by Greg Isle
I closed my eyes, unable to summon more persuasive words.
"If you want Dr. Weiss to live, tell me the rest of it."
The Situation Room
Rachel sat at the table in the Situation Room, mentally replaying David's last words to Trinity. His declaration of love had had no effect on the computer, but it had given her some peace.
"What do we do now, General?" asked Senator Jackson.
"There's only one thing we can do here," General Bauer replied. "Evacuate." The general turned to face the room. "I'm going to check on the possibility of air evacuation. I want everyone to remain here. I'll return very shortly."
He walked quickly toward the door, but before he reached it, he turned and looked pointedly at Ewan McCaskell and John Skow. Then he motioned for them to follow him.
As the hangar door closed, Geli Bauer slid into the seat across from Rachel. Rachel tried not to look at the scar on her cheek, but it was impossible to ignore. Geli wore it arrogantly, like a badge of honor.
"Is Tennant crazy or sane?" Geli asked.
Rachel answered without thought. "I honestly don't know."
"This God obsession of his is bullshit. But the funny thing is, if it weren't for that, you'd be dead. Because if you hadn't gone to Israel, I'd have found you."
Rachel knew she was right. David's decision to follow his visions had pulled them out of the line of fire when almost nothing else could have. Rachel doubted that Geli Bauer had missed many targets in her career.
"So here we are," said Rachel. "At the end of the world."
A hint of a smile touched Geli's lips. "Confession time?"
"I have nothing to confess. What about you? Did you kill Andrew Fielding?"
Geli glanced around to make sure no one was near. "Yes."
Rachel was reminded of a little girl fascinated by her own cruelty. "How does a woman come to do what you do? You carry a lot of anger around, don't you?"
Geli touched the bandage over the bullet wound in her neck. "I can see how you might get that feeling."
Rachel's eyes didn't waver. "You were angry long before that."
"You playing shrink with me now?"
"I am a shrink."
Geli laughed bitterly. "My first shrink seduced me when I was fourteen. I got the last laugh, though. He killed himself over me."
"What about your father? He seems like a real throwback. Dr. Strangelove stuff."
"If you only knew."
Rachel wondered what secret misery drove this cold woman. "There's something dark between the two of you."
"No. Just your ordinary army family hell."
"You hate him, yet it seems you've tried to live up to all his expectations of you."
Geli's ironic smile faded. "Are you in love with Tennant?"
"Yes."
"Will you still love him if it turns out he's crazy?"
"Yes."
"Then you understand a little about me and my father." She rubbed her forefinger repeatedly against her thumb, like someone desperate for a cigarette. "Who killed the man who came to Tennant's house with a gun? You or Tennant?"
For the first time, Rachel sensed some unguarded emotion. "Why do you care? Were you in love with him?"
"We fucked sometimes."
"You really work at being hard, don't you?"
One sculpted eyebrow lifted. The moment of vulnerability had passed. "Why are you talking to me, Doctor?"
"I suppose I'm trying to find out how dangerous you are."
"You mean, am I here to do my duty or to get revenge on you two?"
"Something like that."
The cold smile returned. "Maybe they're one and the same. Any more questions?"
Rachel whispered so softly that her words were almost inaudible. "Is your father really going to evacuate us?"
Geli's eyes glinted. "You're smarter than I thought. I wouldn't count on it."
Ravi Nara sat on the sand outside the Situation Room hangar, his muscles clenched in terror, his eyes on the dark sky. There was no stockade at the White Sands facility, so the guard who'd restrained him had handcuffed him to a flagpole by the door. A neutron bomb, the general had said. Ravi was pondering the grisly death caused by radiation poisoning when the hangar door burst open and General Bauer marched out, barking orders into a walkie-talkie.
John Skow and the president's chief of staff followed the general. The three men walked fifteen meters from the door and stopped. They probably never saw Ravi in the darkness.
"I hope to God you've got some kind of plan, General," said Ewan McCaskell. "Because evacuating this place doesn't do a damned thing for Washington."
"I've got a plan. But I don't think I'm the only one. Skow?"
The NSA man nodded. "We can kill Trinity."
"How?"
"Isolate it from the Internet. That's the same as killing it."
"Talk fast."
"When Godin died, the computer crashed and the Russian missiles launched. Cause and effect, right?"
General Bauer nodded.
"Trinity has to be sending out some sort of safety signal. A constant signal telling certain computers that all is well with Trinity. When Godin died, that signal was disrupted, and the Russian missiles were launched. If we can separate that 'all is well' signal from the rest of Trinity's output, we can probably duplicate it. Then all we have to do is feed our own version into the data line Trinity is using and cut Trinity's power. Trinity will be dead, but the computers tasked with retaliation will have no idea anything is wrong."
"How long would it take you to isolate that signal?"
"I don't know. Trinity would detect any direct monitoring of its lines, so we'd have to do it from outside the cables. That causes distortion. And since the signal is generated by and for computers, it's probably very complex. It might even appear random to us without intense analysis."
