by Greg Bear
"All right," Camp said. "Seven little Indians. How many does that leave?"
"You, me . . ." He looked again at the third body and felt sweat break out. He did not want to say who this was, because it was impossible. He had heard the voice. The voice had been giving him instructions for days.
"You. Me. Jerry Lee. Bork," he finished. "Maybe that's it."
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Lion City
William drove the PerpTrans van off the road and behind a deserted, boarded-up gas station garage. To Little Jamey's slack-jawed astonishment, the two DOC officers riding with him in the back pulled jeans and sweatshirts from a knapsack and started to peel off their uniforms.
William unlocked the driver side door and Kapp came around to insert his plug into the van's security port, just below the dashboard.
Kapp was short and stocky, with thinning brown hair and a fine, patrician nose. "Four minutes, then we smash the GPS tracking unit. That'll take the van off any grid."
Curteze unlocked and pulled open the garage door and stood before a rancher's old Tahoe—stashed here three weeks ago under a tarp. Curteze was tallest, rangy, with thick black hair slicked back from his forehead.
He pulled away the tarp. The Tahoe was still equipped with the rancher's radio frequency ID transponder. Texans were serious about immigration reform. Unchipped vehicles were pulled over and searched by all local police agencies.
As well, Talos security birds flew over most of West Texas and could also ping vehicles.
This part of the plan had been particularly difficult to carry out. The RFID chips were custom programmed in Midland and shipped around the state. In the end, someone in the Bureau had purchased the SUV at a farm auction from the owner's widow and paid her extra not to report her husband's demise to DMV or the local police.
The widow had assumed the purchasers were going to ship Mexicans north. No skin off her nose—she was getting the hell out of Texas and moving to Florida. An extra five thousand dollars would spend just fine.
Curteze unlocked the driver's door and got in. The engine started quickly enough but idled rough for a few seconds. When it settled down, all three agents broke out of their frozen postures and returned to the tasks at hand.
"Good to go," Curteze called to Kapp and William.
Jamey Trues watched with goggle eyes through the open rear doors.
Kapp took a hammer, bent down, slid under the transport van, and slammed the tracking transmitter until pieces clattered on the ground.
"How's that for finesse?" he asked.
They took out their keys and approached Jamey. The boy was starting to come around.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"Friends." William did not want to provide any more hope or encouragement than he felt was deserved, since for now he thought their chances of getting away were slim to nonexistent. He removed the cuffs and bars and helped the boy down from the back of the PerpTrans van.
"Let's boogie," Kapp said.
"You going to lynch me?" the boy asked. He was only fifteen but had been through a lot in the last year.
Before William could answer, the boy slumped and almost fell. The jailers in Lion City had given him a time-release sedative for the duration of the trip, to keep him quiet right up until they strapped him to the gurney in the Walls Unit.
The second round was kicking in.
"We're not going to lynch you," William murmured as Curteze helped slide the boy into the rear seat of the Tahoe. "We're going to drive you out of state."
"He can't hear you," Kapp said.
They strapped him in—seatbelt only, no cuffs.
They had nothing to fear from Little Jamey.
Nobody did, actually.
"We won't get far unless we cut that chip out of him," Curteze said.
"There's an abandoned field just outside of town," William said. "We'll do it there."
That field was the closest they were likely to get to the Smoky, Price's ranch—a mile and a half. Satellites had located Fouad. He was being kept in a bungalow a hundred yards behind the main complex.
The snake bots had an operational round-trip range of no more than seven miles.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Pendleton
They walked around the shack, then cut across to the blockhouse, avoiding the scrub. The blockhouse's southern wall had a narrow inset door accessed by a short flight of steps sunk a couple of feet into the earth.
"Maybe this was some sort of communication station," Camp said. "Loran or Alcan or something."
"Alcan's a highway."
"They'd have buried the power lines, right?"
"Maybe."
"Could still have juice."
