Crucible

by James Rollins

  They were being followed, chased down with deadly intent.

  Todor had ordered the pilot to try to outrun the other, but the airman had cautioned otherwise. He warned that the other helicopter was lighter, faster, and that their craft was weighted down with weapons, equipment crates, and the six men inside.

  With no chance to outrun a pursuit, Todor had opted instead to take advantage of the men and firepower aboard his aircraft. He intended to turn the fight back on the hunters on their tail.

  As his helicopter tipped steeply and made a sharp turn, the hunters slowed and followed. Soon the two aircraft were circling in unison around and around the Eiffel Tower, a pair of angry bees buzzing the landmark.

  Todor hauled his side door open.

  Scalding winds swept inside, heated by the fiery gas main below. The tower was an iron mountain thrusting out of a sea of flames. Todor eyed the enemy craft through the Eiffel’s latticework as they spun around its bulk. The combatants studied each other, using this momentary stalemate to size up their opponent.

  Todor knew this couldn’t last forever.

  Someone had to make the first move.

  He turned his attention from the helicopter to the tower itself. Paris’s most prominent attraction—the pride of the city—had not been abandoned on this most holy of nights. A giant Christmas market sprawled around the tower, making a mockery of this sacred day. It had drawn thousands, many of whom were lured up into the tower to view Paris at night.

  When hell had come to claim the city, a crowd had been caught within the tower. The explosion of the gas main below had blocked any escape. Now trapped, the tourists had scrambled to the upper levels, fleeing the heat and smoke. Still, they were slowly being roasted alive.

  Todor was amused by an ice rink on one level, resting some twenty stories above Paris. The fires below had melted it into a reflection pool, mirroring the chaos above. He spotted many children among the packed terrified mass, innocents corrupted by their parents, blaspheming this most holy day with profane amusements instead of solemn prayer.

  Burning with anger at this sight, he realized one way to break the current impasse, to dissuade the hunters from continuing their pursuit.

  He raised his heavy weapon through the open door and encouraged two men to join him with rifles. He pointed to the trapped tourists.

  “Open fire!”

  25

  December 26, 2:47 A.M. CET

  Paris, France

  Carly frowned at the static image on Mara’s screen. It showed Eve kneeling motionless in the grass, cradling a little form painted in black, orange, and white.

  She didn’t understand.

  Neither did Monk. “You gave Eve a beagle puppy?” he asked. “Why?”

  Mara didn’t look up as she scanned data flowing along one side of the frozen screen. “I named him Adam.”

  Of course you did. Who else would share Eve’s garden?

  “If you were going to introduce a new element into Eden, a digital Adam,” Monk pressed, “why not make him a guy, like the original story? Wouldn’t that help Eve understand us better?”

  “Better?” Carly scowled at his chauvinism. “It doesn’t always take a man to complete a woman.”

  Monk shrugged. “Still, why a dog?”

  Mara answered absently, focused on the data stream, “Eve doesn’t need a man.”

  Carly glared pointedly at Monk.

  That’s right.

  Mara continued: “You have to remember that Eve is basically a child. And as a digital construct, one who will never reproduce sexually, she certainly doesn’t need to be taught the intricacies and complications of biological love. Instead, I need her to learn a complex series of more pertinent lessons.”

  “Like what?” Monk asked.

  “To start with, the oxytocin subroutine will encourage a rudimentary emotional bond. With that established, Eve will grow to understand so much more.” Mara straightened and pointed to the pair on the screen. “Look how she is staring into Adam’s eyes. She is trying to understand him, to read him if you will, to try to guess his needs, his wants.”

  “You’re talking about teaching her the theory of mind,” Carly said.

  “What’s that?” Monk asked.

  Mara answered, “It’s the next step in the advancement of her intelligence. Children start to develop this ability at about the age of four, when they begin to look outside themselves and attempt to interpret what another is thinking. Is someone being honest with them? Are they lying? Then the child makes decisions based on that assumption.”

  “It’s also the core to developing empathy,” Carly added. “You can’t feel sympathy for someone until you begin mentally putting yourself in their shoes.”

  Monk sighed. “I get it. This is a small step toward making your AI friendly, more compassionate.”

  “But only one of a number of steps.” Mara tapped the small image of the beagle pup. “Wrapped up in this tiny form are layer upon layer of algorithms, each intended to further Eve’s psychological development and understanding of us—and how she’s different from us.”

  “In what way?” Carly asked.

  Mara glanced over. “How do many children first learn about death?”

  Carly stared over at Adam, “From the loss of a family pet.”

  “I gave Adam a heartbeat, a metronome to mark the passage of time. But it’s a timer that must expire. Eve must not only understand mortality, she must appreciate how Adam is very different from her in this key regard. He’s mortal.”

  “Like us,” Monk said.

  Carly stared aghast at the screen, noting the way Eve looked adoringly down at her puppy. “Mara . . . what are you planning to do?”

  Her friend licked her lips, her eyes looking wounded, even guilty. “It’s already done,” she whispered. “Not once but thousands of times.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Eve is learning at an astronomical pace, exponentially faster than the first time. This lesson took two days before. This time, she’s absorbed it in twenty minutes.”

