The Immortality Code

by Douglas E. Richards

  And it had worked like a charm. He definitely had her attention. And then some.

  “How did he get the information he needed to wire you the money?” she asked.

  “I don’t know. But my bank told me that it’s much easier to put money into someone’s account than take it out. Which is, you know . . . comforting. But the bottom line is that this guy must be loaded, and he’s got some serious interest in talking to you.”

  Kathy raised her eyebrows, extending eyelids that were painted a dark shade of blue. “So if I were you,” she added, “I’d turn on my damn phone.”

  She shrugged innocently. “You know . . . just saying.”

  3

  Commander Zachary Reed, dressed in civilian clothing, looked up from his tablet computer to briefly admire his luxurious surroundings once again, still finding them hard to believe. He was used to being crammed inside the dark belly of a transport plane, flying with lights off and under the radar, waiting to parachute into hostile territory to conduct deadly incursions.

  And now? Now he was the sole passenger inside the latest Gulfstream luxury jet, with a fully stocked bar and refrigerator, sitting in a chair and a cabin so spacious, so comfortable, so decadent, that the finest first-class compartment of any commercial airline seemed like a cattle car by comparison.

  He allowed himself a brief, satisfied sigh before shifting his eyes back to the tablet, where he had been absorbing the latest developments in genetic engineering made possible by the miracle of Crisper/CAS9 genetic engineering technology.

  He had a lot of catching up to do.

  Technological innovation was erupting across the world far faster than at any time in history, as scientists with fertile imaginations stood on the shoulders of giants and had access to an array of exponentially evolving scientific building blocks.

  And Zachary Reed was expected to get up to speed on much of it—at least at a workable layman’s level—in record time. He had been assigned to an off-the-books black ops group called Tech Ops for two weeks now, and had never crammed more.

  Tech Ops military personnel often dressed and operated as civilians, both inside and outside of the country, with elaborate false identities and lavish bank accounts that legitimized them. This helped them spy on emerging game-changing technologies, influence scientists, commit espionage, or carry out counter-espionage operations as required. As a field operative within this black-ops organization, Commander Zach Reed had been given the broadest of latitude to do anything necessary to complete his missions. Anything.

  And this type of wide latitude had been given for good reason. Because the stakes behind what Tech Ops was chartered to do were exceedingly high. Reed had just left SEAL Team Six, where he had been a special operator, a commando, so he knew something about high-stakes missions.

  But in the big picture, the work he would do for Tech Ops would have a much greater impact on world affairs, on the future of humanity, than that of his all-too-famous former unit. Leaving the SEALs after almost seven years hadn’t been easy, but he had finally decided that he had seen too many horrors, too many atrocities, and had been forced to kill too many people.

  Besides, Reed wanted to avoid leaving the unit the way many of his comrades had—zipped up inside a body bag.

  So at the age of thirty-three, after seeing more bloodshed than most soldiers would in five lifetimes, it had been time to move on. Not that he hadn’t loved his old job. He and his team had saved more lives than anyone would ever know, from more horrific plots than anyone could ever know, lest the population of the country be turned into a nation of insomniacs, never to sleep soundly again. He loved the skills, athleticism, and almost superhuman physical conditioning required—not to mention the vital nature of his missions and the adrenaline rush that came with the job, which made free climbing sheer cliff walls seem almost boring by comparison.

  SEAL Team Six was possibly the most elite unit of any in the world. And while this nickname for the Naval Special Warfare Development Group confused many into believing that it was a single, twelve-member A-team, the reality was that the group was almost four hundred operators strong.

  Even so, Commander Zachary Reed had been considered one of the best. He had been told that if SEAL Team Six did consist of a single twelve-man A-team, he would have been on it.

  But despite leaving his sterling reputation and brothers-in-arms behind, he was already convinced that the powers that be had put him in the right place. Since Tech Ops was a black program, he hadn’t even known it existed, but was told that both human experts and AI algorithms had examined his profile and agreed that this was his best destiny. He loved science and science fiction and was exceptionally adept with technology. And, apparently, he had scored as one of the brightest of the SEALS—which was quite the compliment given that raw intelligence was just as critical a criteria for choosing recruits in this elite group as was bravery and extraordinary combat abilities.

  So here he was. Assigned to a large, powerful organization that wasn’t acknowledged to exist, run by a woman named Colonel Sarah Hubbard. An organization that had only come into existence a handful of years earlier, but had grown at breakneck speed, both in size and importance.

  Although rarely brought up in polite society, the world was in the midst of a new kind of cold war. A war for technology supremacy.

  For millennia, countries with the biggest or most effective armies reigned supreme. Size, might, and economic capacity led to dominance.

  World order was determined by fourth-grade playground rules. The biggest bully won. Period. Brawn over brains, without exception.

  But in modern times this was no longer—necessarily—true. Vast national resources and a Manhattan Project were no longer required to dramatically change the global power structure. Large, rich countries were more likely to dominate technology than small, poor ones, to be sure, but there was no telling when a small country, or even a group of individuals, could develop something that would change the balance of world power overnight.