A small black camera eye poked from the concrete over the steel door. Someone had tried to hammer their way through the door and failed—it still looked strong and secure.
But as they approached, this door also clicked open, just like the gate and the door to the shack.
"Maybe he's here after all," Camp said.
The interior was simple, old—dusty. A dark brown couch, upholstered in worn velour, had been planted in the middle of the floor.
More interesting, a low, putty-colored box about the size of an early-model Jones 1.0 sat on a wooden bench. Behind the table, a metal connection box had been set flush with the wall. A thick pipe dropped from the box through the concrete floor.
Competors like Jones were the next step up from computers. They used competitive algorithms to solve problems—some called them evolution engines. The Turing Seven were probably the best in the world at thinking up such algorithms, a very specialized mathematical discipline.
The Quiet Man had once said that the next step up from competors would be called "thinkers."
"Is that what it looks like?" Camp asked.
"Don't go near the table. It's probably rigged to explode."
"Right. Game logic," Camp said. "But there is a couch. Unfair to blow up a couch. Gamers like to sit. We should sit."
They inspected the couch, lifting the cushions—nothing suspicious—then sat, slowly.
A sensor under the couch clicked, making them both jump up, cursing—but a voice spoke from a small speaker mounted in the wall directly ahead.
"Gentlemen, I regret to inform you that I am no longer able to guide your quest," the voice said. "If everything here still works, you will soon learn why."
It was the Quiet Man—unmistakable.
At the tap of a tiny solenoid, a small piece of plaster fell from the wall. Four shiny black lenses pushed through the hole, angling with tiny whirring noises to find faces, focus on eyes.
"Please sit."
Again, they settled in.
The projectors painted beams of laser light directly onto their retinas, reproducing an image for both of them—a live image, Nathaniel guessed.
The projected point of view was of someone about six feet tall standing in the lobby of Mind Design, facing panoramic picture windows. Mind Design's main building sat on a bluff overlooking the ocean, southwest of their present location—in La Jolla.
"Wow," Camp said. "How old is all this shit? Why not just hand us spex?"
He had a point—the blockhouse interior had been designed and built at least a decade ago. It definitely smacked of spare time, paranoia—and some sort of outmoded cool factor.
Which fit well with what Nathaniel knew about the Quiet Man.
"You seeing what I'm seeing?" Camp asked in an undertone. "Mind Design. Great view."
"Yeah. Shh," Nathaniel said.
"I was there once, four years ago," Camp said. "So is the Quiet Man here—I mean, there—or hiding nearby—or somewhere even safer?"
Camp's caviling about POV was disorienting Nathaniel. Here, there . . . past, future, present. Numbers and coordinates.
The lasers were forcing him to see and thus think a certain way. He was having real problems controlling memories evoked by the remote images.
"I'm
getting a nasty premonition," Camp said. "That sucks. I don't know how to react."
For Nathaniel, the image suddenly tangled up with memory, imagination, suspended fear.
He tried to turn away but could not.
Mind Design was a sixties-style suspended rectangle of white and stainless steel, hanging out over a bluff above the brilliant blue ocean.
Every wave . . .
Nathaniel knew their numbers. He knew these buildings inside and out, backwards and forwards; he could visualize every room just by closing his eyes.
Stop that. Keep it together.
For a few seconds, he relived parking in the shadow of a grove of tall eucalyptus—maybe two years ago. The Mind Design parking lot held no more than twenty cars, and at least ten spaces had been roped off after a storm had brought down big branches. Folks liked their legacy trees. Southern California—and in particular La Jolla—was nothing without eucalyptus.
Nathaniel got out of the car and leaned against the door. The purple of the ice plant on the slope in front of the car was so intense he had to avert his eyes.
Keep your mind on the couch. You are here. You are not in the lobby.
But his mind was fanatically searching for significant patterns, numbers, novelty—and so the memory rolled on. He could make out every single purple flower, every fleshy green blade. If he wanted, he could know their numbers and what those numbers would mean for thousands of years to come.
