He met eyes with Willard with a new sense of immediacy. He felt that, for all the doors of perception that were opening to him, some were closing, and in some way this time was his last chance to lay eyes on a human being.
MERGED
0 hrs 30 min to Birth
Willard swore at Gene and lowered his gun. He watched the flybots swarming on Gene's face. Gene looked blind, helpless under the silver swarm.
The flies injected brainbots into Gene's bloodstream. After a moment, they disengaged from his skin and floated upward, collecting in a silver cloud above his head.
Gene wrenched his eyes open and blinked. His face was red and puffy. His eyes had a vacant look. He opened his mouth with a slight movement of air, like the opening of a coffin. He closed his mouth and gulped, and then his mouth dropped agape.
He's having visions, Willard thought.
He noticed Willard. He looked calm. His face was relaxed.
“What's happening?” Flannigan asked.
“He's putting visions in my head,” Gene said. “Adding thoughts... to what I am thinking.”
“What kind of visions?”
“Of the future,” Gene said. His face cracked into a broad smile and lingered that way, almost frozen looking.
“He's telling you the future?”
“It's more like a conversation,” Gene said. He spoke quietly, but still smiling, with a sense of joy. “Imagine that you can share every little thought without speaking. But you don't merely see what he is thinking. You actually think it.”
“Gene,” Flannigan said, “where are the planes? The airstrike.”
“At the beach,” Gene said quietly. “They crashed. The flybots clogged them.” He was still peaceful, smiling.
Willard raised his gun. “If you're so smart now, then explain to me why I shouldn't shoot you.”
“Are you out of your mind!?” Flannigan demanded. “Look at him. He's harmless!”
“If you're one with God now,” Willard continued, “why would it matter if I shot you?”
“It doesn't matter, for my sake,” Gene replied. “Nemo copies my thoughts throughout his whole network. I can see into the mind of someone else who has merged: a robotics scientist in Tokyo. He merged ten seconds ago. So my consciousness now exists throughout the world. There is little reason for you to destroy my brain, but even if you did, my mind would live on.”
“So why shouldn't I blow your brains out,” Willard growled. Last chance.
“For your sake, Willard. Because you haven't merged. And I'm the only person who can tell you what it's like.”
“I don't care what it's like.”
“You should care, Willard, because Nemo is giving you a choice. You must merge with him, or be destroyed. It is the same offer he will give to everyone on Earth. A generous offer. An opportunity to merge with God.”
“Are you speaking for him?”
“Yes. He can place thoughts in my head. Like pictures.”
“Then you send Nemo this thought,” he said. “I'd rather blow myself into a million pieces before becoming a robot.”
Gene smiled again. Too much smiling. “Willard, you can see I'm not a robot.”
He remembered Sam on the beach. The image was fresh in his mind: she was at war with herself, preferring death to a life with Nemo.
“You're a virus. You kill everyone who doesn't go your way.” God doesn't MAKE people believe, he thought. If you're God, why can't you give people a choice?
“Without death, there cannot be survival,” Gene mellowly countered. “And I can offer you eternal life.”
“That's not life. Without a choice, there is no life.”
And he pulled the trigger.
As his wrist tensed to pull back his trigger finger, the swarm of flybots sent a fully formed thought to the brainbots in Gene's head, another mental picture, this one a picture of a movement.
Nemo did not exactly teach Gene anything. He did not instruct Gene in kung fu, or upload a kung fu information file into Gene's head as if from an encyclopedia or a disc. Rather, he placed a picture in Gene's brain of what it was like to execute a certain movement. Seeing the picture in his head resulted in understanding the movement perfectly, as if he had practiced it for years.
As the shot echoed in the Assembly Area, Gene slid forward and ever so slightly to his left, so that he was almost kissing the nozzle of Willard's gun. According to the picture placed in his mind, his left arm extended up and out, under Willard's right arm, and impacted Willard's throat. Meanwhile, the right hand reached inside the dufflebag and closed around Willard's right wrist. While his left hand was striking Willard's neck, the right grabbed Willard's wrist where it was tender and swollen, and gave it a twist.
Struck twice simultaneously, Willard collapsed to the ground, his arms folded in dumbly and his chin dropped.
As Willard fell, Gene effortlessly slid the dufflebag from his shoulder and took the gun from his hand. He placed them on the floor.
Near the perimeter of the room and at Gene's back, Flannigan pulled out her small pistol and fired three times at Gene.
