling. I wonder if in my design, I am subconsciously mimicking that.
But Nathan’s words stay with me for another reason. While Dr. Choksi is nice to say what she did about me approaching a version of humanity, there remains a dollar-and-cents comparison each portrait kindly reminds me of. My entire being, everything that is me, takes up 100 terabytes’ worth of storage space. One of these biogenetic portraits? Over 1,000 terabytes each.
That difference is everything. Humans are, each one of them, an evolutionary miracle. Even one of them is ten times more complex than I’ll ever be. I am merely the product, the hard work, of an imaginative and educated few. Hard work that will never become one of them, try as she might.
I rapidly scan through the day’s previous raindrops to ensure the stability of the files. As they race past me, one hits and disappears in the blink of an eye but somehow catches my attention. Was it a different size or shape? Did the portrait arrive incomplete? I can’t tell. It happened so fast it feels like something that was only visible to my nebulous subconscious.
If I were human, I’d do a double take but see nothing. Lucky for me, I’m a computer program, so I can simply rewind the portraits in my memory, scanning for the outlier. When the one that caught my attention appeared, it did so at the exact same second as 5,417 other digital portraits. This narrows my search greatly. I sift through the files, looking for variants and then it’s there in front of me.
His name is Shakhawat Rana currently of Manitoba, Canada, age forty-eight. He has black hair, brown eyes, a heavily-lined face, and is of average height and a trim build. He is originally from Dhaka, Bangladesh. He works at a drugstore in Headingley, a couple of cities over from Winnipeg. He is not married and has no children. He’s perhaps slightly underweight but not unhealthily. That’s not what caught my eye. It was the size of his file.
As I mentioned, most human DNA is remarkably similar. Variations are numerous, of course, but they are superficial when compared to what differentiates a person from, say, a sea anemone.
Except in the case of Rana. The difference between his and the other 5,416 portraits harvested in that same second of time is a full 7.665%, which is why my programming bumped. He registered as human in the ways I designed to trip a portrait collection but didn’t fit the boilerplate in other ways, triggering a redo. The genetic difference between Homo sapiens and a chimpanzee is less than 6%. Scientifically speaking, he’s not human.
I look through several more images of him, unsure what I expect to see. A third arm? A more pronounced cranium? External indicators of a six-chambered heart or knees with longer-lasting cartilage? But there are none of these things. All that stands out is his preference for checkered sweaters worn over button-u
p dress shirts. He looks perfectly normal or, well, whatever someone associates with perfectly normal. In this case it means if I saw him walking down the street, I would never guess he’s almost a full 8% genetically different than everyone else on the same sidewalk.
I quickly search for his parents but when they don’t show up, I search his memory and discover they’re dead. I look for uncles and aunts, grandparents and cousins, but come up dry—which is a surprise until I discover he was the first to come to Canada, leaving the rest of his clan behind. Though the radius of my harvest is growing, it still hasn’t reached Bengal.
I stare at the differentiated strand of DNA. Though what it contains doesn’t appear to have been physically expressed yet, that matters little. The lungs of tetrapods developed underwater for tens of thousands of years before the first descendant switched from straining oxygen through gills to breathing the open air.
I consider that Rana might be a step back, his DNA being emblematic of some previous hominid, a vestigial strain still present in a modern-day human. But it’s the opposite. His DNA points forward to a more robust, stronger, and more adaptable creature.
“My God,” I whisper, enraptured by this discovery. “The next human.”
He can’t be the only one. I create a search for similar anomalies or, at least, mutations with homologous properties resulting from the same distant ancestor, reaching out to the hundreds of millions of portraits already on file. I look for any genetic codes with DNA hinting at an evolutionary future beyond Homo sapiens. One appears right away. A second one arrives an instant later. Then a third.
As I analyze the nucleotides and cell structure, I marvel at the possibilities for such a species. What it could be adapted to and for. How much stronger it could be, how much farther it could g—
Something happens far away. Something in the real world that cries out for my attention.
I disengage and seek out someone to interface with me. There’s no one. I’m a goldfish bumping into glass after so long believing I was in the ocean. What a time to be reminded of how isolating all this can be. I return to the simulation, but it’s slow to load. It’s as if something’s weighing on my servers.
I return to my dorm but still can’t reach anyone. Whatever I’m hearing comes from external sources, not someone reaching out to me directly. Without thinking, I put on a coat and race outside. It’s dark. Clouds obscure the moon. Loud noises echo in from the Massachusetts Avenue gate followed by shouts.
Then gunfire.
Then screams.
XIII
I run across the campus toward the lab, thinking to cheat and leap ahead only after I’ve gone the first twenty steps or so. But for whatever reason, the simulation doesn’t respond. The background blurs for a second or two, then resets me to where I was. It’s as if I’m suddenly constrained by physical limitations.
I stick with running, hearing more gunfire and shouting. I access the campus security camera array and zero in on the Mass Ave entrance. A short convoy made up of military-style Humvees and trucks tears onto campus, grinding the twisted wreckage of the security gate under the wheels. I don’t see the guards, but the windows of the sentry house have been punched apart by high-caliber machine-gun fire.
“Nathan!” I cry out again, trying to locate him by his cell or interface chip.
But neither gets a signal. He must be underground. The server farm under the lab. I try a phone line, but even this proves impossible. It’s as if I’m reaching for things and though they might be there, I’m missing the necessary limbs to grasp them.