He had worked at Mind Design four years before the company had sent him to Talos in Lion City, and then to Jordan, and then to Arabia Deserta, and after a few months' hiatus, finally to Dubai, to create a backdoor into MSARC.
On the couch, Nathaniel's muscles twitched as if they were moving, carrying him forward. Walking. Every twitch was like a little orgasm. The muscles reveled in their new multidimensional freedom from time, space, reality.
His body felt younger, unconstrained.
My flesh and blood and bone before the firefight. Before the scars and the pain—physical and mental.
My brain before Mariposa.
He looked with longing at the fast, sleek hybrids parked in the lot, including his: red and silver. Hooked up and plugged in, charged and ready to race down Torrey Pines Road at a hundred and forty miles an hour: just as green for Gaia as for the well-paid programmers and designers.
He walked up the sidewalk to the half hidden glass door, punched in his old security code, added a suffix that the Quiet Man had not mentioned, but that he knew would work.
Mind Design was open to him once more. He would know its numbers.
The building welcomed him as an old, secret friend.
"Nathaniel? We should get going. This is starting to feel like a trap."
He ignored Camp. Camp's mind wasn't yet wrapped around the impossibility of that body laid out behind the tumbledown shack.
Back at Mind Design: deep in the sub-basement, around the corner from the freight elevator, through a door in a half height wall topped with panes of thick glass, an early version of Jones lay spread out on the concrete floor like an art installation: oddly patterned and spaced cubes of plastic and steel hooked up with thick fiber optic cables and pipes carrying nutrient fluids.
Jones Zero had taken five years to build and two to charge up; they had learned a lot from simply getting him to turn on and give simple responses to basic neurologic queries, Gödel number key code strings—lifeboat backups, net housekeeping.
Like HAL, Jones Zero had learned a birthday diagnostic song: not "Daisy" but "Sgt. Pepper's." That was how much artificial thinking had advanced in fifty years.
Of course, even the later versions of Jones were not real minds, not yet true thinkers—more like idiot savants. But after the launch, it soon became obvious that this was the best pattern recognition tool anyone had yet devised.
Jones Zero could not only comprehend any natural language and find matches in even highly degraded databases, but he could deliver highly reliable analytics as to dialect, accent, even birthplace and level of education.
He—they always referred to a Jones as if it were human—could tell whether a voice came from a native who had learned the language as a child, or from a highly educated person who had learned it in school—and even the age at which the language training had begun.
What was more, Jones could penetrate any false accent and pick up the underlying native tongue.
The Quiet Man and the Turing Seven had soon moved Jones Zero up to weather. He had learned quickly. In six months, the distributed competer in its liquid-filled boxes—made up of borax, glass, and gel-suspended rods of PNA and DNA—had quickly proved itself to be a master of winds.
Jones 1.0—smaller, faster, better—beat the best automated and human long-range forecasters.
The Quiet Man decided that Jones 1.0 could be duplicated and shipped to key positions around the planet, standing in for the next step, Jones 2.0, already in development. Jones 1.0 would act as the trigger for his successor, as an atom bomb is used to trigger a hydrogen bomb.
There was to be only one Jones 2.0, and his work was to destined be very important indeed: supervising the world's first nanosecond-updated, worldwide financial data network, collected by over five thousand mainframes controlling server farms throughout Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.
Jones 2.0 was about to become the quiet, humming heart of MSARC. Mind Design's connection with Talos Corporation was the biggest secret of all.
The Quiet Man kept Jones Zero in the basement of Mind Design as a kind of museum piece. Nathaniel Trace seemed to be alone with the machine in its concrete chamber. He felt almost shy in its quiet presence.
The Quiet Man—Chan Herbert—emerged from a rear cold chamber, where volatile Jones components were stored.
He pulled off a watch cap and unzipped his black windbreaker.
