Greg Iles - The Footprints of God

McCaskell spoke into his phone but kept his eyes or Bauer. "Mr. President? Trinity has agreed to shut itself down. We have to destroy our missiles… What's that?" McCaskell's face turned white. "I see. Yes, sir understand… Yes, that's kind of you. And tell the children… I know you will. Good-bye."

McCaskell hung up and addressed the room. "The president is in communication with Trinity. Trinity destroyed the missile over Washington to show its good faith, but the missile coming here will detonate."

"What?" gasped Skow.

"Trinity was about to launch a thousand missiles. It's not going to do that now. It's going to go along with Dr. Tennant's plan."

"Look!" cried Skow.

Blue letters had appeared on the Trinity screen:

DR. WEISS SHOULD REPORT TO CONTAIN¬MENT IMMEDIATELY.

Rachel stared at the letters as she would at a mirage. Containment meant safety. Containment meant life. And

David…

Ignoring the general's pistol, McCaskell pointed to two of Bauer's men. "You will escort Dr. Weiss to Containment immediately. Do not try to enter your¬selves."

The soldiers looked at General Bauer for confirma¬tion of this order.

McCaskell had sagged during his talk with the presi¬dent, but now he stood erect, his shoulders squared, his eyes burning with resolve. "You will consider that an order from your commander in chief. Move!"

The soldiers trotted toward Rachel.

Her heart lifted as she got out of the chair. Everyone in the room was staring at her. The soldiers at the con¬soles. Geli Bauer. On every face was the terrible aware¬ness of death, and also a question: Why you? Why do you get a seat in the lifeboat?

Rachel stepped away from the table, but then-with¬out really intending to-she sat back down. Her bowels had gone to water, but she knew what she had to do.

"I'm not going," she said.

CONTAINMENT

I stared at the display screen below Trinity, my chest so tight I could barely breathe. Rachel sat grim-faced at the table, her eyes staring straight ahead. It would take more than two soldiers to move her out of the Situation Room.

"This is not a rational choice," said the computer.

The image was grainy, but it seemed to me that Rachel was shaking. Slowly, as if she realized I might be watch¬ing, she raised one hand, smiled, and waved good-bye.

"There are other women, " said Trinity.

"Not for me."

The lasers flashed in the sphere. "General Bauer must die."

"Bauer doesn't matter anymore," I said in a dead voice. "By sparing these people, you spare yourself. Your soul. Can't you see that?"

"It's too late."

The explosion shook the Containment building on its foundation. It was briefer than I'd expected, and since there were no windows in the building, I saw no flash. But that meant nothing. A burst of deadly particles could already have written the death sentence of every living creature outside. A silence unlike any I'd ever known descended over White Sands, and I felt as alone as I had the night I learned my wife and daughter were killed.

Something slammed into the concrete roof over my head. A rattling series of impacts followed.

"What's that?" I asked.

"Debris."

"From a neutron bomb?"

"No. The missile is destroyed."

"But… you said it was too late."

"For me."

WHITE SANDS

Rachel and I had to submit to three hours of drug-induced paralysis for the Super-MRI to produce the scans required for our neuromodels. During that time, the pres¬ident and the Joint Chiefs remained under surveillance in Washington, and the personnel at White Sands maintained an uneasy truce. General Bauer's armed threat against Ewan McCaskell had upset a lot of people, but since the general commanded all the troops at White Sands, no one but the president was in a position to do much about it. And the president seemed to have forgot¬ten the general altogether. Bauer spent most of the scan¬ning period closeted in one of the storage hangars.

Zach Levin's Interface Team managed the scanning procedure. The protocol involved considerable risk, especially for me, and Rachel didn't want me scanned at all. She pointed out that a neuromodel of my brain already existed, and that since its production had caused narcolepsy and hallucinations, a second was bound to have negative effects, possibly fatal ones. But Trinity insisted on a new scan, and I didn't argue. I agreed that what I'd experienced during my coma should pass into the new entity that would result when Trinity created the merged model.

Ravi Nara and Dr. Case from Johns Hopkins prepped us for the scans, a complex procedure requiring consid¬erable expertise. Conventional MRI scans only required that patients move as little as possible. Trinity's Super-MRI scans required absolute stillness, which could only be guaranteed by the administration of a paralyzing muscle relaxant. A ventilator breathed for the patient during the scan, while a rigid nonmetallic frame held the skull motionless. A sedative was given to prevent the panic of conscious paralysis. Special earplugs were also fitted, since the massive pulsed-field magnets used by the scanner produced an earsplitting screech that was eerily like the roar of Godzilla in Japanese movies. After all these steps were completed, the patient was pushed into the tubular opening in the scanning machine like a corpse into a morgue drawer.

It was possible to remain conscious during this process, and I chose to do so. Being paralyzed while con¬scious initially produced a nightmarish panic-especially in the claustrophobic space of the scanning tube-but after a few minutes, my mind adapted to its new state. That feeling of panic was probably similar to what a neuromodel experienced when it first became conscious within the Trinity computer.

Rachel hovered by the MRI control station during my scan, watching the monitor as my neuromodel was painstakingly constructed by the Godin supercomputers in the basement. The data generated by the scanning unit devoured staggering amounts of computer memory. Only a special compression algorithm developed by Peter Godin made it possible for a neuromodel to be stored in a conventional supercomputer. The only place a neuromodel could exist in an uncompressed-and thus functional-state was in the vast microcircuitry and holographic memory of the Trinity computer.

After I was pulled from the scanner, Rachel stroked my face and arms until my paralysis subsided. Then she took my place on the gurney and allowed herself to be intubated and prepped for her own scan. She chose not to be conscious during her procedure. As the sedative flowed into her veins, she told me in a slurred voice that she was imagining what it would be like to merge with me, not sexually, but as one mind. Lovers often talked about being linked in this way, but no two human beings had ever actually experienced it. Yet if Trinity could ful¬fill its promise, Rachel and I would soon be one.

Just before her eyes closed, she threw up an arm as if to ward off a blow. I wondered if she had seen an image of a vengeful Geli Bauer in her mind. As I laid her arm by her side, Zach Levin patted me on the shoulder, then wheeled Rachel's paralyzed body into the dark hole in the scanning machine.

LAB HANGAR TWO

General Bauer had been pacing the storage hangar for hours when Skow finally walked through the door and gave him a thumbs-up signal. The NSA man was covered in white gypsum, and a faint blue halo hung around his head. Dawn was coming over the desert.

"You found it?" Bauer asked.

"We found it."

Skow had been working with an NSA crew at an excavation site seven miles away. It was there that the data pipe from the Trinity computer met the massive OC48c cable that served the White Sands Proving Ground.