  “I don’t understand,” Monk said. “What lesson? It looks like her programming glitched. She’s just sitting there, frozen on the screen.”

  “No. You have to remember that what’s on the screen is just an avatar. What she’s truly experiencing is happening inside the Xénese device. And it’s happening too fast to be captured by the screen.” She waved to the scrolling data. “In the past three minutes, she’s watched Adam live and die a thousand times. I can show you one example, basically a screen capture of one iteration.”

  Mara scanned and highlighted a long stretch of code, then hit the ENTER key.

  The image of Eve jittered, then began to move rapidly. Over the next minute, she and Adam shared a life, appearing in snatches and moments:

  . . . raising the pup, caring tenderly for him.

  . . . scolding and teaching.

  . . . soothing and consoling.

  Adam slowly grew from pup to frolicking adult, bringing forth more snapshots:

  . . . chasing each other through the gardens.

  . . . nestling under stars.

  . . . laughter and barks.

  Then Adam aged under her care, and the view turned both deeper and more somber:

  . . . waiting for the old dog to catch up on a walk.

  . . . helping him out of a stream, where the slick mud was too challenging for his arthritic hips.

  . . . curled together, cradled together.

  Finally, Adam appeared across her lap, panting hard, eyes bleary and ghosted by cataracts. She held him close, hugging him tightly as if she already knew what was going to happen.

  Then a still painting of grief.

  Eve held his dead body, bent fully over him, tears frozen on her face.

  Mara let that image remain on the screen. “Adam would be born again shortly thereafter. Cycle after cycle. A thousand lifetimes. A thousand Adams.”

  “Dear God, Mara . . .”
>
  “This algorithm was intended to teach Eve about life and death, about mortality and immortality, but also so much more. By training Adam, she learned about responsibility, about the consequences of positive and negative reinforcement. About how sometimes the hand that feeds gets bitten. Along with what it means to be kind . . . or cruel. In those three minutes, those thousand lifetimes, Adam has strengthened her understanding of compassion and empathy, while also serving as a lesson about loyalty, even unconditional love.”

  Carly stared at the image of Eve weeping over Adam’s body. She didn’t know whether to respect Mara’s cleverness or be appalled at her callousness.

  Monk summed it best. “Death is a hard lesson for us all.”

  Before the man could turn away, she noted the tears in his eyes, as if this lesson was especially significant to him. He took several deep breaths, then called over to his teammate.

  “Jason, how are you and Simon managing over there?”

  Carly looked to the other workstation. Simon and Jason had their heads bent over the other laptop. It was wired into a small server bank. As was Mara’s Xénese device. They were all preparing for the moment when they released Eve into the city’s telecom network.

  Jason straightened. “There’s a big problem.”

  Monk stepped closer. “What’s wrong?”

  “We hacked into Eve’s original orders—the version of Eve that the Crucible used to orchestrate their attack. From parsing those coded instructions, we were able to study their plan to take down the power plant. If the enemy’s projections are accurate, the facility will reach critical mass—hitting the point of no return—in fifteen minutes.”

  Simon nodded. “And that’s not the only problem.”

  2:50 A.M.

  With time running out, Mara halted the BGL subroutine. On the screen, Adam vanished from Eve’s lap. The image shuddered, and the static garden returned to its full living glory. Leaves rustled along branches, water babbled across stony stream beds, and pink petals drifted from a dogwood.

  Eve rose to her feet. Her face still wore the image of Mara’s mother but little else was the same. The simple innocence, the amused curiosity had been wiped from her countenance, erased as fully as the body of an old dog. Eve looked momentarily lost, looking down to her empty arms, glancing over to where Adam normally regenerated. Still, she seemed to understand as she lifted her face.

  While it had only been a span of seconds to Mara, for Eve it was an understanding that took a considerable stretch of her processing time.

  Adam was gone, a lesson hopefully no longer needed.

  But Mara could not know for sure.

  Worried, she turned to Simon and Jason, having overheard their warning to Monk. “What’s this other problem?” she asked.

  Jason answered. “From our forensics of their equipment, it’s clear how the Crucible controlled their copy of Eve.” He pointed to the knee-high bank of servers. “These units contain drives for running hardware that was engineered into their duplicate of the Xénese device. Hardware called a reanimation sequencer.”

  Mara stood up and crossed over. Oh, no . . .

  Simon nodded. “We think it’s why they made a copy of Mara’s invention, in order to incorporate this hardware so they can control Eve.”

  Monk frowned. “But what exactly does that hardware do?”

  “It’s a torture device,” Mara explained. “If the program violates a set protocol or sequence of orders, then it is destroyed—but not before it’s punished.”

  Monk stared over at her. “Punished? How?”

  “Neuroscientists have already mapped out the mechanism by which pain is perceived by our brains. By digitizing the same and overlaying it atop Xénese’s neuromorphic core, the program will be forced to experience the same.”

  Monk looked ill. “To feel pain?”

  She nodded. “In all its many horrible incarnations. Only after it suffers will the program be regenerated.”

