The Omega Project (6 page)

For now, Union Station served as the primary energy junction between Richmond, Virginia and Philadelphia, its nine hundred solar panels, lined up in rows atop its roof and the open upper deck of its closed parking garage, providing 150 kilowatts of power to the bullet train and the surrounding neighborhoods within the sparsely populated District of Columbia.

I followed the signs leading downstairs and headed for the exit at Columbus Circle. My h-phone growled in my pants pocket before I could step outside.

CALLER IDENTIFIED. DAVID SCHALL. LOCATION: UNIDENTIFIED.

“Accept call, audio only. Uncle David, where are you?”

“Still at the Pentagon. I sent a car for you. Stay where you are, it’s homing in on your signal.”

As I glanced out the station exit a black sedan suddenly raced east across the deserted curved tarmacs intersecting Columbus Circle. The vehicle’s wailing siren scattered pedestrians as it stopped ten feet from the Mall entrance.

“You prefer shotgun or backseat?”

“Shotgun.”

The front passenger door popped open.

Shouldering my way past nosy civilians, I climbed in the front seat and the door automatically closed behind me. The dashboard harbored a six-inch-diameter steering wheel, air vents, and an entertainment station set that now displayed its GPS map.

There was no driver, the vehicle empty but for me.

“Geez, Uncle David, could you at least activate a hologram?”

A young Hispanic woman materialized in the driver’s seat, a voluptuous long-haired brunette dressed in a black chauffeur’s uniform. The upper portion of her jacket was unbuttoned low enough to reveal a tantalizing view of her well-proportioned brown left breast.

“I’m Selena. Sit back, buckle up, and enjoy the view.” She winked at me as the car accelerated down Columbus Circle.

“What is it with this country and holographic breasts?”

Selena distorted, her youthful body morphing into the frail figure of a woman in her eighties. Hunched over the small steering wheel, she turned to me slack jawed, her eyes magnified behind Coke-bottle-thick glasses. “Name’s Greta. Wanna see my holographic boobies?”

My uncle’s shrill laugh filled the car. “What’s wrong, Robbie? You look pale.”

“I think I just threw up in my mouth.”

The image enlarged, the uniform filling into a nondescript black man.

“Better. Now maybe you can tell me why I’m here?”

“Not now. Sit back and enjoy the ride, I’ll see you in twenty.”

The call ended, leaving me alone with the holographic chauffeur and the silence of an electric engine powered by a trunk filled with batteries. The view of the former capital of the United States remained disturbing, eight years of nature unbound, the weeds bursting through the concrete slab like a miniature forest.

Within minutes, the car had exited the interstate, following North Rotary Road past near-empty overgrown parking lots. An automated checkpoint allowed us access to Heliport Road, which led to the northern Mall entrance of what had once been the hub of the most powerful military in history.

My uncle exited the Pentagon’s west entrance to greet me. My only surviving blood relative was dressed in his military uniform despite the fact that standing armies no longer existed. General David Schall was sixty-seven and silver haired, with piercing blue-gray eyes that held a glint in the morning light.

“There he is. Give your uncle a proper greeting.” The West Point graduate bear-hugged me, whispering in my ear. “Vanilla sway.”

I froze at the mention of my father’s private code word.

“I’m glad you could stop by, Robbie. There’s about a dozen coworkers in the energy sector who are dying to meet you. Do you mind coming in and saying hello before we head home to see your aunt Aunt Carol? I’m sure she won’t mind.”

Stop by?
“Sure, I’d be happy to say hello.”

My pulse racing, I followed my uncle into the building, ABE immediately alerting me to the body scan as I passed through a concealed metal detector. “How is Aunt Carol?”

“Busy trying to turn Georgetown back into a proper college town.” The general paused at a Plexiglas security door, then looked up at a grapefruit-size metal orb poised to the right of the sealed entrance, its core glowing a phosphorescent neon blue.

To my surprise, my uncle addressed the mechanical eyeball. “I believe you’re acquainted with my nephew. Robert Eisenbraun, say hello to GOLEM.”

“Greetings, Professor Eisenbraun.”

Too stunned to reply, I simply stared at the sensory device like a father suddenly confronted by his estranged child.

