Ghost of the Gods - 02 (17 page)

After about five minutes, Mark saw Karla emerge from the boat. He thought it was ironic that for the next few hours he would be protected by the same government that was secretly hunting him.

Karla set down her now empty mug of coffee. She looked worn. Karla had brought a tablet stuffed with documents covering the research being conducted at her lab. She wanted Mark’s insights and was willing to leave the tablet with him, which was very risky for her. Mark knew if he was captured while in possession of this top-secret material it would be her head. He also knew she could remotely wipe it any time she wanted.

“My team needs you,” said Karla. “But I know we can’t have you. As far as I can tell, there’s only one scientist who won a Nobel for a lifetime of research into COBIC and has firsthand experience because the damn seeds are in his brain. Bad luck he’s also a wanted terrorist.”

“Sorry,” said Mark.

“It’s okay, love. In your absence we mere humans version 1.0 have advanced our cause but not enough. We have a super scanning environmental e-scope running at Los Alamos using one of their top-secret accelerators as a source. It’s a breakthrough that’s delivered wonders. With it we’re finally able to image intact operating seeds and prove that any physical contact causes a seed to self-destruct.

“The biggest mystery is still the power source. We’ve isolated its structure but have only guesses at the physics involved. The theories are all over the map from unlikely ideas such as dark energy to our best guess, which is some type of ultra high efficiency fuel cell combined with IR photovoltaic. We’ve dissected and partially duplicated the structures, but what we built did not work and does not make sense when fit into our limited knowledge base. We also have confirmed there’s a molecular computer in there. It’s not using any kind of quantum computing we can find. This is disappointing, because it may indicate quantum computing is a dead end. If a civilization that advanced did not use quantum computing, then maybe it’s not practical?”

“Maybe there’s another explanation,” said Mark. “Each seed may contain a molecular computer, but collectively they could still form a quantum machine of some type. The god-machine is not hosted in a single seed. It’s hosted in colonies of trillions of seeds, which to me at the very least requires quantum entanglement to make it work. At the CDC we demonstrated seeds scaling up in parallel processing power without any apparent loss of efficiency. Explain that.”

“I’d sure like to get that nanotech brain of yours under an fMRI,” said Karla. “I think we’d get some of these questions answered. Any chance of that?”

“God, why does every woman I meet want me for my mind?”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” said Sarah with a laugh.

Karla looked back and forth between Mark and Sarah without saying a word.

Mark returned from the kitchen with an open can of fruit cocktail. He was surprised by his hunger and ate in silence, listening to Karla and Sarah talk about emotions radiating out across the n-web.

“It’s strange that every emotion is transmitted while most stray thoughts remain trapped in the brain,” said Sarah.

“It could be that COBIC only congregates in the brainstem,” said Karla. “Dendrites growing out from seeds do not reach very far and definitely are not making it to the cortex.”

Mark put down the empty can of fruit cocktail.

“Something is bothering me,” he interrupted. “Why are you still studying the nanotech seed’s structure? We know what they are. We know what they do. You should be studying the data and the software, not the hardware.”

“We need to find a weakness that can be exploited by our current technology, and right now we think our best chance is biology,” said Karla. “Bacteriophages, antibiotics, and radiation are showing promise. Kill the bacterial host and the seed is crippled. If it can’t travel it can’t repair the n-web. If we can cripple the n-web it’s game over. Soft, squishy bacterium biology is the god-machine’s weak spot.”

“That’s not a weak spot,” said Mark. “Name one strain of bacteria we’ve successfully wiped out. Look at the history. The more we tried to wipe out a strain with antibiotics, the more dangerous it became. The key to this whole thing is that hybrids are not immune. Kill-zone trigger signals are ignored by the seeds inside us. It’s programming and data that kept the plague from killing me and Sarah, not biology or physics.”

“We looked at software,” said Karla. “We looked at data. We tried DOS attacks by injecting disruptive network packets. I even have a team looking at computer viruses, but you know that’s hopeless unless we can figure out the programming language. We’ve tried every approach to defeat the software and failed. We tried EMF shielding. It made sense because so many people survived the plague in nuclear EMP bunkers. What we ultimately found was that their survival was due to the god-machine’s indifference to low population targets and not EMP shielding.”

