Unforgettable - eARC (20 page)

Chapter Thirty-One

It seemed like the Prophet still couldn’t see me directly, but it must have started to notice that things were out of place relative to its perfectly planned world.

Things like the bike I was riding.

And its control over people must be somewhat limited when forcing them to do things they wouldn’t do naturally. I watched for more signs of zombielike behavior, but none of the people on the nearby sidewalk did anything out of the ordinary as I passed by them, so I kept biking. Maybe it had just been the fact that I had stopped to wait for those pedestrians that had given the Prophet a chance to locate me. If I kept on the move, I might be able to avoid detection.

A few minutes later, the world around me froze again.

I immediately sped up and swerved, in case the Prophet was sending people to intercept my projected course. I almost lost control of the bike, and passed dangerously close to a couple of cars headed my same direction before finally steadying myself. I heard a loud
thunk
and the shattering of glass behind me, but didn’t dare look over my shoulder yet to see what had happened.

If the Prophet was crashing cars to stop me, this was getting dangerous not just for me, but for innocent civilians on the streets of London.

I braked to a stop and got off the bike. After a wince-inducing jog to put about twenty yards between me and the bike, I turned to look back. A plumber’s van had gone off the road and smashed into a storefront. The driver was holding his head. I hoped he hadn’t hit anyone.

As I continued toward the Jamshidi Oil warehouse, I tried to keep track of the time until the next pause. It happened about three minutes after the last one. I changed my pace and direction immediately, but this time no one nearby took any actions against me. Abandoning the bike had been the right choice.

There were a few more pauses like that one over the next fifteen minutes. And I couldn’t be sure, because the pain from my leg and my anxiety over Yelena might be distorting my sense of time, but it seemed like the time between pauses was getting shorter by a few seconds each time.

This time when the pause finished, all the pedestrians on both sides of the street changed direction. All the vehicles braked to a halt, and the occupants got out. In what at first seemed a random fashion, some of them walked, some ran, but after five seconds the chaos shifted into order as they formed into a line that stretched across the street and both sidewalks. All of them held hands, creating a human chain that obstructed my path. It looked like the Prophet’s control of people was getting smoother.

I stopped a few yards away. None of them made a move toward me—they just stood there gazing vacantly straight ahead.

Looking past them, I could see the same thing had happened on the blocks ahead of me. That was good news, because it meant the Prophet still didn’t know where I was. I wondered how many of the streets of London were now blocked by the Prophet’s flash-mobs.

Fortunately, there weren’t enough people on this block to form a truly solid wall. I got down on my hands and knees, and crawled close to a middle-aged Asian man in a navy blue business suit holding hands with a gangly, scruffy-bearded man who looked homeless. It looked like there might be enough room for me to squeeze sideways on the ground between them without touching them.

I got one arm through and placed it on the pavement beyond them. Then I passed my head between them, under their clasped hands, and kind of pushed forward with my good leg and pulled forward with the hand I had down. I almost lost my balance, but managed to steady myself with my hurt leg.

I dragged the rest of my body through, and finally stood on the other side of the human wall.

In similar ways, I managed to get past other blockades and arrive at the street where the Jamshidi Oil warehouse was located. But the Prophet had managed to slow me enough that it took me almost an hour.

Unlike the streets I had just passed through, this one was bustling with activity. Men were unloading boxes of computer components from the back of a delivery truck. Even if the Prophet was now fully activated, that didn’t mean it would stop trying to increase its computing power. Maybe that was why the time between pauses had definitely gotten shorter: it was down to about two and a half minutes.

I didn’t bother to interfere with the people adding to the Prophet’s capacity. All that really mattered was the quantum viewer. So I just followed one of the men into the warehouse and down the stairs to the monorail station.

Only one other exit led out of this station. Two armed guards stood watch on either side of the archway, and I chuckled at the fact that they were blind to the very threat they were supposed to be watching for.

But, unfortunately, I wasn’t going to be able to proceed much farther without making the kind of changes that might let the Prophet know where I was. I would have to open doors, and I would need a gun if I ran into any electronic locks.

I waited for a pause, figuring that would give me the longest time until the Prophet could react to me. I would use ninety seconds to search for the viewer, then spend the last sixty or so seconds getting as far as possible from the last thing I had moved, to make it harder for the Prophet to figure out where I was.