6

It takes a great enemy to make a great plane.

—U.S. Air Force saying

The deep mechanical voice was male; hollow and metallic—devoid of any human personality.

A look from my uncle warned me about asking questions.

“GOLEM, I want to bring my nephew down to the control room to say hello to the vice president. I think an hour’s visitor’s pass should be more than adequate.”

“Security clearance granted.”

Uncle David escorted me through the unmanned security checkpoint, then down an antiseptic white corridor to a series of elevators. We took the first one, descended six stories in silence, then exited to a steel door requiring a clearance pass. The general swiped his plastic card, its magnetic strip opening the lock with a
click
.

With my curiosity burning, I followed my uncle into the control room, a high school gymnasium-size chamber of reinforced concrete and steel. Rows of computer terminals were occupied by men and women in jeans, shirts, and white lab coats. The entire forward wall was a computerized map of the world. The Space Tracking and Surveillance System, an elaborate satellite-based array originally designed to home in on submarine signatures and ballistic missile activity, now traced power outages along a fractured North American energy grid.

No one so much as looked up as we walked by.

The general pointed to the map. “The green blips are wind farms; orange, solar arrays; the blue, hydroelectric dams. As you can see, their coverage bands are quite limited. Problem is, we can’t expand the grid without the petroleum-based plastics and other raw materials necessary to erect the infrastructure. It takes energy to make energy—in this case the energy needed to recycle raw materials for new uses, so it’s two steps forward and one back.”

“What are those blinking red lights?”

“Fusion reactors. All under construction. Once we get them online this grid will light up like a Christmas tree.” My uncle looked around, perhaps more for the glowing blue orb along the ceiling than for me. “The VP should just be finishing his meeting, let’s say hello.”

Like a dutiful soldier, I followed my uncle up a short flight of stairs that led to an atrium and the outer doors of what I assumed was a conference room, with the tinting on the thick soundproof plastic windows adjusted for privacy. The general pressed his thumb to a keypad and the locks clicked open.

Inside, seven men and two women were seated around an oval smart table. Most of the people in the lab coats were familiar—each scientist representing a key sector of the Omega Project.

The strapping gentleman in the gray suit seated at the end of the table flashed a broad smile as he strutted around the table to embrace me. “Ike, how the hell are you?”

“Good, Lee. Real good. Or should I call you Mr. Vice President?”

“Let’s keep it formal for now. Turn around, let me see the back of your skull.”

I complied without comment.

When we were facing again, he said, “So you actually went ahead and did it. I wouldn’t have had the guts.”

“The surgery’s fairly simple, and the results are incredible. It’s like having the Internet in your head.”

“If it’s all the same, I think I’ll just stick with my h-phone. Sit down, pal, we have a lot to discuss. General Schall, why don’t you handle the heavy lifting?”

My uncle motioned me into one of the two vacant chairs. “This room is a quiet zone, meaning—”

“Meaning GOLEM can’t eavesdrop.”

The general nodded. “Before you assume the worst, I think every person in this room would agree the computer’s performance over the last twenty-one months has been close to flawless, giving us the confidence to use the system to oversee other science-related sectors outside of the energy department. In doing so an interesting thing happened. The more we asked the GOLEM system to handle—”

“The more efficient the computer became,” I said, looking around the room. “It’s part of the computer’s adaptive programming. Which sectors has GOLEM linked to?”

“SEA personnel, both domestic and international, all of NASA’s missions, past and present, as well as Hubble. GOLEM’s been using the telescope as a sort of lunar GPS system.”

“Clever. Optimizing the usage of these varied sensory systems no doubt increased the length of GOLEM’s solution strands, along with the computer’s functional IQ, again all part of its adaptive programming.”

One of the female scientists cut me off. “Dr. Eisenbraun, does GOLEM’s adaptive programming include the development of proactive mechanisms?”

“Absolutely.”

“Then maybe you can explain the difference between proactive mechanisms and cognitive independence.”

Uh-oh.
I glanced around the room. The other scientists’ expressions were as disconcerted as mine must have been. “Are you saying GOLEM has been functioning independent of its programming?”