“You know this for a fact?” interrupted Mark.

“It’s the best theory we have and I believe it. But what we do know for a fact is that this thing is a hardened weapon like nothing we could have imagined. The wireless n-web is constantly self-adapting as if it’s an independent artificial awareness all its own and engineered to defeat any obstacle. Around the globe there are countless trillions of wirelessly relayed n-web routes all carrying indecipherable data streams. It’s like a nervous system flowing across and through everything from the cement walls of a safe room to the dermis of a living creature. The n-web is built as much from solid biological material as it is radio waves. It’s a living, breathing biomass that infuses everything and we still have no idea how to neutralize it.”

“You’re proving my point,” said Mark. “Software, not hardware.”

“Wait, hear me out,” said Karla. “What if we could just interrupt some of the lines of communication? We don’t have to destroy the n-web to stop a kill-zone attack. What we need is a biological firewall. At BARDCOM we found all that was required for a kill-zone signal to get into any safe room was a single microscopic gap in shielding. The terrifying thing is if there’s no gap, the seeds make one by assembling a non-electromagnetic data conduit. We’re not sure of the actual mechanics of this conduit, but we believe it’s electrochemical and similar to how neurons communicate with each other. Again, it’s biology. What we know is that seeds physically interconnected by their dendrites can transport n-web data non-electromagnetically. We’ve observed them doing this on a massively parallel scale. We call this data pathway a biomass conduit. Using nanotech molecular disassembly and reassembly, seeds can tunnel through any material. No physical barriers can block the formation of a biomass conduit. In the lab, we’ve watched seeds construct a conduit in minutes after we blocked their electromagnetic signal with a Faraday Cage.

“We’ve also studied these biomass conduits in the wild. During the plague days, CEOs of big corporations were privy to top-secret information. They knew kill-zone radio signals were a kind of disease vector. One CEO committed a criminal error of judgment. When the plague was escalating, his DOD consulting firm was looking for radio wave shelters and stumbled onto the idea that EMF shielded MRI rooms offered good protection. Without peer review, this CEO sent out private e-mails recommending these rooms as shelters and that they take control of them now. The e-mail went viral in elite circles. His big mistake was that EMF shielded rooms offered no protection from biomass conduits, though no one knew about biomass conduits at that time. The seeds had long ago constructed biomass pipes through the shielding of MRI rooms, as it did with any obstacle. All over the country radiology rooms in big cities became VIP mausoleums for politicians, corporate CEOs, and all their friends, cronies, and families. We sent in teams to study these mausoleums. Using RF spectrum analyzers, our teams quickly found and mapped out countless biomass conduits, penetrating every surface of the rooms. The EMF shielding had been invisibly turned into Swiss cheese.”

“I’m disgusted by all those privileged bastards taking all the lifeboats while keeping the country in the dark,” grumbled Mark. “They’re the same Ayn Rand greed is good geniuses of industry with their self-inflicted environmental destruction that brought us the plague. For once it was better they kept their secrets to themselves. Those rats got their karmic desserts in their leaky lifeboats!”

Mark noticed Sarah frowning at him and felt that familiar tug from her at the back of his mind. His emotions leveled out. He stared at her, unsure what she’d just done to him and wondered if he should be grateful or if she even knew that she had done something.

“I don’t agree,” said Karla. “And even if true, how does revenge help us?”

“You’re right,” said Mark. “It doesn’t help. But look, there’s an important reason you should search for weaknesses in data instead of hardware. The god-machine is censoring the data that I can access. The same is true for Sarah. All information about the history of the god-machine’s creators is inaccessible. Are we headed toward the same end as them? Did the god-machine destroy them? All of these questions go unanswered when I submit queries. So there has to be something important there. Likewise, anything relating to how seeds operate is censored—and by
operate
I mean their programming and communications mechanisms. I’d bet anything the god-machine’s hiding a critical weakness from us.”

“Why does it surprise you that the enemy is withholding information?” asked Karla. “Just because it’s withheld doesn’t mean there’s a weakness. The god-machine operates COBIC like a puppet. How do we know it isn’t operating you two like puppets? Am I fraternizing with the enemy right now?”

