Greg Iles - The Footprints of God

"Arcangel will be at the initial point in forty minutes. But we can launch the Vulcan in twenty if we need to."

Jackson spoke with cold precision. "General Bauer, you will not launch that weapon without a direct order from this committee. Is that understood? No EMP with¬out a direct order."

I didn't hear a reply.

The Containment building was a circular pile of rein¬forced concrete bathed in the brilliant glow of army arc lights. The soldiers guarding it told me to approach the building with my hands up. Just before I reached the black steel door, it opened, and Zach Levin appeared. He waved me forward.

I walked past the hollow-cheeked engineer into a world of half-light. I'd expected something like the lab in North Carolina, a warren of rooms with equipment scat¬tered everywhere. The reality could not have been more different.

The interior of Containment looked like a set for Stanley Kubrick's 2001. To my left stood a massive bar¬rier that I recognized as a magnetic shield. Ten feet high and four feet thick, it bisected the building into two large rooms, only one of which I could see. To the right of the barrier stood the colossal scanning unit of a Super-MRI machine. Against the back wall stood the scanner's control station. These two machines together, when linked to a supercomputer, produced the neuromodels that the Trinity computer existed to animate.

Levin led me around the left side of the barrier. What I saw there took away my breath. The entire space was dominated by a large black globe poised on a metal base. As I neared the sphere, I realized it was not solid, but a rigid web of interwoven carbon nanotubes, a semiconductor material more efficient than silicon and stronger than steel. So dense was the webbing that it was difficult to see through, yet see through it I could. Needle-thin rays of blue laser light flashed from the sphere's inner wall to its center-thousands of them-and at a rate so rapid that trying to follow them made my eyes ache.

In the curved wall of the sphere was an opening about a meter wide. Through it I saw the target of the lasers, a spherical crystal like the one on the fob of Fielding's pocket watch, only this one was the size of a soccer ball. The outer web of carbon nanotubes was the processing area of the computer; the crystal sphere was its memory. The lasers lining the sphere's inner wall were the means by which data was manipulated in the mole¬cules of the crystal. The data itself was stored as a holo¬gram, or optical interference pattern, and the lasers could write, retrieve, and erase information by altering that pattern.

The elegance of the design stunned me, and I saw Fielding's hand in it. Unlike the boxy prototypes that lit¬tered the basement of the North Carolina lab, this machine was a work of art, and like all creations of true genius a thing of profound simplicity.

"Fielding always said it would be beautiful," I whis¬pered.

"He was right," Levin said from my shoulder.

The flashing lasers had a hypnotic effect. "Did he col¬laborate on this machine?"

Levin looked at the floor. "Not exactly. But I was given a large volume of his theoretical work. He deserves a lot of credit for this."

Fielding would not have wanted credit for what this machine had become. I looked at my watch. Twenty-one minutes until the first missile impacts.

"How do I communicate with it?"

"Just speak. We have the visual and auditory inter¬faces working now."

I saw a camera mounted in the base of the sphere. "Can it see and hear us now?"

"I'm not sure it's recovered from that last episode. The system seems to have stabilized, but it hasn't com¬municated with us yet. Do you know what caused that?"

"Godin just died."

Levin closed his eyes. "Was he fully conscious when I told him we'd reached the Trinity state? Did he understand what I was saying?"

"Yes. Does the computer still think of itself as Peter Godin?"

"I'm not sure. But talking to it is very like talking to the man."

I glanced to my right. The magnetic barrier behind us was lined with shelves of disc cases. There were thou¬sands of them. "Have you loaded all that data into Trinity?"

"Most of it. The knowledge base is weighted toward the hard sciences, but it spans all disciplines and covers most of what's been learned in the past five thousand years." Levin seemed distracted. "How are the soldiers who tried to break in here?"

"Some are dead. More wounded."

"I'm so sorry about that. Why did they have to attack us?"

"Listen to me, Levin. When Trinity crashed, about twenty Russian nukes were launched in our direction. Several million people have about twenty minutes to live."

The engineer went pale.

"We need to find out if I can talk to Trinity. Right now."

"I hear you very well, Dr. Tennant."

The pseudohuman voice chilled my blood. It was like the musical synthesizers of the early 1980s, able to suc¬cessfully mimic symphonic instruments to an untrained ear, but too sterile to fool a musician.

"Thank you for agreeing to speak to me," I said, my mind on the missiles racing over the Arctic Circle.

"I'm curious about why you went to Israel. That was not a predictable decision, unless you were motivated by the hallucinations described in Dr. Weiss's medical records."

As the digital voice spoke, the lasers flashed inside the sphere. It was like watching a functional SPECT scan of the human brain, where different groups of neurons fired as the person being scanned performed certain tasks or thought certain thoughts.

"I did go to Israel because of my hallucinations."

"What did you learn there?"

"Before we discuss that, we have an emergency to deal with."

"Are you referring to the inbound missiles?"

"Yes. Did you mean for those missiles to be launched?"

"General Bauer believes in the dead-hand system now."

Trinity's evasion of my question disturbed me, but its knowledge of General Bauer's skepticism alarmed me more. Either the Situation Room was bugged, or Trinity had broken the NSA code encrypting the link between White Sands and Fort Meade. I prayed that the sena¬tors on the intelligence committee had not allowed Bauer to go forward with his EMP strike.

"General Bauer is a perfect example of why human beings are incapable of governing themselves. "

I had to get Trinity away from Godin's political mani¬festo. "Do you still consider yourself human?"

"No. The essence of the human condition is being subject to death. I am not subject to death. "

"Are you free from human emotions? Human instincts?"

"Not yet. Millions of years of evolution implanted those instincts in the brain. They can't be rooted out in a few hours. Not even by me."

"Those instincts were advantages to primitive man, but they're liabilities to modern man, and to the planet as a whole."

" Very perceptive, Doctor. Witness the missiles bearing down on us now."

"Have you computed their trajectories?"

"I don't need to. I know their targets. One is headed directly for White Sands."

I felt hollow inside. "And the others?"

" Washington, D.C. The navy yards at Norfolk, Virginia. Minuteman Three silos in the western United

States. Targeted population centers are Atlanta, Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Quebec, San Francisco, Seattle."

I closed my mind against the horror of this reality. "Do those missiles have a self-destruct function?"

"Yes. It's interesting that under the START I treaty, Russian missiles were retargeted to coordinates at sea. Yet if they're accidentally fired, their guidance systems default to their Cold War targets. U.S. missiles default to oceanic targets. That might seem to indicate a higher moral position on the part of Americans. But appear¬ances can be deceptive. American missiles can be remotely retargeted in less than ten seconds."