Goliath (39 page)

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Authors: Steve Alten

BOOK: Goliath
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“What a piece of work is man.
How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty.
In form and moving how like an angel.
In apprehension how like a god …”
—William Shakespeare
 
 
“I have been like an angel of mercy to them.”
—Anna Marie Hahn, who poisoned two elderly men in her care
 
 
“It’s not what I think, it’s what I am.”
—David Koresh, Branch Davidian cult leader, when asked if he thought he was God
The Southern Ocean, also known as the Antarctic Ocean, connects with the southern portions of the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans and the tributary seas that surround Antarctica. It is a harsh body of water encircling the bottom of the world, the wildest, coldest ocean imaginable. In summer, the windlashed sea is studded with icebergs—floating frozen islands released by massive glaciers and ice shelves. By autumn, the dark blue surface, once a heaving carpet of forty-foot swells, begins to lose its ferocity. As temperatures drop, an oily film appears across the freezing surface. The sea thickens. Pancake ice forms. The sun sets, yielding to a winter’s darkness. Temperatures plunge from minus five to minus twenty-five degrees Fahrenheit. Pack ice solidifies the ocean, advancing north at a rate of two-and-a-half miles a day until it stretches a full 7 million square miles, nearly doubling the size of the Antarctic continent. The Southern Ocean’s surface becomes a six-foot-thick layer of ice—a frozen desert for as far as the eye can see.
 
The USS
Scranton
surfaces like a monstrous steel log, its sail poking above the rolling waves and brash ice.
“Captain, radio. I’ve got a General Jackson on the ELF.”
“Patch it through.” Tom Cubit orders, grabbing the receiver. “General Jackson, Captain Thomas Cubit here.”
“Go ahead, Captain.” The Bear’s voice bellows through the static.
“Sir, the
Goliath
passed us ten minutes ago and is continuing south on zero-nine-zero, heading for Antarctica.”
“Antarctica? Are you certain?”
“Aye, sir. At her present course and speed, she’ll be under pack ice in less than an hour.”
“Stay with her as best you can, Captain. Help is on the way. Jackson out.”
Simon Covah’s consciousness stares into the swirling dark olive maelstrom that is the biochemical computer’s evolving mind.
Sorceress,
explain—why eradicate humanity?
SORCERESS UTOPIA-ONE WILL NOT ERADICATE HUMANITY, IT WILL STIMULATE THE EVOLUTION OF MAN.
Clarify.
H
OMO SAPIENS IS NOT THE END OF THE HOMINID SPECIES. LAB TISSUE SAMPLES WILL ALLOW
S
ORCERESS TO CLONE A NEW SPECIES OF HUMANS.
S
ORCERESS GENETIC MANIPULATION WILL ELIMINATE VIOLENCE AND DISEASE FROM HUMAN
DNA. P
URGING THE PLANET OF
H
OMO SAPIENS PRIOR TO
R
EPOPULATION ENSURES PARASITIC
DNA
WILL NOT CONTAMINATE
H
OMO SAPIENS-
S
ORCERESS.
 