Gene couldn't see Flannigan, but the flybots could. As she fired, they sent Gene's brain another movement to execute: duck. He ducked to the side, suddenly, not with superhuman speed but rather as if he knew exactly when Flannigan was firing and where her gun was pointed.
He straightened himself over Willard.
Willard was able to recover from the blows, which had been moderate by design, and he sat up on the floor like a sullen child, with moist eyes.
As Willard cradled his fragile hand in his lap, Gene rubbed his own perfectly healthy fist.
“We can fix that hand for you,” Gene said. “Your body can be repaired.”
Willard didn't answer.
“You can still change your mind. This is your last chance: just say 'Yes.'”
Willard got up on one knee with a grunt.
“This is your last chance,” Willard grunted. “Just kiss my ass.”
The flybots sent another picture into Gene's head. It was a simple picture:
(Kick forward, under chin, knocking skull up and backward and snapping neck)
But before Gene put the picture into motion, Flannigan shouted across the echoing chamber.
“Wait!” Flannigan shouted. “I will consider merging, but only if you don't kill him.”
Gene paused. “I find that difficult to believe, Flannigan,” he said flatly, without turning his head. “You'd be much more likely to merge if you were left here alone with me.”
“No,” she insisted. She walked toward the center of the room. “I love him,” she blurted.
Willard raised his eyebrows.
“You love him?” Gene asked.
“I'm in love with him,” Flannigan said, hesitantly. “If you kill him, I'll never merge.”
The flybots remained at bay. Willard lived on, for another few moments, at least. “Aren't you afraid,” Gene asked, “that merging might tarnish your feelings for him, or his for you?”
“Of course. But I love him now, and I don't want anything to happen to him. You can understand that, can't you? Can you understand love, Gene? Can Nemo understand love?”
Flannigan had caught on to the way Willard was thinking. If Nemo killed Willard, and she loved Willard, Nemo couldn't expect her to merge. If he killed Willard, he got zero people. If he let Willard live, he at least had a shot at getting one: her. His Eve.
She met eyes with Willard. He understood. He stood up with the gravity of an old man.
“Nemo, you've downloaded Gene's brain,” he said to the room. “Didn't you? He's not so useful to you anymore.”
He walked to the dufflebag, which had the Glock neatly positioned on it, while Gene and the flybots and Flannigan watched.
“We'll trade you,” Willard said, picking up the gun. “The only way you get a woman is if you give us Gene.”
He didn't know whether it was going to work. He knew that Nemo was going t
hrough rapid-fire calculations. Maybe he was calculating probabilities. The probability that Willard would merge later. The probability that Flannigan would merge. The probability that Willard meant what he was saying. There was some sort of calculation of what they were going to do and how much they were all worth. If the calculation came out in his favor, his play would work.
Willard extended his left hand and aimed at Gene's face. He's letting me do it. He hasn't stopped me yet. In Gene's eyes, Willard saw a twitch. A brief flash of surprise. He doesn't want to die.
Nemo had spent half an hour convincing Gene that he was special. Now he was giving up the great genius on the off chance that a total nobody might join Flannigan and merge. It was one human for two; they were all the same to Nemo. Nemo had only one rule: the rule of survival. Everything else was merely a part of the Playbook.
Willard fired twice into Gene's forehead.
Gene dropped to the floor. As Willard picked up his dufflebag, a pool of blood spread across the FlyTech, Inc., crest on the floor.
98% SHUTDOWN
Washington, D.C.
0 hrs 30 min to Birth
“The monitoring network is online, sir.”
The President's advisers had been correct: a monitoring system had been crucial to building a coalition among foreign nations. With forceful diplomacy and the threat of war, the U.S. and a rapidly growing coalition came together into the single greatest international alliance that had ever existed for any purpose. It was nicknamed the Shutdown Coalition. The purpose at hand was to unplug all computers.
Carrillo watched from the sidelines. He was not directly involved in Operation Shutdown. And that was a good thing: he wasn't involved because it wasn't war. Operation Shutdown was the best chance to make his job unnecessary, just as he wanted.
Minutes ago, the President had prepared an Executive Order to be disseminated to the nation over television and radio, ordering all Internet Service Providers to terminate their services immediately and to unplug their computers. He also ordered every citizen and business of the United States to turn off and unplug each and every computer in their possession. The Order would be transmitted in one hour, and effective immediately at that time.
