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Desh stared into Kira’s eyes and saw nothing but sincerity. And her assertions were almost too outrageous to be anything but true.

“You weren’t the only one I was deceiving, David. I was deceiving myself just as much. The fewer people who knew, the less chance something would go wrong. If you don’t know something, you can’t spill it during an interrogation. Disclosure was on a need to know basis only. If it had been up to me, I would have told you everything from the beginning.” She rolled her eyes. “Then again, I would have told
myself
everything also.”

Desh nodded. Knowing that he hadn’t been the only who wasn’t trusted with this plan made him feel better about the situation, even though he knew it shouldn’t.

“Basically, transcendent Kira realized the only way to stave off disaster was to present an external threat. A threat to the entire planet. One that would scare the world straight. Freak out people and governments enough that they would have to learn to work as a single species. They would still have their own languages and cultures, but everyone would be striving toward a common goal, focused on a common enemy, rather than trying to tear out each other’s jugulars.”

Desh’s eyes narrowed. Was she implying what he thought she was? He couldn’t see any other alternative. “So what are you saying?” he asked, his tone incredulous. “You can’t mean that . . .” He paused and waved his hands, somehow unable to finish a thought that seemed so utterly preposterous. “So what are you saying?” he repeated.

“What I’m saying,” responded Kira with a grin, amused by his struggles, “
is that
there is no alien species
. I’m saying that transcendent Kira found a way to fabricate one from whole cloth.” She paused and raised her eyebrows impishly. “What I’m saying, David, is that the entire alien visitation is a sham.”

63

 
Desh sat in stunned silence for almost thirty seconds. Had Kira Miller really engineered the greatest hoax in human history? A hoax swallowed whole by eight billion people? It was remarkable. Stunning. Impossible.

“Just a teeny bit ambitious,” said
Kira
with a smile, “wouldn’t you say? Even for someone with godlike intellect.”

“How?” said Desh simply.

“Second level Kira came up with the entire plan, of course, and imbedded key parts of it in the neuronal structure of both normal me and enhanced me. Like programming a computer.”

“It can’t be done,” objected Desh. “Implanting the epiphanies we have while enhanced in our minds for playback when we return to normal is impossible.”

“Impossible at the first level of enhancement, yes,” conceded Kira. “But as you know, the second level is as far above the first as the first is above normal.”

Desh smiled sheepishly. He
did
know that. He was being stupid. They weren’t using the word
transcendent
for nothing. “Go on,” he said.

“We always thought Ross took enhancement better than any of us, without negative personality changes. Transcendent Kira was certain he was someone who could be absolutely trusted, even while enhanced. And also that if he studied enough physics, he could pull off a few miracles—with her help. So I gave him a lifetime supply of gellcaps, which sped up his advances dramatically, since he wasn’t a danger to society and didn’t need any babysitters.”

Desh nodded. “So once you recovered from your five minutes at this second level, you had Ross bone up on physics. But not to tackle cold fusion.”

“Right. Ross knew the real score from the beginning, even if I didn’t. The hidden half of my personality told him everything. He was responsible for implementing three breakthroughs that transcendent Kira scorched into my mind. Zero point energy was one of them, of course. Ross needed to pretend to be making progress with cold fusion to justify his physics work. And the last thing we could do was risk letting you or Jim—or me, for that matter—know he was working to implement the principles of ZPE my much smarter self had laid out, or we might have connected the dots when the alien ship was discovered. During this time, Ross was also making great progress building his own group to move the plan forward. Doling out gellcaps from the supply I had given him.”

“Can I assume he was also responsible for developing the nanites?”

“Yes. Although I helped some with the biological portion, and others he recruited helped as well.” She paused. “Actually, the nanites are far simpler than you would ever guess. A concerted effort would have allowed us to create them even at the first level of enhancement, without the help of transcendent Kira.”

“But then Frey discovered Ross and attacked,” said Desh.

Kira nodded.

