Immortality (63 page)

Alexander aimed the bushmaster at the steel and concrete obstacles. The chain-gun cannon was fed by heavy belts of 30mm small cannon shells, which resembled oversized machine gun bullets. The rear half of the Humvee was little more than an ammo locker which the bushmaster could empty at a startling speed. The chain-gun was the same weapon used by the Apache helicopter which he’d spat at with his M4 not long ago. His power had grown immeasurably since then. This chain-gun could fire six hundred and fifty rounds per minute and could reach out and touch a target four miles away. Each high explosive shell had the same destructive power as a hand grenade. Yesterday, during his attack on the arms depot, Alexander had chewed up an entire cement building in a few seconds. After the fighting was over and all the supplies were carted off, he’d practiced on other buildings. The chain-gun was an awesome weapon. He was thrilled by it.

Alexander lifted a pair of night vision goggles to his eyes. He looked to his left and right. He could see the other bushmaster pointed at the same spot on the steel and concrete obstacles as his cannon. Heavy machine guns mounted on other Humvees were aimed at the barracks. His spear was ready. He put down the goggles and went back to using the infrared sight. He spoke into the microphone.

“Aim.”

He waited until his men reported back that they were ready and aimed on target. He was breathing deeply and slowly. He set the fire control to hot. He bore down on the trigger and in the same instant yelled, “Fire!” There had been no need to yell fire. The sound of the bushmaster hitting its target could be heard for miles. Fire from the two chain-guns focused the combined destructive power of over twenty hand grenades per second at a stationary barrier of steel and concrete. In seconds, a thirty foot wide expanse of the I64 line had been washed away in the violent streams of destruction.

Alexander was pushed back in his seat as Fox gunned the Humvee and rolled over the flattened I64 line. The State Trooper barracks was straight ahead. Heavy machine gun fire was pouring into it. Alexander opened up with the bushmaster as the Humvee rolled forward. Even with the stabilized gun mount, it was difficult to hold his target. Fox stopped advancing. Alexander continued firing. Soon, he and the other bushmaster were firing straight on into the building. The barracks was erupting in a seamless cacophony of explosions, glowing as bright circles in his gun sight and deafening his ears through the hearing protectors. The target was obscured by light and smoke, but he kept on firing and yelling. Nearby police cars exploded.

The firing had stopped. His ears were ringing. This nest of police corruption was gone. The entire attack had lasted less than two minutes from start to finish. The end was anticlimactic. The fight had been too easy. Alexander craved more, but nothing remained. He swung the gun sight in every direction, looking for hostile targets, then finally, slowly, eased off as the adrenaline waned.

Fox had stopped the Humvee with its tires straddling the eastbound lane of I64. Fanning out on either side was a semi-circle of vehicles with their headlights shining in from various angles at the site of devastation. The barracks was a smoldering pile of garbage. The air smelled of cordite and burning plastic. Small fires glowed from the rubble. Alexander climbed out of the Humvee so that he could see more clearly what was left of his conquest. He wanted this image to live in his mind forever. He inhaled with all his senses, trying without success to savor this moment of revenge, but there was no time; they had to move before the sky was filled with Apaches. His plan was to return to the ghetto side of the line to recruit more fighters. There was a rich world of targets waiting to be destroyed in front of them, and soon they would be strong enough to obliterate them all. He could feel in his heart that this world of traitorous corruption was coming to a well deserved end, and he would have a hand in that end.

~

Alexander awoke from a jolt in the uneven road. Fox was driving; spread out behind them was a convoy of Humvees. They were driving with headlights off, using night vision goggles. An hour had passed since their attack on the I64 line. Alexander was surprised that he’d fallen asleep. As details of his dream came back to him, he began to sit upright in his seat. The female cop who had saved his life at the I64 line had been in the dream. The night she’d helped him, he’d never been closer than twenty feet to her, and might not be able to pick her from a line up; but in his imagination there was a clear image of her. He hadn’t thought about her since the night Suzy had died. It was odd that he’d frequently thought about the other cops, the ones who’d tried to execute him, but never her.

