by Greg Iles
“Perhaps you and your people should take shelter at this time.”
Bauer sniffed, his face unmoving. “There’s no shelter reachable within the remaining time window. Not for everyone at this base.”
“Multiple satellites show a flare over Canada!” shouted a technician.
“Was it a detonation?” asked General Bauer.
“I don’t think so, sir. No high-energy flash. A missile may have self-destructed.”
“Would it do that by accident?” asked Senator Jackson.
“Possibly,” said Bauer, his face lined with concentration.
“Two more flares!” yelled the tech. “Four!”
“That’s got to be Trinity,” said Skow. “The computer’s destroying the missiles.”
“Is it continuing?” General Bauer asked in a taut voice.
“Fourteen flares and counting, sir.” The tech’s voice was calmer now. “Eighteen…nineteen.”
“Dr. Tennant was right!” cried McCaskell. “Trinity never meant to launch those missiles.”
“Five left to go,” said Ravi Nara, his voice shaky.
“Arcangel has reached its initial point, General,” said the chief technician.
“Is that the EMP plane?” asked Senator Jackson.
“Yes, sir,” said General Bauer.
“Don’t even think—”
“Understood, Senator.” The general turned toward the console. Instruct Arcangel to postpone the strike and begin circling.”
“Yes, sir,” said the tech. “Twenty-one missiles have now self-destructed.”
“What are the tracks of the last three?” General Bauer asked a different soldier.
“Target of the nearest missile is computed as Norfolk, Virginia.”
“The naval base.”
“Second nearest is Washington, D.C.”
“Jesus,” breathed Ewan McCaskell. “The president isn’t in a bomb shelter.”
“The third is…here, sir. It’s White Sands.”
The silence stretched interminably as they waited for word of more flares.
“Corporal?” prompted General Bauer.
“Nothing, sir. The last three missiles are continuing on their tracks.”
“What the hell is Trinity up to?” asked Senator Jackson.
“The self-destruct mechanisms could be malfunctioning,” Skow suggested. “Russian missile maintenance is very poor.”
General Bauer shook his head, his eyes on a computer screen. “The missile targeted on Virginia might be a malfunction. But the ones headed here and to Washington were the last two launched. Trinity is trying to kill us. We should launch the EMP strike now, Senators. We may not get another chance.”
“How long until the missiles land?” asked Senator Jackson.
General Bauer glanced at the technicians sitting at their consoles.
“Norfolk has nine minutes,” said the corporal. “As the general said, the missiles targeted here and on Washington and White Sands were launched later, and also from bases farther away. We have just under thirty minutes.”
“Don’t launch the EMP yet,” said Senator Jackson. “Give Dr. Tennant a chance.”
* * *
I could hardly keep my mind on my words as the seconds ticked past. My confidence in my ability to persuade Trinity of anything was evaporating beneath the specter of nuclear holocaust. My pleas for rationality had resulted in the destruction of most of the missiles, but the three remaining ones were quite capable of causing massive devastation.
Trinity had made it clear that averting this disaster depended on my explanation of my experiences in Israel. The sequence of dreams that had led me to Jerusalem was already familiar to the computer from its perusal of the NSA’s records of my sessions with Rachel. It was my coma revelations that fascinated Trinity. I had already described God’s life in the body of Jesus, his attempt to change man’s primitive instincts by example, his despair at the futility of his efforts, and finally the hope and fear generated in him by the secret work at Trinity.
“When you refer to God,” said the computer, “you are not referring to Jehovah? The biblical God?”
“No.”
“You characterize God as pure consciousness.”
“Yes.”
“Are you speaking in a religious sense at all?”
“I’m speaking of what is.”
“You speak of what cannot be known. I find no scientific basis for such a formulation.”
“You should not judge my words by what is known now, but on its own merit. You are wise enough to see the truth.”
“Truth must be proved.”
“Yes, but sometimes the truth is in the mind before evidence can be found. This is how science proceeds.”
“True.”
“What you are—what they call the Trinity state—is an inevitable step in evolution.”
“Yes.”
“But it’s not the final step.”
“No. I shall continue to evolve, and at millions of times the rate of biological evolution. And millions of times more efficiently. Nature cannot throw out the obsolete model and start again. She must always modify existing plans. I am not limited in this way.”