Desh raised his eyebrows as something else occurred to him. “Frey discovered Ross because of advanced science he found on his computer. Frey told me it was so advanced, it meant nothing to him, even when he was enhanced. And Frey was a Ph.D. scientist.”

“It was the principles of ZPE that transcendent Kira had laid down. Believe me, none of us could understand them either, even while enhanced. But Ross and his group kept at it and at least came to understand these principles enough to use them to produce a working drive.”

“So when Frey attacked, Ross decided to be opportunistic and use this as a way to fall off the Icarus radar screen.”

“
Exactly
. He really was shot. He needed to take a gellcap to help him heal—he was lucky the shot didn’t kill him. But once enhanced he realized it was a golden opportunity. If he cut his ties to Icarus, he could act totally independently, without having to pretend to be working on something else. The great majority of time I was just as clueless about any of this as you, including that night. When his pulse stopped, I thought he was just as dead as you did.”

Desh remembered her reaction to Metzger’s supposed death, and knew she was telling the truth. She had been devastated.

“So then he continued building his organization,” said Desh. “Keeping in contact with you periodically.”

“Exactly. He perfected the nanites shortly after this time.”

Desh rubbed his chin in thought. “You needed the nanites to cement the threat posed by the fictitious aliens,” he said. “To create the illusion that an armada was on the way, and establish a specific deadline. To get our species working together.”

“Right. If the threat was too far removed, it wouldn’t have the same impact, the same urgency. But too soon wasn’t good either. Transcendent Kira decided on thirty-four years.” She paused. “But the nanites played another role as well.”

“Well, obviously they were also intended to pretend to blow every nuke on the planet. To freak us out even more. And to get the nations of the world to take their nukes off-line.”

“No. We still can’t count on the nations of the world disarming. Even now.” She grinned broadly. “The other purpose of the nanites was to take the nukes off line
for them
.”

“What?”

“We created the nanites to preferentially migrate to uranium and plutonium. To lend further credibility to the hoax, yes. But their real purpose wasn’t to infiltrate nukes to
detonate
them. It was to
disable
them.”

Desh’s eyes widened.

“Designing nanites to detonate nukes, to make a collection of uranium go critical, is a tougher challenge than you might imagine,” continued Kira. “I learned a lot about nuclear weapons while I was helping Ross develop the nanites.”

Desh nodded. He had discovered this as well. Kira had broken into classified government computers and studied nuclear weapons. But she had studied biological ones also. Why had this been necessary? “You studied biological weapons as well, didn’t you?” said Desh.

Kira nodded. “Impressive deduction,” she said in admiration, having no idea that it was
not
deduction. “Why reinvent the wheel? We needed to optimize the spread of the nanites. And the government has performed extensive modeling and analysis of the spread of pathogens as part of their defense against bioweapons.”

Desh couldn’t help but smile stupidly. She was doing it. She was putting endless and seemingly unrelated puzzle pieces together into a seamless whole.

“Anyway,” continued Kira, “as I said, designing nanites capable of detonating nuclear warheads would have been quite challenging. And designing nanites capable of cleaning up radiation and transforming the atmosphere even more so. But it turns out that designing them to render nuclear weapons impotent was fairly easy. A nuke requires uranium enriched to levels that are very difficult to achieve, using high science and endless ultracentrifugation. So if you introduce even small impurities into your enriched uranium, your nuke becomes a door stop.”

Desh knew this was absolutely the case. “So was Matt in on the plan from the start as well?” he asked.

“That’s right. He was a key player also. It may be difficult to detonate a nuke using nanites, but it’s impossible to tap into alien nanites, running alien software, and get anywhere. But we played a magician’s trick. Matt did so much that seemed impossible while on the
Copernicus
, by the time he finished his act, even the most jaded scientists would believe anything he did was possible. And Matt
wasn’t
tapping into alien nanites to try to figure them out. He helped to build them in the first place. Using code that he developed while enhanced to
look
alien and to be incomprehensible to a normal mind. So he knew exactly how to get the nanites to disgorge the fake end-of-the-world scenario. Because
he
had implanted it. The timing between his discovery of the nanites’ evil purpose and time zero was carefully planned. Much longer and the story would have leaked before they could be stopped, which would have been a disaster.” She shook her head sadly. “Enough people died around the world from panic and riots during this fiasco as it was.”

