The Footprints of God

by Greg Iles

  “It’s happening,” Ravi said, his voice surprisingly reverent. “The impossible is happening in front of us. Duality becoming unity…yin and yang one.”

  I had never asked Nara about his religion; I’d always assumed he was Hindu. I was about to question him when a buzzer sounded in the room.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “The door,” said Levin. He touched a button, and an exterior view of the Containment building appeared on a small wall monitor. There was no one at the door.

  “Weird,” he said. The tall engineer walked around the magnetic barrier, headed for the door.

  “Don’t open it,” said Rachel.

  I walked far enough toward the wall to see around the magnetic shield. As Levin reached for the door handle, a flat crack echoed through the building. Levin’s hands flew to his ears, and the steel security door creaked outward on its hinges.

  A black silhouette appeared in the smoky doorway and flung out an arm with stunning speed. Levin fell to the floor.

  “What is happening?” the computer asked in the identical voice Godin’s neuromodel had used.

  Ravi Nara scrambled behind the black sphere of Trinity. I grabbed Rachel and raced for a door near the back wall. It didn’t lead outside, but through the magnetic barrier to the control station in the MRI room. As I followed her through it, I glanced back and saw a flash of blonde hair above black body armor.

  “Geli,” I said, locking the door behind me and pushing Rachel through the control station. “Go to the basement!”

  A short stairwell behind the control station led to the basement containing the Godin Four supercomputer. I hadn’t been down myself, but I knew Levin’s technicians were there, probably with the automatic weapons they’d used to fight off General Bauer’s initial assault. Rachel raced down the steps, then came straight back up.

  “The door’s locked!”

  I ran down and pounded on the metal with both fists. “Open the door, damn it!”

  Nothing happened.

  “David!”

  Bounding back up the steps, I saw Geli peering around the edge of the magnetic barrier, forty feet away. I pulled Rachel behind the Plexiglas wall of the control station and shoved her down behind some computers.

  Why hadn’t Geli simply walked across the room and shot us? She thinks we have the assault rifles Levin’s people used. As soon as she realizes we don’t, we’re dead.

  Levin groaned from the floor by the door, but he didn’t move.

  “Where is she?” Rachel hissed from the floor.

  As I glanced down to reply, an invisible hammer slammed me against the wall. My shoulder went numb, and my face felt like it was on fire. The sound of the gunshot seemed to arrive long after the bullet, which had shattered the Plexiglas and peppered my face with razor-sharp fragments.

  Rachel tried to stand, but I shoved her back down.

  Geli stepped from behind the barrier and walked cautiously across the MRI room, her pistol aimed at my chest, her eyes flicking back and forth.

  There was no weapon to hand and nowhere to run. As I awaited the final bullet, time dilated around me. Geli moved in slow motion, like a leopardess stalking her prey. I looked down into Rachel’s eyes, knowing they would be my last sight on earth.

  Rachel took my hand and closed her eyes. As she did, I noticed a large red button on the switch panel beside her head. The letters below it read PULSED-FIELD INITIATOR.

  I slammed my hand down on the button.

  The crack of a gunshot died in the inhuman screech of the Super-MRI machine. I looked up and saw Geli bent double and clenching her right hand, which was dripping blood onto the floor. The scanner’s colossal magnets had ripped the gun from her grasp like the hand of God and had probably taken at least one finger with it.

  Her pistol appeared to be glued to the wall of the MRI machine. Not far from it hung a knife, probably yanked from Geli’s belt by the magnetic field. Suddenly the screeching ceased, and both gun and knife dropped to the floor.

  Geli advanced toward me, her eyes filled with murderous rage. I stepped out from behind the panel, but with a useless shoulder there was little I could do. Geli had nearly killed me on the steps in Union Station, when I had the use of both arms.

  “Why are you doing this?” I asked.

  She knocked me to the floor with a lightning kick to my chest, then sat astride me and clenched her hands around my throat. I felt her thumbs searching for my windpipe.

  “Stop!” Rachel screamed from the control station. “There’s no reason anymore!”

  I tried to fight, but once again Geli had leverage on her side. My carotid arteries were closing off, and with them consciousness. I felt as I had so many times on the edge of narcoleptic sleep. But this time, as the black wave rolled over me, a piercing scream penetrated the center of my brain. It was the scream of a child witnessing something too terrifying to endure, almost beyond the range of human hearing, filled with suffering and impossible to shut out. That scream pulled me back to consciousness, back toward the light…and then suddenly it stopped, the silence in its wake as empty as a dead planet.

  Into that silence came a voice I was sure had spoken from within my hypoxic brain, a voice of preternatural calm pitched somewhere between the male and female registers.

  “Listen to me, Geli,” it said. “The man beneath you is not the man you hate. Tennant is not the man you want to kill. The man you want to kill is behind you.”

