Christie nodded almost manically. "Okay, I buy that. But what idea? What’s the big idea that we’re supposed to come up with? I don’t know shit about guns."
"Me neither," admitted Yatin. He held the gun up and looked at it. "Let’s think about the significance of this gun. This is the gun Henry uses, so this is the gun that Henry is supposed to use to kill…" He glanced at Tina, wary of her reaction, but she seemed calm, staring At the gun. "…to kill the girl. That’s the only thing that distinguishes this gun from any other gun."
"Well, it’s also an automatic, not a revolver," said Christie. "Maybe that has something to do with it."
"Yeah, but I don’t know what. Like I said, I don’t anything about guns. Why does it matter what kind of gun it is?"
"I know," Tina said suddenly. "I think I know. Henry taught me how to use his gun, in case I needed to use it. I think… I have a question."
"What?" Yatin asked.
"Why does Oracle want Henry to kill Sam?"
"I don’t know," Yatin said. "Except that I’d venture to say that it has something to do with the fact that Henry won’t to do it. Oracle picked Henry precisely for that reason, I’m certain of it."
"I see," said Tina. She didn’t elaborate.
"What do you see?" Christie asked. She was frantically reaching into her pocket, and pulled out her pen and small pad of paper.
"I think I know what to do," Tina said, "but I’m not sure…" Her emotions had apparently been in check, because suddeenly they all flooded out. Tears started leaking from her eyes. "Oh, God, what if I’m wrong?"
"Tell us what you think, and if we all three agree on it, we’ll do it," Yatin said. "If either one of us has any problems with it, we’ll have to think of something else. Okay?"
Tina nodded, wiping away her tears. "Okay."
"Time," Angus said. He looked over at Martin Avery and nodded. Martin gave Milla a hand signal.
Milla grabbed a little black girl with pink ribbons in her hair, and hauled her to the stairwell of the bus, then down onto the cement. Suddenly, as Milla raised her gun, Cardinal Roscoe lurched forward and shoved her backwards into the bus. She spun and swept his legs out from underneath him and he hit the cement hard.
"Kill me instead!" Cardinal Roscoe shouted, scrambling back to his feet.
"Wait!" Angus yelled. Martin signaled for Milla to pause. Her gun was aimed at the little girl’s head. Cardinal Roscoe climbed to his feet. "Are you sure?" Angus asked.
"Yes." Cardinal Roscoe looked serious. "Take my life, and spare the child’s."
"All right, then," Angus said. He nodded to Martin. Martin signaled for Milla to shoot the Cardinal. Without hesitation she shot Cardinal Roscoe once in chest at point blank range. The Cardinal staggered back but remained on his feet.
"Please…forgive me…" he said, "…as I forgive you…all." He raised his hand to form a cross, but Milla shot him in the head. He fell to the cement floor with a thud, dead.
"Damn it if that didn’t go exactly as Oracle predicted," Angus said.
The door to the warehouse office opened, and out came Tina, flanked by Christie and Yatin.
"And now we come to the finale," Angus said, grinning. "Jesus, I’m nervous. I feel like the director of a movie and this is the big Hollywood premier."
Tina ignored him and walked directly up to Henry. She was holding his gun. He turned to face her. Sam stayed where she was after Angus shot her a look.
"I’m not going to do it," was the first thing Henry said to Tina. He could tell by the look in her eyes that she was going to ask him to do it.
She looked up into his eyes, not blinking. "I know," she said. "I also know that you came back for me when you didn’t have to. I trusted you when you said you would, and you did. Now I want you to trust me. This has to end. Only you can end it. Take this gun, aim it at…" Tina couldn’t get through it. She closed her eyes, held back a sob and took a deep breath. When she opened her eyes again she said, "There is so much I want to tell you, but I can’t right now. All I can tell you is this…if you are willing to trust me as I trusted you, take this gun. Do it. Take this gun, Henry."
In one hand she held the gun, and with her other she reached down and grabbed his gun hand, lifted it, palm up, and placed the gun in it. Then she flicked the safety off. When she let go, Henry held the gun. He hefted it, a motion so slight no one save Angus would likely notice. It was heavy. That meant it was loaded.
