“Fair enough,” he said, though I could hear the doubt in his voice.
“I’d love to get Acharya on the damn phone. Any chance of that?”
“Without opening an official file? None. And, even if we did, I would have to speak directly with the president.”
“Why? We’ve always had an open-door policy with DARPA.”
“Kill Switch changed the politics of cooperation for the DMS, I’m afraid. I’m working on repairing that trust, but it’s much easier lost than rebuilt.”
“That sucks.”
“That’s life, Captain,” he said.
“Yeah, yeah,” I said sourly. “Look, before I fly the friendly skies I want to make sure you didn’t need me for anything else.”
The DMS field teams still left intact were all out in the field, because the world was going bug-fuck nuts. As usual. Or … maybe a little more than usual. Actually, maybe a lot more. Three high-ranking military scientists had died in “accidents” that seemed less accidental the closer we looked. Ecoterrorist protesters had blown up the Ice House, a biological-samples storage facility maintained covertly by NATO for everything from anthrax to Ebola, including twenty-two of the most virulent bioweapons developed during the Cold War. However, instead of shutting down the facility they had released hundreds of pathogens. Luckily, the Ice House was located on an ice pack at the top of the damn world, so the cold killed most of the bugs. A bunch of fuel-air bombs were used to make sure there was nothing left. Other DMS teams were looking into a possible deliberate release of a mutated and highly contagious strain of epidemic nephropathy, a type of viral hemorrhagic fever that isn’t supposed to be communicable human-to-human, but in this form it was. There was also shit tons of GPS hacking going on everywhere around the globe. A factory that made and assembled consumer-level quadcopter drones had been burned to the ground, but arson investigators were building a case for all the completed and packaged drones having been removed before the place was torched. And a firm that made virtual-reality goggles for the video-game market had been busted for including subliminal messages preaching violence against Muslim Americans.
A day in the life of the DMS. Or, I guess, to be more accurate, this was the world being the world. Crazy, dangerous, frequently lethal, often unkind, and populated with lots of very bad people. Am I a cynic? Not really, but I’m getting there, and I’m driving in the fast lane.
However, Church said, “Go to Baltimore.”
“Okay.”
“Take Dr. Sanchez with you.”
I hesitated. “Circe won’t be happy.”
Rudy Sanchez and I have been best friends for a lot of years, but last year he fell under a kind of mind control and attacked me while I was in the hospital. It wasn’t his fault, and the attack was directed by someone who was incredibly dangerous. It turned Rudy into a lethal weapon, and to stop him I had to inflict some serious injuries. I broke his leg so badly that he needed total knee replacement, and his nose had to be reconstructed. Unless you’re both Vikings, that is not the definition of a male-bonding experience. Rudy’s wife, Circe, kind of hated me now. Poor Rudy was caught between my need for him to forgive me, his need for me to forgive him, and Circe’s unfiltered loathing.
“Circe no longer works for the DMS,” said Church coldly.
That was the other thing. Very few people know that Circe O’Tree-Sanchez is the only known living relative of Mr. Church’s. The secret has been kept in order to protect her from Church’s many powerful enemies, who would love to have a weapon they could use against him. It’s possible that Circe, or her son—Church’s grandson—would be the key that unlocked the robot heart of the big man. However, since the Kill Switch thing last year, Circe had left the DMS and very clearly didn’t want anything to do with it. Or with us. She barely spoke to her father, blaming his lifestyle choices for putting her family in harm’s way. She had a point, but I knew that her decisions had to hurt the big man. He’d been less genial these past few months, colder and more distant. Not that he was ever Mr. Rogers to begin with. Even so, I felt bad for him.
“Okay,” I said, “but if Circe comes after me with a knife I’m using you as a human shield.”
He made a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been a grunt of disgust. In either case, the line went dead. It always gives me the warm, fuzzy, bunny tinglies to share a moment with my boss.
I glanced over at Ghost, who was in the passenger seat looking out the window. Usually he was excited to go home, but Junie wasn’t there, so neither of us was enthused.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
INLET CRAB HOUSE
3572 HIGHWAY 17
MURRELLS INLET, SOUTH CAROLINA
SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 8:55 PM EASTERN TIME
First Sergeant Bradley Sims, known as Top to everyone, nursed a beer and watched as his partner, Master Sergeant Harvey “Bunny” Rabbit worked his way through a solid pound of peel-and-eat shrimp, a double side of grits, red rice, and six glasses of Diet Dr Pepper. Bunny ate without passion, more like a machine designed to feed itself. He would pluck a shrimp from the bowl, pull off its legs, use his thumbs to crack the shell open along the underside, pull off the shell, and put the meat into his mouth; he’d chew silently between ten and twelve times, then wash it down with a mouthful of fizz.
It was the diet soda that Top couldn’t understand. Rough count on everything on Bunny’s plate and in the sides, including the appetizer of hush puppies, was three thousand calories easy. Probably closer to four. Seemed to Top that a man approaching a meal with that kind of commitment ought to at least drink a regular soda—a coke, which is what they called every kind of soda down here. In the northern states from Washington to Michigan, they called it pop. In the Northeast and the West Coast, it was soda. Down here everything was a coke. Even a Diet Dr Pepper. Should have been a real Coke, though. That’s what Top figured.
