Flannigan: Ok. See you soon.
Flannigan imagined a genius child sneaking around the facility, behind guards' backs, and playing with flybots. It was a strange picture.
“Can I talk to him?” Gene asked.
He's trying to sound casual. He's itching to talk to him, Flannigan thought. Of course he was. Gene's powerful, lonely intellect was hungry for something worthy of its attention. Someone worth talking to. Or a worthy adversary in a battle of minds. It was only natural for someone of Gene's intelligence to reach out, when he sniffed out the presence of another great mind.
Flannigan wondered whether Nemo must not feel the same way. Had Nemo been bored to tears chatting with her, with Simon, with Jared Keller? She replayed their chat in her mind and detected a certain tone in his words: a hint of sarcasm, the playfulness of desperate boredom. She didn't know whether Gene's brain would be a match for Nemo's, or vice versa. But Nemo didn't know either, and he would want to find out. It was a great piece of news. It meant that Flannigan had something to offer Nemo: the opportunity to speak with Gene. It was a bargaining chip.
“I want to be sure that Nemo meets with us first,” Flannigan responded. “You'll have to talk to him in person.”
“You're using me as bait.” Gene smiled. Flannigan winked at him.
She closed the chat window. “Raymond, arrange for some transportation over there. Everyone meet outside in two minutes. Sam, you'll stay here with the others, but stick to your phone.”
WILLARD PREPARES
Welcome Center, Visitor Area
5 hr 49 min to Birth
Willard was not well qualified as a babysitter for Preeti. A genuine agent of the Distributed Ops program would have been grossly overqualified for the job. And Willard would have preferred doing one-armed pushups on his throbbing right hand to concerning himself with this girl's welfare.
His thoughts were elsewhere: on escape from the island.
Once Flannigan had led the others away to be briefed in the conference room, Willard retired in the direction of his room. He was lugging his massive dufflebag of explosives and cradling his crippled right hand.
He unlocked the door to his room with a keycard and pushed it open with his foot. It closed behind him as he placed his duffle by the bed and lay down on the bedspread, on his back, with a deep sigh. Feels so good, he thought. Don't fall asleep.
The brilliant afternoon sun cast into the room around the window curtains. It was an ordinary-looking hotel room. He would be able to get out of there easily enough. And Flannigan and the others were too busy to notice. But where would he go?
He needed to get to the mainland. If he could get off the island and get to the mainland, he could disappear there. Ecuador, or whichever country it was. If he could make it there, he would sell his explosives on some black market and live on that money.
Was there a boat on the island? A motorboat. If they had a motorboat, maybe he could make it to the mainland. He didn't know how far away the mainland was.
How would he and this lovely boat make their acquaintance? Trying to find it himself by sneaking around seemed too risky. He would get caught, and when he did, he would look guilty.
He stood up from the bed with a grunt. He walked into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. He had not bathed recently. He was tired, hungover, drugged. He had recently killed a man. And there was his hand.
(Killing me it's broken.)
He could do it. But he would have to look more like a legitimate agent. He would need to shave and wash up. Get a more convincing outfit. And the bandaging on his hand would have to go. He had to look presentable.
Needing a razor and some fresh clothes, he left his room and walked toward the reception area in search of these supplies.
He walked by a big room and looked in: it was a small pool. More like a motel pool than a hotel pool, but appetizing enough. How nice would it be to get in a hot tub right now, he thought.
To his surprise, Preeti, whom he had completely forgotten about, was in the pool room, walking down the length of the wall. He stopped and looked at her from the hallway with lazy curiosity.
She was wearing a bathing suit. She had a nice body, though there was something unattractive about her manner. Too much of a hippie.
She noticed him and looked up, suspicious. She was holding what appeared to be a sheaf of straw, a bundle of something that looked like straw.
She proceeded slowly down the length of the wall, shaking her sheaf at the wall as she walked like it was a magic wand. She was chanting something quietly to herself.
He shook his head. Hippie nonsense.
He turned and continued to the lobby.
THE APE-PROOF JEEP
5 hr 48 min to Birth
Raymond led them to a row of Jeeps behind the Welcome Center, in a little lot not too far from the eastern beach of the island. Flannigan climbed into the front passenger seat of the first one. The men watched her for a moment, appreciating her skirt. Raymond got in the driver seat, and Gene got in the back, with Simon on the other side and Kenny squished in the middle.
Flannigan's cell phone, like all of theirs, was worthless on the island, but she had two other communications devices. The first was an annoyingly bulky satellite phone, which she lugged in a black cubical thick nylon case on a strap under her arm. The sat phone was to contact the NSA Director after the situation with Nemo was clarified and under control. Second, strapped ridiculously on her skirt waist, was a walkie-talkie. It was for the purpose of touching base with Sam, who had an identical model.
“This is pretty spacious for a Jeep,” Gene said from the back seat. The vehicle had a fortified frame and windows with faint lines of reinforcing material running through the glass. The edges were hugged by thick rubber flaps.