Henry and Tina still looked into each other’s eyes. "Do what you were sent to do, Henry," Tina said. "If you trust me, then you must believe everything will be all right. Do you understand? Everything will be all right." Windows to the soul, Henry thought. Tina was showing him her soul, hiding nothing.
Henry looked into her eyes for a long time. Angus checked his stop watch.
"One minute, Henry. A child dies, one way or another," he said.
Henry turned to look at Sam. She stood there on the mark like a good little girl, looking right back at Henry with those big, brown eyes. He could see in her eyes that she knew he’d killed her parents, and now…
"I’m sorry, Connie," Henry said. He raised the gun and aimed it at Samantha. He squeezed the trigger.
Nothing happened. The gun did not fire.
"Bloody hell," Angus said.
Henry saw Martin Avery raise his own gun, and he turned to see that Martin was about to shoot Sam. Henry took aim at Martin and squeezed the trigger of his gun, forgetting that it didn’t have a bullet in the chamber. It clicked harmlessly for the second time. Angus spun and shot Martin, the bullet hitting him in the arm, fouling his aim. His gun went off, but the bullet missed Sam. Henry pulled back the slide on his gun and let it go, ramming a bullet into the chamber. He took aim and fired, shooting Martin through the right eye before the Brit could take another shot at Sam, killing him instantly.
Angus and Henry then both spun to take aim at Milla, who had anticipated that she would be next. They all fired at the same time, Milla choosing Angus as her target. Angus felt the bullet from Milla’s gun ram into his chest while he saw blood explode from her throat, which had been his shot, and from the center of her chest, which had been Henry’s. Milla staggered backwards, shifting her aim to Henry, and Henry fired another round into her chest. She was dead before she hit the concrete floor.
Angus dropped to his knees. Now Henry aimed his gun at him. "It worked," Angus said. "I can’t believe it worked. Bloody amazing."
"You knew we’d figure it out?" Christie asked him.
"Oi, I didn’t know a bloody thing. Oracle knew, though. Oracle knew everything."
Tina had gone over to Sam, knelt down before her. Henry came over to Angus.
"It’s over now, isn’t it?" Henry asked.
"Yeah, mate, it’s over. I don’t really know what it was all for, mind you, but I do know that it’s over."
"I know what it was for," Yatin said. He stood over by a computer monitor near what looked like a bank of mainframe computers. "Oracle has crashed. Gone into a logic loop, to be more precise, but the effect is the same. Oracle experienced a contradiction in its programming that it knew could not occur. It knew that there was a zero percent chance that Henry would kill Samantha, yet Henry performed an act that he believed would kill Samantha. Impossible, according to Oracle. Of course, as we know, he didn’t kill Sam. Exactly as Oracle predicted. So now Oracle will spend the rest of eternity going over and over and over the events we just witnessed, trying to figure out the loophole, even though it knows that the loophole is trust. But an A.I. can’t understand trust, can’t measure it…yet somehow Oracle was able to make use of the concept of trust to make…this…" Yatin gestured around them. "…happen."
"Right," Angus said, obviously not getting it. Oracle had said he would know what to do next, once it was over. So it was over, and Angus did know. It made perfect sense, given who he was and what he’d done, and now what would happen to him. If he didn’t get immediate help, he would die anyway. "Well, then, the
re is one last thing for me to do." He raised his gun, pointed it at his own temple. "Goodbye, Henry." With that, he squeezed the trigger and blew his own brains out.
"We have to get her to a hospital," Yatin pleaded. Annika lay on the cold cement floor, her face pale, eyes open but unfocused, breathing shallow.
"We have to get these kids out of here," Henry told him. "Before this place blows." They had checked the Oracle node and found it ringed by C4 explosives with a timer that gave them ten minutes, and counting. No one even suggested trying to disarm the bomb. They all knew it was supposed to go off, that it was part of the plan.
They carried the bodies of the dead child and the school bus driver onto the bus, then Annika Dahl. Christie held Annika’s hand tightly in her own.
