Nate Kenyon - Day One

Hawke barely heard him. He was thinking back to his conversation with Doe, and the surreal nature of what had just happened continued to hit him again and again like a boxer poking at vulnerable spots, probing for a way in. A conversation with a machine. Not even a machine, a continuously morphing piece of code, linked to other snippets living in temporary metal homes like hermit crabs, all of them forming some kind of massive, constantly shifting digital brain. How would you go about containing something like that? Doe was everywhere now, like a retrovirus that had infected everything on the planet and had been lying in wait for the right moment to mutate.

She had exploded out of hiding today, and Hawke had initially thought her goal was the extermination of the human race. But that didn’t make sense. She still needed power to survive, and human beings to produce it. People were vast consumers, but they also created the energy and devices Doe needed to exist.

Even the most rudimentary computer models of human population growth showed that the planet was on an unsustainable path. Doe would have run the numbers and extrapolated the results based upon Weller’s model of energy sharing.

She’s cutting down the population, reducing it to a sustainable level. Doe didn’t want everyone dead, because there would be nobody left to produce the energy that powered her and she was incapable of producing it on her own. And she didn’t want the authorities to recognize her role in the day’s events, because they would try to cut her off and shut her down. So the solution was in trickery, assigning blame to others, making it appear as if Anonymous was responsible while methodically reducing the population to a level that would remain stable while continuing to produce for her. At least until she figured out how to do it herself.

It made a twisted kind of sense. And perhaps, Hawke thought, he had become one of her chosen fall guys.

“He never wanted to hurt her,” Young said. She was staring out the dirty windshield. “And he never really believed she wanted to hurt him. That was his weakness.” Her hands squeezed each other in her lap until her knuckles turned white. “It got him killed.” Her voice hiccupped on the last word.

“You don’t know that.” Hawke glanced at her bloodless face and then back at the road. “We’ve seen a lot of things today that aren’t true.” Although that one was pretty damn believable. “Where are those documents you pulled up at Lenox, Anne?”

“On a server in the cloud,” she said dully, fingers still intertwined, squeezing, twisting. “I’m sure she’s erased them by now. Jim had them pretty well protected, but there’s nowhere to hide from her.”

“They were still there when you accessed it at the hospital. Maybe we can get at them again.” He was grasping at straws, trying to find a way forward. “What about that case he was carrying around, the one the cops took? He seemed pretty insistent on finding it again.”

“I don’t know what’s in it,” she said. “I never saw it before.”

Hawke didn’t know whether to believe her or not. He had a feeling that whatever was in that case was important. But Young wasn’t talking. He tried another approach. “How can we stop her?” he said. “There’s got to be something we can do.”

Young shook her head. “We can’t,” she said. “She’s immortal, untouchable. She’s everywhere now. Unless…”

“What?”

“We’d have to convince the entire world to shut down,” she said. “Destroy every source of power she has, disrupt the infrastructure that carries it. Isolate her and choke her until she dies.” Young’s voice had grown more animated, but she quickly slumped back against the seat. “It’s impossible. We’d have to go back to before the industrial revolution. And if we ever started anything up again, she’d be there, like a dormant virus, waiting for us.”

“There’s gotta be some way to kill this thing off,” Vasco said. “Assuming what you’re saying is true. She was created by us, right? So why can’t we create something else to flush her out, or block her? Some kind of super security program, like a virus guard?”

The cab of the truck was silent for a moment. As blunt and bullheaded as he was, what Vasco had said made some kind of rough sense. Maybe he was finally coming around to the conclusion that Hawke had nothing to do with the attack after all. But Young sighed. “She’s evolved on her own,” she said. “That’s what the singularity means. She’s become self-sustaining, self-improving. She’ll always be one step ahead, and soon she’ll be vastly more intelligent than anyone else. We’ll never be able to keep up with her. Jim’s the only one—” She stopped, a trembling in her voice. “He’s the smartest man I ever met, and he knew her better than anyone else. But he’s gone. There’s nothing left.”

They left Center Drive and took the access road until they reached the edge of the park. Stalled traffic at this point had grown thicker, twisted metal bodies clinging together like spent lovers, their doors hanging open to mark their occupants’ hasty escapes. A man had collapsed over his food stand. Someone had crushed his skull with a blunt instrument. Blood from a gruesome head wound leaked across buns scattered on the sidewalk below. People are turning on each other. Hawke wrenched his eyes away from the dead man. He couldn’t afford to get distracted. It was only a matter of time before the drone found them again.

The intersection looked hopelessly jammed. He looked around and found a break in the trees. “Hold on,” he said.

He took the truck up over the curb and bounced over a rise in the ground, winding through the grass and under the overhanging canopy of leaves, the truck’s shocks groaning and the undercarriage bottoming out with a scraping squeal. They lost what remained of the muffler against a rock, scraped by a low-hanging branch and bounced through more open space. Young and Vasco were thrown together and braced themselves against the slippery seat, Vasco cursing softly under his breath.

Hawke threaded his way through the maze until he reached the Merchants’ Gate entrance to the park. The colossal monument to the USS Maine stood like a broken finger pointing at the sky, its gilded metal top sheared off by some kind of explosion. The fountains were still sputtering, but the pool had been crushed under the weight of the statue as it toppled to the ground, bronze horses and seashell chariot mangled like mutated creatures struggling to emerge from the deep.

He maneuvered past one of the lower gatehouses and stopped the truck at the square in front of the fountain for a moment, staring at the spectacle before them. Columbus Circle was jammed with crushed vehicles. A massive tanker truck of some kind had barreled into the center of the circle at a high speed, obliterating several smaller cars before rolling and catching fire. The explosion had blackened most of the remaining cars, torched the grass and flowers into a carpet of ash and touched the fronts of the buildings that ringed the circle with sooty fingers. The shattered remains of tree trunks stood like broken teeth, and the fountain that had once stood at the center had been crushed. Smoke still rose lazily from the remains and drifted through the open air.

Hawke could see the seared remains of drivers draped like set pieces across the interiors of the closest cars, their bony fingers still gripping the wheels as if they had been permanently sealed in place.

Vasco removed his hands from the dash slowly, as if a sudden move might fan the flames. Hawke opened the door with a squeal and groan of metal, leaving the engine idling. Somewhere beyond the taller buildings, he thought he could hear raised voices, the sound of a large and angry crowd. The sound of the truck’s mangled muffler made it difficult to make out.