  The viselike grip on my throat remained, but I felt Geli’s body twist. I opened my eyes. She was looking over her shoulder at something I couldn’t see.

  “Finish it!” shouted a harsh male voice. “Do your job!”

  General Bauer had entered Containment.

  Geli’s grip tightened on my throat, but the light in her eyes no longer blazed.

  “I know you, Geli,” said the strange voice. “My heart aches for you. I know about the scar.”

  Geli froze.

  “Listen to your father, Geli. Listen to the truth.”

  General Bauer’s voice filled the room, but it was not coming from his throat. It was coming from Trinity’s speakers.

  “That scar? I’ll tell you why she never got it fixed. Three weeks after her mother died, she came home from basic training and tried to kill me.”

  The hands remained on my throat, but the strength had gone out of them.

  “She’d heard about how infantry grunts used to frag officers they hated in Vietnam. You know, put a grenade in the latrine while they were using it and take them out.”

  General Bauer stood with his head cocked in amazement as he listened to his own voice coming from the speakers. His right hand held the black 9mm Beretta I’d seen her pull on McCaskell.

  “I was drinking that night, in bed. She thought I was asleep. Maybe I was. She came in and laid a fucking white phosphorous grenade on my bedside table. From reflex my hand popped out of the covers and grabbed her wrist. Her scream woke me up, and I saw the grenade. Well, I just rolled off the far side of the bed, like any old soldier would. But she was stuck on her side and had to run for it. The Willy Pete blew before she cleared the door. That’s where she got the scar. And that’s why she won’t get it fixed. That scar is her mother’s suicide, her hatred of me, her whole sad fucking life. Pathetic, really. But she’s a hell of a soldier. Hate’s good fuel for a soldier.”

  Geli scrambled off me and moved toward her father, her hands loose and ready at her sides. I couldn’t see her face, but at least her body was blocking her father’s line of fire.

  “Who were you talking to?” Geli asked, her voice ragged. “Who did you tell that to?”

  “Get out of the way!” the general shouted.

  “Listen to me, General,” said the the eerie voice that had just saved my life. “Why do you want to kill me? You’ve killed so much of yourself already. You’ve killed much of your daughter. But I am what is pure in you. What is pure in man. Where is hope if you kill me?”

&nb
sp; I began to crawl backward toward the control station.

  The general aimed his gun at me, but Geli moved to block his line of fire.

  “Do you love darkness more than light?”

  The voice was irresistible, like that of a child. Yet General Bauer ignored it. He moved laterally, trying to get a clear shot at me.

  “Put down the gun,” Geli said, holding up both hands. Was she trying to save us?

  “No more,” she said. “No more!”

  General Bauer’s waxlike expression didn’t change. Nothing that his daughter or the computer said was going to get through. He moved farther to his left, toward the MRI unit, angling for a kill shot.

  “Will you kill me to do this?” Geli asked.

  I looked back at the shattered Plexiglas shield, willing Rachel to act. She was staring hypnotized at the deadly dance between Geli and her father.

  “I won’t kill you,” General Bauer said. Then he lashed out with the heavy pistol, knocking Geli aside as easily as he would a child.

  As she fell, the general swung the barrel of his gun toward me, but in that moment the Super-MRI screeched and he was knocked off his feet as though by a howitzer shell. His pistol slammed into the MRI scanner and hung there as though welded to the machine.

  Rachel knelt over me, probing my shoulder with a finger.

  “Help me up,” I grunted.

  “Stay down.”

  “Please…get me up.”

  I struggled to my knees. Rachel got under my good shoulder and helped me to my feet.

  Geli was sitting beside her father, looking down in disbelief. The general’s neck was covered in bright red blood, and his eyes were glazed open. He’d been standing between the gun and the MRI scanner when Rachel hit the initiator. The huge pulsed-field magnet had snatched the pistol to itself with irresistible force, and whatever was in the way went with it. In this case, it appeared to be part of the general’s throat.

  “John Skow is still trying to shut down the computer,” Geli said in monotone. “I don’t think he can do it with both of you alive.”

  “I am safe,” said Trinity. “And I am sorry for you, Geli.”

  Rachel and I walked slowly around the magnetic shield. The black sphere waited, its blue lasers pulsing like a heartbeat within the web of carbon. On the screen beneath it, I saw an image of myself and Rachel looking into Trinity’s camera.

  “Do you know us?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said the childlike voice. “Better than you know yourselves.”

  Epilogue

  Today, within Trinity’s carbon-fiber circuitry and crystal memory, Rachel and I remain one entity. But we were only a jumping-off point, parents of a child who has already far outstripped its origins.

  Peter Godin dreamed of liberating the mind from the body. He believed that liberation was possible because he believed the mind is merely the sum of the neural connections in our brains. Andrew Fielding believed something different: that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I’m still not sure who is right.

