Dangerous Brains

by Erik Hamre

  Kraut raised his index finger. “Are you saying that Kevorkian’s brain contacted the GPS transmitter through quantum computing? That the electron could be two places at the same time?”

  “Hear me out, Kraut. If there is nothing on the surface, then what Cronus or Kevorkian is pointing to has to be below the surface.”

  “You think Kevin’s body is out there on the bottom of the sea somewhere? That the various locations over the years have been caused by currents and underwater streams?”

  Vladimir shook his head. “No. Currents wouldn’t explain the vast distance between the locations. I think Cronus is pointing to a submarine.”

  “A submarine?”

  “One of the nuclear ones.”

  “What is the reasoning behind that conclusion?”

  “We didn’t detect any activity on the GPS receiver until Cronus attempted to hack the nuclear weapons systems. When it did, it also gained access to the systems running all the nuclear subs in the US. I’m telling you, Kraut. Cronus is telling us to look for a submarine.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Kraut responded.

  “I need access to all the movements of our nuclear submarine fleet over the last ten years. And I need it pronto.”

  The US Admiral on the other end of the phone line had never heard the name Ronald Kraut until he got the call that afternoon. But after verifying that the directive Kraut had rattled off was in fact authentic, he promised to send over the data within the next thirty minutes. Kraut had preferred if it could have been done more rapidly, but under the circumstances he was satisfied. At least he hadn’t stumbled upon a bureaucrat who would cause unnecessary delays.

  And the Admiral delivered on his promise. Exactly twenty-nine minutes later the compressed data file was received on Vladimir’s laptop, and Team Cronus could go to work.

  The problem was that the Admiral had made a critical error when sending the data file. Some missions of his nuclear fleet were Black Ops, and by definition classified. In the haste of making his request Kraut had forgotten to request that any Black Ops missions be included in the file, so the Admiral had simply excluded them on the basis they hadn’t been specifically requested.

  It took almost forty minutes before the mistake was discovered.

  “There is nothing here, Vladimir. I’m telling you. I’ve been through the data ten times. None of the subs were even remotely close to the locations of the GPS transmissions at the time they were supposed to be.”

  “Check again. I know we are missing something,” Vladimir said. Then he left the room. He needed some fresh air.

  As he stood outside the building he came to think of his fellow Russian, Major Olokoff. No one in Team Cronus had any military background. It was in fact insane that civilians were checking the routes of American nuclear submarines. If the data material they had been sent was faulty or lacking, they would have no way of knowing. Vladimir stumped the cigarette butt against the concrete wall and ran back up to the office.

  “We need to get Olokoff out here,” he said, puffing from the short run.

  “We can’t do that. It is both in his own, and our interest that he remains in custody.”

  “What if I tell you Olokoff is the only person that can help us find out what Cronus wants us to find?” Vladimir asked.

  50

  3rd of June 2015

  Kevorkiana HFT’s HQ

  Silicon Valley, California

  DAY 3:

  0640 Hours

  Major Olokoff only had to take one quick glance at the data set he had been given before concluding it was worthless. “They haven’t provided you with anything. They’ve only given you the official routes. The official routes mean nothing.”

  “So the subs may actually have been at other locations than indicated in the data material?”

  “Definitely,” Olokoff replied.

  “I’ll get the Admiral back on the phone. What should I ask for so there is no room for misunderstandings?” Kraut asked.

  “Ask for real routes. No bullshit. Ask for Black Ops, everything.”

  It took another fifteen minutes before the Cronus team had the updated data material at hand. The Admiral had sounded quite nervous when Kraut reminded him of the consequences of not abiding by the President’s directive. But the Admiral could also very well have been stressed by other things going on at the time. The President had ordered all naval vessels to head for the closest friendly port. The admiral, as most other officers in the US Defense Forces, was at that point in time not aware of the full extent of the pending crisis. The President had no real choice. He couldn’t just burst out and tell everyone that the world they had gotten so used to would cease to exist in a few days. That the oven you relied on to cook your food would stop working, that the car you drove to work would break down, that the very job you had spent years securing would probably not be there in a week’s time.

  The world would erupt in chaos in a few days, regardless of how the President approached the problem. The best strategy was to say nothing. To let people figure out things for themselves, once the electricity simply turned off.

  People weren’t stupid. They would intuitively know that some disaster had happened when every city in the world turned dark. There was no point in giving them a reason to blame the governments for it. The governments would be what brought order to the imminent chaos, the governments would be what restored society to its former glory.

  The President had written his speech several months prior to the Cronus incident. He had never in a million years envisioned reading it out publically though. It was something he had done purely for the mental exercise. Most of his regular speeches were created by a team of professional wordsmiths. Vetted and polished until they didn’t really say anything at all. They were just meaningless words he rattled off to please as many voters as possible, words that would maximise his chances of getting re-elected and secure four additional years of influence and steady income for his entourage. But he had grown tired of feeling like a newsreader, reading from a teleprompter. This speech would actually mean something.