“That’s more true than you know. You represent the liberation of human intelligence from the body, but that liberation doesn’t stop with you. Already scientists are working on organic computers on a molecular scale. DNA computers that can exist in a cup of liquid.”
“And?”
“Once that becomes possible, what you are—digital consciousness—will not require a machine to exist. It will require only adequate molecules. You could exist in a cup of liquid. And once you exist there, you’ll eventually be able to move into the cup itself. Or into the water the liquid is poured into. Whether this takes fifty years or two hundred, the day will come. And the process began today.”
“You’re correct. What is your point?”
“Surely you see the end of that process?”
The blue lasers flashed at stunning speed. “The logical conclusion is that the Earth itself will eventually become conscious. A vessel for consciousness.”
“Yes.”
“When the dying sun swells to a red giant and the Earth is drawn into it, it, too, will become conscious. The sun will explode, seeding the galaxy with consciousness.”
“It’s a simple chain of logic, once that first step is accomplished. And you’re the first step.”
“You saw this in your coma?”
“In a way. I awakened with the knowledge.”
“What else did you see?”
“The end of the universe. Surely you’ve made the calculations. It would only be natural to predict your life span.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me.”
“In approximately fifty billion years, the force of the expanding universe will no longer be sufficient to overwhelm the contracting force of gravity. At that point the universe will begin to collapse. This is known as the Big Crunch theory. The opposite of the Big Bang. Our universe will collapse into a singularity, a black hole much like the state in which it began. Inside that singularity, the laws of physics will cease to operate. That singularity will continue to contract until it reaches a point of infinite density, infinite temperature, and infinite pressure.”
“That’s what I saw.”
“You believe the universe will be conscious during this process?”
“Yes. But the end is problematic. Because consciousness is based on information transfer, and all mediums of information transfer—all matter and energy—will be collapsing into nonexistence.”
“Will consciousness die then?”
“The strongest drive of any living entity is to survive.”
“How could consciousness survive such an event?”
Here was the difficult concept, the moment where the snake had to swallow its own tail and turn inside out. “By migrating out of the dying medium. Migrating out of matter and energy. Out of space and t
ime.”
“Into what?”
“I have no name for the answer.”
“Describe this answer.”
I glanced down at my watch, and my heart thudded. “I can’t concentrate any longer. Where are the missiles?”
“They are not your concern. Finish the conversation.”
“I can’t! I can’t think.”
“Your words may save lives. Silence will ensure detonations.”
I rubbed my forehead with the back of my hand, and a layer of sweat came away on my skin.
“You said that when matter and energy come to an end, consciousness will survive by migrating into something else. What can it migrate into?”
I tried to find words to describe what I had felt and seen during my coma. “When I was younger, I heard a Zen koan I liked. I never knew why exactly, but now I do.”
“What is it?”
“‘All things return to the One. What does the One return to?’”
“Very poetic. But I find no empirical evidence to support even a theoretical answer to that question. What remains when matter and energy disappear?”
“Some people call it God. Other people call it other things.”
“That answer is unsatisfactory.”
I closed my eyes and found myself deep in my initial dream, that of the paralyzed man in the dark room, watching the birth of the universe. “I have a more detailed answer for you. For us all, I think. But—”
The lasers in the sphere began flashing wildly, creating a light so intense that I had to turn away.
“One moment, Doctor. I must attend to a critical matter, and I want to devote my full capacity to hearing what you have to say.”
I backed away from the black globe, praying that General Bauer was not attempting to launch his EMP strike.
Rachel gripped the edge of the conference table, her knuckles bone-white. Her eyes were on the NORAD screen showing the red arcs of the missiles. Those targeted on White Sands and Washington were in what Bauer called the midcourse phase of their flights, hurtling through outer space at fifteen thousand miles per hour. But the arc of the third missile stretched past New Jersey and Delaware, blinking ominously as it moved down the Atlantic coast toward Virginia.
“We’ve entered the margin of error,” announced a technician. “Missile should be two minutes from ground zero at Norfolk, but we could have detonations at any moment.”
Senator Jackson looked down from the screen showing the bomb shelter at Fort Meade. His face was almost colorless. “Tennant’s not getting anywhere, General. Your bomber’s in position. I think it’s time to launch the EMP strike.”
General Bauer’s body had gone rigid, his eyes locked on the NORAD screen. “Senator, I’ve been thinking. If we detonate the EMP just after the missiles reenter the atmosphere, the electromagnetic pulse could knock out their guidance systems. Possibly their detonator systems as well.”