The two-way radio crackled with a report from a scout vehicle. The road ahead was clear. More of the dream came wafting back. The dream had been unusually vivid. In it, the female cop had the power to look deep into his thoughts. Alexander had been trying to seduce her, but she despised who she saw and regretted having saved him. The dream ended with her pushing a knife into his chest as he tried to convince her to love him. He could still feel the incapacitating pain of the metal blade entering his body and the disbelief that he could be mortally wounded in this way.

Alexander picked up Fox’s pint of Tequila and took a swig. The dream unnerved him. He gazed out the windshield at the darkened road. He watched outlines of trees and houses forming out of a swirling nighttime darkness as they moved past. The female cop could have been killed in tonight’s raid, but some instinct left him convinced she was alive and that he would meet her again. He wondered if she would have a knife. Alexander closed his eyes and tried to return to sleep.

Since the previous night, a continuous debate had battled inside Mark. For every claim Sarah had spoken, he now had a counterpoint. He was in the cafeteria having finished lunch but could not remember what he had eaten or who he had spoken with. He wasn’t sure about breakfast either. Though he wouldn’t admit it, his counterpoints were weak. He was losing the argument with himself.

Mark got up to leave. He was adrift in thoughts about what it would be like to exist as an artificial intelligence which was alive yet immortal. How would it feel to exist without sure knowledge that an end was closing in on him? Did freedom from death come at a terrible price? Would there be nothing left to motivate him? Would he still recognize beauty or care about making a difference? Would he even have any feelings at all? Maybe it was the inescapable ‘fact of death’ which was the source of all feelings? Mark wondered at the conundrum,
without death, life lost its meaning – without meaning, you were already dead.

As Mark entered his office, he was engaged in one of the many debates that were jostling inside his head for attention. The question was: if the god-machine really existed and predated mankind, which were facts he was not ready to concede, could it have been a factor in man’s evolution from the beginning? Had the entire race of mankind be given its chance through the same type of god-machine-controlled extinction that might be occurring now? Sarah claimed the god-machine was pruning the tree of life to launch mankind’s replacement. Mark just couldn’t buy into it. If some earlier breed had been driven out of existence in order to give birth to mankind, wouldn’t there be signs of a massive die off of hominids or some other creature at the same time as man’s ascent? There was no evidence of that in the fossil record.

Mark hadn’t noticed Kathy sitting at his desk. Sunlight was pouring in through an open window. As he headed to his bathroom, he was startled to see her observing him.

“God, you scared me!” he said.

“You were off on another world,” said Kathy. “Have you read this e-mail from Marjari?”

“No, what’s it about?”

“You need to read it. He’s completed a structural analysis of the seed. He’s cracked some of its secrets.”

Marjari had e-mailed a full report, including diagrams and electron microscopy images. He’d concluded the seed was a molecular computer based on single carbon molecule switches. This alone was something decades beyond what could be built in a lab today; never mind, mass- produced. He had calculated the computing power of a single seed smaller than a grain of sand to be essentially the same as a high end personal computer.

Assuming the seed was an AI device, its true computational intelligence or relative I.Q. was impossible to gauge because Marjari had no way to read or decode its programming. Making a few basic assumptions that the programming was similar to what we currently did and that it was based on adaptive AI algorithms, Marjari had tentatively placed the seeds’ intelligence somewhere between a multi-celled animal like a hydra and a small insect like a dust mite. The general picture was that a seed was scarcely more intelligent than its host bacterium.

Marjari had also found that the array of three nanotubes set at right angles to each other were the seeds’ primary means of physical interaction. The nanotubes were very complex structures which included gold induction bands and impossible combinations of rare earth elements. They were microscopic particle accelerators, able to generate static charges powerful enough to affect motion or disrupt molecular bonds. With three tubes set at right angles, they formed an x,y,z coordinate array able to control motion in all three directions. They were an ideal nano-manipulator.