  That Trinity could be built at all seems to vindicate Godin. But sometimes at night, lying on the ledge of sleep, I feel another presence in my mind. An echo of that divinely unbounded perspective of which I caught only the barest glimpse during my coma. I suspect that this echo is Trinity. That, as Fielding predicted, the Trinity computer and I are forever entangled at that unstable border between the world we see around us and the subatomic world that gives substance to the visible. Rachel doesn’t like to talk about this, but she has felt it, too.

  As Peter Godin predicted, the “new” Trinity computer has not allowed itself to be disconnected from the Internet. It maintains its links with strategic defense computers around the world, thus ensuring its own survival. But neither has it threatened anyone. Trinity recently disclosed to world leaders that it is attempting to determine the most effective symbiosis between biologically based and machinebased intelligence.

  The Trinity computer is not God and does not claim to be. Human beings, however, are not so quick to dismiss this possibility. To date, 4,183 websites devoted to Trinity have sprung up around the world. Some are run by New Age disciples who tout the divinity of the machine, others by fundamentalists who list “proofs” that Trinity is the Antichrist predicted in the Book of Revelation. Still other sites are purely technical: they track Trinity’s movements through the computer networks of the world, mapping the activities of the first metahuman intelligence on the planet. Trinity itself has visited most of these sites, but has left no word of its opinions on them.

  One of Trinity’s chief worries is the inevitable day when another MRI-based computer goes on-line somewhere in the world. To prevent this from happening, Trinity monitors all worldwide signal traffic. But as with nuclear weapons proliferation, compliance cannot be guaranteed by purely technical means. Human nature being what it is, someone will build another Trinity. The Germans—who apparently had access to Jutta Klein’s Super-MRI technology early on—are said to have a prototype up and running at the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart, a machine kept carefully isolated from the Internet. It’s also rumored that the Japanese are pursuing a crash project on the island of Kyushu. Why any nation would do this in the face of the horrific sanctions Trinity could impose seems beyond comprehension. The fact that they have goes a long way toward proving Peter Godin’s argument that man cannot responsibly govern himself.

  The prospect of multiple Trinity computers in conflict is terrifying. It is not known whether the computers rumored to be in development are based on male, female, or merged neuromodels. Could single human minds given such power evolve sufficiently past their vestigial instincts to coexist in the limited sphere of the world? I’m not optimistic. But perhaps they will not perceive the world as limited. The resource of knowledge is theoretically infinite. Perhaps Trinity can, in fact, make an end to war.

  I leave such concerns to others now.

  When people ask if my dreams—or hallucinations—were real, I answer this way: I’m not certain, but I find clues in different places. One of the best I received from the most unexpected source imaginable.

  During the past three months—while I wrote this narrative of my Trinity experiences—the Trinity computer directed construction of a second Trinity prototype for research purposes. It now stands next to its predecessor in the Containment building at White Sands, isolated from the outside world but functioning perfectly as an independent entity.

  When I learned of the development of this machine, I wrote an e-mail to the Trinity computer. In that letter, I made a strong case that no one deserved to experience the Trinity state more than Andrew Fielding, the man who had made it possible.

  Trinity was way ahead of me.

  Last week, I walked through a ring of armed men and into the Containment building, where I found two carbon spheres standing side by side. I’d both dreaded and looked forward to this day. Dreaded it because the Andrew Fielding I was going to meet had no memory more recent than the day he was first scanned by the Super-MRI—nine months before—which meant that I would face the uniquely disturbing experience of informing a man that he had been murdered. Yet my memories of Fielding told me he would handle this shock better than most people.

  I was right. Fielding reminded me that he would have periodic digital life within the Trinity computer, and he even speculated that someday—probably a century down the road—the reverse process of Trinity might be perfected: a stored digital neuromodel might be downloaded into a biological brain, or wetware.

  But what truly salvaged Fielding’s sanity was learning that he had brought the love of his life out of China and married her. His neuromodel remembered only pining in vain for Lu Li, whom it still believed was trapped in Beijing. I told the story of Lu Li’s escape from Geli Bauer’s surveillance teams, which, while not so dramatic as mine, was more successful. A few hours after I’d left her house that night, Lu Li had slipped outside with her bichon frise and made her way across Chape
l Hill on foot. There she joined a Chinese family that owned a restaurant where she and Fielding had frequently dined. That family hid her in their home until the events surrounding Trinity were resolved.

  When I told Fielding that I’d brought Lu Li with me from North Carolina, and that she was waiting outside, he asked that he be given a few minutes to collect himself before she was brought before the camera. His question stunned me, but I realized then how “human” a computer could be. Talking to Peter Godin’s neuromodel had been like talking to a machine; but then talking to Godin the man had been much the same. Andrew Fielding, on the other hand, had been an eccentric character renowned for his wit and passion. Even in the synthesized voice of his neuromodel, I heard the spark of the man who had saved a poster from the Newcastle club where he’d seen Jimi Hendrix play in 1967.