  It was now a world in which a high school student could use the immense power of CRISPR/Cas9 genetic engineering techniques to launch a global pandemic, or hold the world hostage with such a threat. When private companies could get to space at many times the efficiency and at a fraction of the cost of all world governments combined. When advances in AI, the internet, spyware, and ultra-high-powered lasers could trump massive traditional armies, millions strong.

  So a cold war had arisen. A war to stay ahead in the tech race on the one hand, and to sabotage and monitor the tech of other nations on the other. And the stakes were truly unfathomable.

  Every nation was in the game, more or less. And not just the usual suspects, such as Russia, Israel, North Korea, India, and Iran, but scores of others, some allies, some not, but all worth watching.

  Still, there could be no doubt that the two heavyweight contenders in this battle for supremacy were the US and China, even if the US was the last country on Earth to recognize this truth.

  Just as had been the case with respect to bin-Laden and Isis, China had caught America asleep at the wheel. Fat and overconfident. A hare so dominant that it actively helped the tortoise catch up, not knowing the tortoise would repay this kindness by kneecapping the hare and bursting into the lead.

  The Chinese people were, by all accounts, a wonderful group—generous and peace-loving—but their government had become totalitarian. While America slept, Xi’s China grew ever more militant, with the Chinese Communist Party making it clear to anyone who wanted to take notice that it considered the US its enemy, even going so far as to publicly declare a “people’s war” on America.

  And still, the vast majority of leaders and citizens in the US remained in blissful ignorance, unaware that anything was happening between the two superpowers other than the occasional rhetorical or trade war.

  Finally, at long last, the battle was formally joined when the head of American Black Ops, General Eric Orlando, read a very shor
t book in 2020, written by a man named Gordon Chang, entitled The Great U.S.—China Tech War. This short treatise had laid out the situation in stark, unmistakable terms. “America needs to prevent the world’s most dangerous regime from dominating the world’s most powerful technologies,” Chang had written. “And we need to be prepared to take drastic, emergency-like measures to prevent Chinese success.”

  Perhaps one sentence summed it up best, “The United States and China are locked in a cold tech war, and the winner will end up dominating the twenty-first century.”

  So “Tech Ops” was born. To keep watch on technology developments around the world, and especially the activities of the communist Chinese, a government that for many years had bribed businesses, scientists, and politicians, stolen intellectual property, perfected a public relations campaign to whitewash the truth and burnish its image that the most duplicitous Hollywood publicist would envy, and had committed whatever ruthless unlawful acts were necessary to gain the upper hand.

  And in many areas China had raced ahead of the world, most recently when it came to critical 5G wireless internet technology and AI.

  But Tech Ops was founded not just to keep watch, but to actively enter the game—at long last. To do what it took to fend off the threat from China and every other country in the world. To fight fire with fire.

  Reed looked up again from his reading as the tiny smart comms embedded deep within his ears sprang to life, delivering the pleasant feminine voice of his personal AI assistant. The AI, which he had named Eve since it was truly the first of its kind, resided not within Eden, but within the world’s most impressive supercomputer at NSA headquarters hundreds of miles away, enabling it to freely draw on all of the NSA’s data and capabilities. It was the most advanced AI, by far, ever developed, and only a few hundred operatives had authorized access.

  “Commander,” it said, “I’m receiving a video call from Colonel Hubbard. Do you want it displayed on your contact lenses or tablet computer?”

  “Lenses,” he replied immediately, and seemingly before he finished the word his commanding officer’s face was projected onto his smart contacts in such a way as to make it appear three-dimensional, about half life-sized, and floating about three feet in front of his eyes.

  “Commander Reed,” said the holographic image without preamble, “it seems we have a bit of a . . . situation. We need you to abort your current mission and take on one of more urgency. A new flight plan has been filed. Your pilot is being ordered to proceed at best speed to a new destination, even as we speak.”

  The jet suddenly banked sharply to the north, right on cue, exerting enough force on its sole passenger to underscore the sense of urgency.

  “Roger that, Colonel,” said Reed. “Where am I headed?”

  “Vermillion, South Dakota.”

  Reed raised his eyebrows. He wasn’t even aware that this was an actual place. “Please repeat,” he requested. “I thought you said Vermillion, South Dakota.”

  “I know,” said Hubbard, shaking her head. “I was just as surprised as you are, Commander. Turns out a twenty-eight-year-old scientist there made what looks to be a breakthrough in qubit design. Dr. Allison ‘Allie’ Keane.”

  The commander nodded. He might be new, but he had understood the importance of such a discovery even before joining Tech Ops. A qubit, short for quantum bit, was the fundamental building block needed to construct a quantum computer.

  At twenty-eight, this Dr. Keane was awfully young, although Reed had to remind himself that he was only five years older. After an extended stint with SEAL Team Six, he sometimes felt like a senior citizen.

  He checked his location, noting that he was over Nebraska, which bordered South Dakota. He had been traveling to a tech conference in New York from his home base in California, so the timing of Hubbard’s call, when he was at his closest to Vermillion, had not been accidental.

