by Jude Hardin
Cara exited the building and walked out to her car. Before starting at CereCirc, she’d never smoked a cigarette in her life, but it was a good excuse to leave the building several times a day, to get outside where she could make phone calls or send text messages without having to look over her shoulder every five seconds. So six years ago she’d learned how to smoke cigarettes, and now she was hooked on the things. Amazing what people will do for money sometimes, she thought. Emphysema, heart disease, cancer. She planned on quitting when this assignment was over, though—smoking and espionage.
They were both bad for your health.
She climbed into her car, lit a Marlboro, punched Oberwand’s number into her encrypted cell phone.
“Yeah,” he said.
“Why can’t you answer the phone politely once in a while? You know, like a regular person.”
“It’s five o’clock in the morning, Cara. What do you want?”
“I thought you might like to know about the test subject who came in tonight, but I guess not. I’ll let you get back to your beauty rest.”
“Wait. They found someone for the MK-2?”
“Aggerson is installing the device as we speak. Twenty-four-year-old Navy guy, got dropped from the SEAL program yesterday.”
“Interesting. Why did he get dropped?”
“He made it through BUD/S and static line and then chickened out on the freefall, if you can imagine that.”
“How is he?”
“Aggerson couldn’t have asked for a better specimen. Well-defined musculature, perfect diagnostics, textbook blood work. And he seems very bright.”
“Good,” Oberwand said.
“I’m assuming that means you want to go ahead and implement the plan.”
“Of course.”
“When?”
“Let’s give it a couple of days, time for Aggerson to get all the software installed and tweaked, and time for him to run the initial performance tests. Keep me updated. We want as much information on board as possible, and we want to make sure the thing’s working right before we go through with the plan. We only have one shot at this, Cara. We need to get it right the first time.”
Cara took a drag on her cigarette, inhaled the smoke deeply. “This is going to be it for me. You know that, right? Once you get what you need and give me my bonus, I’m retiring. I’m out of here.”
Oberwand sighed. “Don’t remind me,” he said. “I’m going to miss you, my dear. But don’t worry. You’ll get everything that’s coming to you, and more.”
Cara said goodbye and disconnected. She opened the car door, smashed the cigarette on the pavement with the toe of her shoe, got out and shut the door and walked back inside.
10 hours and 28 minutes before the blast…
Some of Clive Aggerson’s earliest and best memories were of his mother and father sitting at the dinner table, eating and drinking and discussing everything from news and politics to the latest John D. MacDonald paperback. Clive sat there quietly most of the time, eating his roast beef and mashed potatoes and absorbing as much of the conversation as his young mind could understand—which was quite a lot, actually. By the time he was eight, he knew more about subjects like Vietnam and Grand Funk Railroad and Watergate than most adults.
Aggerson’s father drove a forklift in a warehouse, but he always wanted something better for his only child.
You’re a smart boy, Clive. You can be anything you want to be.
And it was true. Aggerson had always been extremely bright. He grew up in an era before the term gifted came into vogue, but his grades were outstanding, and once he made it to high school, he was placed in every advanced class that the public school system had to offer.
So yes, he could have been anything he wanted to be.
But that was the thing. He didn’t want to be anything. He didn’t want some kind of ordinary job where he had to answer to a boss and struggle for years and years to climb some sort of ridiculous invisible ladder where success was measured in dollars and cents and vacations to the Bahamas. Like Robert Frost, the poet, he wanted to take the road less traveled. He wanted to invent, to create, to do something big and important with his life.
His father never understood it, really. He went to his grave not understanding it.
You’re a doctor, Clive. You could be making hundreds of thousand of dollars a year. You could have a wife and some kids and a nice big house…
But Dr. Clive Aggerson didn’t care about any of that. To him, those things would only be a distraction, a hindrance to progress, a potential pathway to failure and misery. He’d watched too many of his colleagues waste too many years on all of that nonsense. Piano recitals, little league games, riding lawn mowers. Most of them ended up in divorce court, losing the fine homes they’d spent half their lives working for, and losing a great deal of their sanity as well. Thanks, but no thanks.
No, that kind of life was not for Clive Aggerson. He didn’t want any part of it. He was meant to do great things, and doing great things required focus and dedication. A family—or even a close friend—was something Aggerson didn’t have time for. He wanted to be in the history books. He wanted the name Clive Aggerson to be recognized hundreds of years after he was gone.
And now, with the MK-2, he was well on his way to achieving that goal.
Ten of his top associates had gathered in the control room to witness the historic occasion.
Invitation only.
Aggerson walked in and took a seat at the console.
Following the surgery, Petty Officer Third Class Nathan Brennan had slept for almost seven hours. He’d eaten lunch, and now he was relaxing comfortably in a chair on the other side of the glass. He wore black sweatpants, a black t-shirt, and a pair of Adidas running shoes.
Aggerson pushed a button and disabled the switchable electrochromic two-way mirror separating the control room from the monitor room. Now his test subject could see him. He keyed the microphone on the intercom system and said, “Good afternoon.”
“Hello,” Brennan said. “How long have you been watching me?”