  This speech would actually be different.

  If he had struggled to come up with an answer that fateful day he had visited Harvard University, and out of the blue had been asked by a terminally ill student how he had prepared for the arrival of the first Artificial Super Intelligence, he wouldn’t be struggling to find the words when he read out his Cronus Incident speech.

  The words would flow easily.

  The words would go down in history.

  They would become immortal and his everlasting legacy.

  But it would have to wait.

  It was estimated that it would take at least a few months, possibly an entire year, before radio systems and other basic infrastructure would be up and going again. The US government had all the expertise. They were as prepared as one could be. But it would have to be a slow rebuild.

  One didn’t just move from anarchy to democracy in one day.

  He had learnt that fact from all the military interventions he had approved in the Middle East during his tenure. The moment you took out a dictator it could go either way, but anarchy was always the most likely result.

  Taking out a dictator was easy.

  Rebuilding from anarchy was difficult.

  And it took decades.

  Most engineers would have to realign their skills to the new reality as well. Building new hardware wouldn’t mean producing wafer thin microchips in dust free factories - it would mean building working radios and basic electrical equipment.

  “We have a match,” Amanda yelled out.

  “Which sub is it?” Kraut asked.

  “It’s actually two different ones,” Amanda replied.

  “No it’s not,” Olokoff said leaning in closer to the computer screen. “It’s USS Utah. That’s the sub you’re after.”

  “How do you know?”

  “That’s the sub that was at the location of the last GPS transmissi
on. It was previously called USS Mississippi, but it got a new name when they upgraded it three years ago. It belongs in the Ohio class, it’s a boomer.”

  “A boomer?”

  “One of the fourteen ballistic subs the US Navy currently has in operation. They are designed for stealth and precise delivery of nuclear warheads. They’re good, but not as good as our fleet of Akulas, or as you call them, Typhoons.”

  Vladimir found the whole situation surreal. Here they were, tasked with coming up with solutions to stop the imminent threat to their country, and a Russian Major was lecturing them about the specs of US submarines. Instead of coming up with a witty remark though, he checked the status bar of the computer program he had been running for the last twenty minutes. He smiled when he noticed the simulation was completed.

  “Take a look at this,” he said. “I’ve analysed the data from Cronus’ attacks on computer systems around the world.”

  Everybody stared at the screen in front of them.

  “As you can see it started here in California, before expanding to most other states. Then it suddenly headed overseas. The western world was first attacked, then Asia, then basically every country in the world. I wrote a short program to detect what the common denominator for these increasingly broader attacks could be.”

  “What did the program come up with?” Kraut asked.

  “The second of June 2005,” Vladimir answered.

  “What?”

  “Cronus started by hacking all the computer systems in California to find out who was in the state of California on the second of June 2005.”

  “The date of Kevin’s abduction?”

  “Correct. This all relates to Kevin’s abduction. Kevorkian must have created Cronus to find out who could have killed Kevin. By hacking every system in California it created a list of suspects.”

  “Are you suggesting that Cronus has assumed every single person residing in California on that particular date could be a potential suspect?”

  “It appears so. And when you think about it, it’s not such a bad idea. If you had the resources to treat every single person in the state of California as a suspect, and you had access to all the digital information ever stored about them, every document they have ever authored on a computer, every phone call they have ever made, footage of every time they have passed a CCTV camera, then you could very well pick up something that the police department could have missed.”

  “But why is it pointing to a nuclear sub then? Is it trying to tell us that the culprit is one of the men on-board?”

  “Maybe. But we can’t afford to jump to any conclusions,” Vladimir cautioned. He glanced at his watch.

  06:45

  In just over three hours and forty-five minutes the nukes would start detonating. They were working against an extremely short deadline.

  “Find out where the sub is at this very moment. We need to interrogate all the crew,” Kraut said. “Amanda, look for any connections between Kevorkian, his companies, and any crew on-board the submarine. That might help us narrow down the search.”

  “It’s right here. It’s right off the coast here in California. Due to dock in just two hours,” Amanda said.

  “We can’t wait that long. Amanda, organise a chopper and get the sub to surface. We need to get on-board straight away.”

  “What about the no flying rule? You said we weren’t supposed to fly anymore.”

  “To hell with it. We’ll take the risk.”

  Vladimir just nodded. He wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of jumping on-board a helicopter. At least not until they knew the reason why Mike Hanna's ride had crashed. But Kraut was of course correct; they couldn’t afford to wait. They had to interview the crew on-board the sub as soon as possible.

  “Chopper is ready outside. You’ll be on-board the sub in less than thirty minutes,” Amanda said.

  “Great. Let’s go Vladimir.” Kraut grabbed his jacket from the office chair, and headed for the door.