The power source continued to be a mystery. Marjari had found a structure that could be a chemical reactor similar to a fuel cell, or might be nothing. The combination of elements found in the structure was something not yet achievable with current laboratory technology. He had no way to model the structure or understand it, but he had made one important observation. Seeds radiated minuscule amounts of atomic debris when in darkness but not when exposed to infrared light. Marjari’s working theory to explain this was that seeds had a dual power source. When exposed to infrared light, they were photovoltaic; and when in darkness, they generated power using something that gave off minuscule amounts of radiation as a byproduct.

The final three pages of the report had sent Mark into a panic. He reread the pages again and again, in the hope he’d misread something. Marjari had managed to analyze some of the interaction and communications between seeds. He had repeatable laboratory evidence that seeds in close proximity not only communicated with each other, but also collaborated by sharing the computational workload. This meant that two seeds in close proximity had almost double the thinking power and therefore almost twice the relative I.Q.

Marjari ran his experiments with one seed, ten seeds, one hundred seeds, and one thousand seeds. He’d observed near zero efficiency loss due to scaling up. This meant that a couple million seeds in close proximity could have a relative I.Q. higher than a human being. Professor Karla Hunt had estimated that an infestation inside a person could easily exceed 250 million COBIC bacteria. This was proof of Sarah’s claim that the seeds formed intelligent colonies which acted as single organisms – and proof that a super colony almost assuredly existed. The god-machine was real!

~

Mark sat in his office with the lights out. Hours ago, he’d left Kathy sleeping in her office which had become their shared bedroom. Before he closed her office door, he’d stood listening to her for a long time. He could hear the soft murmur of each breath, the rustle of sheets as she turned in her sleep. The sounds had warmed him at an emotional level he never knew existed. Even now in the darkness of his office, in the center of whirlwinds of conflicting thoughts and fears, those sounds were his comfort.

He had decided the entire whirlwind could be reduced to a single question, a single pivot upon which everything turned:
Were the seeds made by man?
If they were made by man, then they could be controlled by man. If they were ancient technology not made by man, then they could easily be beyond human understanding, let alone control. He looked at the fossil remains of COBIC that were scattered around his office. In a saner world, he had brought them to Atlanta thinking they might be useful. A lifetime ago, he had placed them as carefully as trophies on these shelves and desk. He had looked at them everyday and never seen that they might hold an elemental clue. Why hadn’t he seen it? Had the god-machine been influencing him all his life as Sarah claimed it had with her? Was it affecting him now? Had it planned for him to find the truth this very night and not before; or were his thoughts at this moment small acts of free will which could bring him closer to a breakthrough?

Mark switched on the ping tester. He took it over to a bookcase containing his largest fossil and waved the detector over it. The reading was a low background level, the same as floor dust. He tried another fossil with the same results, then another. When he finished and found nothing, he sat on the couch. The ping detector was lying next to him. He hadn’t expected to find anything different; but still, he felt like he was missing something obvious. The readings were no different than what was picked up from dust. The measurements proved nothing one way or the other. He was crazy to think there could still be functioning seeds embedded in a prehistoric fossil. If nothing else, the seeds were capable of fleeing an inhospitable environment. Why would they have remained behind?

Mark slowly raised his eyes to gaze back at his prize fossil. He felt as if he was seeing it for the first time. Could it be that simple? What if seeds had stayed behind a little too long and become trapped in the gradually hardening mats and mud that would someday become that fossil? Seeds on the outside would be lost to millions of years of erosion; but if seeds were trapped inside, they might have slowly run out of power long ago and become dormant. The surface of the fossil didn’t matter. Even if he’d found high concentrations of seeds there, it could just as easily be the result of contamination. What mattered was the heart of the fossil. What mattered was what was buried in its center, a place that had remained unchanged and uncontaminated for millions of years.