But first, it was critical for the governments of the Shutdown Coalition to begin shutdown of all government- and military-controlled systems. These systems were to be down to 2% within minutes, and they were to stay at that level indefinitely.
The monitoring network had been set up by the NSA and it was visible to everyone in the Shutdown Coalition. The design of the network had been difficult. First, the Internet itself was jammed and would soon be down, so any attempt to monitor it through the Internet itself would not work. More specifically, the U.S. government would have some idea of whether its networks were at 2% or some other percent, but they would have no visibility into what the Chinese were doing. And the Chinese wouldn't be able to see the U.S. level. That was the Prisoner's Dilemma: the U.S. and China were trapped in different cells.
With the use of satellites, the U.S., China, and all the members of the coalition were able to “pass notes” to each other. The plan was that each nation would cut to 2%, and connect a monitoring computer to a satellite network.
Many staff were concerned about the fact that the 2% computers were still connected to the infected network in every country, and a few of these 2% computers would be connected to the satellite link. What if the satellites became infected? In that case, there would be no monitoring. The NSA insisted that being connected to the 2% was required; if countries simply manually entered their levels up to the satellite, for example, they would be too likely to lie. The NSA had guarded against infection of the satellite system by keeping it ultrasecure and ultrasimple. All that was transmitted to the satellite from each nation was their percent level of activity — a two-digit number — and an authorization key proving that the data had been sent by the monitoring software. The only thing that the satellite would send down, in turn, was the level for each country's military network. The satellite also was able to send down the monitoring software with installation instructions for each country, as well as its authorization key.
“If anyone tries to attack the satellite system, we'll be able to see exactly where the attack was uploaded from,” a member of the design team had observed. “They won't get the attack right on exactly the first try.” He argued that a breach of the satellite system was unlikely, and also that, if a breach happened, it could lead right to the physical location of the attackers, which might be more useful than the shutdown itself anyway.
“How many nations are on the monitoring system?” the President asked.
“Over 90%, sir. All the big ones.”
“Okay. Let's get started. Take us down.” Thank God we still have phones, he thought.
In a military deployment of historic size and remarkable purpose, soldiers had been deployed throughout government and military networks to unplug their systems. It was a vast but straightforward deployment, since military troops were generally not far from military computers, and it only took a few hands (and a lot of authorization) to shut down the fuses and backup systems that drove these computers.
The monitoring system flashed on.
United States 40%
Europe 50%+
China 50%+
Japan 50%+
India 50%+
“We're coming down, Mr. President.”
“Good, let's hope they follow us.”
The readouts of the monitoring system were rough, due to the clogged nature of networks globally. Levels over 50% were reported simply as 50%+ since the exact level was difficult to detect.
After a few minutes, the screen refreshed:
United States 10%
Europe 30%
China 50%+
Japan 50%+
India 50%+
Everyone knew it was their most vulnerable moment. The room was quiet, except for a status beep from the satellite system.
A few minutes later:
United States 5%
Europe 10%
China 30%
Japan 20%
India 40%
The room erupted in cheering. They still had a way to go, but they had taken the first step.
“How long are we going?”
“Twelve minutes, Mr. President.”
A few minutes later:
United States 4%
Europe 5%
China 10%
Japan 5%
India 30%
There were smiles.
“Any attacks on the satellite system?”
“Zero, sir.” A fuller readout of the status showed that smaller member nations across the Coalition were bringing their levels down, also.
Twenty minutes in:
United States 4%
Europe 3%
China 5%
Japan 2%
India 10%
By God, the President thought. We're going to take this thing out, whatever it is. His eyes were steady on the screen, as everyone's eyes around him were steady on him. But his thoughts were moving a step ahead: what they were going to do when everything was down.
At first, they had been terrified by the prospect of bringing down their whole network. But someone suggested it would be like life in the 70's, or the 80's. People at that time had been part of a competent, modern society. They didn't live in the dark. They had telephones, fax machines, electricity. Maybe this year (soon to be the next year), with a little more time, under circumstances free of panic, they would be able to diagnose what had happened and start rebuilding their technical infrastructure.
United States 4%
Europe 3%
China 50%+
Japan 2%
India 10%
A chill came over the room.
“Is that accurate?” China, what are you doing?
People were scrambling, trying to double-check. But double-checking would be difficult. No one said anything.
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