“Just got here. How are you feeling?”
“Peachy. Is it over yet? Can I go home now?”
Aggerson laughed. “Actually, we haven’t even started yet, but that’s a question you’re likely to ask four weeks from now when it really is time for you to depart. You won’t have any recollection of the experiment. In your mind, it will be as though you just woke from a nice long nap.”
“Kind of scary, doc, but I guess that’s what I signed up for. You won’t let any of these women around here take advantage of me while I’m out of it, will you?”
“You have a good sense of humor. I like that. I’m going to activate the device in a minute, so I want you to try to relax. Close your eyes and try to think of a nice calm place.”
Brennan closed his eyes. “Will I even know my name when this thing gets turned on?” he said.
“No, you’ll answer to MK-2, our official designation for the implant. If you’re ready, I’m going to go ahead and start the initiation sequence.”
“Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.”
“Good. See you in twenty-eight days.”
Aggerson lifted the handheld remote control from the desk and held his thumb on the red button.
Five seconds ticked by.
Ten.
The men and women standing behind Aggerson started mumbling.
Something was wrong.
The device wasn’t working.
Then, as though he might have been experiencing a mild seizure, Brennan’s muscles started twitching. His eyes fluttered open, and he climbed out of the chair and stood at attention.
“MK-2 reporting for duty, sir,” he said.
The room erupted in applause.
Hugs and handshakes and pats on the back all around.
A single tear escaped from the corner of Dr. Aggerson’s right eye, warmly caressing his cheek as it trickled toward his chin. Seven year
s of painstaking labor had finally paid off. This was more than science. It was art, a thing of beauty, a gloriously computerized human being, standing there calmly waiting for the first command.
“It’s alive!” Ted McKinney said, jokingly mimicking a proclamation first made famous by actor Colin Clive in the 1931 film Frankenstein.
Aggerson turned around and fired him on the spot.
9 hours and 57 minutes before the blast…
Blackness, oblivion, followed by a flood of brightness that started at the top of his scalp and ended at the tips of his toes. The light engulfed him, bathed him, washed over him in continuous pulsating waves.
MK-2 was awake.
A blinking cursor and a blue computer display floated translucently in front of his left eye. The vivid hologram said WELCOME TO THE WORLD, MK-2. INITIATION SEQUENCE: COMPLETE. BASIC MILITARY SOFTWARE INSTALLATION: COMPLETE. AWAITING FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.
After a few seconds, he realized that he could make the display appear or disappear at will, just by thinking about it. This didn’t seem unusual. It felt like something he’d always been able to do, as natural as closing his eyes and picturing a day at the beach. He felt completely rested, focused, refreshed and energetic, ready to take on the world.
A world which, at the moment, he didn’t seem to know much about.
He stood at attention and stared straight ahead. He recognized the man sitting at the console on the other side of the glass. It was Dr. Clive Aggerson, his commanding officer. Dr. Aggerson would teach him what he needed to know. Dr. Aggerson would tell him what to do.
He knew this, somehow, although he couldn’t recall his last meal, or anything that had happened before he opened his eyes.
MK-2 stood there rigidly and waited for his orders, ready to go to work, anxious to do something extraordinary for the United States of America.
9 hours and 48 minutes before the blast…
To Dr. Clive Aggerson and the ten—make that nine—scientists surrounding him, the successful installation of the MK-2 was every bit as momentous as when Charles Lindbergh landed in France, or when Neil Armstrong and crew landed on the moon. It represented years of sacrifice and hard work.
And now, Aggerson thought, the real work could begin.
His team, eager to begin the revelry—and rightfully so—started filing out of the control room and heading toward the cafeteria, where trays of food and cases of champagne awaited them and the other day shift employees. Aggerson planned to throw another party for the night shift as soon as they came in, and then he would send them home as well. It was a special occasion, and everyone involved deserved to share in the celebration.
Nobody seemed particularly surprised or dismayed about Ted McKinney, who was probably busy loading the contents of his desk into boxes by now. They’d all seen Dr. Aggerson capriciously dismiss CereCirc employees before. Maybe some of them felt that terminating McKinney was unreasonable, but Aggerson didn’t care. He couldn’t tolerate his marvelous technological breakthrough being compared to a monster in a book of fiction.
Cara Skellar, Dr. Aggerson’s chief chemical engineer, was the last member of the team to leave the control room. Skellar, a genius in her own right, had formulated a special stealth coating for the MK-2, making it invisible to radiographic scans.
“Aren’t you coming?” she said.
“I need to put the unit in standby mode and then load a few programs,” Aggerson said. “I’ll be there in a little while.”
“Need some help?”
“You should go celebrate with the others, and then take the rest of the day off. You’ve worked hard. You deserve a break. We’ll all be back at it hard tomorrow.”
“Well, I’m not very hungry, so—”
“Of course if you really want to stay, I would welcome the company,” Aggerson said. “What I’m going to do shouldn’t take long.”