"It’s over," Christie told Annika. "You’ll be okay."
Tina put Sam on the bus with the other kids. Seeing Sam, alive and well, Annika managed a smile. Yatin Kumar maneuvered the bus out, past the bodies of Cardinal Roscoe, Angus Becker, and the others. And Oracle, he thought. Oracle was already ‘dead,’ as it were, trapped in an endless logic loop, incapable of functioning except on the most basic level of a supercomputer, like any other supercomputer. The explosion would really only be for show.
"Stop," Henry said.
Yatin braked.
"I’m not going with you. Open the door."
Yatin opened the door. Henry turned to Sam and Tina.
"It’s best if you guys go with Mr. Kumar," Henry told them.
"What about you?" Tina asked him.
He shrugged.
"Then we’re going with you," she said. She took Sam by the hand.
"I don’t know if that’s such a good idea," he said.
"I don’t either," Tina replied.
It was obvious she wasn’t going to take no for an answer.
Yatin managed to maneuver the bus onto the street, and then headed towards Grady Hospital in downtown Atlanta, directed by Christie. Right as the bus reached the hospital they heard, and felt, the massive explosion that buried the last few days of their lives under tons of concrete, steel, and lies.
Chapter 40
"Mr. Kumar, you deny ever making the statements attributed to you in Christie Seifert’s book, regarding the incident at the Georgia State Archives building in Atlanta."
"Yes."
"What about the Security Council’s insistence on allowing Oracle to manage peacekeeping missions for the U.N.? Did that create a loophole in Oracle’s code that also allowed it to implement this program of assassination about which Miss Seifert writes?"
"I think that Miss Seifert, like any good conspiracy theorist, has taken a series of unrelated incidents and fabricated a string with which to connect them."
"Your relationship with Annika Dahl, daughter of Sweden’s Ambassador to the United Nations…"
"What about it?"
"Was it arranged by Oracle?"
"Oracle was not programmed to be a matchmaker."
"She was not used by Oracle to lure you to Atlanta, then?"
"We met by chance on the way to Atlanta to attend a human rights conference at the Carter Center. That is all I have to say on the subject of Annika Dahl."
"In her book, Miss Seifert disputes the claim that you and Miss Dahl were abducted by the North Florida militia unit that blew up the Archives building, that in fact you both went to the Archives building of your own free will on a mission to destroy Oracle and that the militia’s presence there, unbeknownst to them, was merely a smokescreen to disguise the truth of what actually happened."
"I haven’t read her book."
"She further asserts that Miss Dahl received the wound from which she later died by an assassin sent by Oracle."
"My own account of those events is in the public record."
"Yes. Your claim is that the North Florida militia shot her, and also held a school bus full of children hostage, killing the bus driver and one student…as inducement to make sure you cooperated in showing them how to rig the explosives to…correct me if I’m wrong…create a surge in Oracle’s node that would reverberate across the Internet and corrupt Oracle’s core programming. I believe you called it akin to giving Oracle a frontal lobotomy."
"Yes."
"And that is what happened?"
"Again, my account of these events is in the public record, but yes, it is."
"Other experts in Artificial Intelligence dispute the viability of your claim. They say it’s impossible, that physically destroying one node could not possibly have taken out Oracle or any other A.I. for that matter."
"I am aware of these abnegations."
"Do you wish to respond to them?
"No."
Ironically, although there were setbacks in many of Oracle’s initiatives once people realized the A.I. had crashed, most of them were back on track and progressing even more smoothly than before. Without Oracle, the world continued. Yatin Kumar’s employment with the U.N., however, did not. He was going back to his alma mater, to teach A.I. theory. And to warn future versions of himself against giving any single A.I. too much power to influence the course of civilization, although he still believes that A.I. as a whole would prove to be beneficial to humanity.
Yatin Kumar looked at her picture one last time on his computer before deleting the file. He knew that Oracle had meant for Annika to survive being shot by Angus Becker. It had not worked out that way. No one, man nor machine, could direct events so precisely. In the end, despite all of Oracle’s ability to manipulate human beings, the one, true, underlying purpose of Oracle’s existence had turned out to be a lie.