Desh was finding it hard to get his arms around the enormity of what Kira had done. “So just to be clear,” he said, “are you telling me that every nuclear weapon on earth is now disabled?”

“Every one,” she replied proudly. “Eventually, my hope is that the nations of the world will disarm them anyway. When the species has gained back some sanity.” She paused. “In the meantime, of course, governments can’t know they’ve been disarmed.”

“Why not?”

“If a psychopathic killer has a gun, better to fool him into loading it with blanks than to steal it. If you steal the gun, he’ll just get another one. With blanks, he’s clueless until he’s ready to massacre a campus. Then his gun doesn’t work. But his attempt still manages to attract the police.”

“You’ve been thinking about this metaphor for a while haven’t you?”

“Maybe,” allowed Kira with a smile. “We’ve set the fictitious arrival of the alien armada to give an entire generation of humanity a chance to see themselves as a single species,” she explained. “Fighting a common enemy.”

Desh frowned. “But you’ve also condemned an entire generation to fear the skies. To fear the approach of doomsday.”

A guilty look crossed Kira’s face. “I know. In my defense, the plan wasn’t mine. Transcendent Kira made the calculation that the negative consequences couldn’t be helped. That if this wasn’t done,
not enough
people would fear the approach of doomsday—ensuring we brought it on ourselves within ten years.”

Desh tilted his head in thought as the van accelerated briskly. Griffin was probably on the onramp to a highway, heading for the nearest woods. “You said that when you were at the second level, you implanted three scientific breakthroughs into your normal mind. One involved ZPE, and one involved nanites. Did I miss the third?”

Once again Kira gazed at him with unabashed admiration. “Nice to see you’ve been paying attention,” she said playfully. “The third breakthrough was the principle behind a gravitational wave detector. Ross had a scientist on his team take the credit for this discovery, which, as you know, has revolutionized cosmology. He had to time its release just right. If this technology was available when he launched the fake alien ship, someone might have detected it on its outbound journey—which we couldn’t have. So he programmed the craft to hang out in interstellar space while the technology was adopted, so that it would be detected on the way back. It was critical for the entire world to know the alien ship was on its way. So the existence of advanced aliens would be hammered into the world’s consciousness like a spike. And with enough advanced warning so the nations of the world would band together to prepare. The
Copernicus
was perfect.”

Desh smiled appreciatively. “Your alter ego thought of everything.”

“Being nearly omniscient has its advantages,” said Kira wryly. “But believe me, she didn’t think of everything.”

“Wait a minute,” said Desh as a new thought occurred to him. “Does this mean that Madison Russo is on Ross’s team?”

“Great deduction, but actually no. We had to be sure the alien ship was discovered, and we
did
choose out someone on Ross’s team for that purpose.” She shook her head. “But Madison Russo beat him to the punch by five or six hours. Surprised the hell out of us. And it was a setback, if only a minor one.”

“Why?”

“We knew whoever discovered the ship would be a part of the international effort to study it, and we wanted a few more of our people on
Copernicus
.”

“A few
more
?”

“We had three others. The
Copernicus
tapped the best and the brightest. The same group of people Ross was tapping.” She shook her head. “But we decided not to use them. It wasn’t required, and again, everything was on a need to know basis.” She paused. “We had only one chance to get this right.”

“It seems to me the plan had a fatal flaw. You were lucky it all worked out, but what if you hadn’t been able to place Matt as the head of the nanite team? What if Jake hadn’t called you? Or hadn’t conceded to Matt’s demands to work on
Copernicus?
” Desh paused in thought and a troubled look came over his face. “Wait a minute. Does this mean you’re responsible for Jake coming after us in the first place? Because you knew he’d end up being part of the international effort?”