Cara took a seat beside him at the console. She was thirty-two years old, with fair skin and long blond hair and the body of a professional tennis player. Sometimes she wore eyeglasses, sometimes contact lenses. Today it was the glasses. She was the most physically attractive female member of Dr. Aggerson’s elite little team, and certainly one of the most intelligent. If Dr. Aggerson had any interest in pursuing intimate relations with anyone at CereCirc—which he didn’t—Cara Skellar would have been at the top of the list.
“This is exciting,” Cara said. “Benjamin-Franklin-discovering-electricity exciting. There’s no telling where this might lead.”
Aggerson nodded. “I think what we have to remember, though, is that our little brain-computer interface, no matter how sophisticated, is really just a tool. And like any other tool, it has the potential to be destructive if it ends up in the wrong hands. If I give you a hammer, for example, you might want to build a house with it. Or, you might want to bury it in my skull.”
“Oh, I would never do that. You have such a nice skull.”
Aggerson smiled. “Let me just do a few things here, and then we’ll join the others in the lunchroom.”
“Sounds good.”
The test subject was still standing at attention on the other side of the glass.
Aggerson keyed the microphone. “Please state your name and your primary and secondary directives,” he said.
“My name is MK-2. My primary directive is to defend the constitution of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic, to the best of my ability. My secondary directive is to survive, at all costs, while attempting to maintain my first directive. My country and I are one. A strike against me is a strike against the United States.”
“Please state your current chain of command.”
“My current chain of command consists of two individuals. It starts with Dr. Clive Aggerson, and it ends with the admiral.”
“At ease, MK-2. Please take a seat in the chair behind you.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
Aggerson turned to Dr. Skellar. “For the purposes of the study, I’ll be the only person actually issuing orders and loading new software. He’s been programmed to recognize my voice, and everything to be uploaded is password protected. As a safety feature, I added voice recognition for a naval officer who’s been working with me on the project. Just in case I drop dead or something.”
“And your officer friend is aware of this?”
“Yes. If anything happens to me, Admiral Lacy can shut the device down completely with a secret phrase I’ve passed on to him. Once he utters the phrase, the internal components will self-destruct, and the test subject will revert to his baseline state. He won’t remember any part of our little experiment.”
“So is he basically some kind of drone? I mean, what happens if neither of you is around to issue orders? He just sits there and doesn’t do anything?”
“He’s not a drone,” Aggerson said. “He’s perfectly capable of acting independently should the need arise.”
“Will he always speak so mechanically? So robotically?”
“Funny you should mention that. There’s a human inflection algorithm in the first program I’m adding.”
“Fascinating,” Skellar said.
With a couple of clicks of the mouse and a few keystrokes, Dr. Aggerson started uploading the first program on his list.
“He’ll sound much more human in just a few minutes,” Aggerson said. “And he’ll be able to sound that way in eight different languages.”
“What other programs are you going to add today?”
“I have one called Martial Arts. It covers the gambit of ancient and modern hand-to-hand combat. Tae Kwon Do, Judo, Shaolin Kung Fu, you name it. I can give him a lifetime of training in the time it takes to cook an egg. I have one called Running, Swimming, and Cycling that will give him enough speed and endurance to set world triathlon records. I have one called Handgun Proficiency, one called Explosive Ordinance Disposal, and another called Ten Pin Bowling. There’s one called Basic Flight that covers fixed-wing and rotary-wing ai
rcraft. And then there’s the General Knowledge program. History, art, literature, pop culture, mathematics. All kinds of stuff. He’ll be able to answer every question the television show Jeopardy ever came up with. And then there’s the Assassin program. We’re going to perform our first mock kill mission day after tomorrow, so I want to go ahead and get that one loaded and calibrated.”
“Wireless Internet?”
“Of course. Accessed through the same networks used for cell phones, and then fed directly to his brain.”
“Anything else?”
Aggerson laughed. “I think that should be enough for one day. I don’t want to overdo it.”
“Why bowling?” Skellar said. “I’m just trying to imagine why a Special Forces soldier would ever need that particular skill.”
“I’ll show you in a few minutes.”
Skellar nodded. “So what’s he going to be when he’s finished? Superman?”
Given Ted McKinney’s blunder just moments ago, Aggerson was surprised by Dr. Skellar’s crass cultural reference. He let it slide.
“No, there’s nothing superhuman about any of this. Not really. The BCI only enhances what the test subject had to start with. Most people never know what they’re actually capable of. Hardly anyone would be motivated to memorize the complete works of William Shakespeare, for example, even though most people could do it if they tried. It would take years the old-fashioned way, of course. With the BCI, it only takes seconds. The storage capacity for the human brain is virtually limitless, so once time is taken out of the equation, a whole new world of knowledge and abilities becomes available. Right now we’re developing the MK-2 for the United States military, but I can envision a future where brain-computer interfaces are as common as smart phones. And that future isn’t as far off as you might think.”
“What you’ve accomplished here is truly amazing, Dr. Aggerson. I’m just happy that I was able to be a small part of it.”
“I couldn’t have done any of it without you and the rest of the team,” Aggerson said. “I’m going to load these programs now, and then we’ll head on over to the gym. If you’re still interested, that is.”