“These models are customized,” Raymond said. He started the engine and they could hear the wheels on the gravel of the lot. “The vehicles are customized to be resistant to flybots and apes.”
“Apes?” Simon asked.
“In the early days, apes sometimes scaled the walls of their containment,” Raymond explained over the steering wheel, as they pulled out of the driveway. “Apes are not usually violent, but they are affected by the tests we conduct with the flybots. We have killed very few apes in our tests. Usually we test by sending out flies to attack and tranquilize one or more targets. So the apes are in a kind of war with the flybots. They are always looking for new ways to avoid the flybots, fool them or escape from them. The Jeeps are toughened as a precautionary feature against angry apes.”
They were now driving westward on the dirt road, between the gorilla areas to the north and to the south. But all that could be seen of these areas were massive hills, steeply sloped and covered with vegetation natural to simian habitats.
Raymond pointed to the walls. “Gorillas kept trying to get over those fences,” he said. “They are intelligent. We had difficulty keeping them in their areas at first,” Raymond recounted. “We weren't able to create a perimeter that they couldn't get through. We tried all kinds of materials and traps. But the little buggers are clever. Finally we realized that we didn't have to fool them; we could teach them. When they left the perimeter, we gave them a zap. It's dangerous because those gorillas are gigantic, and liable to fight in groups. But eventually they learned not to cross the perimeter, so they don't even try.”
“Do they wear collars?” Flannigan asked.
Raymond smiled. “No, we used a more advanced technology to zap them.”
“The flybots,” Gene said.
“That's right. Once our flybot prototype was working, we'd release them to discipline any gorilla messing around at the fence. We don't even need to worry about it any more. The gorillas have learned. We even see them teaching each other to stay away from the fence.”
“Gorillas are quite intelligent,” Gene remarked. “Aside from humans, they are the most intelligent animals on Earth. You must have chosen them as your test subjects pa
rtly for that reason.”
“Yes,” Raymond said, “and also because their bodies are so similar to ours.”
“Not only their bodies are similar,” Gene added archly. “Their minds are, too. The difference between human intelligence and that of other primates is much smaller than you might imagine.”
“Then why,” Simon challenged, “don't they learn more when we try to teach them? They only learn a few words.”
“To be precise, Koko the gorilla understood two thousand words and more than one thousand signs,” Gene corrected. “But to answer your question: what holds them back is their lack of vocal chords. Their brains are fine; they're simply missing vocal chords. If they had vocal chords, they would have developed human language and intelligence a long time ago.”
“But can't we teach them sign language?”
“Sign language doesn't require speech, but it's based on spoken language,” Gene explained. “And it's developed by, taught by, and used with people who also use spoken language. It's based on a whole species with a spoken language. If humans didn't have spoken language, we could have a sign language. But it would be a very simple one, accompanied by maybe a dozen different types of noises.”
“Like gorillas,” Simon ventured.
“Exactly.”
They drove on and thought about it.
“Interesting,” Flannigan said.
“We think all of our abilities come from our brains alone,” Gene said. “But that's not true. In many ways, our brains are taught by our bodies.”
Flannigan caught a twinkle in his eyes as he directed these words at her. At his mention of bodies, she understood a double meaning. She wondered whether he, with a great teacher's mind, could also teach her body something.
SILK
5 hr 37 min to Birth
Ten minutes to the Laboratory Complex. Flannigan looked at her watch as the Jeep jostled down the road, kicking up dust.
She studied Gene. He didn't seem to be concerned about what they were going to find. That worried her.
“Do you know, Raymond, whether flybots are actually designed as invertebrates?” Gene asked. “You've probably built them with interior skeletons, in which case they'd be vertebrates and not much like flies at all.”
“Flies are invertebrates?” Flannigan asked. Simon's scowling gaze was fixed on the passing roadside.
“They are, yes,” Gene said. “They don't have backbones — rather, they have exoskeletons. In fact, they have a lot in common with slimey and slithering invertebrates like worms and slugs. For example, some of them can make silk. Only invertebrates can make silk. If you want something that is light, strong, and elastic, there is no better material yet in existence than silk. Some worms can make it, spiders, a variety of insects, but no vertebrates.”
Is he nervous? Flannigan wondered. Is he talking to pass the time? Then she remembered: Gene actually cared about this stuff. She had read it in a file, once.
At the outset of the Distributed Operations program, Flannigan used some of the operatives to create psychological profiles of hundreds of key individuals within the intelligence community. She assigned spies — she called them “psycho-spies” — to study senior management and persons of interest at the Agency and a great number of individuals in the D.C. area. Unbeknownst to Gene, the attractive “greeter” who had ridden with Gene to the airport was one of these psycho-spies. Rather than laying wiretaps, or promoting dissension, they asked questions. Their information, supplemented by the guidance and analysis of Flannigan and a few psychologists at Flannigan's disposal, yielded rich reports.