"How long? "
The NSA man shrugged. "It could take ten minutes or ten days."
"We'll be dead long before you do that. And Washington will no longer exist."
The beat of rotor blades reverberated over the compound. McCaskell looked skyward, then at General Bauer. "Is that helicopter coming to evacuate us?"
"No. It's coming for you."
Puzzlement wrinkled McCaskell's face. "Why?"
"Our EMP strike failed because our communications were compromised. But the plan was sound."
"Do you have another bomber in the air?"
"We don't need one. We have ICBMs sitting in silos in Kansas cornfields right now. One of those can reach the necessary altitude for an EMP detonation in three hundred seconds."
"That's five minutes," said Skow. "An eternity in Trinity's terms. And Trinity will detect the launch immediately."
General Bauer nodded. "We'll inform Trinity of what we're doing just prior to launch. We’ll say the president has decided he can't survive politically if he doesn't respond to the Russian missile detonated off Virginia. We'll remotely retarget the missile for Moscow, and Trinity will hear our telemetry. But when it reaches the peak of its boost phase . . . boom. EMP."
Skow's face shone with admiration. "That could work."
"But we can't launch an ICBM from here," McCaskell said.
"We're not. The president's going to launch it. He's got the nuclear briefcase with him, and he's with the Joint Chiefs. They'll know the necessary altitude and yield for an EMP blast."
"But they're all under surveillance!"
The helicopter was descending fast. Ravi had dreamed that a machine like this one would carry him out of harm's way, but the pounding rotor blades overhead did not soothe him. This bird was a harbinger of war.
General Bauer laid his hands on McCaskell's shoulders. "Do you know a Secret Service agent you can trust? Someone who'd be in the White House and whose cell number you know?"
"Of course. But we can't transmit a word without Trinity hearing it."
"Yes, we can. Our mistake has been to use our most advanced communicat
ions. Trinity is focused on those. We need to do it the old-fashioned way."
"Telephone," said Skow.
"Right. Lockheed has a research lab six miles west of here. If you use a land line from there, and you don't use key words like Trinity, the computer would have to sift through massive amounts of data to find the conversation. It's like hiding hay in a haystack."
Skow was nodding excitedly.
Bauer stayed focused on McCaskell. "Call your Secret Service man and tell him that unless the president and the Chiefs are moved to the White House bomb shelter, they'll be vaporized. He should say that on camera, so that Trinity can hear it. As soon as the president is clear of surveillance, you get him on the phone and explain what he has to do. He and the Chiefs can launch the missile on their way to the bomb shelter."
The thunder of the approaching helicopter was drowning the conversation.
"General!" McCaskell shouted. "If an EMP pulse will knock down an ICBM, what will it do to commercial airliners?"
"Airliners have redundant hydraulic systems! They'll lose electrical power, but they'll be able to land just fine. You've got to go now, sir. The president has less than fifteen minutes to live."
A Black Hawk gunship painted in desert camouflage set down thirty meters from the hangar.
"Go!" Bauer yelled.
McCaskell turned and ran for the waiting chopper. A soldier pulled him up into its belly, and the Black Hawk lifted into the night sky.
"I can't believe he bought that," said Skow.
"What?"
"Older planes like 727s and DC-9s have redundant hydraulics, but newer models are fully computerized. They won't make it. There are probably three thousand airliners aloft right now. The passenger load is at least a hundred thousand people. If only half of them crash, that's twenty times the casualties of the World Trade Center. We'll have bodies strewn from Maine to California."
"Experienced pilots will be able to set down on the interstates," General Bauer said.
"In Montana, maybe. The rest will be blocked by stalled cars and trucks, and they won't move an inch without new parts. But there won't be any parts. There won't even be food moving on the roads. Not unless the National Guard moves it. And they'll be too busy shooting looters and delivering water to do that."
General Bauer looked fiercely at the NSA man. "If that missile had hit Norfolk, we'd be looking at two million dead. Two million."
Skow nodded soberly.
"And if we don't knock down the next two, you can scratch off three million souls in and around Washington. Including your wife and kids, if I'm not mistaken."
The NSA man looked stricken.
"Now, you get somebody working on finding Trinity's 'all is well' signal. Because if we don't get our bone marrow fried by a neutron bomb in the next fourteen minutes, we just might need it."
Chapter 44
Containment
The black sphere of Trinity pulsed with blue light as the lasers inside fired into its crystal memory. Given the enormous capacity and speed of the computer, I could not begin to imagine how many trillions of bits of data it had to be manipulating to cause such activity. Was it monitoring the military status of every nuclear-armed nation? Scanning and analyzing every square meter of the earth visible to satellites? Was it searching obscure astrophysics theses for references to the concepts I had been talking about? Or was it patiently writing a perfect symphony while we awaited nuclear disaster? Perhaps it was doing all that simultaneously.