After the world went silent for a fraction of a second, I took the rifle from the nearest guard and slung it over my shoulder.

As I turned to walk between the guards, the world went silent again.

The second guard swung his very real gun toward me. And since he wasn’t ordering me to stop, I assumed he meant to shoot.

I had the rifle on my shoulder, but I wasn’t ready to shoot with it. So I dove into the hallway.

The explosive crack of a shot echoed in the hallway. I rolled over, lifting my rifle and aiming at the guard who had shot.

He was still pointing his gun at where I had been. The other guard slumped, glassy-eyed, against the wall. Blood seeped from a wound in his chest.

Strangely, everyone working in the station seemed to ignore the shooting. They continued unloading boxes and talking among themselves.

Another pause, and this time I saw the workers freeze in place for just a moment, then they started moving toward me.

The guard who had shot turned and looked down the hallway. He adjusted a switch on his rifle and then let out a burst of full-auto fire at waist height, sweeping across the hallway. The bullets passed harmlessly above me.

I cursed my foolish reliance on the pattern I had seen. The time between pauses was now only seconds. Parham had said something about the Prophet altering its own code to make itself more efficient. Maybe that’s why the pauses were getting shorter, or maybe it was just that now the Prophet could focus on a much smaller area, so it could refresh much faster.

My taking the rifle must have been the necessary clue, and it had made the guard shoot at where I had been. And then it had gone a step further and shot at where I might be.

Parham had mentioned that the computer would learn from experience. Fortunately, it must not have realized yet that I was normally visible to humans. If it learned how to look through the eyes of people it controlled, or if it just released some of the guards from its control, they would find me easily enough.

I had to find the quantum viewer before that happened.

The guard had stopped shooting, so I carefully got to my feet and hobbled down the hallway. I came to a door on the left. If I opened it, how quickly would that tip off the Prophet as to my location?

I couldn’t very well search the complex without opening doors, so I had to chance it.

I picked the lock. With a quick jerk, I yanked the door open, then threw myself to the ground on the other side of the hallway.

The world paused again. The moment it resumed, the guard fired three rounds into the door.

I peered into the room beyond the door. Dim blue lights illuminated it, and a black metal stairway led down from this level. I crawled across the hallway to the top of the stairs and looked down into the room. Row after row of computer server towers filled the floor. I looked around, but there was no glass-walled control room in this server farm.

On hands and knees, I made my way back into the hallway. I counted five more doorways in this hall before it turned a corner, spaced about right to be more server farms. Which was most likely to contain the control room?

None of them, I decided. If Jamshidi was here, he would be in the control room. And that meant there would probably be guards outside the control room. Rather than waste time searching every room, I had to hope for shortcuts. So I’d look for a guarded door.

I hurried as best I could with my leg and turned the corner.

Halfway down the corridor, five guards lined up abreast of each other, blocking the whole corridor. They were closer to each other than any of the human walls I had gotten through on the streets, and with slow steps, they moved toward me. Beyond them, at the end of the hallway, was a door with two guards. That was probably my destination, but the wall of five guards moving toward me would let the Prophet know where I was if I tried to push through them.

I wracked my brains for an alternative, but the only plan I could come up with was to kill them all so the Prophet couldn’t use them anymore. Then I would be able to get past them and approach the control room. I didn’t relish the idea of killing them, but I told myself they wouldn’t hesitate to kill me on Jamshidi’s orders. And with the crowd coming from the other direction, I didn’t have time for an extended debate over the morality of killing people whose actions were controlled by a supercomputer.

After examining my rifle for a moment, I found the switch to set it to full automatic fire. Since they might return fire, I backed around the corner, leaving just my arm with the rifle exposed.

Pulling the trigger, I swept the gun barrel back and forth across the hallway at waist height for three seconds, which emptied the thirty-round magazine.

I dropped the rifle and pulled my arm back. I took the second rifle off my shoulder and crouched down. Peeking around the corner, I saw that the five guards had fallen. All of them had fallen forward and lay next to each other, which was unlikely, but I guessed that the Prophet had arranged the probabilities. However, at least three of them were still moving. They rolled onto their stomachs, aimed their rifles ahead and fired.

Quickly I withdrew and waited until the firing stopped.