His own meal—a grilled grouper sandwich on whole wheat with lettuce and red onion—was nearly untouched. The beer was a Landshark, a brand Top usually enjoyed but that he’d let go warm as he rolled the bottle back and forth between his calloused palms.
Since they came into the crab house, the only words either of them had spoken was to the waitress. Nothing at all to each other. That was becoming a thing with them. A new routine that replaced their old rhythm of being willing and able to talk about damn near anything. However, they’d logged a lot of silent miles on this gig. They’d flown from the Pier in San Diego to Oklahoma City and taken a car from the DMS field office there, and had since traveled thousands of miles. Zigzagging from place to place. Fayetteville to Pine Bluff, Memphis to Tuscaloosa, Montgomery to Alpharetta, and then half a dozen towns, large and small, in North Carolina, lower Virginia, and now South Carolina. After this, they would check into a motel for the night and in the morning head almost due south to Savannah, Charleston, and then down the long Atlantic side of Florida, hitting Fernandina Beach, Daytona Beach, Fort Lauderdale, and Miami, after which the two of them would fly home to California. It was a rinse-and-repeat assignment. Go to a town, set up a meet with someone who was either a former or an active special operator, or a cop, or a Fed from the FBI, NSA, DEA, or ATF. They’d ask some questions, listen to the answers, tell the candidate very little, and promise to be in touch. Most of the times, that last part was a lie. So far, they hadn’t found anyone they felt sufficiently enthusiastic about to recommend as a candidate for the DMS.
It depressed Top, adding to the weight of everything else that had been pushing him down these past months. Ever since things went wrong last year, he had begun to lose faith in many of the structures he’d always believed were immutable. The DMS, their mission, his own optimism, and even what he believed about himself. Top had always trusted his own judgment and the stability of his personality. He had neither an inflated ego nor a falsely suppressed one. A lifetime in the military, both following orders and giving them, of time spent training and time spent on missions, of patches of peace and long
runs through the valley of the shadow of death—all of that had allowed him to assess his skills, his strengths, his weaknesses. He knew who and what he was, and he was at peace with it. He knew that he could rely on his own judgment, moral view, and fairness as much as others could when he was part of a team. Mr. Church and Captain Ledger had each leaned on him in moments of crisis, and Top had become a cornerstone of the DMS field-operations structure. Top accepted that and worked to make sure that he was always a known quantity to the people who needed to trust him.
Now, though…?
When things started going bad for the DMS last year, he stayed steady, believing in the mission and in Echo Team. That changed when someone sneaked into his mind and smashed the controls, cut the wires, took over. The intruder used Top’s body like a hit-and-run car. He forced Top’s hands to use the tools of war to do dreadful things to the very people he had sworn his life to protect. He made Top complicit, however unwillingly, in the wholesale murder of innocent civilians.
Top understood the science of it. Long hours with Dr. Sanchez had helped him learn to say all the proper words about not accepting unearned guilt, about placing the blame where it truly belonged. Top understood that he had been used, and that he had no defense against it. He understood that the blame was not truly his.
Sure, he understood all of that.
But it didn’t change a goddamn thing. It had been his finger on the trigger. He had memorized the names of each victim, and every night he got down on his knees and prayed to whatever God was in heaven—if any god even existed anymore. He did not pray for his own soul but for those whose lives he had destroyed. The dead ones, and the living survivors who had to carry their own weight of grief and loss.
Bunny was going through it, too. They both had their minds raped; they had both committed unspeakable atrocities. It bonded them as much as it marked them.
What neither of them knew yet was whether it had ended them in every way that mattered to who they were and what they did. Since then they hadn’t fired a gun in anger. Sure, they could cap off a thousand rounds on the target range and never blink. That wasn’t the same thing. That wasn’t real. It was no more authentic combat than playing a first-person shooter game on Xbox. The question was whether either of them could be trusted to carry a weapon into combat. The question was whether their minds were ever going to be truly their own. The question was whether the violation had broken something crucial inside their hearts or minds or souls.
Top truly didn’t know.
Now they were out doing busywork because Captain Ledger and Dr. Sanchez hadn’t yet cleared them for fieldwork. They carried guns, but for the first time in Top’s adult life the SIG Sauer in his shoulder holster felt wrong, lumpy, awkward, and he felt like a dangerous jackass for carrying it.
He sighed and sipped his beer. It tasted like piss.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
JOHN THE REVELATOR
LECTURE, “THE FACE OF ROBOTICS”
PATTEN AUDITORIUM
DREXEL UNIVERSITY
NINE WEEKS AGO
“In order to understand the significance of the coming technological singularity, you have to view things from a big-picture perspective,” John told his audience. “You need to step back from personal agendas and immediate needs and look at the world as a whole.”
The audience members were silent, attentive. Some leaned forward, and others were pressed back in their chairs as if they were afraid of what he was saying. Or repelled by his words. It was all the same to John. The message was what mattered.