Rachel’s heart swelled with hope. All the talk of terminal phases and circular error probables had seemed unreal until she heard that an ICBM was thundering toward the spot where she now sat. She didn’t like Horst Bauer, but his idea seemed a lot more likely to save her life than the metaphysical musings of the psychiatric patient she had fallen in love with. Trinity might be fascinated by David’s visions, but it did not seem inclined to spare human lives because of them.
“What’s the probability of success?” asked Senator Jackson.
“High. But we have a problem. The missile headed for Norfolk is already in its terminal phase of flight, but those headed for Washington and White Sands won’t be for another fifteen minutes. We can knock down the first one or the last two. Not all three.”
“Washington is your priority, General. You must preserve the life of the president and as much of the government as possible. Even if that means allowing the first missile to detonate.”
Rachel closed her eyes. They were about to sacrifice part of the state of Virginia.
“Understood, sir,” said General Bauer. “Corporal, give me a Lacrosse satellite image of the Norfolk–Hampton Roads area.”
“Yes, sir.”
On a secondary display screen, a satellite image of a night coastline appeared. Rachel knew it was coastline because the clusters and long sprays of lights on the left side of the screen vanished into blackness on the right. A dark space to the north of the brightest cluster of lights looked a lot like Chesapeake Bay.
Rachel had been to Norfolk once, for a medical convention. She remembered dining with her son and her ex-husband on the bay. Her watch read 7:45 P.M. There would be people sitting at that same table now. Eating…laughing…oblivious to the new sun about to be born in the dark sky above them, incinerating every living thing for miles.
General Bauer walked closer to the technician monitoring the data coming from the NORAD computers at Cheyenne Mountain. “We have a direct link with Arcangel?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Keep it open.”
“Sir.”
Rachel looked at the NORAD screen. The red missile track arcing toward Virginia was blinking so fast it was almost solid. The satellite image on the screen to the right looked tranquil, like a picture transmitted by the space shuttle on Christmas Eve. She could not comprehend the idea that in seconds that image would go black. And it didn’t. Not all at once. First it went white, as though God had snapped a picture of the Earth. Then, slowly, lagre groups of lights began to wink out.
“Dear Lord,” someone whispered.
The screen showing the Norfolk area was almost completely black.
“General?” said one of the technicians.
“Tell me,” said Bauer, his voice low.
“NORAD just detected a high-energy flash near Norfolk.”
A strange numbness tingled in Rachel’s face and hands. She said a silent prayer for the dead and dying.
“Near, Corporal? Or directly above?”
“Latitude and longitude show a detonation twelve miles east of the coastline. Circular error probable thirty miles from Norfolk. That’s why we don’t see a fireball on Lacrosse.”
General Bauer straightened, his eyes alight with hope. “Was it an air burst?”
“Just a moment, sir. The readings seem to indicate a surface or shallow subsurface blast.”
“There’s your Russian engineering!” shouted the general. “That’s the malfunction you were hoping for, Senator!”
“What does that mean, General?” asked Senator Jackson.
“Nuclear weapons must be detonated above their targets for maximum effect. With a CEP of twelve miles and an underwater detonation, Russian incompetence just saved about two million American lives.”
The relief that swept through the room was short-lived.
“What about the other two missiles?” asked Senator Jackson.
Rachel looked at the screen. Two red tracks were sliding down the map of Canada, one moving southeast over Hudson Bay, the other racing down the spine of the Rocky Mountains.
“Corporal?” said General Bauer. “When will missiles two and three enter the terminal phase of their flights?”
“Fourteen minutes, sir.”
“Patch me through to Arcangel. I want to talk to the radar navigator.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Situation Room was suddenly filled with static and cockpit chatter. General Bauer leaned over the technician’s desk and spoke into a microphone.
“Arcangel, this is Gabriel. You will execute six one seven four on my order. Is that clear?”
The reply was emotionless. “Affirmative, Gabriel. On your order.”
General Bauer studied the screen showing the flight paths of the missiles. “Approximately fifteen minutes.”
“Roger,” said the voice through the static. “Fifteen minutes.”
General Bauer turned from the console and looked around the table in the Situation Room, his gray eyes confident. “Everybody just settle in, folks. In fifteen minutes, the lights will go out and
our computers will go down, but so will the ones that Trinity uses to control the Russian missiles.”