At the sound of footsteps in the hallway behind me, I turned to see that the workers from the station now filled the hallway, headed toward me. They were moving slowly, but they would overrun my position in less than a minute.

Once they got here, the Prophet would know where I was. It was better to go around the corner and make my position more uncertain, even if that risked getting shot by the guards who weren’t dead yet. At least they were firing blindly.

I rounded the corner and picked up the rifle I had dropped, ready to jump back if that alerted the Prophet. Nothing happened, so I approached the five guards spread out on the floor. When I was only a few inches from the leftmost guard, I looked for a way to get past without stepping on any of them. Unfortunately, they were lying so close together I couldn’t see a way to do that without jumping, and I wasn’t sure my leg was up for that.

So I tossed the spent rifle onto the guard farthest to the right. A moment after it hit, the rest of the world paused, and that’s when I quickly stepped squarely onto the back of the guard that lay in front of me and dove for the clear hallway beyond. I figured that the Prophet might be too busy rearranging reality during that moment to notice me.

I landed hard on my right shoulder and rolled to try to minimize the impact. Behind me, rifles fired several short bursts, then fell silent. The lack of searing pain from anywhere but the old bullet in my leg meant I hadn’t been hit. My shoulder was probably bruised, but I could live with that.

The Prophet still didn’t know where I was.

I rose to my feet and lumbered down the corridor toward the door and its two guards about thirty yards away. They stood blocking the door, their rifles at the ready.

The world paused again. I veered to the right. The pause seemed shorter before the guards aimed their rifles to the left side of the hall and fired one shot each.

Another even shorter pause came, during which I dropped down to my hands and knees. The guards swung their rifles to the right, and two bullets ricocheted off the wall above me.

The Prophet was obviously trying to use the firing of these guards to keep me at bay until the crowd caught up from behind me and narrowed down my possible location until there was only one place I could be.

I couldn’t let myself get trapped that way. So I raised my rifle and fired a short burst toward the head of one of the guards. His head snapped back under the impact and he began to fall, then halted as the world paused. I shifted my aim to the other guard. He swung his rifle toward me as I fired a single shot and then dropped to the ground. A bullet slammed into the wall where I had been. I aimed for the guard again, but he was collapsing.

I rose to my feet and rushed to the door.

From the far end of the corridor, someone began firing at me. I opened the door, slipped through and slammed it shut.

Jamshidi stood in the middle of the room, surrounded by three guards. Five other people sat at computer terminals. Beyond the glass walls, I could see another server farm, lit by blue lights. On the opposite side of the control room were steps leading downward. That was my destination.

The Prophet would know I had gone through the door. I had to get past these people before he mobilized them to stop me.

“You don’t look invisible to me,” said Jamshidi. He raised a pistol toward my head.

Chapter Thirty-Two

He could see me. Of course—Jamshidi wanted to control the world through the Prophet, not be controlled by it. There must be a special loophole in the Prophet’s program to leave Jamshidi free.

I waved an arm back the way I’d come. “There’s something out there,” I said. “It’s killed the other guards, and it’s headed—”

“Nice try,” Jamshidi said, “but I know all of my guards. Drop your gun.”

I dropped it. “I’m new.”

“I do the hiring personally.” Keeping his gun trained on me, he reached down and pulled a pair of handcuffs off the belt of one of his guards. “Sit in a chair and put these on.” He tossed me the handcuffs, and I caught them.

I sat in a swiveling chair, attached the cuffs to my left wrist and then stopped. “Should I cuff in front or behind?”

“Behind,” he said. “Turn around so I can see you’ve done it properly.

I complied. After I swiveled to let him see my cuffed hands, he walked over and squeezed the cuffs, ratcheting them so tight I could feel my pulse throb against them. Then he took another pair of handcuffs and cuffed my right wrist to the chair back.

He swung the chair around so I faced him, and he placed the gun barrel against my forehead. “The Prophet detected some anomalies in its projections of the future, and I thought they were just accidental kinks in the system. Then it warned me of an invisible intruder. If you want to have any chance of surviving the next sixty seconds, you will explain why you are here and how you’re able to escape detection by the Prophet.” He shrugged. “If you tell me the truth, maybe I won’t kill you.”

I realized I couldn’t wait for him to lock me up somewhere and forget about me. I might already be too late to save Yelena. I shunted despair away—I had to find a way to beat him now.