“Yes, you are!” said Mark. “I confess…” He extended his arms, offering them for handcuffing. “I only ask that when you take us back to your lab, please don’t dissect us.”

Karla was smiling at his joke, but Mark could tell from stray thoughts as well as a medical assist that her question had a very serious and sharpened edge. She was not sure of them and that was troubling. What was more troubling was that Mark could never be sure her concerns were misplaced. His awareness shifted for a heartbeat as he experienced a memory capsule from Sarah. The capsule contained the emotional dimensions of Karla’s doubts. Mark took a deep breath and then let it out. He needed Karla’s help as much as she needed his. He had to reassure her; he had to give her something new, something that gave her a measure of power over them.

“I have some information for you,” said Mark. “It may change a lot of what you know about hybrids.”

Karla’s smile faded. Her look was so strange that it unsettled him. Oddly, there were no stray thoughts coming from her. He plowed ahead with his disclosure, now unsure whether it was such a good idea.

“There are more of us,” said Mark. “In Chicago we found a number of hybrids. We saw at least six different individuals. They’re gone now, dead or on the run. I don’t know. The townhouse they were living in was built like a high tech fortress. Just before we left Chicago, it was destroyed by a suspicious explosion. You may have heard about it. The explosion was reported as a terrorist bomb factory going up. The cause was a large thermobaric weapon that was engineered to destroy with intense heat and reduced blast. How many kids on the street have those kinds of high tech military toys besides the USAG? Not many, is my guess.”

Mark Freedman – Ohio – February 10, 0002 A.P.

Mark and Sarah were sitting in the dark on a couch they had turned to face the sliding glass door. The blinds were open. Mark was thinking about what he’d learned today and, more important, had not learned. Sarah was as still as if asleep, but Mark knew she was wide awake. It was past midnight. His eyes had long ago adjusted to the darkness. Genetic as well as physiological changes made by COBIC had improved his biological night vision. An assist further enhanced edge detection. The combined result was noticeable, but not much more than what a human with superb night vision would experience.

A gibbous moon was a few hours from setting. Mark could hear the wind blowing against the glass, trying to force its way inside. The room was growing very cold. He could see the vague dark shapes of branches moving in the wind and leaves flying through the air. Karla had left about six hours ago. In the morning at first light they too would be departing. They’d let the fire die out after Karla was gone. There was no reason to broadcast their presence with a heat signature. Mark wanted to make it appear to any human predators that could have witnessed the earlier airboat activity that everyone had left with the boats. Ralph was curled on the floor on a blanket in front of them. His head was on his paws. Sarah’s voice floated softly out of the darkness beside him.

“I saw you finished reading the documents Karla brought,” she said. “Are they close to finding anything that could stop it?”

“No closer than we were before the kill-zones and that psycho Alexander drove us from the BVMC lab.”

“If they could find something that even partially worked,” said Sarah, “the paranoids in the government might stop seeing us as a threat.”

“You know, Karla was right to worry about fraternizing with us. Just about everything we say and do feeds directly into the god-machine’s memory. We are leading a fully recorded life. The only question is how much will be archived. When she’s at her lab there’s a good chance the god-machine is ignoring her. Every time we meet has to draw more unwanted attention from the machine onto her. Karla is nobody’s fool.”

“So you’re saying she might not be telling us everything.”

“That and the fact she might not know everything going on at her own division. The USAG is a police state. They don’t exactly promote an environment of trust. I wish—”

Ralph lifted his head and looked toward the glass. Mark instantly knew something was very wrong. He opened his mind and began picking up stray thoughts as if he were a shortwave radio snatching bits of conversation from distant stations out of a waterfall of background static. One stray thought contained a tiny green night vision image of the outside of their cabin. Someone was looking at the other side of the same glass door that Mark was staring through. The perimeter sentry had not gone off yet. He grabbed the tablet before it issued an alert that would have lit up the screen. If that had happened, anyone looking at the glass door with night vision goggles would have seen him and Sarah as if they were mannequins in a brightly lit storefront window. He heard Sarah releasing the safety on her M4 assault rifle.