“We’re not sure,” the vice president said, “which is one of the reasons we summoned you to Washington. Dr. Nilsson’s in charge of the helium-3 conversion program, I’ll let him explain.”

Thomas Nilsson was the Swedish geologist who had developed the computer’s Lunar Soil Analysis Program, or L-SAP. “Hello again, Dr. Eisenbraun. We have a most disturbing situation. Five months ago, your computer sent a priority message to all departments. Among other things, the message contained a chemical analysis of samples taken from each of the seventeen helium-3 caches it had mined from the moon’s surface. According to its analysis, the gas derived from the ore wasn’t pure enough to create a stable fusion reaction; in other words, the helium-3 was useless. As you can imagine, we were all a bit overwhelmed.”

I groaned at the colossal setback, the news hitting me like a punch to the gut. “All that work … all that money.”

Dr. Nilsson held up his hand. “There’s more. Using data from NASA’s old reconnaissance files, GOLEM indicated it had located an alternative source of helium-3, one that would render a stable fusion reaction with a far greater energy output.”

“That’s fantastic. Where’s the source?”

“Underwater.” Thomas Nilsson engaged the smart-table, accessing a hologram of Jupiter. “Beneath the frozen ocean on Jupiter’s moon, Europa.”

My eyes widened as I watched the moons orbiting Jupiter enlarge, the hologram now focused solely on Europa, its frozen surface scarred with a chaotic highway of fracture zones.

“This is crazy,” I said. “The technology required to get to Europa—”

“The computer accounted for that by designing a solar sail for one of the helium-3 transport shuttles.”

“Really? Wow.” I shook away the distraction of ego. “Still, Europa? We haven’t put a man on Mars. Where’s the data to even support such a mission?”

Thomas smirked. “The computer reconfigured the data downloaded from NASA’s old Galileo probe. The helium-3 is being dispersed from hydrothermal vents located along the Europa seafloor.”

My uncle turned to face me. “GOLEM’s assessment is pretty enticing—one manned mission to Jupiter’s moon has a potential economic value in the order of three trillion dollars. Despite the news, we were still grappling with this unexpected setback, and so we ordered GOLEM to continue its mining operations while we readied a lunar shuttle to transport a scientific team to Alpha Colony to examine the ore caches. That’s when GOLEM decided to let us know who the alpha dog was.”

Thomas nodded. “Your computer shut down all strip-mining operations on the moon. Then it sent out e-mails instructing teams of engineers and skilled laborers to report to Caltech to begin immediate construction on
Oceanus,
a manned underwater habitat designed by the computer to mine helium-3 on Europa.”

“It designed a habitat?” I found myself beaming. The thought of an artificial intelligence independently creating a habitat for a mission it had conceived from scratch … it was surreal. Still, I could see why Omega’s administrators were unnerved. “After GOLEM shut down mining operations, did you attempt to override the system?”

“Of course we did,” the female scientist replied. “Nothing we did made a bit of difference. GOLEM’s interpretation of the situation was that it was following that damn prime directive you imprinted upon its matrix.”

“To protect and preserve the human species—I forgot all about that.”

“Yes, well GOLEM didn’t forget. Since the machine equates mining helium-3 with preserving the human species, its defense systems counteracted any actions we attempted.”

“Which is exactly why the computer, and not some politician, was placed in charge of the Omega Project.” The man forcing his way into the conversation was in his early sixties, his gray hairline receding, his paunchy physique poorly concealed beneath a tailored Italian business suit. “Sebastian Koch, Koch Fusion Industries. KFI is the power company that funded a significant amount of this lunar venture. I’ve met with Dr. DeFriend, and she and I agree this computer of yours is acting in all of our best interests.”

“How can you be so sure?” Thomas asked.

“I’m sure because GOLEM isn’t a politician, it’s a machine designed to think … to adapt. Unlike some of the people in this room, it won’t massage the message in order to remain in office, or spend time defending its own scientific theories in order to justify its employment. GOLEM ceased operations on the moon because it refused to waste any more time, money, or KFI resources on a course of action that it knew would fail to meet the mission’s objectives. Instead, it located a suitable source of helium-3, designed the habitat required to secure the compound from Europa, then put together the talent necessary to complete the mission as efficiently and as cost-effectively as possible.”