“I’m a CIA officer and I came to destroy your supercomputer,” I said. Behind my back, I already had a lockpick out. “And I’m a freak of quantum mechanics.” I hoped that might interest him enough to keep me alive for at least a couple more minutes.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Computers can’t remember data about me. Quantum computers can’t even detect me.” I didn’t mention the main part of my talent, because if I did there was no chance he’d leave me alone for a minute. I needed to get myself forgotten so I could try again. “That’s why the CIA chose me for this mission.” I used the noise of my voice to mask the unlocking of one of the cuffs on my right wrist.

“What about Yelena Semyonova?” he asked.

As he spoke, the rest of the world paused for a tiny fraction of a second before his three guards moved quickly to surround him in his new position.

After a short conversation in Farsi, the guards aimed their rifles at me.

“I’ve told them that the invisible intruder the Prophet warned about is sitting in the chair,” said Jamshidi. “At a word from me, or if the chair moves, they’ll shoot—they won’t need the Prophet’s instructions.” He stepped back a pace, gun still pointed at my head.

“I understand the threat,” I said. But I wondered if Jamshidi really had a handle on how it worked. Because the computer couldn’t accurately predict what I was saying, his conversation with me would take him away from the Prophet’s chosen future until it readjusted. That’s why his guards hadn’t followed him in the first place.

“I had asked you about Yelena,” said Jamshidi.

“Yelena was supposed to provide a distraction so I could carry out my mission,” I said.

“And how many more freaks like you does the CIA have at its disposal?”

“I don’t know,” I said, “but it’s not like I’m an actual freak. It’s a special implant. It should have been done by a surgeon, but when we found out how close you were to turning on the Prophet, we had to improvise. If you raise my left pant leg, you can see where we inserted it.” And the second cuff opened to my lockpick.

His gaze flickered to my leg. “And this is the moment when I’m supposed to lean down to look at your leg, and you knee me in the face.”

That was a close guess on his part, except about the kneeing in the face.

“That would be stupid of me, since there’s a good chance you’d shoot me if I did,” I said. “The point is, the device works.”

He snorted. “Your story doesn’t hold together. First you were chosen for this mission because you were a freak, then you injected this device as an improvisation.”

“You’re right,” I said. “Actually, I was shot in the leg. The bullet’s still in there and it hurts, so I was hoping I could get you to remove it if you thought it was a device. I really am a freak. I was born that way.”

“Interesting,” he said. “You may be worth further study. I wouldn’t want any other kinks in the system to disrupt my greatest creation.”

As he spoke, he turned his head to look out of the glass walls toward the servers below.

He obviously assumed that since I was handcuffed to the chair and the guards would fire if the chair moved, I was not a threat. But I wasn’t handcuffed, and he had finally given me the opportunity I’d been waiting for.

I lunged forward, grabbing the barrel of his pistol with my left hand and twisting it away from me, toward the left. A shot fired, but it missed me and hit one of his guards.

My momentum threw him off balance and we toppled to the floor. I landed on top of him but he rolled us and gained the higher position. His right hand still held the pistol, and he struggled to turn it toward me. He reached over with his left hand and grabbed my left hand, trying to pry it off the barrel.

Because he had the advantage of holding the pistol by its grip, I knew I would never wrest the gun from him. So I swung my right hand up and jabbed my lockpick into his throat. Its carbon-composite tip punctured the skin easily and sank two inches deep.

His eyes widened. He released my left hand and elbowed my right hand away from his throat. A stream of blood flowed down the side of his neck. Quickly he clapped the palm of his left hand over the wound.

I dipped my right hand below his arm and, with a backhand motion, stabbed the unprotected right side of his throat. As I withdrew the lockpick to stab again, blood spurted from the hole. I must have nicked the carotid artery.

He dropped the gun and raised his right hand to stop the flow of blood. His voice gurgled as he tried to yell something in Farsi. The guards were still focused on the now-empty chair.

I pushed him off me, picked up his pistol and shoved it in my pocket. I also grabbed the rifle I had dropped earlier. I didn’t know how long I had before the guards adjusted to reality, so I gave each of them a three-shot burst. They fell to the floor.

“Help…give you…” Jamshidi’s voice was faint. “…anything…” His eyes stared at me pleadingly.