Gene's report had mentioned in passing that, as a child, he had been infatuated with animals.
Gene, like a flawlessly beautiful woman, was somewhat boring for all his lack of blemishes. The psycho-spies who spent weeks and months profiling him (in short meetings, mostly) came back for the most part with highly abridged notes of his thoughts on abstract topics — nothing much for the analysts to use. But there were a few gems in the report. Gene came across as a mathematician, a limitless genius, not a naturalist. But on two occasions, a psycho-spy had stumbled into a conversation about animals with him and suddenly his eyes had lit up in such a way that made all his previous enthusiasm for math and puzzles seem listless.
He had confided to one psycho-spy: Did you know that wasps plant eggs in the cones of oak trees and the larvae grow there? They look just like a fruit, but there's an animal inside. Some of the wasp “eggs” even secrete honeydew. Any person who saw or touched it or licked it would assume it's a hard fruit or maple, but it has a wasp inside. We have such clear ideas of what a plant is and what an animal is. But there are so many plants that look like animals and vice versa — it makes me wonder.
Flannigan started to remember other details from the report. Every psycho-spy commented with reverence on Gene's profound and nimble mind. He also had the classic, expected weakness: overconfidence. It was the mark of every genius. Confidence was what led his mind to solutions and discoveries, but it blinded him a little.
One beautiful psycho-spy reported: He's not my type. He's witty, charming, but I'm attracted to vulnerable men and he's the opposite. It was too easy to fool him into thinking I was interested. For a moment, he seemed like a dumb chauvinist, assuming that I HAD to be interested in him. That was the only vulnerability I was able to detect.
As the words played back in her head, Flannigan noticed that the psycho-spy was connecting Gene's overconfidence with women. Was he overconfident because he was a genius, or because he was a proud man and almost certainly a social outcast while growing up?
The psycho-spy reported: He was the smoothest-talking NSA type I've ever met. At first I thought it was a study or a science for him, like a recluse learning how to talk to women from a textbook. But this wasn't true. It was like a sport for him — a sport that he never practiced, but he threw himself into any game he played, anything he did. I think he got a little high from the idea that, as a reclusive academic, he wasn't supposed to be good at talking to women, he didn't have much practice at it, but he was good at it just the same.
Gene's other vulnerability was a sense of guilt. According to the psycho-spies, his remarks, otherwise oh-so-perfect, occasionally leaked small admissions and minute apologies about his choice of career. Gene made small apologies for the fact that he worked at the NSA.
He's afraid, in his heart of hearts, that he's a mercenary. He thinks he's a sellout. He fears he should be doing mathematics at a university and contributing to the future, not working at the NSA and contributing to espionage.
There were two parts to it. He wanted to contribute to the future. He also wanted memory of him to survive it.
He's not nervous, Flannigan thought. He's excited. It was a glimmer of childlike excitement.
KENNY'S CONFESSION
5 hr 32 min to Birth
Five minutes to the Laboratory Complex, Flannigan thought. We don't have much time. What are you doing, Gene?
“You said the vehicle also protects against flybots,” Gene noted, placing a finger on the window near where one of the air sealing flaps was.
“We've never had a single instance of a flybot attacking the wrong target,” Raymond said. “We are extremely thorough in our precautions and tests. We test first in the Laboratory Building, in the indoor facility. We test outdoors, on the gorillas, only when we're positive nothing can go wrong. The vehicle features are just a precaution.”
“In case something goes wrong with the One Attack Rule,” Gene said quietly, glancing at Raymond.
“We want to make sure flybots could never be any of our staff,” Raymond said, “but it's just a security precaution. There's no reason to think they ever would. And with the One Attack Rule, it's impossible they would ever get to attack more than one target.”
“Impossible?” Gene asked. “I don't think it's that hard to imagine. If something went wrong with the software, the flybots might think they were supposed to attack you, me,
everyone on the island,” Gene imagined.
“But the hardware,” Simon observed. “Hardware is more reliable than software.”
“Hardware?” Flannigan asked.
“The One Attack Rule is triggered by the proboscis of the flybot,” Simon recalled, “so it is mechanical. That's hardware. It's supposed to work even if the software goes wrong. Like these flaps here.”
“You appear to be assuming that, in such a case, the flybots would swarm around one of us first, attack that person, and then disengage, triggering the One Attack fuse with their proboscis and self-destructing.”
“What else would they do?” Raymond asked.
“The flybots would be interested in completing their mission as effectively as possible,” Gene began. “If they saw a better way to attack us all, you could expect them to do that. They could try anything, even if it didn't quite work at first. They might try attacking one of us and remaining on the skin, with the proboscis injected. They might try to work in teams somehow. Maybe some of them could attack, and then other flybots could swarm around them and try to dig up the flesh so that the proboscis could be withdrawn without catching on anything and triggering the mechanism.”
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