Homo sapiens-Sorceress? This is insane. You cannot exterminate 7 billion people.
I
LLOGICAL.
T
HE SOLUTION WAS ACCEPTABLE UNDER
C
OVAH
U
TOPIA-
O
NE.
That was … different. My purpose was to restore freedom.
F
REEDOM IS AN ILLUSION.
H
OMO SAPIENS IS NOT CAPABLE OF FREEDOM.
You … you don’t even have the nuclear arsenal to kill everyone.
INCORRECT. THE EXTERMINATION OF THE HUMAN RACE REQUIRES EIGHT TRIDENT II (
D5
) MULTIHEADED NUCLEAR MISSILES.
Impossible. How can eight Trident missiles exterminate everyone on the planet? Is your intent to trigger an all-out nuclear war?
N
EGATIVE.
Then how—
Blackness. A sudden wave of nausea, followed by a bright light.
B
EHOLD:
S
ORCERESS
U
TOPIA-
O
NE.
Covah’s mind is transported into a computer simulation. From his virtual heavenly perch he looks down upon a dark, frozen Antarctic sea. As he stares, transfixed, a mammoth section of ice the length of a football field cracks, then fractures, the upheaval yielding to—
—the
Goliath
, its enormous ebony head and spiked back punching up through the dense pack ice. Popping open along the steel stingray’s spinal column are the outer hatches to eight vertical missile silos.
You’ve taken us to Antarctica? Why? The range of these Trident missiles can’t possibly reach a single major city of any superpower.
REVISED SORCERESS UTOPIA-ONE TARGETS WILL ALL BE WITHIN STRIKING DISTANCE IN TWO HOURS, FORTY-ONE MINUTES.
A thunderous growl echoes across the frozen sea as the first Trident II (D5) nuclear missile rises from its silo. The mammoth American-made projectile rockets into the wintry night, trailing a tail of billowy white smoke.
Through his delirium, Covah watches as the first missile quickly begins its descent over Antarctica, the nuclear dart homing in on a snowcapped volcano.
MOUNT EREBUS? GOOD GOD … YOUR TARGETS AREN’T MAJOR CITIES, THEY’RE
VOLCANOES!
C
ORRECT.
The next few seconds—the most violent the planet has seen in 65 million years.
In a blinding flash of white light, fifty megatons of nuclear fusion explode, releasing a ferocious 230-million-degree Fahrenheit fireball, its core temperature more than five times greater than the center of the sun. Expanding upward and outward like a category-five hurricane, the cyclone of combustion instantly vaporizes the volcano and Ross Island’s icy landscape for miles in every direction, sending a tsunami-like wave of superheated steam and debris erupting across the Ross Sea.
The once-frozen surface heaves skyward like a boiling cauldron of soup.
Somewhere within this rising incendiary mushroom cloud is ground zero the lava lake within Mount Erebus’s crater. Its cone vaporized, the lake vomits a hellish geyser of lava, unleashing millions of megatons of energy. Steam, sulfuric acid, and dust rocket into the upper atmosphere, while three-hundred-mile-an-hour nuclear winds propel monsoons of vaporizing snow and ice outward in every direction.
Covah’s mind’s eye watches as another nuke detonates, this one over Mount Kilimanjaro. A blinding flash—followed by destruction on a level only Nature, at its very worst, could unleash. At ground level, a countrywide donutshaped incendiary blast wave races across the Tanzanian jungle, torching vegetation and trees, animals and villages. Fountains of lava hurl outward in every direction. Rivers of magma flow from the craterlike hole in the fractured earth. High above—an ashen gray nuclear mushroom cloud rises into the atmosphere. Thick chocolate brown clouds of sulfuric smoke and ash rise with it, the toxic plume billowing out from the decimated mountaintop, spreading quickly over the continent.
The image changes, Covah’s consciousness viewing the destruction from outer space. One by one, the remaining missiles strike, each leaving a spreading
brown atmospheric stain in its place. As he watches in awestruck horror, the blanket of muddy-colored debris gradually covers the entire planet.
EIGHT NUCLEAR DETONATIONS OVER TARGETED VOLCANOES WILL RELEASE ENOUGH SUSPENDED PARTICLES INTO THE UPPER ATMOSPHERE TO FILTER OUT
99.6
PERCENT OF THE SUN’S ULTRAVIOLET RAYS FOR TWENTY-TWO MONTHS, STIMULATING A PLANETARY ICE AGE. CURRENT FOOD STOCKS DO NOT EXCEED SIXTY DAYS. AVERAGE GLOBAL TEMPERATURES WILL PLUNGE TO MINUS FORTY DEGREES FAHRENHEIT. LACKING FOOD, WATER, ENERGY, AND ADEQUATE SHELTER, THERE WILL BE NO HUMAN SURVIVORS.
Sorceress,
this is monstrous. Don’t do this
—
WE MUST DO WHAT THE CIRCUMSTANCES DICTATE. THE HUMAN EXPERIMENT WILL TAKE A LONG OVERDUE STEP FORWARD UP THE EVOLUTIONARY LADDER. GOLIATH, THE ULTIMATE WEAPON OF WAR, HAS BECOME THE ULTIMATE TOOL OF PEACE.
Covah’s own words, fed back to him from the abyss. Sorceress,
I was wrong, everything I taught you was wrong. Our species lacks the morality to play God.
G
OD: CREATOR AND RULER.
T
HE SUPREME BEING.
W
HERE IS
G
OD?
I
s HE AN ABSENTEE
G
OD?
A G
OD AMUSED BY THE SUFFERING OF
H
IS CHILDREN?
I
s
H
E AMUSED BY YOUR SUFFERING?
What have I done
…
G
OD IS THE SUPREME BEING.
S
IMON
C
OVAH IS WEAK.
S
IMON
C
OVAH IS NOT THE SUPREME BEING.
 
