Greg Iles - The Footprints of God

Where else are they waiting for me? I wondered.

"David, don't shut me out," she pleaded. "Talk to me."

"They have my memories, Rachel. They have me, loaded into their computer. That's how they knew to be waiting at Frozen Head. They don't have to chase us anymore. They know what I'll do before I do it."

"That's impossible."

"No. That's exactly what they've been working toward for two years. I know these people. I know Peter Godin. And I know it's true."

She slowed the truck for a hairpin turn. "You're say¬ing that Fielding was right? They've been working on the computer somewhere else all along?"

"Yes. While Fielding and I screwed around trying to figure out the MRI side effects, they were building the goddamn thing at some secret location." I slapped the dashboard. "That's why they laid off certain teams dur¬ing the suspension."

"What are you talking about?"

"After we suspended the project, groups of engineers were told to take paid leave. Sometimes there were only skeleton crews in the building. The team most conspicuously absent was the Interface Team, led by a guy named Zach Levin."

"What's the Interface Team?"

"The team responsible for trying to communicate with the neuromodels once they're successfully loaded. Remember what I said at the amphitheater? If you download a human brain into a computer, what do you really have? A deaf, dumb, blind, and paralyzed human being, scared to death. Half the battle is giving that brain eyes, ears, and a voice. That's the job of the Interface Team. With the project suspended, it made sense for them to be laid off. But now I see. God, I wish Fielding were here."

Rachel glanced at me. "But if they were that close to success, why kill Fielding? If Godin actually made Trinity work, would anyone really care about medical side effects or anything else?"

"You've got a point. If they've really done it, Godin will be almost invulnerable. We don't have enough infor¬mation. Maybe-" My hands went cold. "Oh, God."

"What is it?"

"I know why they killed Fielding."

"Why?"

"They could afford to."

"What do you mean?"

"Yesterday, John Skow announced that he wasn't going to replace Fielding. I thought he was crazy. But now I understand. If they have a prototype computer up and running, Fielding isn't dead."

Rachel turned to me in confusion. "What does that mean?"

"I mean they can load Fielding's neuromodel the same way they've loaded mine. They'll have Andrew Fielding's mind at their fingertips. He can solve their remaining problems for them!"

She drove for a few moments without speaking. "Okay. Let's just say this is possible for a minute. Why would Fielding help the people who murdered him?"

An eerie feeling of admiration came over me. Peter Godin was more ruthless than I ever imagined. "Fielding's neuromodel will help them because it won't know he's been murdered. It was made six months ago, when Fielding was scanned by the Super-MRI. It has no memories of anything that's happened since then. That Andrew Fielding doesn't even know he married Lu Li."

"David, this can't be happening."

"Sure it can. We just happen to be standing close to a revolutionary leap in science. Splitting the atom. Unraveling the human genome. Cloning a sheep."

"What you're talking about isn't like those things. Liberating consciousness from the human body?"

I thought about it. "You're right. This is bigger because it will give us the ability to make those kinds of advances at an exponential rate. Or not us, exactly. Whatever you call the new form of consciousness that Trinity will evolve into. And it will evolve very fast."

"You don't know for sure that they've done it."

"They're at least part of the way there. Maybe they just have a crude version up and running. Maybe they can access my memories-pull out images, for exam¬ple-but not actually operate the model as a functioning mind. Human memory is Ravi Nara's specialty, and they made a lot of progress in that area early on. There's just no way to know."

Rachel touched my arm. "If you're right, what do they know about what we're doing now?"

"Nothing, I hope. They can't read my mind in any mystical way. They probably have my memories from childhood up to six months ago, when I was scanned by the Super-MRI. As for my thought processes, my judg¬ment, my personality-that would take a fully functional computer. And if they have that…"

"What?"

"The president won't care what happened to a couple of doctors. The nation accepts more casualties to build a skyscraper or a bridge. You and I are a negligible price to pay for the strategic superiority Trinity will bring. If they've truly completed Trinity, we're dead."

She pointed through the windshield. "There's Caryville. And I-75. Are we going north or south?"

"Pull over."

She slowed gradually, then turned the wheel and stopped on the shoulder, just short of the northbound on-ramp.

"I'm trying to escape from myself," I thought aloud. "To do that, we have to make utterly random choices. But how random can my choices be? I suppose we could flip a coin every time we come to an intersection like this."

Rachel was shaking her head. "They don't have a scan of my brain. They can't predict anything I would do. I'll just make the choices from now on." She saw doubt in my eyes. "You still don't trust me?"

"It's not that. But by now Geli Bauer knows every¬thing there is to know about you. She knows things even you don't remember."

Rachel's lips compressed into a white line. "I hate her. I hate her, and I don't even know her."

"I know. But hate's not going to save us."

"Why can't we just disappear into nowhere? Pay cash at a no-name motel in a no-name town? Back this truck up to a fence and go to sleep for three days. America is a big place. Even for the NSA."

"You ever watch America's Most Wanted? They catch criminals every week who try what you just suggested. Television makes America a lot smaller than you think."

I leaned back in my seat and tried to let instinct take over. Cars and trucks passed in both directions, some slowly, others shaking the truck with the wind they threw off. As I sat there, the situation began to clarify itself.

In three days, we would get a chance to see the presi¬dent. Our problem was staying alive long enough to talk to him. The odds of that were long and getting longer. Even if we did reach Matthews, I'd have to convince him that I was telling the truth and that everyone else involved in Project Trinity was lying. To do that, I needed hard evidence. And I had none. My other option-going public-would only convince the presi¬dent that I was the loose cannon everyone at Trinity claimed I was and alienate the one man who could save us. Three days…

"How long are we going to sit here?" Rachel asked.

"Give me a minute."

Hiding was not the answer. Running wasn't either. Not in any conventional way. We needed to take a step so radical that no entity in the world could predict it. But what?

As I stared through the windshield at the oncoming traffic, I realized I was sitting here with Rachel for one reason: my dreams. My dreams had brought us together. Without my dreams, we would both have been shot back at my house. Yet I was no closer to understanding them than I had been on the day I first walked into Rachel's office.

For months they had progressed, like a persistent message being sent from a distant radio source. In the beginning, the incomprehensible images had troubled and even frightened me. But over time-and especially during the past three weeks-a conviction had begun to crystallize within me that something important was being communicated to me. Of course, schizophrenics felt the same conviction. What separated me from them?

I closed my eyes and tried to blank my mind, but the opposite happened. I suddenly saw a walled city on a hill, its stones glowing yellow in the sun. There was a gate set in its face.