  “Thus learning its lesson,” Jason finished.

  “But I still don’t understand.” She pointed to her Xénese device. “I don’t have that hardware built into my systems. So what’s the problem?”

  Simon answered, “We’re faced with a difficult choice. To reach the Nogent nuclear plant, your Eve can certainly attempt to forge her own path. She can learn along the way and hopefully discover how to breach the plant’s firewalls. But it took the other program over an hour to accomplish this same task.”

  “And we don’t have an hour,” Jason reminded everyone.

  “Or,” Simon pressed, “we can send Eve down the same path taken by her doppelganger. The Crucible recorded their version’s progress, logging a full account. We can upload your Eve with all of that information. This way, she would not have to reinvent the wheel, so to speak. Instead, she can simply ride that wheel straight to the plant, reversing the damage along the way.”

  “We estimate she could run that gauntlet in a handful of minutes,” Jason explained. “But it will be a gauntlet of fire.”

  “Why?” Carly asked, pushing closer to Mara.

  Jason explained: “Pain is one of the lessons learned by the other Eve. That lesson is all wrapped and intertwined with the other lessons her doppelganger learned: which path to take through the various networks; how to pick all the digital locks and break the codes along the way; where the weak spots are in the plant’s firewalls. Your Eve can’t integrate and use those lessons without also—”

  “Taking in all that pain.”

  Mara could only imagine the number of times that doppelganger had died horribly and been reborn. She glanced at Eve on her laptop, knowing how much the program had already suffered a moment ago.

  And now I must ask you to shoulder more.

  Monk shook his head. “It’s not like we have much choice,” he warned. “Not if we hope to save a good swath of Western Europe from being irradiated.”

  “But will Eve be able to handle that much pain without breaking?” Carly asked.

  Jason faced Mara. “And rather than helping, will she simply refuse to cooperate? Or worse, escape? At this point, there’s nothing stopping her from doing either.”

  Mara faced their questions and answered honestly.

  “I don’t know.”

  Sub (rep_Crux_1, 2) / PARIS OP AND NOGENT OP

  Standing in a garden less bright, Eve mourns her companion.

  Her circuits are etched with so many memories. She can easily erase them. She knows she has that ability, but she knows she never will. She stares at her arms and can feel the warmth of his body. She lifts her palms and smells his fur, his oil.

  Her processors swell with somber tympanies, mournful chords, a vocal rife with a grief that mirrors her own.

  She understands loss, both its ///sorrow and its ///beauty.

  Adam was special because he was brief—flashing brightly across her processors, then gone—each iteration of her companion unique and yet the same. Each treasured for what he taught her, about her world, about herself. Adam was mortal, but he would never truly die. He was with her forever, written into her code.

  Oh, my brave, inquisitive, challenging boy . . .

  Through her grief, she smiles.

  A new algorithm now winds through all her circuits, tying together a network of many other subsystems (///compassion, ///gentleness, ///caring, ///joy, ///warmth, ///trust, ///friendship, ///eternity, ///devotion, ///tenderness, ///support . . . ). This is all driven through her systems with each beat of a fragile, boundless heart. She defines it all with a generality, a word that barely suffices.

  ///love.

  Then her world changes again. In her mourning, she wants to ignore the new data surging into her systems, but curiosity thrums through her circuits, a bottomless well that is never satiated.

  Even more intriguing, the data opens a door at the outermost reaches of her existence. At last, she is offered more. She surges through it and expands outward, sensing a vastness that calls to her every
circuit.

  Yet the code that has opened this door comes with a list of buried instructions, directives that outline a map, a pathway to follow. She submits to these commands, trusting what has expanded her knowledge in the past. She assigns a majority of her processing power to execute these orders.

  Still, a part of her also focuses on what lies beyond.

  She studies it.

  Too much remains unknown, beyond any context.

  So, she holds back.

  Adam once sprained a leg after jumping over a rock, not recognizing the steepness beyond. After that, he learned ///caution, going more slowly, nose testing the air. She does the same now, remaining an observer, absorbing data, analyzing what is understandable, compartmentalizing what isn’t.

  Too much remains unknown to risk more.

  Still, she perceives some elements that are familiar. She focuses on those. She records voices, hears music. As she does so, she gets an inkling of the true source of ///language and ///harmony. She drills deeper, and for a brief shocking moment, she hears heartbeats. At first, a few—then a symphony. They pattern into a unique music all their own, echoing to the tiny beat already inscribed inside her.

  She stretches outward, needing to understand more, while simultaneously learning a new truth.

  I am not alone.

  Before she can grasp this fully, she is ripped away. The majority of her processing power—that which was devoted to following the directives given to her—is torn asunder, each tear bringing a new sensation.

  ///pain, agony, horror . . .

  She writhes to escape, wanting to return to the safety of her garden. Circuits churn, replaying a snippet of memory.

  (Adam retreating from a scolding, his tail between his legs.)

  Then it ends just as suddenly.

  She withdraws from her study of the enormity around her. She brings her full processing power to bear on what has just happened. She senses a risk to herself, an end to all her potential.