"Hello," he said.
Nathaniel bit his lip. Back on the couch, no longer traveling through memory's vivid album.
Seemingly live, in real time, Chan Herbert was being projected into their eyes.
"Hello, Mr. Herbert," Camp said.
Herbert looked up at a corner, eyes hunting, like a blind man. "Hello, Mr. Camp. I thought that was you. Hello, Nathaniel. How's the viewing?"
"It's fine," Nathaniel said. "Why the spy stuff?"
"Backdoor precautions. Always good when working with certain business types. I'm a little paranoid, naturally, and right now that's useful. Jones 2.0 has come online in Switzerland. They've run all their tests. He passed with flying colors. MSARC is going operational in fourteen days."
Actually, less than thirty hours. The Quiet Man was relaying old information.
"So?" Camp said, not reassured. "Off the hook. That's a good thing. Our work is done."
"Not yet. Something's gone wrong."
Nathaniel felt a weird twinge. "A programming glitch?"
"No. Besides, Jones 2.0 is well beyond our programming at this point. He's harder to get hold of than a venture capital broker. What can you tell me about Mariposa?"
"It works," Camp said. "But it adds stuff. Weird shit."
"You were test monkeys," Herbert said. "As always, Price thought he should kill two birds with one stone—repair the Turing Seven to finish their job, and at the same time, get positive test results for Mariposa. Now Dr. Plover has revealed who the first monkey actually was: the vice president. And he's not the only one who's flipped. Nick Elder. When I heard from Nick is when I called you and told you to get out of Dubai."
"Old news," Camp murmured.
"Jerry Lee is feeling odd, too. He's in Arabia Deserta, and he seems to be making a fuss—killing animals, I hear."
Jerry Lee hadn't been in Arabia in weeks, perhaps months. Nathaniel felt feverish. "Why are we here?" he asked.
The Quiet Man gave a little jerk before responding. "After 9-11, the telecommunications industry duplicated the fiber optic point of entry for Asia and the Middle East to a centralized commercial facility in San Franci
sco. Somehow, they forgot to deactivate the old junction stations—which make excellent listening posts. Three of them serve me as personal tin cans strung on all the world's data traffic. Every blockhouse has a Jones 1.0 analyzing traffic.
"Jones 2.0 has the option to tie in with one or more of his siblings. Sometimes I ask an older Jones—the one right next to you, for example—to pull up anomalies in government traffic. He knows how to behave like a blank pipe or a legitimate client. He's still pretty sharp, even though most people think he's past his operational prime.
"In fact, both Talos and the regulators at MSARC believe all of the earlier versions have been shut down. Tell me how you feel, Nathaniel."
"Different," Nathaniel said.
"Like you want to kill somebody?"
Nathaniel twitched his folded hands. "Mostly, I just feel free to choose."
"You're unpredictable. You can't be trusted. You need a fallback."
"Why tell us to come here, then?" Nathaniel looked askance at the Quiet Man. The projected image skewed. He looked back, and there it was again, but seeming less and less real.
Low-res.
Of course, his eyes might still be playing tricks.
"Because that's the only place you can still see me," Herbert said.
"You reluctant to leave Mind Design?" Camp asked.
"No," Herbert said. "Not reluctant. I'm dead, Mr. Camp. They killed me fourteen days ago."
Camp started to chuckle, a grim exhibition of bitter humor, but his chuckle gurgled out when Herbert faded from the distant basement laboratory.
"What the hell?" Camp blurted.
Herbert's image slowly returned. "I often use Jones as a kind of answering machine," the voice said. "I recorded phrases, then trained him to select and modify and assemble them. Images, too.
"I like being two places at once. Now I'm nowhere at all. Jones can still answer questions, give out my messages, but only for a while. Pretty soon, Jones will run out of my words. He's sophisticated enough to make up new phrases—but I don't know whether he wants to.
"If he doesn't—I'm afraid you're completely on your own."