“The fact that human beings developed self-awareness, problem-solving intelligence, the ability to invent and to have both abstract and practical thinking is every bit as important, and as inextricably tied to our evolutionary development, as the opposable thumb. Nature selected humans for survival. And everything around us, from the chairs on which you sit to the speakers that amplify my voice, to the automobiles in which you drove here, are by-products of that intelligence.”
He paused to let the audience digest that.
“Now we are on the leading edge of a new stage of evolution, and that is artificial intelligence. AI. We became smart enough and wise enough to be able to create machines whose functions not only approximate human thought but will ultimately surpass it. We have already built machines that can perform physical functions that exceed much of what humans can manage. There are already machines that are stronger, faster, more precise, less vulnerable, more versatile. We have machines that can fight fires, defuse bombs, oversee security, engage in combat, survive extreme environmental conditions, fly, swim, dive to astounding depths, and operate in microgravity. Machines do not require breathable air, and they can tolerate temperature ranges far beyond human endurance. Are there limits? Of course. Improved battery life is a constant challenge. The balance of durability, flexibility, and weight in materials is a challenge. Expense is a challenge. And processing speed can always be tweaked. But”—he paused again to smile—“those challenges are being met, and we’re constantly exceeding our own expectations when it comes to development and innovation.”
He pointed to a man in the fifth row who had gray hair.
“How old are you, sir?”
“Sixty-five,” said the man.
“I wouldn’t have guessed older than sixty,” said John, and waited through the ripple of laughter. “You were born before the computer age. Well before. Do you remember your first personal computer?”
“I do,” said the man. “It was a Commodore 64.”
More laughter, and even some sympathetic applause.
“Ah,” said John. “Do you recall how it felt to have your own computer?”
“Yes, I do. It was amazing. And when they came out with the Commodore 128 three years later, I was in heaven. I wrote my dissertation on that machine.”
“One hundred and twenty-eight K of memory,” said John. “The Commodore 128 was released in January 1985. How many of you here were alive then? Half? The rest of you were born after. Some, I see, born well after. That was the last of the eight-bit home computers. At the time, that was an amazing amount of memory. It provided astounding computational potential. For the first time, computers weren’t something used by corporations and the government. Now everyone could own one. Suddenly the power was in the hands of ordinary people. Wow! What a moment. And then in the nineties we saw the commercialization of the World Wide Web. The computer age became the Internet age. Now, what most people didn’t know was that these technologies were on a converging course with the early expert systems—what most people know as artificial intelligence. And robotics was flourishing quietly somewhere else. All of these technologies, which had long, painful histories of design and failure, structural limitations, and intimidating research costs, suddenly benefited from one another’s existence. These fields fed on the energetic potential in one another and soon began growing together.”
John paused once more.
“A perspective check,” he said. “The personal computer debuted less than forty years ago. The Internet ten years later. In terms of the scope of scientific invention, that’s a blip. It’s nothing. And yet consider how much has happened in each field since then. You can’t even find a piece of technology that uses sixty-four K of RAM. Nothing we have moves that slowly. Nothing. You can go to Staples and buy a five-terabyte external hard drive for less than a hundred and fifty dollars. By next year, the storage will be double that for half the cost. On the way home from Staples you can stop at Walmart and buy a drone, and you can take both home in your autonomous-drive car while talking to your cousin in London on your cell phone as music streams in real time from a concert being performed in Los Angeles.”
He watched people as they glanced at their phones and tweeted him on social media.
“Less than forty years,” he said. “I was born the year and the month that the Commodore 64 was released, and I will live to see computers, artificial intelligence, and robotics accelerate
beyond all predicted models. Is the technological singularity coming?” He laughed. “It’s already begun.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
THE PACIFIC COAST HIGHWAY
SAN DIEGO COUNTY
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
SATURDAY, APRIL 29, 5:56 PM
Before I could call Rudy I got a text message and sent it to the dashboard screen. It said:
I am all alone.
There was no ID, though. Odd. I accessed the voice command for Miss Moneypenny, which is the nickname someone hung on the DMS version of Siri. I think the actress whose voice was sampled for the system is Cate Blanchett. Very cool and veddy, veddy British.
“Identify text sender,” I said.
“Specify which text, Joe,” Miss Moneypenny said.
“Most recent.”
“Most recent text was from Delta Airlines, confirming your flight status.”
“No,” I said, “the one that just came in.”
“The most recent text was from Delta—”
Another text came in:
I’m awake.
I’m alone.
I’m afraid.
I growled at Miss Moneypenny. “I just received another text. Identify sender.”
“Joe, the most recent text was from Delta Airlines,” insisted the computer, and she gave me the time, which matched when the airline sent the flight info.
“Search all text messages for the last half hour,” I said.
“There have been no other texts received in the last half hour, Joe.”
“You’re an idiot,” I told her.
“Calling people names is childish.”
If I ever find out who programmed Miss Moneypenny, I’ll break my foot off in their ass. At the light I tried sending a reply text, but the incoming texts were gone. I sat there staring, my eyes flicking back and forth between my phone and the dashboard screen, and then jumped out of my skin when someone honked at me. I realized that I’d sat halfway through a green light, so I waved an apology and started driving.