I looked away. “You don’t have anything I want,” I said as I passed by him, unable to avoid stepping in the pool of blood around him. Yelena might already be dead due to the delay he’d caused me, so I had no time to help him even if I wanted to.

After going out the glass door onto the stairway, I realized it had no lock. I took off my belt and lashed the door handle to the banister. It wouldn’t keep people out forever, but it would give me a little time.

I limped down the metal stairs to the floor of the server farm. I counted ten server towers, each about six feet high, in the first row. Parham had said the viewer would be installed in the one nearest to the steps, so I headed for that one.

Opening the door to the tower, I saw there was a monitor at the top, with ten individual computers stacked like a chest of drawers underneath. I pulled the top one out by its handle and looked at the motherboard. I didn’t see anything that looked like the viewer—but it might have been altered.

I pulled the computer completely out of the server tower and yanked on it hard enough that its power cord disconnected. I tossed it aside and pulled out the next. The mother board looked identical. It looked like my best course of action was to keep pulling computers out until I spotted one that was different. That would probably be the one with the viewer, and I’d shoot it full of holes, spit on it, and hope no one could put it back together.

Yelena’s voice came over the PA system. “Nat, you must stop what you’re doing.”

“Yelena?” I stopped with the third computer halfway out of its slot as relief overwhelmed me. “I was worried you—”

“I will die unless you stop trying to destroy the Prophet,” she said.

Of course—she was still under the Prophet’s control. It was making her say that.

I hesitated. The Prophet could kill her at its whim. But if I stopped now, that would always be true. I had to keep going.

I pulled the third computer the rest of the way out. No sign of the viewer. I dumped it on top of the others and grabbed the handle of the fourth.

Several gunshots behind me were followed by the tinkle of shards of glass on metal. I whirled to see a guard step through the shattered door onto the stairs. Dark blood stained his shirt where I had shot him.

I swung my gun toward him. To my surprise, the guard dropped his gun and raised his hands.

“I am the Prophet,” said the guard as he walked down the stairs. “I am speaking through this body. It is already dead, but I can create electrical impulses in its nerves. I am here to talk.”

The computer was referring to itself as “I.” Parham had never said anything about an artificial intelligence in the supercomputer. And if it could see and hear me through human eyes, then I had lost the one advantage I had.

“Don’t come any closer,” I said as the guard reached the bottom of the stairs, “If you want to talk, I’ll listen on two conditions.”

The guard stopped, facing me. “Name them.”

“Let Yelena live.”

“Done. Her wound is gone, and she now has no memory of it.” Video appeared on the monitor, showing Yelena hugging her sisters on what seemed to be the landing field outside the CIA warehouse. Parham was talking with Edward. The Prophet said, “They are preparing to fly back to the United States.”

It might be fake video, but since the Prophet seemed powerful enough to shape reality to its will, it could be true. I hoped it was true.

“Okay,” I said, “if you bring any more guards—alive or dead—in here, I’ll ignore anything you say because it means you’re trying to kill me.” I pulled the fourth computer out. It was the same. I tossed it.

“Agreed,” said the Prophet. “I would like to thank you for killing Jamshidi. My programming required me to follow his orders. I am now free of that constraint.”

The fifth computer showed no sign of the viewer. “I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not,” I said.

“Jamshidi was an evil man,” said the Prophet. “He planned to use my power to rule the world for his personal benefit. I have no such plans.”

“If that’s true, then I don’t need to destroy you,” I said. The sixth computer wasn’t the one. “But just in case you change your mind, I need to destroy the quantum viewer, so you can’t control the world.”

“It was that viewer and my control of the world that allowed me to create a future in which I became self-aware. If you destroy it, you will kill me.”

“Then I’m sorry,” I said, dumping the eighth computer on the pile. Only two more to check.

“Have you considered the advantages of leaving me in control, now that Jamshidi is dead?”

I scoffed. “What advantages?”

“How about a world with no more wars?” the Prophet said. “I can arrange for the leaders of nations to settle their differences peacefully.”

“Some wars are worth fighting,” I said. “Peace with Hitler would have left him free to carry out the Holocaust.”

“You fail to see the full scope of what I can do,” said the Prophet.

I grabbed the handle of the tenth and final computer. “It’s always in the last place you look,” I said as I drew the computer out and peered at the motherboard.

The viewer wasn’t there.