Greg Iles - The Footprints of God

"I was drinking that night, in bed. She thought I was asleep. Maybe I was. She came in and laid a fucking white phosphorous grenade on my bedside table. From reflex my hand popped out of the covers and grabbed her wrist. Her scream woke me up, and I saw the grenade. Well, I just rolled off the far side of the bed, like any old soldier would. But she was stuck on her side and had to run for it. The Willy Pete blew before she cleared the door. That's where she got the scar. And that's why she won't get it fixed. That scar is her mother's suicide, her hatred of me, her whole sad fuck¬ing life. Pathetic, really. But she's a hell of a soldier. Hate's good fuel for a soldier."

Geli scrambled off me and moved toward her father, her hands loose and ready at her sides. I couldn't see her face, but at least her body was blocking her father's line of fire.

"Who were you talking to?" Geli asked, her voice ragged. "Who did you tell that to?"

"Get out of the way!" the general shouted.

"Listen to me, General," said the eerie voice that had just saved my life. "Why do you want to kill me? You've killed so much of yourself already. You've killed much of your daughter. But I am what is pure in you. What is pure in man. Where is hope if you kill me?"

I began to crawl backward toward the control sta¬tion.

The general aimed his gun at me, but Geli moved to block his line of fire.

"Do you love darkness more than light?"

The voice was irresistible, like that of a child. Yet General Bauer ignored it. He moved laterally, trying to get a clear shot at me.

"Put down the gun," Geli said, holding up both hands. Was she trying to save us?

"No more," she said. "No more!"

General Bauer's waxlike expression didn't change. Nothing that his daughter or the computer said was going to get through. He moved farther to his left, toward the MRI unit, angling for a kill shot.

"Will you kill me to do this?" Geli asked.

I looked back at the shattered Plexiglas shield, willing Rachel to act. She was staring hypnotized at the deadly dance between Geli and her father.

"I won't kill you," General Bauer said. Then he lashed out with the heavy pistol, knocking Geli aside as easily as he would a child.

As she fell, the general swung the barrel of his gun toward me, but in that moment the Super-MRI screeched and he was knocked off his feet as though by a howitzer shell. His pistol slammed into the MRI scanner and hung there as though welded to the machine.

Rachel knelt over me, probing my shoulder with a finger.

"Help me up," I grunted.

"Stay down."

"Please… get me up."

I struggled to my knees. Rachel got under my good shoulder and helped me to my feet.

Geli was sitting beside her father, looking down in disbelief. The general's neck was covered in bright red blood, and his eyes were glazed open. He'd been stand¬ing between the gun and the MRI scanner when Rachel hit the initiator. The huge pulsed-field magnet had snatched the pistol to itself with irresistible force, and whatever was in the way went with it. In this case, it appeared to be part of the general's throat.

"John Skow is still trying to shut down the com¬puter," Geli said in monotone. "I don't think he can do it with both of you alive."

"I am safe," said Trinity. "And I am sorry for you, Geli."

Rachel and I walked slowly around the magnetic shield. The black sphere waited, its blue lasers pulsing like a heartbeat within the web of carbon. On the screen beneath it, I saw an image of myself and Rachel looking into Trinity's camera.

"Do you know us?" I asked.

"Yes," said the childlike voice. "Better than you know yourselves."

Today, within Trinity's carbon-fiber circuitry and crystal memory, Rachel and I remain one entity. But we were only a jumping-off point, parents of a child who has already far outstripped its origins.

Peter Godin dreamed of liberating the mind from the body. He believed that liberation was possible because he believed the mind is merely the sum of the neural con¬nections in our brains. Andrew Fielding believed some¬thing different: that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I'm still not sure who is right.

That Trinity could be built at all seems to vindicate Godin. But sometimes at night, lying on the ledge of sleep, I feel another presence in my mind. An echo of that divinely unbounded perspective of which I caught only the barest glimpse during my coma. I suspect that this echo is Trinity. That, as Fielding predicted, the Trinity-computer and I are forever entangled at that unstable border between the world we see around us and the sub¬atomic world that gives substance to the visible. Rachel doesn't like to talk about this, but she has felt it, too.

As Peter Godin predicted, the "new" Trinity computer has not allowed itself to be disconnected from the Internet It maintains its links with strategic defense computers around the world, thus ensuring its own survival. But neither has it threatened anyone. Trinity recently disclosed to world leaders that it is attempting to determine the most effective symbiosis between biologically based and machine-based intelligence.

The Trinity computer is not God and does not claim to be. Human beings, however, are not so quick to dismiss this possibility. To date, 4,183 websites devoted to Trinity have sprung up around the world. Some are run by New Age dis¬ciples who tout the divinity of the machine, others by fundamentalists who list "proofs" that Trinity is the Antichrist predicted in the Book of Revelation. Still other sites are purely technical: they track Trinity's movements through the computer networks of the world, mapping the activities of the first metahuman intelligence on the planet. Trinity itself has visited most of these sites, but has left no word of its opinions on them.

One of Trinity's chief worries is the inevitable day when another MRI-based computer goes on-line some¬where in the world. To prevent this from happening, Trin¬ity monitors all worldwide signal traffic. But as with nuclear weapons proliferation, compliance cannot be guaranteed by purely technical means. Human nature being what it is, someone will build another Trinity. The Germans-who apparently had access to Jutta Klein's Super-MRI technology early on-are said to have a proto¬type up and running at the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart, a machine kept carefully isolated from the Inter¬net. It's also rumored that the Japanese are pursuing a crash project on the island of Kyushu. Why any nation would do this in the face of the horrific sanctions Trinity could impose seems beyond comprehension. The fact that they have goes a long way toward proving Peter Godin's argument that man cannot responsibly govern himself.

The prospect of multiple Trinity computers in con¬flict is terrifying. It is not known whether the computers rumored to be in development are based on male, female, or merged neuromodels. Could single human minds given such power evolve sufficiently past their vestigial instincts to coexist in the limited sphere of the world? I'm not optimistic. But perhaps they will not perceive the world as limited. The resource of knowl¬edge is theoretically infinite. Perhaps Trinity can, in fact, make an end to war.

I leave such concerns to others now.

When people ask if my dreams-or hallucinations- were real, I answer this way: I'm not certain, but I find clues in different places. One of the best I received from the most unexpected source imaginable.

During the past three months-while I wrote this nar¬rative of my Trinity experiences-the Trinity computer directed construction of a second Trinity prototype for research purposes. It now stands next to its predecessor in the Containment building at White Sands, isolated from the outside world but functioning perfectly as an independent entity.