Christie Seifert’s book had a six-week run on the New York Times bestseller list, reaching as high as number five. What had sold it to the publisher was her interview with Vincent Waldrup, formerly the United States Ambassador to the United Nations. But his revelations about the secret network of anti-U.N. terrorist forces in America, and their link to Senator Watts and the right-wing militias he supported, which seemingly bolstered Yatin Kumar’s version of the story, were dismissed as outright lies by Christie Seifert.
Waldrup’s death just subsequent to the publication of Selfert’s book helped propel it to the Bestseller list. He was hit by a car while crossing Second Avenue in midtown Manhattan, distracted by his cell phone. His ‘suspicious’ death seemed to add credence to Waldrup’s own statement that he had evidence linking Senator Watts to the Florida militia group. It surprised no one that a man who had crossed Senator Watts had then been ‘accidentally’ run over by a car while crossing the street.
In the book, Seifert espoused a theory that Oracle’s assassinations each had to be approved by the permanent members of the Security Council. Waldrup had vehemently denied this. The other Ambassadors for the permanent members of the Security Council also denied it, calling Seifert’s allegations pure fantasy. Nothing could be proven. Only Teng-chi declined to comment. Although it was claimed to be unrelated, China’s Ambassador retired only a few months before the publication of the book.
There was some damning evidence in support of her claims. First of all was the abandoned house where the Rohdes had lived. Seifert managed to locate it and prove that yes, there was a family named Rohde, and yes, they had a little girl named Samantha…and yes, they had disappeared without a trace. Her detractors called it coincidence. Her supporters called it proof. The Rohde’s were never seen again, nor were their remains ever recovered.
Christie also claimed a link to a murder in a poor black neighborhood in south Atlanta, at the home of an elderly woman named Eunice Campbell. Along with the badly burned body of Eunice were found several other, unidentifiable bodies. They had all been shot and were dead before the fire was started, according to a forensics report. Local authorities were treating that as a drug-related crime due to an ongoing turf war between rival drug gangs in the neighborhood. Rumor had it that there was some FBI interest in the case, but no one from the FBI ever came forward to confirm or deny it.
; Seifert’s critics claimed that her book conveniently gave Oracle far more power than it really had. The book claimed that Oracle had altered or falsified records to account for everyone involved in her conspiracy, while managing to successfully hide the truth. For instance, she firmly claimed that a Roman Catholic Cardinal had been with her the whole time, but the Vatican produced records to show this particular Cardinal had been murdered a year earlier in Ecuador by pro-government forces during a protest to oust the President.
She claimed that she, the Cardinal, Oracle’s assassin whom she called Henry, and the little Rohde girl had been shelted by Coca-Cola executive Juan Alonso, who had been coincidentally murdered that same weekend by home invaders.
Seifert’s most intriguing allegation was this: the aim of what had happened, as accounted in her book, was that Oracle had engineered its own downfall by setting into motion, and manipulating, a series of events that would result in its demise. Oracle had been able to predict when certain individuals might pose a threat to civilization. A programming loophole created by the Security Council’s insistence on allowing Oracle to manage peacekeeping missions actually gave Oracle the means to engineer the assassination of these individuals. However, Oracle could not simply order its own assassination when it determined that it, itself, was becoming a threat to the stability of civilization. Nor could Oracle simply turn itself off. It had to manipulate a series of events that involved its own creator, assassins, a U.S. Senator, a Catholic Cardinal, a little girl, a school bus full of children, a Coca Cola executive, a right-wing militia group, and the daughter of the Swedish Ambassador to the United Nations, among other disparate yet interconnected elements, to bring itself down.
The sheer of audacity of this book made it a ‘must read’ for conspiracy buffs, but even they shook their heads in amusement upon reaching the last page.
"You’re not leaving," Tina told Henry, who had already packed his bags. Teddy, Tina’s cat, had curled up on Henry’s suitcase and was fast asleep.
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