My original intention to persuade Trinity to shut itself down had changed under the threat of the incoming missiles. I had focused instead on convincing Trinity to spare those lives under immediate threat. Yet my efforts had failed. Trinity wanted only to continue our discussion of my coma revelations. As I stood dazed before the black sphere, hoping that General Bauer was evacuating the base, the last part of my coma conversation with Trinity began to play from the hidden speakers.
"You said that when matter and energy come to an end, consciousness will survive by migrating into something else. What can it migrate into?"
"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 have a more detailed answer for you. For us all, I think. But—"
The light within the globe faded, and Trinity went black. Then a few needle-thin rays fired into the crystal.
"I want to know," Trinity said in real time. "What is this thing that some humans call God and other humans call other things?"
I glanced at my watch. My face felt hot. Rachel is in the helicopter, I told myself. On her way to safety. It's Washington that's at risk. And my best chance of saving it is doing what I planned to do in the beginning. What I was sent here to do.
"The longer you wait, " said Trinity, "the more people will die."
Peter Godin's vision of Trinity as a benevolent dictator was not proving out. I closed my eyes and tried to find words to relate the knowledge imparted to me in Jerusalem.
"There is a force in the universe that we don't yet understand. A force without energy or matter. I'm not sure it's a force at all, actually. It may be more like a field. It pervades all things but occupies no space. It's more like . . . antispace."
"What is this force? Or this field?"
"I have no name for it. I only know it exists."
"What is its function?"
"Let me answer with a question. What is a chair? What is required for a chair to exist?"
"A seat. Legs. A back."
"Is that all?"
"There are other types of chairs. Bean chairs. Japanese stools."
"You've left something out. Something else is absolutely required to have a chair."
"What?"
"Space."
The sphere went black again. "You are correct. Space is required."
"In the same way that space is required for a chair to exist, the field I speak of is required for space to exist."
The lasers fixed for several seconds. "Is that the sole function of this theoretical field?"
"No. It can act as a medium of communication. Such as that between quantum particles."
"Be specific."
"I'm referring to those cases when atomic particles make simultaneous decisions across vast reaches of space, as if they were invisibly connected. Experiments show that information traveling between such particles would have to be communicated at ten thousand times the speed of light. And breaking the speed of light is impossible."
"Through this medium you speak of, information is communicated faster than light? "
"Yes and no. Imagine that I dip my hand into the Pacific Ocean. Now, imagine that my hand is simultaneously touching everything that the ocean touches. That's the kind of communication I'm talking about. It's not a transfer of information. The information is simply everywhere at once."
"The quantum phenomena you speak of defy logical explanation, but observation has detected no field or medium such as the one you describe. "
"We haven't detected dark matter either, but we know it's there. We can't see black holes, but we see the light bending around them."
The lasers flashed at a blinding rate, lighting the crystal like a blue star. "My memory does contain something very like what you describe. I was searching my science banks. I find what you speak of under philosophy." "Does it have a name?" "It is called the Tao."
The word took me back to my undergraduate days at MIT, when books like The Tao of Physics were the bibles of New Age-oriented students. "That's Eastern philosophy, right?" "Yes."
"What is the Tao, exactly?"
"'The Tao that c
an be spoken of is not the true Tao.'" "Is that a quote?"
"Yes. Taoism is not a religion. But its adherents believe there is a force that pervades all things. The Tao is undifferentiated, neither good nor evil. It animates all things but is not part of them. Are you suggesting that something like the Tao is what remains after the universe collapses into itself?"
"After the final singularity vanishes. Yes."
"This is the field into which consciousness migrates when matter and energy are destroyed at the end of time?"
"Yes."
"How can this happen'"
"Let me use an analogy. On the physical level, human beings are animals. Large-scale creatures who live in a Newtonian world of predictability, where time only moves forward, where we're separated from each other in space, and information is limited by the speed of light. But the subatomic world is different. There, particles exist right at the border between the large-scale world of matter and this other force—the Tao, you call it. It's only natural that at this border we should observe behavior that seems to break our physical laws."
"What does this have to do with consciousness?"
"Though we're animals in body, our minds are conscious, self-aware. Andrew Fielding believed that human consciousness is more than the sum of the connections in our brains. Through our consciousness, we participate in that all-pervasive field—in the Tao, as you say—at every moment of our lives. Our consciousness returns to it when we die, though without individuality. In the same way, the consciousness of the universe will migrate into the Tao when the universe ends."
"You suggest a cyclical pattern of existence. The universe is born, becomes conscious, dies, and then is born again."
"Yes. Big Bang, expansion, contraction, Big Crunch. Then it all starts again."
" What causes the next bang? "
I thought of my recurring nightmare, the paralyzed man in the pitch-black room. "The consciousness that survives has no knowledge of the past or future. It's a baseline awareness. But some desire to know survives. That's the strongest feature of consciousness. And from that desire to know, the next cycle of matter and energy is born."