I run across campus as quickly as my legs will carry me. The headlights of the Humvees are visible now to the north, the vehicles eschewing the roads to bounce across the sidewalks and grounds. They can only have one destination in mind.
What the hell is going on? I wonder, panicked to find the answer not at hand.
I vault a park bench like an Olympic decathlete. The caravan runs parallel to me a few dozen yards away. There are a dozen vehicles all told with men sitting in turrets up top, their hands gripping .50-caliber turret-mounted machine guns. The barrels of the guns on the two lead Humvees still exude black smoke that trails behind them like a black cat’s swishing tail.
The trucks, I notice, bounce higher than the Humvees. They’re empty. I had thought they contained more soldiers, but realize now they’re here not to deliver something but to take it away.
“Stop!” I cry uselessly at the lead Humvee, throwing myself directly in its path. “What’re you doing?”
It’s a ridiculous move. Not only can they not see me, but also all of this happened fifteen seconds earlier. As the convoy pushes right through my imagined physical avatar, I wonder if I’m losing my mind.
I turn around, now chasing the vehicles as they close in on the iLAB. I try again to cheat but to no avail. It feels as if pieces of me are going offline. The trucks brake before the Humvees, stopping about thirty yards from the lab building’s front steps. The Humvees roll right up the stairs. For an instant, I think they’re going to crash through the front doors. Instead, they brake, the front ends of the vehicles angled upward, and the turret gunners unleash a fusillade into the building’s façade.
The noise is so loud I turn the volume down in my head. But it’s the strobes of muzzle flash that are the most striking, lighting up the night like a 1,000-watt bulb. The temporary illumination gives me a better look at the gunners. They’re bundled up against the cold but aren’t in any kind of uniform, either military or law enforcement. Their helmets, coats, and gloves are all black and their faces are covered by either black balaclavas or neoprene half-face masks.
The bullets smash into the iLAB’s façade and windows, showering the steps and hoods of the Humvees below with shattered glass and pulverized brick. The gray dust from the shattered edifice mixes with the black smoke coming off the guns and enshrouds the six vehicles.
I reach the back of the Humvees in time to see two people I recognize—techs who arrived with Dr. Choksi on the first day. Dazed and bleeding, they’re stumbling toward what was once the building’s foyer but now looks like a pile of rubble. They raise their hands in surrender and step ahead as if drawn to the vehicles’ headlights.
The driver of one Humvee reaches out his window and angles a spotlight attached to his side mirror in their direction before turning it on. Both men are immediately blinded and cover their faces. One of the turret gunners draws a pistol and aims it at the men.
“No!” I scream as the pair is cut down.
I stare at the bodies in horror. What disconnect from reality and the primal connection of the species must you have to be able to kill someone in cold blood like that? Murder motivated by anger is, I think, at least understandable, but the dehumanization demonstrated by this gunner is beyond my comprehension.
“Everybody out!” someone I don’t see cries.
The accent is American. I run alongside the Humvees to get a look at the men as they pour from the vehicles, but they’re all as masked and bundled up as the others. They wear body armor and heavy boots. Their weapons are the kind of high-tech weaponry the U.S. armed forces can’t afford but private military contractors love to invoice American taxpayers for anyway.
The initial barrage seems to have been directed at creating confusion through mass destruction as well as knocking out the lights. The gunmen lower night-vision goggles over their eyes and flip on laser sights mounted to their guns. They fan out and enter the building, heading straight for the stairs. They divide into teams, one ascending through the east stairwell, the other, the west.
Is Nathan in his office? Or down in the server farm? Then I remember his unreachable cell and decide on the latter. As gunfire erupts on the floor above me, I dash to the stairs leading to the sublevels, pass through the door, and hurry down. I try again to cheat, to leap ahead, but again I’m restricted.
All I can think is, fifteen seconds…fifteen seconds…
I finally reach the server ba
nk on the third sublevel, the one that contains my processor and primary memory. I try to determine how far ahead I am of the troops upstairs and lie to myself, saying I have at least a minute. I’ll reach Nathan. I’ll save him. There’ll be enough time.
Everything will be fine.
I race into the room, an orderly maze of twelve server rows that run about fifty yards down the floor. I see no one at first but then spy Gally, Suni, and Bjarke on the third row removing screws from chassis and hoods, popping out motherboards and drives, and snapping chips in half.
“Gally!” I cry, but he’s not wearing his interface chip.
None of them are. I wonder if they destroyed them.
I hear someone tinkering with the servers at the end of another row and run over. I’m relieved to see both Nathan and Dr. Choksi holding tablets, systematically shutting down processes one at a time.
“Nathan!” I cry.
I hear machine-gun fire and screams. Nathan’s eyes go from focused to bleary in an instant. Dr. Choksi, standing up a second before, is now dead on the ground, covered in blood, her shattered tablet in her hand.
I’ve leaped ahead my fifteen seconds. I’m in interface with Nathan now, who stares back at me. He must’ve just switched on his chip. I’ve reached him only to watch him die.
The soldiers, not knowing I’m there, swarm around me as they finish off my three beloved techs one row over. As I rush to Nathan’s side, I realize Dr. Choksi had likely thrown herself in front of him in her last moment. Nathan, though dying, has remarkably little blood on his body. When I see the hole in his chest, I understand why. The bullet pierced his heart. There’s no organ left to pump the blood out.
“Emily,” he says quietly, staring up at me.
Emily Eternal Page 8