  “This could be a huge deal,” continued the colonel. “Because after Dr. Keane made this breakthrough, she posted it on a wide-open online physics forum,” she added disapprovingly.

  “Well that . . . sucks,” noted Reed.

  “Yeah. Even worse, we’re running very late on this one. Since you’re my closest asset, I need you to protect this woman and recruit her if possible. Too late to put this genie back in the bottle, unfortunately. You’ll be landing at Sioux Falls Regional Airport, about sixty miles from Vermillion. I have your flight time at approximately forty minutes. A heavily armored van is already en route, loaded to the gills with weaponry, drones, two portable, shoulder-fired rocket launchers, and so on—just in case—and capable of driverless operation. I’ll send the specs on it and the weaponry we’ll have loaded inside. It’s fairly large, all electric, with the engine and other vital organs protected within a carbyne shell, straps below for stealth incursions, and an extendable triangular ram, made of the same ultra-hard steel as an excavator bucket.”

  “Impressive,” said Reed. “Thanks.”

  “I’ve also scrambled six plain-clothed commandos out of Fort Carson,” added the colonel, referring to an army base in nearby Colorado that was home to the 10th Special Forces Group. “They’re in the air with a faster ride than you have, so they should land in about twenty-five minutes. They’re yours to command as needed. Both the van and men should be on the ground in Sioux Falls when you arrive.”

  “Roger that,” said the commander. “So who is Dr. Keane? And what’s she doing in Vermillion, South Dakota? Last I checked, Silicon Valley didn’t extend quite that far.”

  The colonel smiled. “Yeah, that’s an understatement. She’s an associate professor at the University of South Dakota. Which is one of the reasons she flew under our radar. Not just under, but not even in the same universe as our radar. Which could turn out to be a big problem. You’ve only been on one assignment, Commander, but given your impeccable record with the SEALS, I’m counting on you to make this work.”

  “I won’t let you down, Colonel.”

  “Well, we may have let you down, Commander. This is as tardy as we’ve been with something of this potential magnitude. It’s likely most interested parties also failed to keep tabs on this Dr. Keane, but not all. And everyone will be waking up soon, if they haven’t already. So we’re likely already late to the show, which could be very bad.”

  Reed frowned. Science used to be done out in the open, in a collegial atmosphere, more or less. But the money that could be made from new tech, and the tech wars being waged throughout the world, had changed that dramatically. For certain key areas of science, sharing breakthroughs publicly the moment they were made was a thing of the past.

  Powerful players, both governments and individuals, took care to identify promising scientists and approaches, and to forge lucrative agreements to see any breakthrough work first before it was made public. Or forged other arrangements, including funding the research for a guaranteed license to any results, with preset financial terms for such acquisitions.

  Key scientific discoveries were now driven underground, hoarded, covered by ironclad NDAs. This wasn’t how science was supposed to work, but in modern times technology had repeatedly shown an ability to remake the entire world in the blink of an eye, so it had become the new reality.

  Whether the world would be controlled by dictatorship or democracy could well come down to a single scientist. The recruitment and control of individual geniuses had become far more important than it had been at any time in human history.

  If a lucrative deal couldn’t be signed with a key prospect, Tech Ops would at least see to it that the prospect was monitored, at minimum, for any signs of a breakthrough, and to make sure that any American scientist was prohibited from working with China or other nations.

  “Just how earthshattering is this discovery?” asked Reed.

  “Very,” said the colonel simply. “And by posting it so publicly, she basically unleashed a ball of bread into the ocean.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”


  “My version of chumming the water, Commander. Or for those who like more violent metaphors, throwing a bloody hunk of meat into a shark-infested ocean, or a piranha-infested river. I think of bread because I have personal experience with it. When I was fourteen, my parents and I went on a touristy snorkeling outing while vacationing in Hawaii, and the boat we were on offered loaves of bread and fixings for passengers to make sandwiches. I came up with the epically bad idea to use the bread to entice fish to come into view. I wet an entire loaf and wadded it up into a giant ball. Then I swam away from the boat, dived down about ten feet, and proceeded to obliterate the ball into thousands of tiny bread particles.”

  “I take it that this worked better than you expected.”

  The colonel laughed. “Just a little bit,” she replied. “Within seconds I’m pretty sure every last sea creature in the entire Pacific was surrounding me and the ball. I suspect there were at least a billion of them, but I didn’t stop to count. I was too busy panicking and swimming away like my life depended on it. The bread almost certainly didn’t attract any carnivores, but I’ve never been so terrified.”

  “So you’re saying Dr. Keane had better be a good swimmer.”

  “Yes. And you had better be a good lifeguard, Commander. Because God knows how many fish are already on the way.”

  4

  Reed sighed, wishing he had had a few more months to study up and gain his footing within Tech Ops before becoming the point man on a mission of this potential importance.

  He looked deep into the eyes of the holographic face floating in front of him. The colonel looked anxious, as if willing the Gulfstream to go faster than its top speed. “Let me give you a quick backgrounder on Dr. Keane before I sign off,” she said. “You’ll find a much more extensive briefing in your inbox.”