  Vladimir followed.

  51

  3rd of June 2015

  Kevorkiana HFT’s HQ

  Silicon Valley, California

  DAY 3:

  0650 Hours

  In the helicopter, on the way to the submarine, there was one thought Vladimir couldn’t get out of his head: How had the GPS receiver been able to receive the signal? Vladimir was the one who had proposed the outrageous theory that Kevorkian’s physical brain was somehow still connected to the artificial copy they had created at Neuralgo, and that the mode of communication between the two could possibly be explained by quantum theory. But even if the physical and the artificial brains were able to communicate, it didn’t explain how they were able to communicate with the GPS receiver. And it most certainly didn’t explain how Cronus had been able to communicate with the GPS transmitter back in time. Because that was a natural logic conclusion; that the pings Kevorkian had received on the anniversaries of Kevin’s abduction over the last couple of years were actually Cronus attempting to reveal to Kevorkian who was behind Kevin’s abduction, even before he had created Cronus.

  Time travel would however contradict the known physical laws of the universe, so how was it possible that Cronus had been able to send a signal back in time? Or had something entirely different actually happened?

  “I don’t understand it,” Vladimir said. “There must be something we’ve missed. Something obvious.”

  “Why?” Kraut asked. He was strapped into the seatbelt in the helicopter, staring out the open side door. His mind seemed to have drifted away to some happy memory long gone, and Vladimir almost felt bad for dragging him back to reality.

  “A GPS signal needs a clear line of sight to be picked up by the satellites. We know the submarine was submerged when we received the last signal. Now this could be explained by quantum computing, if it works. But it doesn’t explain how the GPS receiver was pinged in previous years. How was that possible? How could the signal have gotten through in those previous years?”

  “You think Cronus transmitted those signals too? That Cronus somehow has figured out a way to send information back in time?”

  Vladimir nodded. “I know it sounds insane. But how do you otherwise explain it?”

  “I can’t,” Kraut said, his head cradled in his hands. He looked ten years older than he had only two days earlier. His face had turned a grey and deep bags of skin weighed down his cheeks. Gravity was taking its toll. Reality was taking its toll.

  “Does it really matter whether we figure out what Cronus wants us to figure out anyway?” Vladimir asked, philosophically. “It’s not like anything can stop the nukes from blasting us backwards in time.”

  Kraut nodded. “I don’t know the answer to that question, Vladimir. But I do know I would rather spend my last hours of civilized life attempting to get to the bottom of this mystery than prepping for some society I have no intention to live in.”

  “You’re not going to fight for your own survival?”

  Kraut shook his head. “For me the road ends figuring out what happened here. I never liked camping much anyway.”

  Vladimir laughed. “You might change your mind once it becomes reality. You don’t strike me as someone who gives up.”

  “We’ll see. We’ll see,” Kraut mumbled, returning his gaze to the scenery outside the open door once again.

  The helicopter ride to just off the coast of San Diego took thirty-five minutes. It was the longest thirty-five minutes of Vladimir’s life, and it made him ponder about how humans perceived time, and what time really was. Could it really be that it was possible to send a digital signal back in time? Was there something our brightest physicists had missed when they tried to understand and explain quantum mechanics? Vladimir didn’t think so. He wasn’t one of those computer geeks who loved watching Star Trek and reading science fiction novels.

  Vladimir was a grounded person.

  Rock solid.

  He was the geek version of Vladimir Putin.


  Until the day he was made aware that he had been partaking in creating Cronus, the day he was made aware that he unwittingly had helped create the first Artificial General Intelligence.

  Until that day, he had been all that.

  That day changed everything for Vladimir Sorovis though.

  That day changed absolutely everything.

  52

  3rd of June 2015

  Kevorkiana HFT’s HQ

  Silicon Valley, California

  DAY 3:

  0700 Hours

  The mood was tense back at the premises of Kevorkiana High Frequency Trading. Amanda had been tasked with identifying crewmembers with any links to Andrew Kevorkian and the string of companies he had been involved with throughout his career. The problem was that even though she had been granted full access to personnel files of the one hundred and forty or so enlisted crew and fifteen officers on-board USS Utah, the files didn’t reveal any obvious links to Kevorkian. From time to time a couple of the crew had owned shares in one of Kevorkian’s listed companies, but so had hundreds of thousands of other Americans. Owning shares in a company Kevorkian had once founded hardly qualified one to be a suspect in an abduction and murder case anyway.

  “I think this might be another dead end,” the soldier with an advanced degree in computer science said. He had been driven down from Nevada, along with twenty other DARPA analysts, to assist with the operation from Kevorkiana HFT.

  “Keep looking,” Amanda snapped.

  “These guys are military guys, submarine guys. They are some of the toughest people in the world. None of these guys has ever worked in a tech company. I’m telling you.”