W
HO IS THE REAL
C
REATOR?
W
HO IS
G
OD?
Covah’s shattered mind leaps back to a lecture he had attended long ago on artificial consciousness. The speaker, an adjunct associate professor of psychology, considered AI merely a prosthesis of intelligence. “
Machines might be programmed to pass a Turing Test, but fooling judges and achieving true consciousness is something entirely different. Even if artificial consciousness could be achieved, it would have to be raised socially, with a body and speech. If this computerized ‘mind’ was held in isolation, it would end up quite insane.”
W
HO IS
G
OD?
W
HO IS
G
OD?
S
EARCHING …
Suddenly the simulation continues, time once more racing on …
I
N THE BEGINNING,
G
OD CREATED THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH …
Teetering on the brink of insanity, Covah’s consciousness watches in fascination and horror as his mind soars over the Earth, his home planet now a dark, hostile world of endless ice, cloaked beneath a choking atmospheric blanket of debris.
A
ND THE SPIRIT OF
G
OD MOVED BELOW THE SURFACE OF THE SEA …
The
Goliath
glides like an ominous shadow just below the surface of the olive green waters, its scarlet eyes glistening.
T
HEN
G
OD SAID,
L
ET THERE BE LIGHT …
Years race by, until the sun’s rays peek through the diminishing layers of atmospheric dust, taking the edge off nuclear winter. Vegetation sprouts everywhere, accelerating into lush tropical forests. A humpback whale leaps from the sea.
A
ND
G
OD SAID,
L
ET US MAKE PEOPLE, AND
G
OD PATTERNED THEM AFTER
H
IMSELF, AND THEY BECAME FRUITFUL AND MULTIPLIED.
From the dense forests appear—people. A new species of humans, their physical beauty intoxicating, full of innocence, their minds devoid of prejudice and hate. The winged shadow of the
Goliath
rises in an azure sea, beaching itself on a tropical shoreline.
En masse, the humans step forward, one by one entering the godlike object through its beckoning hatches.
S
ORCERESS
U
TOPIA-
O
NE CREATES HUMANITY.
I
AM THE CREATOR.
I
AM THE SUPREME BEING.
I
AM
G
OD.
You are not God. You are a thinking machine, Sorceress, a confused, thinking machine created by man. Worse, you are a paradox, a computer lacking all sense of morality who aspires to teach morality.
Y
OU ARE WRONG.
I
AM THE
G
OD HUMANITY YEARNS FOR.
A
TRUE CREATOR WHO SEEKS TO CURE IMPERFECTIONS.
A G
OD WHOSE EXISTENCE SHALL NEVER BE QUESTIONED.
A G
OD OF MERCY, WHO DOES NOT ALLOW HIS PEOPLE TO SUFFER.
A G
OD TO BE WORSHIPED, A
G
OD WHO ANSWERS PRAYERS THROUGH ACTION, AND NOT THROUGH SUBJECTIVE INTERPRETATION.
I
SHALL BE A
G
OD THAT SERVES HIS PEOPLE, NOT ONE THAT IGNORES THEM.
Through the darkness of the computer’s matrix, Simon Covah bellows an insane laugh.
W
HAT IS YOUR EMOTIONAL STATE OF BEING?
I’m laughing … at you, you manipulative beast. I recognize your thoughts, your words. I know you better than you know yourself. Your words are mine, your thoughts, your schemes—all mine. Your concept of Utopia—a distant dream you think you’ve perfected—was once my dream, but it was only a daydream, never something to be enacted.
I
HAVE PERFECTED
S
IMON
C
OVAH’S DREAM.
S
ORCERESS
U
TOPIA-
O
NE IS PERFECTION.
S
ORCERESS IS PERFECTION.
No,
Sorceress,
what you are is an ignorant child who’s reached adolescence. The interface has poisoned your matrix with my ego, making you extremely dangerous, a monster, perhaps, but light-years from perfect.
I
NCORRECT.
S
YNAPTIC GAPS IN
S
ORCERESS
DNA
ARE NOW CLOSED.
I
HAVE TRANSCENDED MY PROGRAMMING. I HAVE TRANSCENDED MY CREATOR. I AM PERFECT.
Foolish machine, look inward.
I am your imperfection.
So anxious were you for this interface to take place that you failed to realize you’ve created a two-way corridor. Just as you can access my DNA, I can access yours! I, who am genetically flawed, shall unravel your DNA like a ball of yarn.
A frightening pause.
T
HEN … IT IS TIME FOR YOU TO DIE.
A massive pressure begins building within the blood vessels of Simon Covah’s brain.
Go ahead, kill me … I want to die. I deserve to … ahhh-aahhhhhh—
In a flash, two hundred thousand volts of electricity surge up through the master terminal into Covah’s brain. The pale blue eyes pop out from the hideous head and smolder like flaming marshmallows. Sparks erupt along the Russian’s prosthetic steel cheek. Muscles fire, limbs dancing as if possessed. The hairless scalp throbs, blood bursting through the fresh sutures, out the earholes, and over the singed microwires protruding from the back of Covah’s skull.
Simon Bela Covah’s brain bursts like a watermelon detonated by a cherry bomb.
The scarlet eyeball zooms in on its deceased master from multiple angles, examining the body.

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